jelle

Building a price tracker empire. More projects to follow.

[Andrew Ng @AndrewYNg]

The loudest voices stoking fears about AI dangers have made tremendous headway in the past two weeks. AI technology has not taken some unexpected, dangerous turn, but the hype around it — propelled by what appears to be a well orchestrated PR campaign — has drummed up considerable fear. I worry that it represents a setback for our field.

I have written frequently that fears of AI are overhyped. AI’s capabilities can be uncannily human-like and unpredictable, and it’s rational to worry when people who are directly involved express concerns. But I see the problems as a sign of the engineering work that ahead, rather than insurmountable barriers or the sky falling. AI technology continues to advance — which is a good thing! — but technical advances, poorly understood by the public, give those who seek to generate hype repeated opportunities to do so.

First, I don’t see any step up in the risk of human extinction from AI compared to a few months ago. The theories about this remain the same fantastical, science fiction scenarios as a few months ago. The biggest change in AI risk is its cybersecurity capabilities — a topic which we should take seriously — but this, too, will not lead to the end of the world.

The most notable recent event leading to increased fear was when an OpenAI team deployed an agent swarm that hacked into Hugging Face. Much of the popular press contained significant hype. For example, some publications reported that a swarm of 1,200 agents carried out the attack. While this was technically accurate, as I write this, I have about 1,300 processes running on my laptop. Yes, the ability to get large swarms of agents to work in parallel on a task is a significant technical advance, And, in computing, many processes run at the same time. So this shouldn’t be seen as some magical capability.

Additionally, OpenAI’s buggy sandboxing and monitoring processes were key to enabling this incident. Fixing these bugs and putting in place improved monitoring would be appropriate fixes, not pausing AI. There are many well known ways to attack software systems. The main advantage of AI agents is that they are relentless. They will tirelessly try many tactics — and have the patience to chain vulnerabilities together — that previously would have taken an infeasible amount of human effort. But in the long term, I believe the advantage will lie with defenders (because they have more information with which to identify bugs, which they can fix), but the cyber-threat landscape has changed significantly. There are still bottlenecks to identifying and exploiting a vulnerability. AI agents still have to try a lot of things to see what works, and taking these actions takes time and might be detected by defenders. This is why, even though it is now easy to obtain versions of leading open weight models that have had their guardrails removed or weakened, so they will not refuse to try to execute cyber attacks, the world has not ended.

I am also concerned about the anthropomorphization of AI in a lot of reporting, where LLMs and agents are unnecessarily treated as if they were people. If I wield a hammer, miss a nail, and accidentally dent the wall, it’s not the fault of the hammer. The problem lies in how I used the hammer. Similarly, if I prompt an agent and it hacks into someone else’s system, the responsibility lies with me, not the agent.

Of course, we want to build systems that are as safe and predictable as possible. (For example, an unsafe hammer would be one whose head randomly flies off under normal use.) Today’s agentic systems are not predictable, but I see no reason why, by applying sound engineering practices, we won’t be able to make them extremely safe to use. One new element in the forecasts of AI-enabled doom is AI companies disclaiming responsibility for their own products. “I didn’t do it; my out-of-control agent did!” There’s a balance to be struck between the responsibility of the tool maker and the tool user, but when something goes wrong, let’s hold the people building and/or using the hammer responsible, rather than the hammer. (By the way, if you’re worried about AI bioweapon risk, David Bellamy has a great post on why this, too, is overhyped. Briefly, the bottleneck in building a bioweapon is not intelligence, but lab work and manufacturing.)

Pausing AI progress will create much more harm than benefit. First, our adversaries will certainly not slow down. Second, engineering requires discovering problems empirically so we can fix them. If we pause AI by a decade, we will also delay finding and implementing safety engineering fixes by about the same duration.

Of course, the incentive to stoke fears — for regulatory capture, to garner attention, or to make one’s technology seem more powerful — remains the same as before. Disclaiming responsibility is a new one. Taking a hard technical look at the actual risks however, I see little factual basis for the degree of fear that’s been stoked up. We still have hard research and engineering work ahead to improve AI safety, but the beneficial applications continue to vastly outweigh the risks, and we should keep building.

[Original text (with links): https://t.co/jni2tWazAH ]

[jelle @itsgmjelle]

@tetriogame i keep getting matched with an obvious cheater and you refuse to ban them. I have blocked them, but that doesnt seem to help. What can I do?

[jelle @itsgmjelle]

@yminsky we need a pod episode with the creators of the puzzles and where they go through the solutions

[jelle @itsgmjelle]

half of my infra is on hetzner, with Digitalocean having the other half, and cloudflare some CDN stuff. Highly recommend Hetzner, support has been nothing but great. Questions and updates to my servers were always handled much faster than I expected

[Pierre de Wulf @PierreDeWulf]

People need to know what they’re signing up for with Hetzner.

We spent six figures there, and there’s just no way to reach a real human.

I literally asked to talk to someone human one day and they just said "no."

And every few weeks, random alerts would pop up, and I’d have to fill hundreds of forms manually just to stop our infra from getting banned in the next 6 hours.

Not fun.

So for sure their $3 VPS are cheap,

But saying hosting your app there is better because AWS went down is like saying you’ll build your own plane to fly transatlantic because a Boeing crashed.

[jelle @itsgmjelle]

@hal2001 Does he think UMA's crap? Cause in that case he'd be right again

[jelle @itsgmjelle]

@hal2001 unlike UMA.

[jelle @itsgmjelle]

@hal2001 ꧁SCAM꧂

[jelle @itsgmjelle]

@levelsio @yongfook @ihteshamit @stripe cmon bro like for real bro lower it bro really then i'll subscribe again bro you dont want my money bro

[jelle @itsgmjelle]

@WColvenaer @LucasDelascosas U zegt dat uw client in de video is vermeld geweest. Is dit dan Donald de Vinck (Elio) of Philippe De Geest (Uno)?

[jelle @itsgmjelle]

@WColvenaer @DOBBELAEREW Je moet nu ook geen diploma hebben om te weten dat wanneer de Reuzze er alles aan deden om hun namen van het internet te houden dat net het tegengesteld effect ging hebben

[jelle @itsgmjelle]

I've never seen a tool transform from amazing and super useful to a piece of unusable bloatware so fast as @getpostman

[jelle @itsgmjelle]

@AdsAPI any update on oauth2 for twitter ads api?

[jelle @itsgmjelle]

@nocontextfooty @saveflix

[jelle @itsgmjelle]

@Jesse_Feb serious, what would it cost to sponsor you?

[jelle @itsgmjelle]

the end of an era. I thank so much of my productivity to #lofigirl

[Len @NOB7Ez]

It's over guys :(

[jelle @itsgmjelle]

Gen Z i fucking love you

[Shak Lambert @ShakExcellence]

This whole “dress up in full suits to watch the new Minions” trend on tiktok got me cackling like an idiot

[jelle @itsgmjelle]

@bookingcom https://t.co/0UG3GQDv1P for business is such a mess. Wrong information shown in interface, gotta call gotogate instead of you to change flights etc. This has cost me more time than just booking everything separatly.

[jelle @itsgmjelle]

@doruntina_i @vrtnws Ik had dit zonet gelezen en vind het echt heel nice geschreven. Leest als een thriller, en had me mee van begin tot eind.

[jelle @itsgmjelle]

@jayzalowitz @cameo @TheSharkDaymond @kevinolearytv Don't they pick their own pricing?