this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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AI one-percenters seizing power forever is the real doomsday scenario, warns AI godfather::The real risk of AI isn't that it'll kill you. It's that a small group of billionaires will control the tech forever.

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[–] [email protected] 195 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Business Insider warning about late stage capitalism feels more than a little ironic.

[–] [email protected] 56 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As does being warned of technological oligarchs monopolizing AI by someone who works for fucking Meta.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Not to mention the reason we can all fuck around with llama models despite the fact. Props to yann and other meta AI researchers. Also eager to see future jepa stuff.

If only openAI was so open.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Today on PBS, we got an insider warning from a lifelong Republican that the fascism got put of hand and is going for full autocracy, even though he'd been pushing through pro-fash policies for the last thirty years.

Everyone thinks The One Ring will be theirs to control.

[–] Mirshe 9 points 1 year ago

And in other news, the Leopards Eating Faces Party continues to eat faces, confusing Leopards Eating Faces voters...

[–] MirthfulAlembic 7 points 1 year ago

Was that the Adam Kinzinger one? It's a low bar, but I'll give him a modicum of credit for saying his vote against the first impeachment was cowardice and that he'd vote for Biden in 2024 if Trump is the Republican nominee. Doesn't totally feel like a lesson learnt that he still considers himself a Republican, though.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

They should rename themselves to Business Balls Deep Insider.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Business Insider is run by college students making minimum wage.

[–] pozbo 3 points 1 year ago

That's how they got inside.

[–] [email protected] 65 points 1 year ago (4 children)

This is why we need large-scale open-source AI efforts, even if it scares the everliving shit out of me.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I've been thinking about how to do that. The code for most AI is pretty basic and uninteresting. It's mostly modifying the input for something usable. Companies could open source their entire code base without letting anything important out.

The dataset is the real problem. Say you want to classify fruit to check if it's ripe enough for harvesting. You'll need a whole lot of pictures of your preferred fruit where it's both ripe and not ripe. You'll want people who know the fruit to classify those images, and then you can feed it into a model. It's a lot of work, and needs to attract a bunch of people to volunteer their time. Largely the sort of people who haven't traditionally been a part of open source software.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

AI safety experts are worried that capitalists will be too eager to get AGI first and will discard caution (friendly AI principles) for mad science.

And I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Any AI safety experts that believes these oligarchs are going to get AGI and not some monkey paw are also drinking the cool aide.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Actually AI safety experts are worried that corporations are just interested in getting technology that achieves specific ends, and don't care that it is dangerous or insufficiently tested. Our rate of industrial disasters kinda demonstrates their views regarding risk.

For now, we are careening towards giving smart drones autonomy to detect, identify, target and shoot weapons at enemies long before they're smart enough to build flat-packed furniture from the IKEA visual instructions.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

If we have to choose between corporations or the government ruling us with AI I think I'm gonna just take a bullet.

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[–] errer 6 points 1 year ago

Might be one of the key democratizing forces us plebs will have…I do suggest people try out some of the open solutions out there already just to have that skill in their back pockets (e.g. GPT4All).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yep. As dangerous as that could be, it's better then centralizing it. There are already systems like GPT4all that come with good models that are slower then things like Chat GPT but work similarly well.

[–] alienanimals 31 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Calling anyone the "godfather" or "father" of AI is the stupidest shit.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

Longtime expert, prodigy, and one of the greatest minds in the field just isn't good enough

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Unless they say Al instead of AI.

[–] ricdeh 2 points 1 year ago

Truer words were never spoken!

[–] clearleaf 30 points 1 year ago (3 children)

At first the fear mongering was about how AI is so good that you'll be able to replace your entire workforce with it for a fraction of the cost, which would be sooo horrible. Pwease investors pwease oh pwease stop investing in my company uwu

Now they're straight up saying that the people who invest the most in AI will dominate the world. If tech companies were really all that scared of AI they would be calling for more regulations yet none of these people ever seem to be interested in that at all.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (19 children)

I think you've spotted the grift here. AI investment has faltered quickly, so a final pump before the dump. Get the suckers thinking it's a no-brainer and dump the shitty stock. Business insider caring for humanity lol

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You're conflating polarized opinions of very different people and groups.

That being said your antagonism towards investors and wealthy companies is very sound as a foundation.

Hinton only gave his excessive worry after he left his job. There is no reason to suspect his motives.

Lecun is the opposite side and believes the danger is in companies hoarding the technology. He is why the open community has gained so much traction.

OpenAI are simultaneously being criticized for putting AI out for public use, as well a for not being open enough about the architecture, or allowing the public to actually have control of the state of AI developments. That being said they are leaning towards more authoritarian control from united governments and groups.

I'm mostly geared towards yann lecun and being more open despite the risks, because there is more risk and harm from hindering development of or privatizing the growth of AI technology.

The reality is that every single direction they try is heavily criticized because the general public has jumped onto a weird AI hate train.

See artists still complaining about adobe AI regardless of the training data, and hating on the open model community despite giving power to the people who don't want to join the adobe rent system.

[–] worldsayshi 3 points 1 year ago

I've heard some of them are calling for regulation, that favours them.

[–] echo64 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

God I can't stand these people who are only basically only worried about AI's affect on the stock market. No normal person would even notice. we have more realistic issues with AI.

[–] TragicNotCute 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sure AI is going to kill us all, but what about the Dow?!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Raytheon is going to make a killing selling terminators!!! BUY!BUY!BUY!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Yann LeCun the Godfather of AI? He feels more like a Fredo to me.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


He named OpenAI's Sam Altman, Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis, and Anthropic's Dario Amodei in a lengthy weekend post on X.

"Altman, Hassabis, and Amodei are the ones doing massive corporate lobbying at the moment," LeCun wrote, referring to these founders' role in shaping regulatory conversations about AI safety.

That's significant since, as almost everyone who matters in tech agrees, AI is the biggest development in technology since the microchip or the internet.Altman, Hassabis, and Amodei did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

Thanks to @RishiSunak & @vonderleyen for realizing that AI xrisk arguments from Turing, Hinton, Bengio, Russell, Altman, Hassabis & Amodei can't be refuted with snark and corporate lobbying alone.

In March, more than 1,000 tech leaders, including Elon Musk, Altman, Hassabis, and Amodei, signed a letter calling for a minimum six-month pause on AI development.

Those risks include worker exploitation and data theft that generates profit for "a handful of entities," according to the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR).


The original article contains 768 words, the summary contains 163 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well we know that, but anybody who does anything less than clap and sing about it gets treated like trash by the huge wave of people who immediately trusted the crazy thing with their lives. It's the fucking iPhone all over again. So hooray for AI.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Yeah, my own Dad calls me an "activist" now (in a deragotory manner). I never leave my house most days... But okay. I'm an activist because I think AI is a tangible threat to the working class. I've said only a few sentences to my Dad about it. But yeah... I guess I'm the problem for not finding some creative way to profit off LLM's yet.

[–] LemmyIsFantastic 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Me running various models that outperform gpt or bard just fine on a 4080: 👌👍

[–] Silinde 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That's great. Now try training that model on a 4080 and you'll see it'll take significantly longer. Try amassing the data needed for training on your home PC and see how much longer beyond that which you'll need. There's a reason the current race is down to just a few companies, it costs pennies to run queries on an existing model, millions to build and train that model in the first place.

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