Anthony

I thought the Ronan Farrow/Andrew Marantz New Yorker article on OpenAI and Sam Altman in particular reveals many important details and helps settle several speculations (e.g. about what happened when Altman was briefly fired from OpenAI). The overall portrayal of Altman as frankly a compulsive liar is much needed.

However, like many Farrow and Marantz seem to take the so-called "existential risk" framing of AI seriously. I really wish people would stop doing that. In this case it makes the article feel incoherent in places.

This technology by itself does not pose a unique risk. It's the people, organizations, and governments around it, and their behavior with respect to it, that generate risk. Treating the technology alone as uniquely existentially risky provides cover for a wide variety of bad actors to both continue doing their work as well as to shrug and say "oops" if something goes catastrophically wrong or if smaller harms accumulate into intolerably large ones. The very framing provides an accountability shield, which by my read contradicts what Farrow himself suggests is needed, namely more accountability. I take this from this article, his previous work, and comments he makes in interviews (e.g., this one with Decoder.

We need to stop catastrophizing. It's thought and action terminating.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #SamAltman #RonanFarrow #AndrewMarantz #NewYorker #xrisk #ExistentialRisk #AISafety

My wife found a baby tick yesterday. They'reeeee hereeeee.

#maine #ticks

I realized that if I was writing a program and it didn't always work, I had a choice: I could either fix it, or call it AI.

--David Parnas

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AgenticAI #LLMs #Claude #ClaudeCode #ChatGPT #tech #dev #software #SoftwareDevelopment #SoftwareEngineering

I recently reread Fred Brooks's 1986 classic No Silver Bullet, which you can find here: https://www.cs.unc.edu/techreports/86-020.pdf . I think it is useful to re-consider Brooks's distinction between the essential complexity versus the accidental complexity of software development in light of the recent mania behind using LLMs for coding. Which of these types of complexity does LLM use address? Does it introduce more of either class of complexity?

In light of what I've seen, LLM use seems to provide the illusion of addressing both kinds of complexity in the short-term while it increases essential complexity in the long-term. It may or may not reduce some accidental complexity; the verdict is still out, as far as I can tell. Judging from the recent leak of the Claude Code front end source code, LLMs seem to introduce an enormous amount of new accidental complexity.

To the extent that LLMs are in the category of what Brooks calls automatic programming, this quote he shares from David Parnas is important:

Automatic programming always has been a euphemism for programming with a higher-level language than was presently available to the programmer.

The "higher-level language" LLMs trade in is English, which Dijkstra has strongly argued makes for a poor programming language. But even if, contra Dijkstra, it turns out LLMs somehow change that equation, we are still stuck with Brooks's argument that higher-level programming languages largely only address accidental complexity. They do not get at the essence of what makes creating software systems difficult.

Taken together, all this seems to suggest that LLM use in coding is a net negative, and if the above is to be believed it will result in worse outcomes, not better, over the long haul. Definitely re-read Brooks and see if you agree.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AgenticAI #LLMs #ClaudeCode #software #tech #dev #SoftwareEngineering #SoftwareDevelopment

Here's one for the dystopia/AI Hell files: https://jaigp.org

Journal for AI Generated Papers
Where humans and machines are welcomed.
The Open Prompting Journal Built Collaboratively by its Community.

One positive I can think of is that folks who wish to "collaborate" with machines can congregate there, giving the rest of us a clear signal about who to block, ignore, critique, ridicule...

cc @olivia@scholar.social @Iris@scholar.social @dingemansemark@scholar.social @alex@dair-community.social @emilymbender@dair-community.social

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #AntiScience

I wonder about using "failscene" to describe the current slate of AI tools and demos. In contrast with the demoscene, which is about getting very low powered computers to do cool things you wouldn't expect them to be able to do, the failscene is about getting very high powered computers to fail at doing boring things we already know how to do without them. Plus you can stylize it fAIlscene if you're inclined to.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #demoscene #failscene