I got my masters in machine learning years before LLMs took off. I’d usually tell people I work in “AI“. Even though it wasn’t quite accurate, people understood it easier than ML.
The conversations would inevitably turn to joking about Skynet or AI taking over the world. I would reassure people that these models are only mimicking intelligence; they can make predictions, or they can classify data into categories, or they can generate text, etc, based on analyzing the patterns of data they’ve previously seen, but that’s it. They don’t understand anything, they can’t make decisions or act on their own. I’d tell people there couldn’t be an AI apocalypse because we would never be dumb enough to give them that ability.
I used to tell people that there’s very little actual risk, because if we had something even half as concerning as AGI (which I’d argue we did with chatgpt 3.5), that we’d easily be able to lock it down and prevent it from doing anything funny.
Super intelligence isn’t just going to magically spawn on 32 GB ram in a sandboxed environment. And AGI will not magically know how sandboxed it is or how to escape.
…then I saw people letting Claude send emails and use their credit card on their behalf like immediately when it was able to do things that appeared intelligent.
They literally saw the smallest hint of AGI and said, “here’s my credit card and identity, take the wheel”.
There was no fucking talk of sandboxing. Everyone turned that off so they didn’t have to click the “allow” button.
Not that I think we’re at any risk of ASI since it seems more like we hit a logarithmic wall, but we are absolutely at risk of letting random algorithms destroy critical parts of infrastructure because people are lazy and stupid and managed by even worse people.
I would not be surprised if the right AI hallucinations could cause a nuclear bomb to go off right now. I’m not talking about super intelligence, just automated super idiocy.
Proof: literally this post is about an idiot letting an AI control their fucking email and it emailed the FBI because it was fucking stupid
I’m guessing this means you got your master’s before transformers made sequential data processing so parallelizable that it’d be commercially viable to let Bob down the street into the “we” who wouldn’t be dumb enough to give them that ability.
I got my masters in machine learning years before LLMs took off. I’d usually tell people I work in “AI“. Even though it wasn’t quite accurate, people understood it easier than ML.
The conversations would inevitably turn to joking about Skynet or AI taking over the world. I would reassure people that these models are only mimicking intelligence; they can make predictions, or they can classify data into categories, or they can generate text, etc, based on analyzing the patterns of data they’ve previously seen, but that’s it. They don’t understand anything, they can’t make decisions or act on their own. I’d tell people there couldn’t be an AI apocalypse because we would never be dumb enough to give them that ability.
I don’t know why I gave us so much credit
YEP. I’m not in AI but I’m in cyber security.
I used to tell people that there’s very little actual risk, because if we had something even half as concerning as AGI (which I’d argue we did with chatgpt 3.5), that we’d easily be able to lock it down and prevent it from doing anything funny.
Super intelligence isn’t just going to magically spawn on 32 GB ram in a sandboxed environment. And AGI will not magically know how sandboxed it is or how to escape.
…then I saw people letting Claude send emails and use their credit card on their behalf like immediately when it was able to do things that appeared intelligent.
They literally saw the smallest hint of AGI and said, “here’s my credit card and identity, take the wheel”.
There was no fucking talk of sandboxing. Everyone turned that off so they didn’t have to click the “allow” button.
Not that I think we’re at any risk of ASI since it seems more like we hit a logarithmic wall, but we are absolutely at risk of letting random algorithms destroy critical parts of infrastructure because people are lazy and stupid and managed by even worse people.
I would not be surprised if the right AI hallucinations could cause a nuclear bomb to go off right now. I’m not talking about super intelligence, just automated super idiocy.
Proof: literally this post is about an idiot letting an AI control their fucking email and it emailed the FBI because it was fucking stupid
I’m guessing this means you got your master’s before transformers made sequential data processing so parallelizable that it’d be commercially viable to let Bob down the street into the “we” who wouldn’t be dumb enough to give them that ability.
I think your assumption was reasonable.