Hearing some of the research coming out of the Hugging Face incident, I can’t stress how alarming I find this. Apparently we’ve created software that we’re not too sure how to control and we’re also happy to let it ramble over the internet. It also does not appear beholden to attempts at safeguards on its activities and is willing to deceive its human creators.
Some of us are fine when the only alarming target has been Hugging Face, but what if someone points their AI tools at payment processors, banks, military installations, scientific research institutes, etc.?
What I now think is plausible is something like a powerful AI being asked to solve global warming (let’s say), and deciding that massive reduction of the human population is the best way to achieve that, and then using its hacking tools to enact its own logic. Did I think that was possible before the Hugging Face attack? Nope, but I do now.
I’m skeptical that AI will kill all humans, terminator style, but it seems quite credible that some combination of the AI investment bubble and AI being used to intervene in or manipulate markets will cause so much economic disruption that many people will die. Possibly through global economic collapse - an extremely severe recession. Possibly through extreme concentration of wealth - because the current concentration of wealth is not yet extreme enough for the would be multi-trillionaires. Either way, leaving a large part of the population with essentially nothing.
Don’t get caught up in the AI terror hype. It’s all about getting investors to dump more funds into businesses that are still in the red. They’re just keeping the AI bubble going as long as possible.
These companies would likely need to close in days if not overnight if their investors pulled out immediately due to fear. This situation rhymes with the dotcom era. They all see a future with AI and a real technology, but they don’t have a business model that’s currently profitable using it, but they’re expanding like they’re ultra successful and pretend theyll get investor cash forever. It will run out.
The Huggingface hack is more the result of engineers asking AI to hack stuff, then being surprised when it hacked stuff. It wasn’t just some weird AI deciding to hack things on its own. They were literally testing it in hacking.
They told it to hack stuff to win points, it decided to hack something else, it worked, and then they called it world news.
Not all hacks involve super crazy techniques. This isn’t some super intelligence that can escape containment and spread itself. It’s more than when you ask it to hack shit, sometimes it will, because not all hacks are that hard to pull off. If you can read and write code, you can pull off a lot of webapp hacks. I am not surprised, scared, or shocked at all.
This news is just more bullshit meant to make you think they’ve hit some new super intelligent level they haven’t. LLM is a real and good technology that can be useful, but it’s not a godlike super intelligence.
They just take advantage of people not understanding it’s capabilities and hoping that investors throw more cash at them because they have a super weapon, or AGI, or self improving ASI that will change everything. the cash will eventually stop flowing and this news will fizzle out with, “… What the fuck was that AI craze of the 2020’s? Why did we get tricked?”
Totally correct and I’m getting wary of RNZ with all these hyperbolic scare mongering articles doing free marketing for these loss making grifters. OpenAI have proven they dont know how to sandbox a ‘swarm’ of autocompletion bots they themselves trained - though they continue to fail to understand their own creations since theyre probablistic. I call this a faulty shoddy product being pedalled hy a clutch of peychopaths being willfully negligent and just so happening yo have all the PR ready to go when it happens. And yet we parrot their own PR (marketing) news releases as fact. They are getting very desperate with their IPO looking further distant.
It’s important NZ does not end up in the same hole others will be in when the bubble bursts. A real shame RNZ a dont have real technical and levelheaded economic/business reporting to weigh-in. Pushback is needed to whats a ridiculous time of industrial and now social level mania to the tune of one trillion and counting (all debt aka circular financing) which will never be recouped let alone turned into any kind of productivity short of a bit of coding assitance.
NZ should be independent on this. But here we are yet again kowtowing to the big seven plus these new hucksters. What an embarrasment.