| We, globally, can stop it. It has worked (so far) for nuclear disarmament, and could work for training large models. I know that policing the usage of computer clusters is not a popular opinion in technical forums, but something has to be done. Specially when talking about potential superintelligences. And if people think that's impossible, remember that current models would have been considered science fiction just a few years ago. |
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| ▲ | _dwt 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't buy the superintelligence package, but I think uncritical LLM adoption poses plenty of threats to things I care about, in a mundane human-scale way. Anyhow, I think you're (absolutely! ugh) right about the politics and I try to make the same point to people: whether you love or hate LLMs, accepting the "inevitabilism" framing is just ceding control of the Overton window. For better or worse, technology adoption can be and has been slowed by politics. We don't have nuclear plants everywhere. We don't have Project Orion starships colonizing Mars. We still have very strong social stigmas against genetic selection for human embryos, etc. This all can change in a heartbeat, and I'm not sure that policing the hardware rather than holding specific humans accountable for bad LLM outcomes is productive, but fundamentally: yes, we can stop it. | | |
| ▲ | BoppreH an hour ago | parent [-] | | > I don't buy the superintelligence package It's the same deal as Quantum Computers breaking crypto. Maybe there's an 80% chance of it never happening, but when you multiply that remaining 20% by the potential impact... |
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| ▲ | jackie293746 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It hasn't worked for nuclear disarmament. We live in a world where many countries have nuclear arsenals. "But it hasn't killed us yet!" Yeah sure, it's only been less than a century since they were invented. Who knows when nuclear war will come? | | |
| ▲ | BoppreH 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | True, but look at nuclear tests. There used to be around 50 tests every year, for decades. Now the only nuclear tests in the last 27 years were the six done by North Korea[1]. And there's still only nine countries with any nuclear weapons, and none in the past twenty years[2]. That's a bit better than just "it hasn't killed us yet". I think it shows we can at least stop the further development of this kind of technology. [1] https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/nuclear-testing-tally [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_we... | | |
| ▲ | cortesoft 31 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Nuclear tests are extremely easy to detect worldwide, and enrichment activity is a major industrial process that is also fairly easy to track given the specialized equipment needed. AI development doesn’t have any of these characteristics. It would be almost impossible to easily distinguish a datacenter that is working on AI development and a datacenter mining cryptocurrency. It would not be nearly as easy to stop AI development as it is to stop nuclear arms development. | |
| ▲ | Analemma_ 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | To the extent nuclear arms control works, I think it's only because nuclear weapons are so hard to build-- uranium enrichment is hugely expensive and complicated, and plutonium weapons need actual reactors. If it was possible for ordinary companies to build nuclear weapons, and also release open-source ones that anyone could use to compete with the paid ones, I suspect we'd all have been dead a long time ago, arms control treaties or no. | | |
| ▲ | BoppreH an hour ago | parent [-] | | Even the (SOTA LLM) open source models are trained with huge clusters. Datacenters are also hugely expensive and complicated. Or you can take one step back and look at chip allocation. As far as I know there are only three companies on the planet that can make the chips that go in those clusters. One (ASML), if you look back the supply chain to the Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography Systems. If politicians decided that no more large language models should be trained, it sounds like we could do it. |
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| ▲ | vitalyan1234 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | are you going to nuke China when they predictably ignore you? what the fuck are you going to do, tariff them? lol. | | |
| ▲ | BoppreH an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I think the standard answer is "yes, the consequence of noncompliance is bombing the datacenters, but it wouldn't happen because China also understands why we shouldn't build it". | | |
| ▲ | cortesoft 30 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I am not sure where you get the idea that ANY country thinks we shouldn’t build AI. | | |
| ▲ | BoppreH 24 minutes ago | parent [-] | | In 2023 there was an open letter titled "Pause Giant AI Experiments", signed by almost all the big names on the West. I'd say the public opinion only got worse since then. |
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| ▲ | vitalyan1234 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | the standard answer is laughably naive, then. "might is right" has never been more true than now. |
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| ▲ | SpicyLemonZest 30 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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