The author of this blog is an AI skeptic (see the backlog of posts). That's fine, but it's hard to square with this particular post. To take Coxon's argument seriously, you have to believe frontier models are hypercapable, and not just hype objects. That's what Coxon believes and why he left.

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moolcool 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

All OP has to believe is that Coxon himself believes the hype.

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tptacek 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I guess if the entire argument is that people should make moral choices in their employment, sure, but that's not a very interesting piece; people generally already believe that.

But I don't think that's their argument. I think their argument is that people should make moral choices to avoid employment with AI firms, and if you're using Coxon for that argument, you can't coherently argue that models are hype objects simultaneously. There is no greater claim you can make about AI hypercapability than that it will eradicate humanity.

(I don't buy any of those claims, for what it's worth.)

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moolcool 4 hours ago | parent [-]

The heads of the firms themselves believe it too. Maybe it’s reasonable to quit your job if your boss thinks he’s building a doomsday machine (regardless of how ridiculous you or anyone else find that idea)

	▲	tptacek 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, I guess, but you see how the argument is starting to get tortured.

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dsign 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> To take Coxon's argument seriously, you have to believe frontier models are hypercapable, and not just hype objects.

It's harder and harder to make the point that frontier objects are just hype objects though. And, even if they stay where they are today, that's more than enough to make them incredibly...destabilizing, to say the least. It's not only it, but frontier models act like knowledge mixers and percolators. Some people (not necessarily everybody), are adept at the discipline of learning, building things and executing projects, and that's all you need today with LLMs filling many of the gaps such person can have. Now, most of those people are actually engineers. So I'm going to go with the article and say that we must stop selling our souls for money.

	▲	goatlover 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Hype objects when it comes to the idea that they will soon become recursively self-improving, boot strapping themselves to super intelligence, at which point we will be at their mercy. Because that's basically the p(doom) argument, that some probability is associated with ASI killing us all. That's different from what we have today with powerful software tools that people can use for all sorts of things, which is an extension of what we already had in less concentrated form. It makes things easier for humans to do good and bad things, but it's not an autonomous digital god.