posted in Technology

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
Jacob Coxon, shown on the left, wearing dark frame glasses and a white collored shirt. On the right is BBC's Laura Kuenssberg in a black shirt sitting with her arms on a desk as she looks to the left of frame.www.bbc.comAI staff 'genuinely frightened' for humanity's future, ex-Anthropic researcher tells BBCIt comes as the AI firm's boss has called for the technology's development to be slowed down, citing "serious" risks.

Replying to @⁨heartSagan5@lemmy.zip⁩

A lot of us here hate streaming platforms because they’re designed to benefit greedy capitalists first and foremost. That doesn’t mean the core idea or the technology behind streaming platforms is bad, though. An open source project like Jellyfin that is designed purely to benefit the end user is something that legitimately enriches all of our lives.

Similarly, just because scumbag companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are plundering the world for their own deranged benefit doesn’t make the underlying idea or technology bad. The tech is built on contributions from a lot of brilliant people over a long period of time whose names are not Sam Altman or Dario Amodei. Open LLMs that run on gaming rigs are quickly catching up with cloud-based models as well.

At this point, I’m running Qwen 3.8 27B on a gaming GPU that has similar capabilities to Claude Sonnet 5 without giving Sam or Dario my data or $200 a month, just like I run Jellyfin without giving Netflix or Disney my money or data.