LLMs have already been used to bomb school girls, chilling is absolutely the operative word to use here. Especially since these delusional fools want to incorporate LLMs into everything.
Forgive my ignorance, but were LLMs involved in that decision? I don't remember hearing anything to that effect, but we're so bombarded by news these days I guess I could just be forgetting
Yes our government purportedly used technology to work up a list of targets in the Iran debacle as well just not with a LLM a distinction that to me just isn't that meaningful
Shouldn't companies figure this out before wasting tens of millions in budget + working hours? All I'm reading is that corporations are not taxed enough if they are okay with such opulent waste.
ceo had invested £1 million to build a data analytics platform. "democratising data analytics" in a very specific domain. essentially, competing with someone like databricks in a niche. although they had never heard of databricks before i showed up.
For that million pounds they got a job scheduler written in pure django with a halfway finished react frontend. the whole thing was constantly broken. there were multiple race conditions throughout the product. i joined well after the million pounds was all gone. three years after i joined i had fixed the worst of the problems by rewriting massive swathes of the thing.
i eventually convinced the ceo they'd been doing the wrong thing all this time -- they should focus on analytics + specific domain consultancy services instead of software products.
the major failure was no-one ever moved on from idea V1. they never moved to idea V2. which meant they never got to idea V3. instead, everyone spent a hell of a lot of time talking about how great V1 was going to be, and how they planned to build V1 and what V1 would look like, check out this status update about our progress on V1, check out this mock up on what V1 is going to look like etc. they had an agile consultant come in to tell them how to be more agile. a scrum-master to tell them how to scrum.
3 months after joining was the first time i mentioned apache airflow. they literally could have just stuck a nice frontend on top of it and written a backend data transfer library. job done. very cheap idea V1. unfortunately, the previous team of django developers could only see their trusty django hammer. edit -- and i should add their big £1 million budget too.
multiply the budget by 10x or more. exact same thing at some big corpo. bigger budget = room for more bullshit.
Yes, thanks for the story. This is what I was trying to say. The idea that it's completely okay for companies to misallocate billions of dollars across the industry while people are legitimately suffering do to myriad of reasons is just bonkers level of selfishness.
I worked at a company that had an $80,000 monthly AWS spend when the total users in question was less than 100,000. The most concurrent users was <500.
This obscene waste actually isn't health for society nor the economy.
Software engineering projects expand to fill the deadlines you set for them (usually going over). Same thing for budget. You'll waste a bunch of a million pound budget. People are forced to get creative and thrifty with a £20k budget.
> The idea that it's completely okay for companies to misallocate billions of dollars across the industry while people are legitimately suffering do to myriad of reasons is just bonkers level of selfishness.
Yes. The metaverse bullshit comes to mind. Something no-one wanted or needed, and exorbitant amounts of money spent on it.
Knowing what to build (and that it hasn't already been built or bought elsewhere in the company) requires bits of information / person-to-person networking / visibility into the state of the company that not all managers or VPs have.
In fact, most people don't have that knowledge, because they're busy with existing or "local" problems , or because they didn't know to ask Davis the DBA or Kris the Kafka Cluster Manger or Alex from accounting if we have <resource> our team can plug into and use. "Oh, yeah, El has one under their desk they kick occasionally, ask them to hook you up!"
If you solve this problem in a turnkey way Fortune 500 companies will write you very large checks to help them prevent such duplicate waste, and will in turn become the 15th system they need to integrate....
That XKCD joke about "how 14 standards becomes 15 standards" also applies to the class of "one system to integrate with and report from all other systems"
Not the same. Every corporation I've worked at (several dozen in my career across the F500) has had numerous stories about obscene waste in regards to building things in software.
Waste at all levels. I've worked at insurance companies that spent $100million on development where only 200 customers signed up (estimated to be 20,000 at start). I've worked at telecoms that spent $25 million developing internal tools that no one used. I've worked at big tech where entire teams sole purpose is to control a single widget on a UI page.
This isn't even on the procurement side. Recently left a company where a single org was paying $10,000 a month on licenses when only 12 devs existed. I've seen organizations waste tens of millions of salesforce licenses that no one uses.
I'm sorry but the waste is rampant. SMB's can afford to waste tens of millions of failures, but modern US corporations can because there is no real competition in US markets. Just monopolies abusing each other.
I'm sure scientists would love the chance to have stupid budgets and make stupid things.
It is true that businesses tend to have more money than scientists so the numbers are bigger, but scientists pursue failed experiments that are "waste" in just this same way.
"It only got 200 users" is the business version of the null hypothesis.
No, it's best to manage your software delivery organization to reduce the cost and time of experiments so that you can quickly and cheaply figure out what to build... and then build that.
But there will still necessarily be things that you build that don't ship, and that's inherent to the problem domain.
Nothing, they are just trying to scare monger the public and prime the pump for a massive bailout when it crashes out because apparently China are the big bad meanies.
It has nothing to do with being "fine" if the PRC or anyone else for that matter get to some speculative and hypothetical ASI first. There are zero US regulations that would be effective to prevent that.
US regulations apply to US companies and citizens, exclusively. Anthropic crowding out all future potential competitors in the US via regulatory capture has no weight on what the rest of the world does.
Unless you are proposing military action over a speculative sci-fi future
PRC labs reportedly aren't even thinking about getting to ASI, much less trying. They think of AI as a technology that can provide utility across the board even without anything like superhuman smarts.
