AI staff 'genuinely frightened' for humanity's future, ex-Anthropic researcher tells BBC

I’m not an AI techie and I’m not well educated on LLMs/AI in general. The issue I’m having is the dichotomy between how people talk about it. I’ve heard completely opposite ends of the spectrum. From AI is quickly becoming advanced enough to threaten human society, all the way to its a glorified dictionary/search engine that can’t really do much of anything. I know Lemmy has a steep anti-AI slant. But, can someone talk about this in a way I can wrap my head around why the divide seems so big?

www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1kx0gyje9wo

Good job in helping with their guerilla marketing campaign.

When a corporation realises that working for government will be more profitable than working for consumers, they pivot to scaremongering, but always with the undercurrent of “and that’s why you should PAY US so that you own the nukes, and not your enemies”

I don’t have the confidence in my knowledge/understanding of the topic to just take a “its all bullshit” view. Especially when many of the people who believe that act like you. You don’t have to be a prick to explain something or talk about it.

LLMs basically work like auto-correct. They’re much more sophisticated, but it’s the same basic principle. Instead of “Which letter is most likely to follow after this series of letters?” it’s “Which token is most likely to follow after this series of tokens?” A token can be anything, but usually it’s a word.

Now, given that, consider a statement like

We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!

Okay, how? A statistical model generating tokens doesn’t have thought, it doesn’t have emotions, so it can’t want to do something, much less make plans and carry them out.

Could AI give somebody the ability to kill all humans? How? Under what scenario? Is somebody putting an LLM in charge of their nuclear stockpile? You don’t blame the LLM. You blame the humans who made that decision.