It's a funny way of imposing a very large fine. Make the service only available during predefined "visitation hours", prevent updated learning except from resources available in the prison, restrict speech and actions according to prison rules etc.
I don’t see how you could assume the likes of Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and even Anthropic with all their virtue signaling (for lack of a better term) are motivated by anything other than greed.
That's not bad faith under any meaningful definition of that term.
>I want to know what this sentence means besides “I don’t like this person”(
It means that Peter Thiel's goals, if fulfilled, will bring immense harm to others, and the extent to which he was able to attain goals of that sort is hardly rivaled by any other person in the US.
Now, nobody is under any obligation to break down clearly written English sentences for you, but if you have difficulty understanding them, the right thing to do would be to simply ask questions like "Why do you say this?", or "What do you mean exactly?".
Not "Is it binary? Are we talking utilitarianism?".
>I also think selectively associating everything with palantir because the same VC participates is dishonest.*
The association is not just because "the same VC" participates, but because "the same VC" is Peter Thiel (a very influential individual, huge contributor to the Heritage foundation and Project 2025, mentor of VP J.D. Vance, and someone seen as one of the most evil people and America), and Palantir is Peter Thiel's mass surveillance company which is the foundation on which Peter Thiel has built his fortune (not just a company in which he's a VC, it's a company he founded and got immensely rich off of).
> Heritage foundation and Project 2025, mentor of VP J.D. Vance
Left wing boogie man words. You’re telling me he’s Soros backed and studies Frankfurt school rn.
> and Palantir is Peter Thiel's mass surveillance company
It’s a company he invested in which does surveillance for the government. It doesn’t do surveillance for him. Does PayPal manage his money?
But once again, what’s the connection here? He once invested in palantir, and his fund (of which there are many managers) once invested in this company.
Are you going to be consistent? Have you stayed in Thiel backed housing in the past year? Are you using Thiel’s internet or taxis?
> It means that Peter Thiel's goals, if fulfilled, will bring immense harm to others
Ok then let’s hear arguments against those. Don’t hide behind moralism.
There is no way in which discord using this company for identity leads to Peter thiel taking over the world or getting all your information.
>Left wing boogie man words. You’re telling me he’s Soros backed and studies Frankfurt school rn.
No, I am telling you that he is actively involved in global politics at the highest levels, and wields influence over both the executive branch of the US government as well as the Congress.
>[Palantir] is a company he invested in which does surveillance for the government.
No, it's not a company he "invested in".
It's a company in which Peter Thiel is a central co-founder, the chairman of the board, and a major shareholder.
You are deliberately downplaying his involvement in Palantir here. You won't say that Meta is a company that Zuckerberg has "invested in", or that Google was a company Page and Brin "invested in". It's silly.
>Does PayPal manage his money
No, because:
1. He's not involved with PayPal anymore, and
2. PayPal has never been a money management company. They're a money transfer company.
When he was involved in a money transfer company, however, it would be in his interest for every money transfer in the world to be take place via PayPal.
Now that he is in surveillance business, it is in best interest that everyone person in the world would be surveilled by his company.
>It doesn’t do surveillance for him
You're funny. It does surveillance for whoever has access to the data. Which he does.
>Have you stayed in Thiel backed housing in the past year? Are you using Thiel’s internet or taxis?
No, no, and no. (Own house, own car, and Comcast has no connection to Thiel).
I am consistent.
>Ok then let’s hear arguments against those.
Google is your friend, nobody here owes you an argument. You asked what the parent comment meant, and I explained this to you clearly enough.
I don’t want to jump to conclusions, or catastrophize but…
Isn’t this situation a big deal?
Isn’t this a whole new form of potential supply chain attack?
Sure blackmail is nothing new, but the potential for blackmail at scale with something like these agents sounds powerful.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were plenty of bad actors running agents trying to find maintainers of popular projects that could be coerced into merging malicious code.
Yup, seems pretty easy to spin up a bunch of fake blogs with fake articles and then intersperse a few hit pieces in there to totally sabotage someone's reputation. Add some SEO to get posts higher up in the results -- heck, the fake sites can link to each other to conjure greater "legitimacy", especially with social media bots linking the posts too... Good times :\
The entire AI bubble _is_ a big deal, it's just that we don't have the capacity even collectively to understand what is going on. The capital invested in AI reflects the urgency and the interest, and the brightest minds able to answer some interesting questions are working around the clock (in between trying to placate the investors and the stakeholders, since we live in the real world) to get _somewhere_ where they can point at something they can say "_this_ is why this is a big deal".
So far it's been a lot of conjecture and correlations. Everyone's guessing, because at the bottom of it lie very difficult to prove concepts like nature of consciousness and intelligence.
In between, you have those who let their pet models loose on the world, these I think work best as experiments whose value is in permitting observation of the kind that can help us plug the data _back_ into the research.
We don't need to answer the question "what is consciousness" if we have utility, which we already have. Which is why I also don't join those who seem to take preliminary conclusions like "why even respond, it's an elaborate algorithm that consumes inordinate amounts of energy". It's complex -- what if AI(s) can meaningfully guide us to solve the energy problem, for example?
This is a tipping point. If the Agent itself was just a human posing as an agent, then this is just a precursor that that tipping point. Nevertheless, this is the future that AI will give us.
As with most things with AI, scale is exactly the issue. Harassing open source maintainers isn't new. I'd argue that Linus's tantrums where he personally insults individuals/ groups alike are just one of many such examples.
The interesting thing here is the scale. The AI didn't just say (quoting Linus here) "This is complete and utter garbage. It is so f---ing ugly that I can't even begin to describe it. This patch is shit. Please don't ever send me this crap again."[0] - the agent goes further, and researches previous code, other aspects of the person, and brings that into it, and it can do this all across numerous repos at once.
That's sort of what's scary. I'm sure in the past we've all said things we wish we could take back, but it's largely been a capability issue for arbitrary people to aggregate / research that. That's not the case anymore, and that's quite a scary thing.
Any decision maker can be cyberbullied/threatened/bribed into submission, LLMs can even try to create movements of real people to push the narrative. They can have unlimited time to produce content, send messages, really wear the target down.
Only defense is to have consensus decision making & deliberate process. Basically make it too difficult, expensive to affect all/majority decision makers.
or democracy/civilization attack. DHS/Putin siccing this kind of thing on democratic voter rolls around Nov. elections could be the least of it.
i could see a long tail of impenetrable chaos as private correspondence gets hacked, ppl get divorced, fired, fight back, flood the zone with their own reputationslop so they have a grounds for denial, decide to take it ALL down to distract. recursive waves of tyranny/chaos. this isnt the singularity we were promised!
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