How do rules that inhibit what AI can be sold on the US market (adding additional costs to trading in that market) do anything to inhibit a competing nation from reaching ASI first? Insofar as they inhibit anyone from reaching ASI, its firms whose primary commercial interest is selling AI services in the US market, not foreign threat actors except to the extent those two categories overlap.
No, because there is zero reason to think LLMs will lead to it but we do know that the massive LLM investment has a huge financial risk for the US. Not too mention it's exacerbating the climate crisis (you know the actual thing that might end civilization, not a fantasy delusion of AGI), giving citizens cancer that live next to data centers, the extreme decrease in quality of life, and the misallocation of capital while Americans lack healthcare, childcare, housing, and education.
Also don't believe China is actually a threat to the world. That's some cold war delusional think you got there.
All the companies seem to believe is that it's okay to immiserate a large percentage for the pursuit of money, you seem to believe the lies they're feeding you.
What are you referring to? The cult belief that they are ushering in a machine god or that they strictly care about making as much money as humanely possibly while ignoring the absolutely destructive impacts these companies have had on society?
IMO they are using the cult messaging to distract the public so they take out all the oxygen in the room regarding people that care about the immediate impacts (climate exacerbation, ease of scamming, degrading job prospects, increasing income inequality).
Whenever real concerns are brought up against these companies they are always ignored while claiming the real concern is the fantasy of a machine god turning into skynet.
"Why don't they just not participate in the arms race?!" - guy who's never heard of arms races
If they believe they're creating "a machine god" and that it's better it's their machine god than someone else's (which, given the other contenders, I tend to agree with), then all the corollaries you mention are mostly irrelevant.
Whether you believe they're creating a machine god is irrelevant. They believe that they are. It would be helpful if you could create an actually good argument for why they cannot or are not creating a machine god, but it turns out there are no good arguments for why it's impossible to do so. And so... they shall try.
If you believe in the AI doom scenario then yes, you do need to do that. Because it's very important that your "less ethical" and "less good" competitors do not get to the machine god first.
If you don't believe that, or you don't believe that the frontier labs believe that, then sure, it makes no sense. But they probably do. The people at these companies literally dedicated their lives to building this specific thing that, up until people had to make tradeoffs between "that looks risky" and "that looks useful", virtually everyone agreed would be a dangerous technology.
What apparently many people on HN failed to appreciate is that the thing that makes it dangerous is the fact that it grows in utility.
Oh okay, they're all just legit crazy and are allowed to poison the environment, murder teenagers, and ruin the material lives of millions for fantasy level delusions.
Imagine how much better the future could be if we broke away from the American cold war mentality, one that has made the world more dangerous and unstable, versus actual diplomacy and cooperation?
> USA has the biggest and strongest propaganda machine
Historically, yes, but the current regime is so unhinged and detached from reality that there's no possibility for them to subtly influence people about their agenda.
How is this not any different than US corporations only existing do to hundreds of billions worth of corporate welfare? Good grief, why are American corporations such sore players against actual competition? US elites are absolutely pathetic.
This may surprise the cohort on hacker news but there are large amounts of people on this planet that value things beyond money like ethics or having principles. Excusing absolutely repugnant behavior because of money to be made is so deeply antihuman, but then again most people working at LLM companies are deeply antihuman to start with.
> but then again most people working at LLM companies are deeply antihuman to start with.
I agreed with you up til this point, but this isn’t true and isn’t called for, and doesn’t strengthen your otherwise good point, in fact it weakens your point to make statements like that. Most people who work at LLM companies, like most people who work at most companies, are making a living and have the same ethics and principles as anyone else. I don’t know where you work or live, but don’t forget the exact same logic and exact same hyperbole is being used to make the same claim about people in tech, and the same claim about Americans and Europeans.
No it's totally called for. This is technology that is literally ruining, destroying, and killing lives. Especially in regards to how US companies are operating with this tech. It's a valid claim, "just following" orders has never been a valid excuse.
These people just care about chasing the bag rather than doing right by their fellow humans. In their mind clearly some humans are more equal than others.
edit: to reiterate, the people choosing to work at these companies care more about becoming millionaires and chasing generational wealth rather than maybe questioning if the machine they are building may be producing terrible outcomes. They can work at any company on this planet easily, stop running coverage for FAANG workers that have always shown disdain for their fellow humans, they choose to work at the misery death machines because they simply do not care about the destruction they have wrought about the world.
You can say that but Anthropic are literally the "good guys" that were disgusted by Altman and co, yet even they seem to have sold off their morality. Absolute money corrupts absolutely.
They are not the good guys and never where. They where fine with the Claude being used to plan the murder of people and spying on people as long as they where outside the USA. That is not something "good guys" do, thats what sellouts do. Everyone working at these companies, who where paid small fortunes to ignore any feelings they might have. Hopefully we get a modern version of the nuremberg trials when this madness in the USA is over and we the people will then judge everyone involved.
From what I hear it seems like any other large labor hating corporation. Does Disney have a unique take on face stomping compared to Comcast or Walmart?
Wow I wonder why maps and gmail are extremely popular by the company that controls the largest browser, search, android, and advertising. It's based solely on their merits and not abusing their monopolistic position to thwart competition right?
This comment is how I find out there was a Platoon game based on the movie. Legit hilarious, and for a movie tie in game it doesn't look half bad! Like a mixture of Contra + those dungeon explorer RPGs around the time too:
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