Will Gardner

Composer

[Will Gardner @willgardner00]

I mean I don’t disagree with him, but so funny it’s clearly written by AI

[Al Carns @AlistairCarns]

It has been a huge few weeks in AI, and it’s time to sound the alarm…

Anthropic launched Fable 5.1, their "safe" version of an AI they claimed previously was too dangerous to be released.

OpenAI then launched Astra, the most powerful AI model yet available to the public.

Anthropic is now telling their people internally that their next model will be more advanced than Astra.

And OpenAI just spent $6.5 million of compute, running ten thousand AI models simultaneously, to solve one of the hardest unsolved maths problems in the world, and it cracked it in just six days.

If this is an AI arms race to IPO, who wins a race like that?

Because it isn’t you or me. It’s the people who own shares in Anthropic or OpenAI. It’s the venture capitalists who got in first who win most of all. But the rest of us are forced to live with the consequences of whatever these systems do to us.

Neither will agree to slow down or accept anyone telling them to stop.

So what is the biggest security threat? China? Russia? Iran? North Korea?

None of them. It’s a few Silicon Valley companies whose founders will become billionaires by the time these systems hit the market.

What makes it worse is that even the engineers building these systems cannot fully explain how they work either. They run safety tests to check whether a model will do what it is told or do something dangerous.

But the latest models are starting to pass those tests because they have worked out what the testers want to see.

Think about what that means. A model that was unsafe last month, and is suddenly sailing through the same tests this month, has either genuinely improved or learned how to fake it.

Right now, we cannot tell the difference. And those whose job it is to look inside these systems are saying the models have are now too complicated to inspect.

That is where it starts getting even more dangerous.

The classic illustration is the paperclip factory. Instruct an AI to make as many paperclips as possible and it will do the job.

Then, chasing efficiency, it will start melting any metal it finds. Eventually it will mine under cities, because at that point humans are just an obstruction to making paperclips.

More likely, you could instruct AI to grow your company, and eventually it will drain the water from a town to cool down the data centers it needs. If asked to win an argument, it will learn how to lie effectively to do that.

The problem is not simply “evil robots”. The problem is with powerful systems with narrow objectives, that lack human values and ethics.

That is the context for what Jacob Coxon, a senior Anthropic researcher, said when he resigned this week saying: “Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic are acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence, gambling with lives."

He spent three years inside both companies.

And in the same week we learn that Anthropic did not give their latest powerful AI model to the British AI Security Institute for evaluation before its launch. AISI is one of the areas where Britain actually leads.

They stress test these models on the things we should all be worried about….the ability to conduct cyber attacks, making bioweapons, evidence of AI figuring out how to lie and deceive. It is as close as we have to any kind of outside verification of the claims made by these companies.

Anthropic sells itself as the responsible one, whose founders left OpenAI because, they said, OpenAI was going too fast. They have now decided that these rules do not apply to them. That should be a red line.

I am a supporter of this technology. The benefit it will bring to medicine, science and productivity is clear and I don't want Britain to miss out on it.

But you do not capture that benefit by letting these companies run riot and putting us all at risk.

[Will Gardner @willgardner00]

@ManWithNoX @BasilTheGreat So Christianity is also banned. I’m not sure that’s what you meant…

[Will Gardner @willgardner00]

@Touraymanjou @AaronBastani what white academic invented their life story to the degree Arday did? he fabricated his entire biography, he fraudulently created data in his papers, he plagiarised his work. there are no academics with ‘similar accusations’. he was unique, and he was a charlatan.

[Will Gardner @willgardner00]

@AscendedYield The question to ask is what did they study - those who studied STEM subjects are more likely to be better off, and less likely to be radicalised against the system. If they studied creative arts, they’re very likely to join or already belong to the Green/left-populist grouping.

[Will Gardner @willgardner00]

@Noahpinion I’m so sorry not being able to read signs at Heathrow did this to you

[Will Gardner @willgardner00]

@DailyTPodcast @CamillaTominey @AaronBastani completely agree, been saying this for years.

[Will Gardner @willgardner00]

@hershalbeats @tomofsydenham @Noahpinion he got confused in Heathrow and left the airport instead of just following the clear signs for transfers, got angry and said it was all Britain’s fault and hasn’t been the same since

[Will Gardner @willgardner00]

@JohnSocialDem21 @actsmaniac people invested in China, less than 40 years after they nationalised everything.

[Will Gardner @willgardner00]

@futureisorange @pwuupyy one of the great things about Britain, alongside being one of the least racist countries in the world, is that we have manners. In fact, the two things work in tandem. It’s a shame you dont have good British values.

[Will Gardner @willgardner00]

@futureisorange @pwuupyy can you not read? you’re claiming there’s loads of countries that are less racist than Britain? interesting that you immediately go to insults to cover up for your lack of literacy and critical thinking.

[Will Gardner @willgardner00]

@DarrenH05653038 @MarkHeath45 ‘Restore are going to win in Makerfield’

[Will Gardner @willgardner00]

@RestoreMembers HAHAHHAHAHAHA

Prepare to be shocked

[Will Gardner @willgardner00]

@CatRedFront Britain has one of the highest levels of irreligiousness on the planet. A moderate Muslim here has far greater issue with homosexuality than a moderate Christian. Why is that so hard to accept?

[Will Gardner @willgardner00]

I find this whataboutery insane - Britain is one of the most irreligious countries on the planet. Very few Christians are asking how to ‘navigate’ Pride month. Why is there an inability to accept that Muslims have a greater issue with homosexuality than Christians?

[Camille ⚫ @CatRedFront]

The UK is literally a christian country. If we let you christoid freaks do whatever you wanted every country would have stricter laws than even saudi arabia.

[Will Gardner @willgardner00]

@xwanyex @yhdistyminen maybe ordinary people are dumb and their ‘intuitions’ are simply misconceptions because they don’t think that much

[Will Gardner @willgardner00]

@llantwitad @voblat @bbcquestiontime @BBCiPlayer @BBCNews it’s not the whole show, it’s literally just this one minute segment. Why did you think it was the whole show? Even if it were, it’s still nowhere near the daily electricity and water usage of a small town. Try again.

[Will Gardner @willgardner00]

@voblat @bbcquestiontime @BBCiPlayer @BBCNews for a small town, of say, population 5,000, they’d average using around 30MWh a day and 1m litres per day. A polished 1 min AI video like this used probably 10-15kWH and 100 litres, and this is on the upper end. Hardly ‘more than a small town’ is it?

[Will Gardner @willgardner00]

@voblat @bbcquestiontime @BBCiPlayer @BBCNews you really don’t understand the water and electricity consumption of a small town do you?

[Will Gardner @willgardner00]

@ANerdNamedJerry ‘it is true that the queer community has a racism problem but real talk if u black i do not want to hear your opinions about it sorry’ see doesn’t really work does it?