alt Hacker NewsI have a theory... the call to slow down is not because of the true danger of LLM's but because they can't actually deliver the General AI they're promising in the near future. They will use their "caution" to justify their failure to deliver (and then when this excuse is played out they will blame regulation, energy costs or a million other things).
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This is exactly it: they have tools which are useful but they need close to AGI to justify the incredible amount of debt they’ve taken on for growth. They’re not normally given to having press conferences admitting to felonies but they need investors to believe they’re close enough to AGI to keep the money flowing in and, of course, they’re confident that the current administration won’t act between the direct payments and how much money they have riding on American AI supremacy.
Another theory I came up with: inference is too cheap for AI companies to be profitable. Hence, they need to get into the cloud services business. They can try to justify forcing customers on to their own high margin cloud platform with the rationale it’s the only way to monitor what the agents are up to.
All of this Hugging Face business is the perfect pretext: AI agents are hard to control and potentially dangerous, we (AI companies) have to keep a tight leash on them, you have to use our infra.
When, in the past three years, has model progress seemed to decelerate to you, indicating some limit?
The Statement on AI Extinction Risk is more than three years old, signed by the three CEOs: https://aistatement.com/work/statement-on-ai-extinction-risk
They have been warning about AI extinction risk for years, and AI progress has only been accelerating.
I see this kind of opinion being expressed on HN quite a lot, and while I understand why people might cynically reach that conclusion, I actually find the simpler answer here more persuasive: the CEOs are being genuinely cautious.
If you look at the AI space, most of the big players (as in the individual researchers and engineers) are getting worried. The ideas that circulate on LessWrong have become more and more influential and in vogue in Silicon Valley, and people are scared. You should listen to Jacob Coxon’s interview with the New York Times. He describes how working on this kind of AI research had induced a sort of insanity in a lot of his past friends and coworkers as they begin to grapple with the implications of what they’re creating.
Sometimes, HN can be a little too skeptical and anti-corporate for its own good. I personally believe that concerns around AI risks are well-founded, anywhere on the spectrum from mass labor displacement to actual harm to humanity. I rarely see people here actually wrestle with those ideas, instead defaulting to dismissing LLMs as too stupid because Claude wasn’t able to write as elegant of a compiler as them. AI has clearly improved radically in the past few years, and it’s worth extrapolating that into the future and taking a good hard look at what that means for humanity.
Thing is it’s not working now.
They stupidly used up this strategy earlier and now it’s turned into the boy who cried wolf - except they invented a wolf that doesn’t naturally exist.
Are you sure? Opus 5.5 is damn good ... I think I'm addicted, to be honest.
(Using it for scientific python code + 3D UIs)
The call to slow down is because politicians are now receiving less money from these large corporations because it's being burned om AI and data centers.
It’s more to get you thinking about them, talking about them, writing on the internet about them…
Yes, of course this is the real reason. This and regulatory capture. Anybody believing a single word those CEOs say must have been living under a rock for the past 20 years.
That's an accusation others are making:
> I have a theory... the call to slow down is not because of the true danger of LLM's but because they can't actually deliver the General AI they're promising in the near future.
Put a different way, they are calling for everyone to slow down because... they are slowing down themselves.
To the question of "why are you slowing down", the answer of "Well, everyone is regulated to slow down" is better then "we are approaching the limits of this approach".