I think all the anxiety around AI would significantly diminish if we had trust worthy leaders in tech overseeing it all.
Like, I’d have trusted the google of the early 00s.
Notice how the big AI companies are now in on the ‘scary AI’ bandwagon, just because they see the impending AI bubble cracking, and they need a scapegoat in the form of government regulation to blame, when it eventually cracks.
They want regulations put in place to stop other companies from being able to compete with them.
The fact that it will give them good PR and stop people from opposing it because it’s regulated is just a bonus.
Lol!! This is literally her AI channel. So, someone was dumb enough to offer her AI bot money, to say that AI is bad?
It’s more that they want to say “AI Dangerous”. It’s step 2 in the oligopoly playbook:
- ”It’s a perfectly safe miracle solution. Invest with us or miss out."
- "It turns out it’s really dangerous. We need the governments to make tough laws that coincidentally prevent start-up companies from competing with us, (while we don’t sell you any RAM chips.)
- “Remember those miraculous investment returns we promised, the evil governments forced us to spend them all on lawyers and stuff. Sorry about that. But the good news is…”
- “We have a new safe sure-fire miracle solution (to something new and different). Invest with us, or miss out!”
Video too long. Is there an AI summary?
They want to regulate away their biggest fear: open weights LLMs.
And, as a bonus, draw attention away from how harmfully Big Tech has packaged LLMs for the public. That’s the dangerous part.
That’s all the Terminator meme is. I’m not surprised influencers are being payed, given all the previous astroturfing in this space.
Yup. The problem isn’t the large language models, it’s the business models
Maybe “large business models” would be a better name?
Data centers are coal/methane pigs. AI will (help) kill us. Just not in the way that’s being suggested.
I know I’m not the only one who has been scratching their head at all the doomsday cries around AI that have suddenly rose up. Especially as it seems as if all those calls are coming from inside the house.
Play on fear hard enough and you have people not worrying about the actual limitations of LLMs. My worry is that they shift the goalposts hard enough that instead of them asking for a bailout, the narrative becomes them being nationalized for our safety with guys like Elon sitting at the head of a new governmental department or something. Government buys all this dead weight of an industry and the tech fascists get a permanent seat at the table.
They want you to think AI is going to destroy the world so that you forget that the rich are already destroying the world right now
the rich are already destroying the world right now
Which is likely: Climate models and observations match with a current 3 ° C warming path, and 3°C warming would destroy our human civilization, and lot of other living beings. What climate models can’t predict is economic developments and political processes.
It is the “accusation in a mirror” pattern.
Are you incapable of nuance?
ye
What nuance?
It’s crazy to treat all forms of threat the same. Is climate change a threat to present human civilization? Could it cause a collapse on the order of the Bronze Age Collapse? Could it potentially kill billions? Yes to all. But there are threats of devastation, and there are threats of extinction. Climate change is incapable of causing human extinction. There are just too many of us and we’re far too adaptable to too many types of environment. The absurdly worst case of climate change is that things go so bad that we end up back at hunter-gatherer levels of population and technology, with a few million survivors huddled in the high latitudes. But even that is absurdly unlikely, as we would be far better off rolling the dice with climate engineering efforts like releasing fine particulates into the upper atmosphere. That’s not a solution we want to use first, but it is quite practical, quite affordable, and would be infinitely preferable to the worst case climate scenarios.
But superintelligent AI? That is a legitimate threat of human extinction. Something like that could actually end the human race and leave no one left to rebuild.
That’s what I mean by nuance. It’s lazy thinking to just throw up your hands and say, “well, any number of things could kill us, guess they’re all the same. No use worrying about this one if the billionaires are going to do it anyway! What’s one more threat on the pile?”
Nuance matters. There are actually very few scenarios that could truly cause human extinction. Climate change can’t do it. Nuclear war can’t do it. Soil depletion and microplastic won’t do it. Declining birth rates certainly won’t do it. But truly capable AI run amok? That is something that could actually wipe out the human race. We owe our domination of this planet to the fact that we’re the smartest thing on it. And in our past we drove several other human species to extinction, outcompeting them on intelligence. Creating something more intelligent than ourselves is a genuinely suicidal act as a species. And hand-waiving it away as “well, we got billionaires doing that already!” ignores all nuance and causes us to not truly consider what is an existential threat and what is not. Nuance matters. Not all bad things are equally bad. Not all dangerous things are equally dangerous.
