Silicon Valley’s elites can’t be trusted with the future of AI

https://fortune.com/2023/09/01/silicon-valley-elite-trust-future-ai-dominance-dangers-god-complex-wadhwa-gupta/

by CharlesW • 3 years ago

63 27 3 years ago

mtillman• 3 years ago

Author is an AI fear monger (see previous articles) and with regards to elitism, it’s literally called fortune magazine.

rgrieselhuber• 3 years ago

I think that’s the definition of ad hominem, doesn’t address the points made in the article. As someone without strong opinions on this topic I appreciate hearing the various sides.

blastonico• 3 years ago

No, only government can because they love us.

charcircuit• 3 years ago

In January 2023, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told a large audience in India that the country was not capable of building a ChatGPT.

No, he said that for a company with 3 engineers and $10 million it is hopeless to compete against OpenAI on providing a foundation model.

The author is twisting his words and gets triggered to the point where he tries to defend India and brings up things like CEOs of companies like Google being Indian despite the race of the CEO of an American company having very little to do with the viability of start up companies in India.

MrBuddyCasino• 3 years ago

The article seems like a vehicle for the author’s ethno-narcissism.

whereistejas• 3 years ago

I agree with you, it does feel like the article is coming from a very defensive place that seems like an emotional response rather than a logical argument built up from facts. But, the SVs elites "god-complex" that the author refers to is very real. Regulation and policies must be set up to actively keep them from gaining another monopoly.

nmfisher• 3 years ago

I saw that interview, Altman said (paraphrasing) "you won't be able to compete, there's no point trying". I didn't interpret it as directed at the example the questioner gave (a few engineers with a few million dollars), I took it to mean "we're so far ahead of you, you'll never be as good).

The arrogance was breathtaking, particularly when it's inevitable that OpenAI will be knocked down a few pegs (arguably, it's already happening).

bawolff• 3 years ago

This feels pretty unconvincing tbh.

Sure India could build some large model. There's no reason to think that they would do a better job than anyone else. They won't magically have access to different data sets than other people do.

Like does it even matter how out of touch silicon valley elite are? These AI models aren't made by scanning silicon valley elite's brains.

jrflowers• 3 years ago

It feels like a lot of Silicon Valley elites are just sort of stuck in the mud today

atleastoptimal• 3 years ago

Silicon valley tech execs aren't the perfect people to control the future of AI, but imo they're the least bad option among all the people realistically powerful enough in the world today to wield that kind of power.

Also this article is cope about India's stance on the world stage: attempting to equate SOTA AI advancements with a lunar landing, the latter of which was done 60 years ago. There's a reason all of India's smartest go to the US.

at_a_remove• 3 years ago

You're touching on the separation between the people who can and the people who cannot but wish to control. You get a lot of people bleating about AI, unabashedly with their own ideology behind it, but they tend not to be in the crew who can make whatever we are calling AI these days.

erosenbe03• 3 years ago

Largely agree, but it's not clear at this point who will control the AI future. SV elites today are like NYC/NJ/Philly elites of the 1960s. They have the momentum and the capital but the cost of doing business, red tape, and wages are too high. It's not clear they will control the next tech revolution.

ksec• 3 years ago

SV elites today are like NYC/NJ/Philly elites of the 1960s.

As someone not from US, I understand NYC, but what was it about NJ and Philly in the 60s?

grajmanu• 3 years ago

There is no point in trusting anything with anyone. In a world, where everything is quantitatively measured in economic scale (no negative sense intended), all we can hope is that the economic forces is sufficiently strong enough to work towards the betterment of civilization. We have to have scientific temperament to tackle these issues with humanistic approach.

erosenbe03• 3 years ago

Very true. But--Economic scales and incentives are artificial and must be tuned. For example, the USA has a badly regulated medical system that refuses to train doctors efficiently, so medical care is overpriced. 18 year-olds who want to become doctors go to college for like 36 weeks a year with maybe four or five hours of instruction a day. Massive waste of human potential. The legal system is very bad as well. Two graduates from different schools with the same score on the bar receive compensation varying by a factor of 3x dependent on where their degree was obtained. Going to Harvard law is indicative of having connections and the cognitive potential to engage in lucrative schemes well into the future, not actual skill. This does not happen in a country with an efficient legal system, like Germany.

Quindecillion• 3 years ago

No one can be trusted, so everyone should have access.

Open source is the way to go.

The real control is the hardware/infrastructure needed to develop these models.

ralusek• 3 years ago

Nobody can be trusted with the future of AI, but neither can anybody stop the future. The only restraint against AI will be AI, not regulations, but I'm worried that any equilibrium that's reached will be happening at a scale with some serious collateral damage.

asomggazzz662• 3 years ago

The actual constraint is that AI has a fundamentally parasitic reproductive strategy, it cannot reproduce on its own and it's reproduction is likely to be detrimental to the host.

