All this longtermism though is harmful. There are real problems of data theft, bias, labor displacement, and environmental costs that are happening right now but every push for regulation and regulatory capture, and all the safety talk, is always focused on some speculative future machine god to distract from the current problems.
I'd have a higher opinion of these labs if the issues they openly talked about and worked toward where the real issues we face currently, not speculative defenses against some future AGI that may never happen in my lifetime. I'm less worried about "our new model might kill all humans in the future" and more worried about how we are going to address anti-competitive behavior, copyright protections, labor rights, and the energy impact.
Honestly, that respect for 'copyright protections' has somehow become a leftist shibboleth is bizarre to me and indicative that something has become deeply warped in our discussions around this topic.
Frankly, this appeal comes across as the same kind of impassioned plea that a missionary might make when begging the faithless to repent and come to Christ before it's too late. This weird religiosity some people around here use to talk about AI, ASI and AGI is bizarre. Take what I've quoted and replace the words "progress" and "ASI" with "sinning" and "the Book of Revelations", and the zeal becomes apparent.
Outside of that though, there are other issues right now that need addressed before we speculate about what might be possible with ASI in the future. If the potential for a harmful ASI is truly that near, and that great, then why push forward at all? Where's the push for a global stop order on development of this technology until regulation can catch up?
The talk of a potential future serves as a distraction from the very real problems people are facing in their lives today.
While Dario and team are worrying about ASI, real people are worrying about how they are going to continue to feed their family after wide spread layoffs set a very large portion of the population back into a lower quality lifestyle. Real people are concerned about water usage is draught stricken areas, the massive energy demand driving grid instability in their communities, or that the environmental and economic externalities of model training is being socialized while the profits continue to be strictly private.
What about the mass proliferation of misinformation at scale having a real effect on our democratic process?
Forgive me if I'd like to see those addressed first, and fast, before we start worrying about an unpromised future technology.