Like,… But trickle down economics?
I liked this take: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/16/beggar-thy-neighbor/
An excerpt:
But what if there was a way for the AI companies to get government permission to violate antitrust law and cease to compete with one another, and secure a ban on the use of Chinese open weight models? Turns out, there is a way to call time on the Red Queen’s Race: merely insist that you are on the verge of teaching so many words to the word-guessing program that it will wake up and devour us all, and call for a ban on “superintelligence”:
Once the government stipulates that “superintelligence risk” is an existential crisis, it must grant the hyperscalers a consent decree absolving them from any violations of antitrust law stemming from a conspiracy to halt direct competition with one another:
https://stephaniekelton.substack.com/p/brer-rabbit-and-ai-extinction
Freaking out about “superintelligence” is a canonical example of “criti-hype,” where critics repeat boosters’ claims but append, “(and that’s bad)” to them:
https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/
Remember, the tech giants want to stop competing.
The argument is, these companies cant be profitable as long as there is competition (from open or chinese models), so the US companies want those to be banned and be allowed to collude with each other to ramp up the money extraction without fear of consumers moving to other services.
sick of this guy. Fine, the bond villains have a plethora of wish lists. We’re not forced to care about any of their ambitions to prevent AI destruction. They could achieve the same ambitions, by just parrotting NVidia: “No danger. Only cure for cancer. Must beat China, by making AI more expensive everywhere else to stop them from making their own AI”
I’m fond of the conspiracy theory that each of the AI companies has realized that revenues are not growing anywhere near fast enough to justify their spend rate, but none of them is willing to be the first to slow down and risk losing market mind-share. Government decree lets them stop their unsustainable growth without having to tell investors that their whole business model was unsustainable.
Manufacturing consent for a bailout. I’m with you on this one.
Basically what they want is regulations that they can write so nobody else can spin up an AI company, or run an independent AI model on their home lab for example. And yes, you can download an llm and run it on a beefy enough computer, independent from any LLM company.
Basically they want laws that develop a Monopoly so we have to rent out AI agents rather than make our own, and have that written down in law.
They also do not want say, smaller companies developing their own AI systems and instead be forced to rent from them.
Are there dangers in AI? Yes very so. Misaligned AI have done things in a lab setting that is concerning, but these regulations are calling for aren’t there to deal with that, it’s to create a monopoly because they realise that everyone from hobbyists to governments can run their own AI system if they can afford to.
There is a very interesting upper echelon video with an explanation for the sudden doomsday narrative we are currently being fed.
Right now in my Lemmy feed there is a post with a screencap from a FOX News segment where the their screen says:
Fear = Control = Power.
Fox would know all about that.
Idk probably the rich want to divide us over another issue so we don’t eat them.
It’s a privacy nightmare, but no no, these killer robots could kill us all with their killing!! Restrict their use to just us, so that the privacy issues are… all ours baby YEAH!!!
OTOH, this isn’t something we can just ignore either. It’s all marketing hype, until it’s not.
Sabine is an idiot fraud
Thank you, that’s the first thing that came to mind. She’s a horrible person both to listen to as well as in terms of not being an empathetic human being.
She’s no prize to look at either.
Honestly - that’s low, dude. Don’t diss people’s looks. Weak.
I have this theory that when you are public facing, it behooves you to put your best foot forward.
For example, if you are going to talk to people in a grocery store trying to sell your pasta sauces, make sure your breath doesn’t smell like a seagull died behind your uvula. (I’m looking at you, Stefano Faita)
Pull your dick off your ear next time you’re speaking
What an interesting idiom! Thanks for believing me when I say my dick is three feet long.
You have no idea how much I suffer.
Oh, man. Have you ever heard her sing? It’s something else.
the most important part of her ugly inside is her face true
I don’t even know what about her is supposed to be ugly on the inside. She bores me.
