No, that is not my argument, which you would’ve seen if you’d read to the end.

Maybe Google is insane. The last time I tested it, I got a different answer the second time.

Technically not a monopoly, because that would mean only one company has control, and that’s illegal. It would be a small number of companies, though.

Got it. So plants are intelligent.

Or if the military put an LLM in charge of nuclear weapons. But surely nobody would be stupid enough to do that!

Yes, but when the shit hits the fan and they blame the AI, we shouldn’t let them get away with it. It’s their fault, not the computer’s.

LLMs basically work like auto-correct. They’re much more sophisticated, but it’s the same basic principle. Instead of “Which letter is most likely to follow after this series of letters?” it’s “Which token is most likely to follow after this series of tokens?” A token can be anything, but usually it’s a word.

Now, given that, consider a statement like

We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!

Okay, how? A statistical model generating tokens doesn’t have thought, it doesn’t have emotions, so it can’t want to do something, much less make plans and carry them out.

Could AI give somebody the ability to kill all humans? How? Under what scenario? Is somebody putting an LLM in charge of their nuclear stockpile? You don’t blame the LLM. You blame the humans who made that decision.

Yeah, because it’s all statistical. You can test this yourself. Go to Google and search for something. Then search for that same exact thing again. Gemini will give you a different response each time.

I’ve heard a few explanations for the “AI will kill us all” narrative.

1. AI techies are in a cult. They genuinely believe this stuff because they’re crazy.

2. It makes the AI sound powerful and impressive, which is ultimately good for the AI companies.

3. They’re starting to face competition from open-weight models, so they want to scare politicians into crafting regulations. They think that they will be able to influence the regulations to favor them and squeeze out their competition.

And, of course, there’s

4. It keeps people talking about AI. Because whatever you do, don’t quit talking about AI, because if you quit talking about it, the line might go down! And the line going down is very, very bad.

I think it’s pretty wild that not only is there a man who saved the world, but most people don’t even know his name.

“This reminds me of a movie I once saw, so I’m going to believe it didn’t happen.” LOOOLLL

What a world you must live in.