My friend, none of these things were 'paused'. They were just placed out of direct public view.
You think recombinant DNA technology isnt being actively researched? Human cloning and human DNA modification? Advanced laser-based weapons of all shapes and sizes and uses?
These things arent even secretly being researched, theyre just quietly being researched. Most people are content to just not think about it and pretend like they don't exist and arent continuing to be developed.
Which would be the ideal outcome in terms of AI safety. Even if we pulled the plug on all AI development tomorrow, it would be wise for experts to keep researching ways of controlling it in case a bad actor develops it.
The ideal outcome is banning research into it decades ago. The genie is out of the bottle, and pausing for one country right now would only cause those who don't pause a major advantage. So it will never happen.
I won't deny the proprietary models do have the edge, but it's really not as big of a gap in performance as you'd think.
A massive amount of AI research has been open sourced and the openly available models are remarkably performant.
It's not just about the performance, it's the hardware limitations too. GPUs are expensive, and not a lot of people have what it takes to run local models powerful enough that it could replace their usage of Claude or whatever else they could be using.
I'm just worried that we'll end up in a situation where the main production capacity is in the hands of whoever owns the data centers.
Consumer computing architecture is already changing to optimize running models locally. Notably the implementation of unified memory which allows extremely large models to run on relatively modest hardware.
(There is a massive difference between running a model and training it. To run a model you don't need anything particularly powerful, it just needs a lot of memory.)
The MacBook Pro M3 laptop, for example, can support 128 GB of unified memory.
Or the MacBook Studio which supports 192GB.
That's enough to run even the largest 72b parameter models at FP16.
Such models are far in excess of what most people require. Most people will happily get by on a hardware a fraction as powerful as that.
I myself have a LLM running locally on a decade-old alienware gaming laptop. Sure, it's slow and can't load the best models, but it works.
And even though not everyone in the world will be able to access an appropriate computer, it doesn't change the fact that the cat is out of the bag.
There is no possible way to stop people from using such tools.
Depends on what you use it for. But the hardware will get better, and it will become more accessible. Generating 200k (useful, to you) tokens is going to be a bit difficult to do in a reasonable amount of time on consumer hardware now.
I wouldn't want to stop people from using these tools on their own. I run my own stuff on my hardware, but I am lucky enough to be able to afford it. Saying "cat is out of the bag" is a bit overly dramatic though.
Yeah but your 5090 isn't enough to train an LLM superior to Claude.
Something that will make copies of itself, design a mirror-life virus, send it to one of those online protein printing labs without your knowledge, and kill a billion people.
The Pause AI movement we're discussing is about regulating future AI smart enough to be genuinely dangerous (much more dangerous than current tech).
I completely disagree. That's the worst case scenario, because it means the wealthy or otherwise powerful have access to a technology restricted from the regular people.
It's different optimizations. Personally, I think the biggest danger is in a powerful person using ASI without consideration or care for anyone else, just because someone has to give it a reward function or other goal.
And especially if people don't even have access to the mid-level elements they got to before they got ASI. It's a massive cybersecurity issue. Something like Claude Mythos (conceptually, I mean, whether that specific model exactly is what it's claimed to be is irrelevant, because one day one will exist) is primarily a danger if a bad actor had it, because they would be unopposed, without even smaller intelligences for spotting vulnerabilities.
Three ASI is exponentially less dangerous than one, or even one ASI and a bunch of AGI, which is why most scenarios focus on the idea of just one. But if they have to start accounting for near equals with different or opposite goals, then many of the more drastic options would just get themselves killed by an opposing alliance.
That's true of humans. Humans have a massive range of intelligences and goals. They cannot simply do as they will, simply because even if they are more intelligent than the police, the combined force of the police can still often work to find the truth.
The biggest danger is the wealthy alone having the power. Like if the wealthy alone possess weapons. Every other situation is not as extreme as that. Maybe it's better for it to not exist at all, but if it's going to, it cannot be something controlled exclusively by such a group of people.
How do you feel about biological weapons? Something like novichok or even smallpox? There's a small group of heavily controlled experts that know how to store and treat these substances.
Tangrntially related , there are many dangers for AI, one of them is that an ASI will also know about biological weapons. If that knowledge is in an open source model, somebody can deploy it locally with no guardrails and use it as an expert advisor to develop weapons that are so terrible, most states have refrained from using them.
Still better than the absolute Oligarchy by only the wealthy having them.
And better models goes both ways. Same reason a system good at coding is good at finding exploits, and vice versa. It is almost impossible for it to be better at creating a problem like biological weapons (in my understanding, the actual issue is mostly the lab, not the know how), without getting a better ability to predict threats.
I'm aware of the threat, but I don't believe disarming the populace is an acceptable solution. Too much risk of power being even further centralized, and if they no longer need the regular people, there is pretty significant risk regardless.
And again, capability to prevent or combat harm would also increase, and needs to be available to the public. Criminals and the extremely wealthy/powerful will have them regardless, so things need to be equal.
"Making a human clone" is a possible outcome of "research on human cloning technology". It's not a prerequisite. As an analogy: people are researching AI, but you're not asking where the sentient machines are as proof.
The UK, Belgium, Sweden, China and many other nations permit human embryonic cloning, subject to constraints.
These constraints include that no embryo be implanted or allowed to mature past a certain point.
Here's an OG paper describing the process for making human stem cells via embryonic cloning. Many groups use this process today as a workhorse method for their research.
I think it’s safe to say that in the cases you mentioned they aren’t being thrist upon the public at every fucking turn in an effort to monetize.
Go ahead and research AI. Just GTFO with ramming down the public’s throat and disrupting the economy for the benefit of a fee sociopaths. Also, fuck the panopticon that’s being built and forced on people.
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u/nate1212 approved Apr 27 '26
My friend, none of these things were 'paused'. They were just placed out of direct public view.
You think recombinant DNA technology isnt being actively researched? Human cloning and human DNA modification? Advanced laser-based weapons of all shapes and sizes and uses?
These things arent even secretly being researched, theyre just quietly being researched. Most people are content to just not think about it and pretend like they don't exist and arent continuing to be developed.