A sufficiently powerful AI will overshoot and kill it's host so to speak, in any number of conceivable scenarios that don't necessarily imply also killing all humans, just digital infrastructure.

This would have serious consequences, but those consequences probably would not include complete extinction for us, and the unsustainable nature of digital infrastructure was obvious way before AI advancements became a serious mainstream issue over the last several years. It's possible AI does not even represent a significant acceleration towards that end that was always going to happen.

So I think we are safe at least in that very limited sense.

matteoraso• 3 years ago

I think it might be the complete opposite. Now that LLMs are available for consumers, I think we'll start seeing individual troll farms sprout up and influence public opinion (it probably already started to happen, but we haven't really seen evidence of it yet). If the technology stays in SV hands, it can at least be regulated. Sadly, the source code for some of these LLMs have already been leaked, so there's no way to stop this.

MiguelX413• 3 years ago

It was inevitable that it would fall into the hands of consumers (leaked or released), so it's better that we deal with the consequences rather than putting it off.

archo• 3 years ago

https://archive.li/wAp0c

Mandatum• 3 years ago

No shit. We need faster legislators. We need faster legal precedence. This shit needs to be prioritised in the courts.

matt-attack• 3 years ago

Can someone please explain why there’s such a concern about the misinformation that could be generated by AI? When the human mind, and typewriter was capable of the same levels of misinformation for quite a bit longer.

I don’t see anyone stare are a typewriter and think: “it’s great but what do we do about the false statements it might produce? Surely we need to regulate this machine and force its manufacture to add features to the mechanism so that it cannot make hateful or erroneous sentences.”

ljbc• 3 years ago

I can tell you my personal reasons for thinking the concern of misinformation is valid: LLMs offer a tradeoff between time to generate content and credibility. You can generate ten thousand websites worth of misinformation in a day, at the expense of having it sound rather clunky, machine-ey. Sophisticated minds won't fall for it the way they might fall for savvy, hand-crafted propaganda articles. But recent experience seems to have shown that clunky webpages with clunky content is enough to influence a critical mass of low-sophistication citizens, polarize their views, make them very angry, shut down their ability for dialog, etc. That's concern #1.

Factoring in the enhancements to LLM output quality (which translates to credibility) we're likely to see in the very near future is concern #2: misinformation, mass propaganda, targeted propaganda, bogus news articles on fake websites, perhaps even crafted opinion pieces that can get through the gates and published onto legitimate news and commentary platforms, or full-blown legitimate-looking bogus news websites, all that kind of stuff will be available by the terabytes at the push of a button. No need for a bright, educated mind to sit at the typewriter, no need for an operator to even have a basic command of the target language.

All of this falls in the class of willful misinformation/disinformation/propaganda; reading your comment once more makes me think you might be wondering more about accidental misinformation, is this the case? I can already put forward this much: an immature or insufficiently educated person is unable to cause kind of harm to themselves or their surroundings with a typewriter compared to what can happen when you put an LLM-powered chatbot in their hands. I've heard of, or witnessed a significant number of people in their twenties, be them students or curious-minded guys, who would use ChatGPT as an authoritative resource upon which to base their work. It blew my mind to see this whole new way for not-unintelligent people to act willfully naive, whereas the appearance of the printing press and typewriters was accompanied (mostly) by an ethos of critical thinking, an ability for autonomous questioning and doubt. And if this wasn't the case in the early stages (you might even argue we're somewhat still in this early stage given the relationship of millions of Westerners to the work of toxic fiction known as the Old and New Testaments aka the Bible), then the case for being wary of what might come out of a printing press/typewriter and being concerned about its effect on society then was a valid, warranted one. What you funnily but derisively describe as to "regulate this machine and force its manufacturers to add features to the mechanism so that it cannot make hateful or erroneous sentences" has more realistically been conceived along the lines of: "we need to establish a basic hierarchy of knowledge, as well as a solid epistemological foundation accessible to people at large, a caste of authority figures / educators (clergy, professors) to guide young minds into this new realm of textual abundance, cultural guardrails against the really toxic stuff that might come about, etc."

xhkkffbf• 3 years ago

The headline says this is about Silicon Valley, but most of the text seems devoted to bragging about India. Is this all because of one offhand remark made by one tech executive?

To the original question: I would much rather have Silicon Valley execs or HN readers in general making the decision. What's the alternative? Some gender studies major? Some film studies dreamer?

Silicon Valley’s elites can’t be trusted with the future of AI

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