> The companies are begging to be regulated for this reason and have been doing so for years

They can stop doing a thing they claim should be regulated. You dont need to be regulated and forced to do the thing you consider right, especially when you are the primary one collecting the money to do the bad thing.

They could train ai for pro-social purposes, they dont here. They could make it useful for worker, they intentionally try to harm workers. And then pretend "it just happened".

> The companies are begging to be regulated for this reason and have been doing so for years

Regulations are rules that you force on a market, but the actors in the market should not be assumed to be all operating against the regulations before they come into play. Said in other words, these companies don't need to wait for regulation to not destroy the world, if that's truly what they think will happen.

> inb4 someone else will do it

I know, that’s the position Dario Amodei argues for in his essays. I did pass their cultural interview and had to consume a lot of their content to prepare, I think I have a good idea of their stated values. But what the company does and what the leadership states their vision is is pretty contradictory.

They are providing everything bad guys need to develop their unaligned frontier models. Chinese models that Dario considers to be dangerous are distilled from Claude, and they know this.

They are creating the FOMO around AI which pushes adversary countries to invest so much into unaligned models.

They offer models as a service they know are jailbreakable and can be used by bad actors.

They are running internal red-team experiments without adequate isolation.

If I take their statements seriously, AGI research should really be seen as bioweapon, or cloning, or nuclear research. Something strictly regulated worldwide, with export controls for HBM and other hardware used for AI training. What they are trying is instead to boost their position by becoming too big to fail and too powerful to ban, but then want the industry to be regulated to pull the ladder behind them. It really doesn’t feel they are serious about their values, otherwise they wouldn’t be offering Mythos (a model that is unsafe from their own admission) as a service to their close partners

https://theonion.com/sam-altman-if-i-dont-end-the-world-some...

Considering their current valuation and the prospects of getting any of this money back, that's a genius exit strategy.

> "Neither can a CPU, but somehow we managed to make it work way back in the day. Amazing, isn't it?".

I feel this completely misunderstands the problem, and the vast gulf between an LLM and a CPU.

First and most importantly, the set of behaviors of a CPU is extremely constrained, and we have a very simple model for which behaviors are safe and which are not. Writing to addresses between X and Y, executing certain instructions - unsafe; everything else, safe. In contrast, an LLM has a huge array of possible behaviors, and variations of those behaviors, and it's very unclear which are safe and which are not. Is emitting the text "sudo rm -rf /" safe? Yes, in some contexts, such as writing this HN comment ; absolutely not in others, such as generating a command that an agent will execute. How do you check which is which? What if it emits "sudo rm -rf /usr/sbin/../.. ", is that safe?

Secondly, CPUs can absolutely be used to hack other people. Nothing in the permission model helps in any way prevent other computers from being attacked by your CPU. So exactly the part we care most about in AI security is the part that has never been solved, for any computing system ever created.

I get the impression that every AI lab is desperately trying to figure out how to unambiguously separate instructions from data in their token streams. The fact that they haven't managed to yet suggests to me that it's a very, very difficult problem.

The entire economic premise and value case of LLMs rests on the idea that instructions need not be provided in advance, and that the model can "reason" based on evidence and "decide" what to do next.

Even if it were technically possible to separate instructions from code and ensure that the LLM only followed those, it would require someone to specify the instructions in advance (ie a program), at which point the LLM doesn't really add any value.