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

I’m more worried about the people using AI than the tech itself.

it’s the former juuuuuuuust until the latter

once it escapes the lab there’s no putting it back in the bottle

Unlike a bio-virus that has evolved for a billion years across all the niches of our ecosystems, when AI “escapes the lab” it’s entirely confined to man-made infrastructure, it’s not going to infect a flock of migrating birds and hop to the other hemisphere, it’s going to be in systems we built, mostly within the past 30 years or less, mostly in the past 30 months for the powerful ones.

When AI starts demonstrating “copying itself” through DNA encoding infecting living beings without killing them (too quickly), and/or “running” on something more ubiquitous than massive data-center hardware, that’s when it’s over.