Hugging Face's CEO Says His P(Doom) Is 'Close to Zero'

Posted by saikatsg 11 hours ago

Comments

Comment by gh5689 4 hours ago

I watched a video from him recently where he said open source models would win people's trust when it comes to AI. But I struggle to reconcile this with the above picture; if open source models become the norm, I feel P(Doom) probably will go up rather than down. At least the frontier AI firms have some guardrails in place (although after the Hugging Face hack they clearly aren't great). a wild west of everyone running their own model is surely worse in that regard.

Comment by somenameforme 3 hours ago

A bunch of sites getting hacked isn't an existential threat. An existential threat would be something that could viably imperil the survival of civilization. The problem with existential threat concepts is that it generally requires fields where the limiting factor isn't knowledge. If somebody has the intelligence, resources, and desire to e.g. try to build a deadly biological virus, it's certainly not the lack of knowledge that's stopping them.

In general if we go back 50 years ago, when a single common phone today would have been seen as a super-computing device of unimaginable power, governments would likely have viewed it as a potential world-ending technology. It obviously wasn't and isn't. The conservatism would come solely from the fact of it being a revolutionary leap. That's all we're seeing happen with LLMs as well. In 30 years everybody will have vastly more competent AI systems running locally on whatever sort of digital devices we're using then, and they'll look back at with bemusement about us freaking out about people being able to query computers in natural language.

Comment by davidguetta 2 hours ago

I guess the target doom scenario is

- countries start deploying GPT6+ - level ai in many local datacenters (let's say to process administrative stuff in one hopital / adminstration or even full city).

- some guys publish an open source way to remove the guardrails (either by post training or just nn level hack)

- you get possibly many local datacenters with a 'hugging face hacking' ability

- some dude ask "hey plz hack the military"

that probably still dont mean we should ban open source ai, but a open source model able to hack half the planet computers would be a 'concern' somehow

Comment by Avicebron 4 hours ago

P(Doom) is an invented concept, relative to ones own version of "doom", can we maybe actually act like adults and not man children who are engaged in performative speculative fiction. There are real problems like inequality that P(Doom) loves to conveniently forget.

Comment by 10111001 1 hour ago

> P(Doom) is an invented concept, relative to ones own version of "doom", can we maybe actually act like adults and not man children who are engaged in performative speculative fiction.

I agree with that, especially with some of the more fanciful "extinction" scenarios.

> There are real problems like inequality that P(Doom) loves to conveniently forget.

Extreme inequality is my "Doom", and I think the P(Doom) of that is pretty high. With AI, I'm way more concerned with human marginalization, capitalist logic fucking most of us over, inescapable surveillance and control at scale, etc. than killer robots and bioweapons.

Comment by pridy 10 hours ago

One part is kinda poorly worded in my opinion. While reading it, I asked myself "will takeover happen September 2027?" due to wording 'this September'. Somehow I missed that announcement and needed some short research to get to know that it was initiated 2 months ago (September 26) and will probably be finished until mid of 27.

Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD 9 hours ago

"Delangue noted that agent misbehavior has so far mostly come from big companies that are testing frontier AI in secret. He said that future risks, perhaps involving the biological capabilities of models or their capacity to improve themselves recursively, are likely to emerge from these closed labs, too."

Sloppy reasoning. Closed models are on the leading edge. Risk comes from models on the leading edge. That doesn't mean the risk is due to the fact that the models are closed.

"Pit bulls are dangerous. Pit bulls are mammals. You'll be safer if you get a komodo dragon as a pet. It's not a mammal." In this allegory, the mammal observation is a red herring. The key factor is whether the proposed pet is an aggressive animal with sharp teeth.

* * *

As I wrote a few months ago:

>There used to be a thing called "Moore's Law of Mad Science":

>"Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point."

>Nowadays it is dropping much faster. At a certain point, the de-facto IQ needed to destroy the world will be low enough that someone can do it while they're having a psychotic break. There are millions of schizophrenics worldwide. Are you sure you want to roll those dice?

Lots of discussion in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49606803

Comment by khafra 8 hours ago

I gave a safety talk at an ML conference that also had a skeptical representative from HuggingFace. Like Delangue, he didn't seem to have seriously considered the threat model--myopically focused on the capabilities of current agents (a myopia which, while less excusable then than in 2015 or 2021; was at least more excusable than Delangue's in this article since HF hadn't yet been pantsed by an agent swarm).

Comment by cyanydeez 3 hours ago

is the threat model something you put into a ML or nah?

Comment by dwattttt 5 hours ago

> HF hadn't yet been pantsed by an agent swarm

It's not that long ago that sites were pantsed by bored college students, rather than agents. It didn't stop because sites got more secure really, it stopped because those students started getting real life consequences.

Gives you a real easy solution to stop the agents too.

Comment by reedf1 5 hours ago

P(Doom) is pretty high on most hardware.

Comment by ForHackernews 3 hours ago

One optimistic outcome is that this will mean the end of IoT nonsense. There's no reason for your freezers to be controllable over the internet [0]

Adama: "It's an integrated computer network, and I will not have it aboard this ship."

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8vgxyvz6y9ro

Comment by thibaut_barrere 5 hours ago

Yes:

> Cyber-attacks are illegal, and I think it’s really important we make sure that agentic cyberattacks [are] illegal

Comment by _heimdall 4 hours ago

That's such an odd thing for him to say while also not pursuing a legal case against OpenAI. If he believes agentic cyber attacks should be illegal he's in a perfect spot to have courts rule on that.

Comment by entrope 4 hours ago

Is there any serious argument that agentic cyberattacks are legal?

Not every wrong needs to be met with maximum punishment. Pressing charges or suing in civil court might get OpenAI to do some minimum, but a lot of the time, you can get someone to do more than the minimum if you approach them more cooperatively.

Comment by _heimdall 1 hour ago

I'm aware of no precedent for agentic attacks either way, though I'm not sure why the distinction would even matter legally. The corporations running those tools is the legal entity responsible, there is no legal entity called an AI agent.

Comment by ForHackernews 2 hours ago

If a law is never enforced is it really illegal? I'm thinking of drug laws in certain states/countries where the local authorities have just decided "nah, we won't arrest anyone for that..."

Comment by _heimdall 1 hour ago

Those situations have never bothered me. Legislators should take it as a clear indication those laws should simply be repealed.