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 @⁨zarkanian@sh.itjust.works⁩

That’s always true. I just did two searches and got the exact same AI result.

I’m guessing google is caching AI results, it would be insane not to.

I did at one time have a Gemini window open that was explaining how to solve a technical problem. It was pretty adamant the solution it was proposing would work, but it wasn’t working. I gave up on AI, and decided to just google for old fashioned web forums about the issue. Of course the AI result comes up first, and it said what I was trying to do wasn’t going to work and gave the reason why. So yeah one instance of AI will say the opposite thing from the other.

BTW I eventually solved the problem by taking a different approach which involved using some code someone posted to stack overflow a few years ago. So AI was just a complete waste of time on that problem.