Your post is a 10 out of 10 on the bullshit meter.
Edit. The bait was taken, t was just a joke people.
She has no credibility.
Claims of Scientific Stagnation: Hossenfelder argues that foundational physics has made no real achievements in 40 years. She labels areas like string theory and supersymmetry as “mathematical fiction” and a waste of taxpayer money.
Accusations Against Academia: She has asserted that a large portion of tax-funded academic research amounts to “nonsense” produced solely to keep professors and institutions funded. (this comes from her failed academic career).
Institutional Fallout: Tensions regarding her sharp rhetoric culminated in public friction, including her departure from the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, where she argued that much of modern foundational physics no longer follows the scientific method.
The “Motte-and-Bailey” Approach: Commentators point out that she often uses extreme, provocative statements (“science is dying”) to grab attention, but retreats to milder, defensible observations about administrative publish-or-perish pressures when challenged.
Aiding Science Denial: Science communicators, including Dave Farina (Professor Dave Explains), argue that portraying academia as a corrupt enterprise creates an undercurrent that inadvertently fuels science denialists.
She failed in academics for good reasons.
Thanks, Claude.
I feel like her stuff against particle physics academia feels likely true, and the cosmology criticism is just — string theory is not testable, it’s not science
It’s her Motte and Bailey style is what led to me dumping her channel
Yet I see little to no arguments disproving the “accusations” . She on the other hand shown some really juicy mails supporting her claims.
You can’t prove a negative. The burden of proof is on the one making the claim. There is no argument to be done except by Sabine, the one making the claim that science is dying.
O a replying to the whole thread. I have watched a few of her videos but always found them off putting and then https://lemmy.ca/u/SaveTheTuaHawk and https://slrpnk.net/u/ProdigalFrog gave me a blackhole to fall down for a while this morning.
Have you seen this?
I’ve seen the Marxists “debunking” her economics video few years ago. Hours of vids, few minor good points you could fit into 10min of solid criticism and the rest was complete garbage. I haven’t watched this video, but I expect the same.
Anyone remember Max Clifford? He was (is?) a publicist and his modus operandi was to generate infamy. He was hired by Rockstar Games to get “Cop Killer Game” headlines about GTA on the front pages, for example. There’s no such thing as bad press, after all. This whole “Killer AI” routing smacks a lot of that.
Offered money by whom exactly?
1:43
So “an AI advocacy group” and “specifically for this kind of topic”.
The person in the image above reported and repeated the claims about AI’s potential to wipe out humanity without irony or sceptism on a recent video. I used to watch her but found her tangled neverending analogies tiresome… Always something like “XYZ is spending money like an ABC, with an QRS sized hole In the money bucket while DEF does ZZZ to scoop up the dropped pennies… we all know what that is like, don’t we?”.
i find it convenient that at the same time that AI cluster supposedly broke out of their “secure” sand box and “hacked” huggingface, “on their own”, as the AI ceo’s all individually wrote a paper about how there should be legislation constricting ai development in very specific yet seemingly the exact same ways, then they all had a meeting to agree on how to lobby the government, at the same time i am getting paid anti ai advertisements and news articles.
I’m sure all of these restrictions conveniently prevent other companies from developing the same level of AI that OpenAI and Anthropic have because it’s so “dangerous.” Thereby granting them a duopoly. I fully expect that Chinese AI companies are going to be restricted as well for “security reasons.”
Read a short article about a study by Microsoft claiming most people around the world think AI is good enough and restrictions are needed. All of these tech giants are full of it.
Exactly. They have no ‘moat’ in vulture-capital-speak. So they’re now trying to buy one via
lobbyingbribes, legislation to cement their leading position. This is also why they’ve bought up all the RAM and SSD storage for the rest of this decade, to make the next gen of PCs and GPUs unaffordable for everyone else. This is phase two of forcing everyone into the cloud; a war against home computing.Sounds about right
Inb4 “We would have been profitable, but the regulations mean we have to be safe. Sorry investors. The government will bail us out now though because we’re so powerful and dangerous.”
They’re all pretending blowfish blowing each other as one big blowfish Ouroboros.
