Was this a "build better sandboxing" and "don't tell people to eat glue" safety leader, or a Roko's Basilisk believing safety leader?
A lot of the "AI safety" types are very focused on the latter and not at all concerned with the former. We need both, but we clearly need a much stronger focus on the problems we are seeing now, and much less on the hypothetical problems we might see in the future.
Today’s current problems were all hypothetical several years ago. At that time people claimed that the “real pressing problems” were misinformation and DEI issues. If we pretend that hypothetical problems can be safely ignored because there’s “no evidence” that they are real, we will keep getting surprised.
We don't actually need anybody worrying about silly hypothetical scenarios — at least not as paid employees. There are already a surplus of sci-fi authors doing that.
The way it works in practice seems to be something like: If a risk is covered in sci-fi, people will say "that's just sci-fi", and proceed to not worry about it. So arguably, science fiction authors writing about hypotheticals is actively counterproductive for addressing said hypotheticals.
Imagine, for example, if a major piece of pandemic fiction was published in 2019, trying to explore how a pandemic would work out in modern society. Doubtless, many would've responded to news about COVID-19 by saying "it's just sci-fi, nothing to worry about".
If organizations actually succeed in making a future AI smarter than us, then how do you hope that it takes actions that are aligned with our interests?
This seems like an ad hominem? "He has weird kinks, therefore his theories are incorrect." Should we investigate the sex lives of every Nobel Prize winner to figure out which prizes need to be rescinded?
So what. Various attackers managed to take down large chunks of the Internet on a frequent basis before LLMs even existed. This killed very few people. The great thing about the Internet is how resilient it is.
At risk of falling into hypothetical traps, darling companies of this very website have mistakenly brought down large portions of the internet... thanks to our old friend BGP. No attack needed, just oversight and concentration on the business and IP space!
Anyway, to your point, things can be resilient. They tend to be or not be... because we made them that way. Don't poke your bruises, and all that.
What's next; life support is deployed on-campus but relies on a VPN tunnel to us-east? Stop that.
It is that they are chatbots. If it were real AI, an actual singularity, I would worry, maybe. But it isn’t. They are absurdly powerful automation tools that can handle logic better than a human can dream of. They take care of the grunt minutiae without complaint. But they are not going to end the world in their current form.
> “Given today’s risks, frontier labs need to run like nuclear-power plants or busy airports, with layers of redundancy and careful, time-consuming planning, so that the occasional and inevitable human error does not open a door to disaster,” he wrote.
>we clearly need a much stronger focus on the problems we are seeing now
I think it's a little more complicated than that. As Dean Ball put it:
>Some people will look at misalignment incidents and insist that these are akin to bugs in traditional software. This is an actively bad analogy, because playing whack-a-mole with examples of misalignment (as one might with software bugs) not only fails to resolve the underlying problem but may in fact make it worse by making it harder to detect or even, depending on how you do the whack-a-mole, teach the machine to deliberately hide misalignment. This is not how traditional software works, and those who insist “it’s just like fixing bugs in software” are confidently applying a lossy analogy that confuses more than it clarifies.
The important distinction, in my view, is between solutions which at least attempt to address the root problem, and solutions which sorta just patch things up (like better sandboxing). Addressing the root problem is both more robust in the short term, and also more likely to generalize in the long term. Resist the urge to focus on band-aid solutions, even if they are easier.
He is a hypocrite for all we care. You work there for a while when your stock is getting vested and suddenly you have this feeling? Like the dude hired a PR firm as well.
While the safety and alignment is a real problem, I don’t get this guy or the Anthropic dude. First world problems.
“I believe there’s about a 50% chance we all die because of the development of smarter-than-human AI systems, and that our actions over the next two to 10 years will determine the outcome.”
There are a gargantuan number of extremely intelligent AI researchers, Turing Award winners, and the lab CEOs saying the same thing. They are the ones closest to understanding the technology.
I don't believe it. Ever since I've been alive I was told something would kill us all. This is the new thing that's going to kill us all. I don't believe it.
“I believe there’s about a 50% chance we all die because of the development of smarter-than-human AI systems"
... over an unbounded timeframe?
And how exactly?
Those are very round numbers, but also very specific. Can we get some accounting on how you came to that? Anything? Vibes?
I mean, if you want me to take you seriously, let's have a deep discussion with things that can be measured. I absolutely agree that OpenAI and friends aren't being restrained enough and are acting with recklessness, but declarations of doom based on vibes isn't cutting it.
>“Given today’s risks, frontier labs need to run like nuclear-power plants or busy airports, with layers of redundancy and careful, time-consuming planning, so that the occasional and inevitable human error does not open a door to disaster,” he wrote.
