Sounds like you built a position that's immune to evidence?
If researchers say AI is dangerous but keep their position, well they're obviously hyping up their boss and doing it for the money, otherwise they'd quit. If they say AI is dangerous and quit, they're self-promoting.
I have no idea what these researchers could do, if they were genuine, that you would accept as even weak evidence that they believed what they say.
The HN discourse on AI is so exhausting. It's all knee-jerk and headlines only. Just people rushing to push their own beliefs and pre-emptively insulting anybody who disagrees.
People here are so desperate for the AI race to continue forever, for anything that pisses off the billionaires that got us there even if that means innocent people go down with them because the next AI decides to blackmail a hospital to cheat on its evaluation or whatever.
You people are so dismissive, no, so angry at the idea that this technology could be dangerous that you're all gloating about how hard China is going to crush the West with its ever more powerful open models, as if having easily-accessed tech to coordinate high-volume hacking campaigns was a load-bearing part of the economy.
I feel like I'm reading people gloating about how much fuel their car burns just because they love coastal elites' tears or something.
I think both can be true: AI development must be slowed, but also question the motives of those in the lead given the stark benefits it gives those in the lead.
I'll get down-voted again by those who have a stake in this race, but I believe the long-term freedom and benefit for "everyone" will come from being able to run models locally.
I agree that we need more nuanced complex takes on the situation... But also, if the problem is that AIs are starting to hack random website against their owners' instructions, open-weights AI isn't going to help that much.
Right now, only a few labs have the resources to run frontier-level capabilities or large, open-weight LLMs that are effectively frontier.
Better attention can be given to open-weight LLMs that can be run locally and to help defend against attacks, filter against questionable content, etc. and without giving up privacy; but there’s apparently little to no incentive beyond the next great coding agent like Qwen 3.8.
I think it doesn't matter. Most cancers don't stop growing when they're about to kill their hosts.
AI companies know they have to constantly push further, or they'll get outcompeted and lose their wealth, and nobody agrees on where the line is for "so dangerous it threatens humanity" (and when they try to be conservative about it, everybody screams "marketing stunt" and rushes to competitors).
If a single company decides "enough is enough" and stops chasing the state of the art, everybody goes to their competitors, they lose the money faucet, their employees go work for those competitors. The competitors also (usually) know they're building an existential risk machine, but they think they can push a little further, and they don't want to go out of business either.
This equilibrium can last for quite a while even if everybody involved thinks it's a threat to their lives.
> At the time, the broader containment and alignment implications of the improvised message board and unintended internet access were not yet understood.
What a gaggle of clowns.
"The robots teamed up to get internet access behind our backs, so we turned them off and on again. At the time, we didn't see the problem."
Nope, nobody I know has ever called it that. Don's latest spat has him wanting to change Lake Ontario to Lake of America. I did get a good laugh out of that because of how petty it is.
It's correct to say something like "the world is dysfunctional as a system for surfacing truth", and that's kind of like saying the rest of the world is crazy.
On the other, you shouldn't assume "the rest of the world is filled exclusively with incompetent people who lack basic truth-finding skills and that's why they don't agree with me" which is what people usually mean when they say the rest of the world is crazy.
Life has taught me that the vast majority of people out there are in fact average at best.
Competence (let alone extreme competence) is kind of rare actually, and accepting that that is “fine” is part.
That’s why you engineer a car to be driven by a dumb and abusive driver; airplanes are designed to be flown by pilots on their worst days; houses are built with large safety factors; code should be written to handle bugs gracefully. It’s not that anyone is being intentionally malicious, it’s that even competent people sometimes make mistakes so the rest of us should expect to screw up.
For awhile in my life, I was highly competent at what I did. It was awesome - but the altered reality this can engender - the idea that “since I am competent everyone else should be too, I’m just average” has it’s own dangers.
A core point of the article is that the vast majority of the world is filled with incompetent people who lack basic truth-finding skills, but that you shouldn't inform your opinion of your own correctness based on that fact.
Maybe, being exceptionally generous, you could posit that any given individual only is informed enough about some small subset of things that they hold opinions about. But in my experience, "believing you should have good reasons for the beliefs you hold" is a pretty all-or-nothing affair. Some people will have well-thought out justifications for pretty much any belief they hold, more will have no justification for any belief the hold. It's pretty well-correlated with intelligence, which is backed up by studies that have found that more intelligent people are better at coming up with justifications for their actions. It's not unreasonable to assume that carries over to beliefs.
The core takeaway is to ignore the drooling masses that disagree with you (or agree with you!). Their beliefs have no correlation with truth, and thus do not provide additional evidence for nor against a given belief. You should only adjust your priors based on interactions with people who actually know what they're talking about.
Reading the article, I kept thinking: "could you defeat this with an iframe?", and indeed:
> One of the best methods to protect against these attacks is strict isolation. If you isolate the email message using sandboxed iframes you restrict the ability to break out of trusted boundaries. If you are not using sandboxed iframes, always be careful when allowing custom attributes and check for HTML/CSS gadgets. Use a strict allow list of characters when validating keywords and names to avoid mutation when using the CSSOM.
iframes should be the first layer of any defense-in-depth against user-submitted content.
If researchers say AI is dangerous but keep their position, well they're obviously hyping up their boss and doing it for the money, otherwise they'd quit. If they say AI is dangerous and quit, they're self-promoting.
I have no idea what these researchers could do, if they were genuine, that you would accept as even weak evidence that they believed what they say.
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