I’m not an AI techie and I’m not well educated on LLMs/AI in general. The issue I’m having is the dichotomy between how people talk about it. I’ve heard completely opposite ends of the spectrum. From AI is quickly becoming advanced enough to threaten human society, all the way to its a glorified dictionary/search engine that can’t really do much of anything. I know Lemmy has a steep anti-AI slant. But, can someone talk about this in a way I can wrap my head around why the divide seems so big?
LLMs are not intelligent. They lack morals, knowledge, and intent. The only remote risk of extermination is if a company with absolute impunity and endless resources told an LLM to hack the nuclear weapons and if knowledge of how to do that was already published online and processed as training data.
LLMs cannot do anything new, they can only regurgitate information thats already been stolen.
Absolutely a huge risk.
extremely naive to not understand existing capabilities of 100s of probings and planning based on probings, and multiple strategies, in a swarm working towards a goal.
Still to your first point, the organizations with the budget and impunity, seeking the most powerful tools, are then the ones who will use them for evil, at expense of others, power maximization.
Or if the military put an LLM in charge of nuclear weapons. But surely nobody would be stupid enough to do that!
"And that’s why today I’m signing into law the Trump Nuclear Act. Some say it’s the greatest law of all time. Very smart people, even smarter AI. Elon tells me this will save billions, and I’m going to increase my dividend, let’s call it the ‘Nucular Peace Dividend’ to honor Bush, I don’t remember which one used to say ‘Nucular’, but I always liked that guy, and it made me think up how to say Chayyyyna.
CNN get out!"
That is simply counter-factual. LLMs can absolutely do things that have not been published before, and they can access knowledge that is not in their training data through RAG. Intelligence is debatable, but reasoning models can reliably imitate “thinking” to a degree, and recursive self-improvement might lead to an autonomous advancement of intelligence. That LLMs allegedly “only regurgitate information” is simply wrong.
You’re confusing morals, knowledge, intent, and intelligence with capability. An atomic bomb has no will of its own either.
idk, every atom bomb I’ve met has one purpose…