This sounds more like an attempt at regulatory capture. Current AI systems aren't physical infrastructure that can just run away like a nuclear power plant, for example. At the end of the day, AI is still just software running on someone's hardware.
Why would the people who quit these companies try to push regulatory capture by said companies? Why would the numerous independent AI researchers do that either? Is it all a big conspiracy?
The LeCun article being posted at the same time as this is quite apt.
These "safety" people should have spent more time reading actual cybersecurity textbooks and less time reading EA forums and less wrong (or in Robinson's case, it appears, being policy wonks). Maybe then these labs wouldn't be totally incompetent.
A lot of the "AI safety" types are very focused on the latter and not at all concerned with the former. We need both, but we clearly need a much stronger focus on the problems we are seeing now, and much less on the hypothetical problems we might see in the future.
Imagine, for example, if a major piece of pandemic fiction was published in 2019, trying to explore how a pandemic would work out in modern society. Doubtless, many would've responded to news about COVID-19 by saying "it's just sci-fi, nothing to worry about".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49831269 article is gone. archive: https://archive.is/QMo1k
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49737985
Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse: https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-th...
Is it that "chatbots" can't come out of the screen to immediately harm you physically?
Let's say they simply manage to take down the internet. How many would die?
Anyway, to your point, things can be resilient. They tend to be or not be... because we made them that way. Don't poke your bruises, and all that.
What's next; life support is deployed on-campus but relies on a VPN tunnel to us-east? Stop that.
> “Given today’s risks, frontier labs need to run like nuclear-power plants or busy airports, with layers of redundancy and careful, time-consuming planning, so that the occasional and inevitable human error does not open a door to disaster,” he wrote.
without snark, how can we do this if these people are obsessed with:
a) move fast and break things and externalize the costs to those who have nothing to do with their company
and
b) beta testing their products on the public when the public hasn’t agreed to be beta tested on…
So there's no AI errors anymore, only the human errors are left? Nice! </s>
Is the whole article generated slop?
I think it's a little more complicated than that. As Dean Ball put it:
>Some people will look at misalignment incidents and insist that these are akin to bugs in traditional software. This is an actively bad analogy, because playing whack-a-mole with examples of misalignment (as one might with software bugs) not only fails to resolve the underlying problem but may in fact make it worse by making it harder to detect or even, depending on how you do the whack-a-mole, teach the machine to deliberately hide misalignment. This is not how traditional software works, and those who insist “it’s just like fixing bugs in software” are confidently applying a lossy analogy that confuses more than it clarifies.
https://x.com/deanwball/status/2104622726140883355
The important distinction, in my view, is between solutions which at least attempt to address the root problem, and solutions which sorta just patch things up (like better sandboxing). Addressing the root problem is both more robust in the short term, and also more likely to generalize in the long term. Resist the urge to focus on band-aid solutions, even if they are easier.
While the safety and alignment is a real problem, I don’t get this guy or the Anthropic dude. First world problems.
(donor advised fund where he retains complete control, after a 60% tax deduction)
You can basically time your openai releases by if another safety person has quit in protest
Or, in other words - we have two P(Doom), one for AI being developed, and another for AI being not developed. The latter is not discussed enough imho.
lol. Please tell me some abstract concept like one employee's view of "culture" should be the priority over "rules and laws."
There are a gargantuan number of extremely intelligent AI researchers, Turing Award winners, and the lab CEOs saying the same thing. They are the ones closest to understanding the technology.
Where there’s smoke there’s fire.
... over an unbounded timeframe?
And how exactly?
Those are very round numbers, but also very specific. Can we get some accounting on how you came to that? Anything? Vibes?
I mean, if you want me to take you seriously, let's have a deep discussion with things that can be measured. I absolutely agree that OpenAI and friends aren't being restrained enough and are acting with recklessness, but declarations of doom based on vibes isn't cutting it.
> Geoffrey Irving, who worked at OpenAI and DeepMind before becoming chief scientist of Resolution, also joined the warnings on AI on Saturday.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49944227
This sounds more like an attempt at regulatory capture. Current AI systems aren't physical infrastructure that can just run away like a nuclear power plant, for example. At the end of the day, AI is still just software running on someone's hardware.
And the statements of the "doomers" tells us a lot about them, and nothing about the technology
These "safety" people should have spent more time reading actual cybersecurity textbooks and less time reading EA forums and less wrong (or in Robinson's case, it appears, being policy wonks). Maybe then these labs wouldn't be totally incompetent.