alt Hacker NewsTheir position makes no sense to me. I don’t see how you can be a mainstream company selling your services worldwide (almost) if you also believe that you’re building an extremely dangerous AGI (supposedly based on the same technology you’re offering to everyone). If you actually believe that an AGI would be extremely dangerous that should 100% be a very strictly regulated area of research, similar to bio weapons.
And we know that Chinese models are derived from OpenAI and Anthropic, they are at the same time talking about how dangerous models can be (even their aligned ones it seems), while being also responsible for the development of the whole industry and providing the basis for adversary countries to build their own.
I don’t believe we would accept that for any other technology that is expected to be as risky for the world
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> If you actually believe that an AGI would be extremely dangerous that should 100% be a very strictly regulated area of research, similar to bio weapons.
Yeah. They do believe that, and they have been pushing for regulations for years.
And every time one of their models does something horrible, it helps them achieve that goal.
If you are a company selling Red Team cybersecurity services, it’s in your interest to make your services indispensable. Your unwilling customers must subscribe to frontier cybersecurity scans and fixes to ensure they’re immune to just-behind-frontier attackers, who are training on those very same frontier models.
And of course this also satisfies those who think the best prospect of aligning superintelligence is to be in The Room Where It Happens. Arms races are what make that room exist, after all.
It’s the Yelp protection playbook too. If you don’t play ball, somebody else will control your reputation and livelihood. We live in a dark forest.
> Their position makes no sense to me.
If one assumes that they don't actually care about security, and care very deeply about getting sensational press, their position makes a lot of sense.
For all their chatter about how incredibly important "alignment" is, they still haven't bothered to remember the 30->50 year old computer security principle of "Don't blindly do what some random stranger tells you to do." and ensure that system instructions, user instructions, and instructions from untrusted sources are indelibly marked with their category and treated according to those markings. Every single time one of these systems fails to distinguish between these three classes of instructions -or confuses its internal chatter with user instructions-, that's proof that the major LLM companies cannot be bothered to follow one of the most basic computer security principles.
"But it's all vectors, not language! The LLM can't tell where the instructions came from", one might retort. I'd reply: "Neither can a CPU, but somehow we managed to make it work way back in the day. Amazing, isn't it?".
The companies are begging to be regulated for this reason and have been doing so for years. HN's response is generally that this is performative for marketing or seeking regulatory capture or haha anthropic you get what you ask for. Maybe the cynics are right, but there's really nothing inconsistent about the naive view here, once you factor in race dynamics and obligations to investors.