alt Hacker NewsI feel completely baffled by the other responses on this thread. People viewing this purely as a marketing stunt, regulatory capture or attack on their freedoms, with seemingly no appreciation of the real threat that AI could pose to society and even humanity given its current rate of progress.
I'm not going to claim that the CEO of pre-IPO company has no incentive to bolster the claims of his tech, but to completely disregard everything he is saying based on that seems awfully binary.
I don't know whether people are just high on copium, spouting "it's just fancy autocomplete" or "only humans can really be creative" on every LLM-related thread, but it is impossible to deny that in a span of a few years we've gone from models that could barely put together a sentence, to something maybe not equivalent to a junior developer, but at least resembling it.
And sure, you can point out every flaw that current day LLMs have, just how everyone pointed out that Stable Diffusion couldn't generate accurate hands (until it could 6 months later!). But the gradient is pretty clear and I am yet to see a well-argued narrative from anyone why scaling laws should fail in the next year or two (by which point it feels like we're going to have a real problem, extrapolating the current trajectory).
I'm very glad this discussion is at least being had, and I wish everyone would get off their high-horse and take things a bit more seriously.
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In terms of aeronautics, went from the Wright brothers to the moon in 40 years. After that, everyone understandably thought that we'd be living in space and flying everywhere with personal jet packs in another couple years. Little did they know, it was the top of the S-curve, not the middle.
In the 60 years since, we've barely been able to adapt the 737 to fly longer routes.
Or simply we use AI and see on the ground what it can and can't do. I can generally trust an agent for solved problems, but the more something deviates from established industry standards (i.e. what was relentlessly scraped) I have an increasingly harder time not having constant oversight of what it's doing, no matter the specs I put on the md.
Personally I feel most of the improvement in the last year comes from tooling/integration (MCPs, realtime documentation access, treesitter support, orchestration) than from the models themselves, in the last year. And still frontier models would routinely come up with bs until you tell them to actually use those tools.
I agree that AI poses a threat to society. I act on this by not developing world-leading AI models and offering them to anyone willing to pay top dollar, while funneling that money back into accelerating AI capabilities development. Maybe Dario would consider taking a similar ethical position? Maybe he would support restrictions and taxes on data center construction, in order to slow down the pace?
It’s a guy asking to make an end-run around the constitution and the APA regulatory framework based on a flimsy sci fi premise. Naturally it provokes a negative reaction.
Why are they not preaching for protected weights, but public, ie, under state control? What do you feel his posture will be if that is starting to be discussed?
Also, on an unrelated note, why would you have an account for 5 years and only now post your second comment? AI has been an existential threat for years, why only now?
This is a pattern I am seeing all over the place on HN in the last year in AI threads, and I have to admit that I am starting to become paranoid and my feels need some assuaging.
Humans just aren't very good at dealing with threats that aren't immediate concerns. 'Safety regulations are written in blood' is a saying for a reason. A significant chunk of the population shrugs off climate change, and nearly all fertility rate crises threads are filled with dumb 'hurr lower population good' and/or 'See what Capitalism gets you!' rhetoric - They fundamentally don't even understand what the problem is. So is it really all that surprising that a technology like this would be shrugged off until it's too late ? Especially one with such existential issues for humanity? Some people are still too loathe to admit the clearly intelligent machine is intelligent, devolving into increasingly nonsensical and absurd (and ironically more human demeaning) arguments as model capabilities get better. I'm afraid you're asking for too much.
It's denialism, same as climate change, the subconscious fear to really grapple with the actual "what if" alternative scenario. Anthropic are true believers. They got to $1T in 5 years by being exceptionally smart and ahead of the curve here. Meanwhile HN just continually devolves into reactionary cynicism. "must be marketing, they just want to be rich, impossible AI advances much further." Meanwhile at every step of the way, Anthropic and X-riskers / "doomers" are vindicated in their correct predictive beliefs. We're headed to a future far dangerous than nukes very soon. We're in an arms race to detonate one 100x the size
Here's the real reason you are finding these responses in the thread and I'll lay it out in the open.
There are people who simultaneously are scared about AI but refuse to believe that AI is the * real deal * and can do everything Dario thinks it can. These are the same people who think its all marketing hype and Dario is "hyping up" before IPO or some lame conspiracy theory.
It is high time people start accepting the real world performance of LLMs and brace themselves instead of hiding behind two contradictory views
1. AI is hype
2. AI is scary
> I'm not going to claim that the CEO of pre-IPO company has no incentive to bolster the claims of his tech
I am going to say it. The CEO of a pre-IPO company has extreme incentive to bolster the tech he is selling, to the point where his every action should be viewed as only in service to that goal. Every word he says should be viewed critically through that lense. He is not making this post out of the goodness of his heart, he is doing it in service to the IPO. If it happens to align with your views that's great, but it's still just a marketing stunt to get people with your views to buy in. Don't be fooled. Buy in if you feel it's a good deal, not because of the CEO's marketing.