Dan Lorenc

This is a strange moment we’re living in. Dario is saying the most sane and balanced shit ever, that’s like completely common sense, and people are hearing ransom voices in their heads. Here let me try: “It would be bad if every 14-year-old boy could create massive hacking campaigns, or dox their female schoolmates with deepfakes that make them want to kill themselves, or any number of other things because they have an unrestricted open model that’s smarter than Mythos. Which will soon be possible. In other words there are millions of young people, and people who have nothing to lose, or people with low self-control that would accidentally or otherwise do extraordinary harm, with unrestricted models this smart. We’re just saying there should be a tiny amount of friction that prevents those types of seriously dangerous misuse by people who are good but in a (perhaps temporary) bad situation.” PEOPLE: “So you want to burn books.” ME: “No. I’m saying there are a lot of people suffering who have no money in this world. Like hundreds of millions or billions of people. People with severe mental problems. People losing their jobs and their relationships and their livelihoods. Or people who had never had any of those things and are willing to do anything to get ahead. All I’m saying is it’s a good idea to make it SLIGHTY harder to do harm on a whim. In other words, don’t make the models that are completely unrestricted and this smart publicly available on every model website for free with absolutely no restrictions. Because if we do that, the amount of harm that will result from it will be completely predictable.” PEOPLE: “So you only want rich billionaires to have good models, and everyone else is locked down to stupidest stuff forever.” ME: “Who said anything about stupid? Everyone should have extremely smart open source AI. All I’m saying is the public and widely available versions of the models should have some basic level of controls around preventing extremely dangerous prompts. Like how to ruin somebody’s reputation or shoot up a school or take down critical infrastructure or steal money from a local bank with bad security, etc.” THEM: “So you want Dario and Sam to rule the whole world then with no democracy.” Jfc. This is literally what this debate looks like right now. Virtually everywhere that it takes place. And the trajectory that we're on is basically going to guarantee that we have these unrestricted open-source models that are way better than Mythos or GPT-6. We are going to have these in the next three to 18 months, almost for certain. So we're about to find out really fast that when hundreds of millions of people, or billions of people, have access to something that is that dangerous and is completely free and unrestricted, bad things will happen. And then the same types of people will be like, "I can't believe we did this. We should have had some sort of controls." Yeah, no shit, that's literally what we are telling you right now.