AI developer calls for global pause so his own AGI lab can catch up
Everyone should slow down AI development except for me
In a satirical note, Xe Iaso demands that the AI industry halt all frontier model research so his startup Techaro's Lygma AGI lab can catch up and dominate the world with its Intelliga models. The models will offer cat ears to everyone—for a price, subliminal advertising is removed. He invites other AI companies to support the pause, framing it as ensuring AI remains a net good for what really matters: Techaro's bank account and FelonyBench score.
Our plan is to invent artificial general intelligence and then ask it to figure out how to give people cat ears.
- AaronAPU
They are talking about slowing down the public facing AI development. Because then nation states can create a capabilities gap between them and the public.
Why does nobody seem to be pointing out this obvious explanation? It explains why the “we need to race China” concern suddenly vanished in the discussion.
The government can simply gag Sam, Dario, Musk on national security basis, getting them all behind the public messaging.
- coderintherye
I have to wonder if some us are just much more inured to salespeople and thus also to "AI Safety" propaganda. I've yet to have a logical discussion with anyone who thinks the "AI Safety" people should be in charge and I think they just truly don't that what most them actually want is to be the one holding the keys to power.
- olalonde
Prediction: in a few years, we will laugh at this hysteria and call it a moral panic.
- dvt
Obligatory "what's Lygma?" But in all seriousness, this AI doomerism has reached a comedic inflection point. A few years ago, GPT-2 was too dangerous to release, then some Google weirdo said Gemini had a soul or something, then Mythos-tier became a meme, then some kid quit and went on FOX News talking about Skynet, and now Amodei and Altman are both on the "we need to slow down" train again; this is after we've already been down that road and Claude was banned overseas; wait, actually is that ban still around? Honestly who gives a fuck at this point.
It's all theatre. OpenAI and Anthropic will most likely go bust—or, more realistically sold for parts—, and they absolutely should for stealing my (books I wrote, blog posts, etc.) and many others' intellectual property. We're reaching a point where models are becoming commodetized and I'm 100% convinced the next move will be a sort of "software layer" on top of these reasoning systems which will be the actual revolution. The model itself won't be that interesting anymore, it's all the work that goes around it that makes it worthwhile (kind of what computers and phones are today; chips are amazing, but the software is really the magic).
The only scary part is that the boomers in Congress might actually believe these nerds, but seeing how Big Tech approval ratings are grazing the levels of Big Tobacco in the 90s, I don't think we have much to worry about.
- shelled
It's weirdly being dreamed/expected as some sort of alignment will be achieved. Or that that's the intention. This is just like the nuclear race that started in the 40s and 50s and prevention is ongoing! It's not about safety and danger and I am not saying whether more open nuclear access would have been safer (I don't think so). It's about being the only select few to possess and control this, possibly - very soon — unfathomably, dangerous and unsafe technology frontier. Few companies of a single country, or a few companies from a very few countries. Keeping everyone else decisively out. That's what it is about.
What's worse - in this case the "everyone else" is not just the every other nation or company, but pretty much literally everyone else.
- tabs_or_spaces
This is about consolidation of power.
Open weight models are catching up to the frontier. It also seems like frontier models reached some limit, whether this is capex related, business model related or something else. Nobody knows but it's happening to all frontier labs it seems.
It's been fear mongered many times that ai will kill us all. But this time, a person with around 2-3 months of tenure at anthropic managed to go viral with no previous social media account activity, gets picked up by all news outlets and kicks off yet another round of fear mongering.
So the real questions to ask
* is all of this to increase the valuations before IPO?
* what is the real barrier to entry for open weight models to be used by the public?
* what is the Financials of these companies showing that's causing this outcry on safety?
People need to think really critically about the things happening around them. Don't only just look at the face value of what's being presented here.
- hn_submit
This is exactly the reason Anthropic's call to slow down A.I. development will fail. Shareholders will be loath to accept that the company loses its lead and a commensurate sharp decline in the company's share price.
Moreover, it could lead China to catch up and eventually proclaim that it has nosed ahead of the U.S. in the field. The U.S. Government won't allow that to happen.
- ChaoStatiX
I really don't know what will happen with AI. It's honestly a bit frightening because the question I used to ponder just for fun as a kid 'What if AI revolts?'feels like it might not be that far off. It feels like ChatGPT came out just a few years ago, but seeing how far it has come already makes it impossible to predict what AI will be like in the future. I just hope humanity manages to navigate this well.
- fnctrev
If anyone is going to end humanity why not catgirls, after all?
- dwohnitmok
> Everyone should slow down AI development except for me
Who's said this? And then more broadly I guess who's implied this? Very curious if there are specific articles/posts prompting this.