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 @⁨Return_of_Chippy@lemmy.world⁩

I’ve heard a few explanations for the “AI will kill us all” narrative.

  1. AI techies are in a cult. They genuinely believe this stuff because they’re crazy.

  2. It makes the AI sound powerful and impressive, which is ultimately good for the AI companies.

  3. They’re starting to face competition from open-weight models, so they want to scare politicians into crafting regulations. They think that they will be able to influence the regulations to favor them and squeeze out their competition.

And, of course, there’s

  1. It keeps people talking about AI. Because whatever you do, don’t quit talking about AI, because if you quit talking about it, the line might go down! And the line going down is very, very bad.

Replying to @⁨zarkanian@sh.itjust.works⁩

as soon as we figure out how to break the laws of thermodynamics and invent infinite energy, we can feed that to ai to finally gain real ai and it will solve perpetual motion and faster than light travel. get ready because once all this happens and the stars align, the fountain of youth will rise in the bermuda triangle and the ufos will bring back jesus(white and original flavor). this is going to unlock all the mysteries of the universe.

en