AI-pushers: “The Apocalypse is nigh!” mom, tired: “we have The Apocalypse at home…” The Apocalypse at home: CAPITALISM
Lol, you anti-capitalism people are hilarious.
Is capitalism in the room with us right now? Does it want to drink our bones?
Yes, late stage capitalism in the US and many countries is a problem, but no… It’s not the source of all the problems in the world.
I told this sort of thing under the same category as religion at this point.
haha you are hilarious, is this brain of yours in the room with us right now?
yes late stage brain tumors in sh.itjust.works users and on many other instances is a problem, but no… it’s not the source of all the problems on fedi.
i told this sort of thing under the same category as bigotry at this point.
I used to follow hossenfelder’s channel on youtube after hearing her on an episode of the Mindscape podcast. It seemed like a good place to get a skeptical point of view on some issues. Over time it became apparent to me that it waa pretty much just skepticism for the sake of skepticism. I don’t know of any actual controversy she is involved in, though some of the other comments here seem to imply there is some, but I definitely didn’t get good vibes.
She started on a sincere goal of knowledge translation, but then she got obsessed with the YouTube algorithm and many of her videos are hot takes she’s not qualified on.
Same here, watched a few of her videos. Was good in the beginning, and I liked her critical stance. But I think she got worse and worse over time, now it’s painful to watch her.
I’ve been standing on a soap box on a street corner for fifteen years holding a sign saying “The End Is Nigh” and nobody paid me nuttin’!". /s
I am less afraid of artificial super intelligence getting out of control than artificial super intelligence being controlled. I dont know what an intelligence superior to us would do to us but I sure as hell now what humans would do to other humans if they have absolute control enabled by artificial super intelligence.
The important thing to keep in mind is that we are not currently at risk of anyone inventing a super intelligence. The word guessing engines are getting amazingly good at guessing words, but the huge jump from that to actual intelligence, super or otherwise, remains out of reach with currently known technology.
I agree that if we did manage to invent that, the biggest threat would be the humans doing short-sighted, greedy and generally stupid shit with it. No coincidence that that’s also the biggest threat from current LLMs.
Edit: “Super-hammers could break containment and kill us all if we don’t invest more in controlling them!” shouts man wildly swinging around a hammer in a crowded room. “The government needs to regulate this technology so that only people like me, who use it responsibly, can have access to it,” he added. He tried to say more, but was out of breath after some particularly enthusiastic hammer swings.
Best responses so far in this thread. People need to stop calling these ‘whatever’-intelligence engines. They’re NOT INTELLIGENT. They are probabilistic text-synthesizers. Stochastic Parrots. Or one of many other terms people have begun using, any of which are much more accurate and do not incorrectly assign ‘intelligence’, agency or motivations to what is still only an algorithm. One with ‘temperature’ (randomness) parameters thrown in, to jiggle the retrieved phrasing of sentences somewhat, and so on.
The reason these things always ‘hallucinate’ (some are advocating we drop that term as well, and simply say the algorithms yield incorrect results) can NOT be fixed, as it’s a side-effect of the fundamental way they synthesize their answers.
And then there’s the architectural issue where LLMs have no way of separating commands and data, so hacking them will always be possible.
You’re simply not using “intelligence” in the same way the literature does.
My fear is that the stupid money people will weaponize what they percive to be a smart machine, and then fall back behind “The AI said so” as an excuse. People who understand computers know it isnt intelligent, but people who cant understand any concepts beyond “more money” will think it’s a god and act accordingly.
Oh yeah, that’s already been happening and going to get worse, especially so as long as the “AI race” narrative holds sway.
The good news is that instead of research that might lead to something that is meaningfully super intelligent, or even intelligent in any moral agent sort of way, instead we’ve put all the AI funding into LLMs and transformer architectures. There’s likely little to no research with any odds of actually progressing in that direction because of LLMs instead sucking up all the oxygen. There’s nothing to worry about in the near future, and anyone telling you otherwise has something to sell you, or really doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
If something happens that causes us to actually need to grapple with the idea of a sentient machine in the next 50-70 years, society will have gone on a very different course than it seems to be, and we’ll all be very old if we’re still around.
