Is AI threat overhyped?

I grew up watching science fiction. I wasn’t much of a reader until I was in the Navy; then I made up for lost time. Again, science fiction.

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

The doom of mankind coming from artificial intelligence is a staple of science fiction, and it’s a good warning to keep in mind. A true AI wouldn’t necessarily see us as equals or as masters, and that could create some issues.

Large Language Models, or LLMs, are what people term AI, and as a regular user of AI for personal research purposes, I don’t see the distinction between AI and LLM. No, it’s not ready to pass the Turing Test, but it’s closer than I thought I’d see in my lifetime.

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And, for better or worse, the future will rely heavily on it.

In fact, there’s a bit of an AI arms race happening, with the United States and China vying for supremacy, and the loser may lose more than a simple race to technology.

That makes me very concerned about some people who are doing more doomsaying than most.

Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon’s abrupt public resignation dominated the news cycle Wednesday afternoon. His warning that AI capable of recursively improving itself could wipe out humanity “by the end of the decade” immediately captured the media’s attention.

Coxon, 27, spent six weeks conducting pretraining research at Anthropic after working at OpenAI for nearly three years. In a lengthy X thread [posted on Tuesday night], he accused both companies of recklessly pursuing technology that could pose an existential threat.

“Neither company is acting responsibly,” Coxon wrote. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

…

And Coxon was not alone. Just one hour before his interview with Baier, The Wall Street Journal published an equally stark warning — and a strikingly similar solution — from billionaire hedge fund manager and Democratic donor Paul Tudor Jones.

In an op-ed titled “AI May Become the Third Superpower,” Jones argued that “the threat to mankind is real, and Trump and Xi need to develop a shared strategy to confront it.”

Jones wrote:

When Donald Trump and Xi Jinping meet this month, the leaders of the world’s two full-spectrum superpowers will confront a force that has grown far more powerful since they last met: artificial intelligence. In the past few months, frontier AI has learned to identify previously hidden security flaws and attack them with little human guidance. Yet AI’s most consequential advances—starting with recursive self-improvement—are still ahead.

Jones painted a decidedly apocalyptic picture, citing a stark warning published Sunday by OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki: “No one is prepared for the consequences of a continued rapid rise in machine intelligence.’’

Probably not, but do we have a choice?

I’ve been critical of AI and its uses. Then Google basically forced it on me and I got used to it. I use ChatGPT for research into things like woodworking and to figure out the best price for something on the internet, that kind of stuff. I never use it here because that’s offensive to my creative mind, but I might use it to find data that I’d miss otherwise.

It’s a tool, and I can assure you that unless OpenAI is hiding some capability somewhere, the risk to humanity sure as hell doesn’t seem remotely close at hand.

I mean, the thing can’t remember the conversation we had two days before, so I’m not sure I’m worried about it accessing nuclear launch codes.

The problem with this is that something stinks, and I’m not the only one who sees it.

Investigative researcher Parker Thayer, whose work I have found to be trustworthy, is among those sensing a political agenda behind these three developments. Thayer said it looks like a well-planned information operation.

He believes “there is a corporate PR operation trying to stir up fear of AI to advance their policy goals in an industry worth hundreds of billions.”

He laid out his suspicions in a detailed post on X .

There’s a lot there, and you should check it out, but what bothers me isn’t that anti-AI groups are part of this.

My concern is a little bigger…and farther east.

See, all of this calls for the United States to make an agreement with China to limit AI development, which means that there will have to be trust in place that both sides will adhere to that.

In reality, either will, but the United States can’t be sure it can keep the media from finding out that they’re violating the treaty. China can guarantee that no one will report a damn thing it doesn’t want them to.

So who has the strategic edge?

You all know that I’m skeptical of anything the Chinese government does. If they say tomorrow that the sky is blue, I’m going to verify it with my own eyes before I take them at their word.

What if Bernie’s anti-AI bill, Coxon’s sudden resignation, and an op-ed in a major paoper all happening at the same time aren’t some coincidence, but are nothing more than a major offensive in a cold war over AI with the People’s Republic of China?

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Don’t tell me they wouldn’t do that. We’ve got Chinese researchers smuggling in samples of dangerous pathogens, we’ve got tracking software in countless Chinese-based apps, and they’re putting weird things in products used in solar energy.

To assume they won’t do something shady with AI is beyond retarded.

AI needs guardrails. I’ll agree with that. But I want the industry to put their heads together and find the guardrails that work for the customer best, while not leading to the AI apocalypse.

I don’t trust the government, any government, to actually do that and stick by it.

I trust the people who want the government to limit the technology even less.