AI Eye: Is AI a nuke-level threat? Why AI fields all advance at once, dumb pic puns

12 June 2023

Cointelegraph By Andrew Fenton

Just as we don’t allow just anyone to build a plane and fly passengers around, or design and release medicines, why should we allow AI models to be released into the wild without proper testing and licensing? 

That’s been the argument from an increasing number of experts and politicians in recent weeks. 

With the United Kingdom holding a global summit on AI safety in autumn, and surveys suggesting around 60% of the public is in favor of regulations, it seems new guardrails are becoming more likely than not. 

One particular meme taking hold is the comparison of AI tech to an existential threat like nuclear weaponry, as in a recent 23-word warning sent by the Center of AI Safety, which was signed by hundreds of scientists:

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

Extending the metaphor, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is pushing for the creation of a global body like the International Atomic Energy Agency to oversee the tech.

“We talk about the IAEA as a model where the world has said, ‘OK, very dangerous technology, let’s all put (in) some guard rails,’” he said in India this week. 

Libertarians argue that overstating the threat and calling for regulations is just a ploy by the leading AI companies to a) impose authoritarian control and b) strangle competition via regulation. 

Princeton computer science professor Arvind Narayanan warned, “We should be wary of Prometheans who want to both profit from bringing the people fire and be trusted as the firefighters.”

Netscape and a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen released a series of essays this week on his technological utopian vision for AI. He likened AI doomers to “an apocalyptic cult” and claimed AI is no more likely to wipe out humanity than a toaster because: “AI doesn’t want, it doesn’t have goals — it doesn’t want to kill you because it’s not alive.”

This may or may not be true — but then again, we only have a vague understanding of what goes on inside the black box of the AI’s “thought processes.” But as Andreessen himself admits, the planet is full of unhinged humans who can now ask an AI to engineer a bioweapon, launch a cyberattack or manipulate an election. So, it can be dangerous in the wrong hands even if we avoid the Skynet/Terminator scenario. 

The nuclear comparison is probably quite instructive in that people did get very carried away in the 1940s about the very real world-ending possibilities of nuclear technology. Some Manhattan Project team members were so worried the bomb might set off a chain reaction, ignite the atmosphere and incinerate all life on Earth that they pushed for the project to be abandoned. 

After the bomb was dropped, Albert Einstein became so convinced of the scale of the threat that he pushed for the immediate formation of a world government with sole control of the arsenal.

Read also


Features

North Korean crypto hacking: Separating fact from fiction


Features

Game theory meets DeFi: Bouncing ideas around tokenomic design

The world government didn’t happen but the international community took the threat seriously enough that humans have managed not to blow themselves up in the 80-odd years since. Countries signed agreements to only test nukes underground to limit radioactive fallout and set up inspection regimes, and now only nine countries have nuclear weapons. 

In their podcast about the ramifications of AI on society, The AI Dilemma, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin argue for the safe deployment of thoroughly tested AI models.

“I think of this public deployment of AI as above-ground testing of AI. We don’t need to do that,” argued Harris.

“We can presume that systems that have capacities that the engineers don’t even know what those capacities will be, that they’re not necessarily safe until proven otherwise. We don’t just shove them into products like Snapchat, and we can put the onus on the makers of AI, rather than on the citizens, to prove why they think that it’s (not) dangerous.”

Also read: All rise for the robot judge — AI and blockchain could transform the courtroom

The genie is out of the bottle

Of course, regulating AI might be like banning Bitcoin: nice in theory, impossible in practice. Nuclear weapons are highly specialized technology understood by just a handful of scientists worldwide and require enriched uranium, which is incredibly difficult to acquire. Meanwhile, open-source AI is freely available, and you can even download a personal AI model and run it on your laptop.

AI expert Brian Roemmele says that he’s aware of 450 public open-source AI models and “more are made almost hourly. Private models are in the 100s of 1000s.”

Roemmele is even building a system to enable any old computer with a dial-up modem to be able to connect to a locally hosted AI.

The United Arab Emirates also just released its open-source large language model AI called Falcon 40B model free of royalties for commercial and research. It claims it “outperforms competitors like Meta’s LLaMA and Stability AI’s StableLM.”

There’s even a just-released open-source text-to-video AI video generator called Potat 1, based on research from Runway. 

The reason all AI fields advanced at once

We’ve seen an incredible explosion in AI capability across the board in the past year or so, from AI text to video and song generation to magical seeming photo editing, voice cloning and one-click deep fakes. But why did all these advances occur in so many different areas at once?

Mathematician and Earth Species Project co-founder Aza Raskin gave a fascinating plain English explanation for this in The AI Dilemma, highlighting the breakthrough that emerged with the Transformer machine learning model.

Read also


Features

Crypto is changing how humanitarian agencies deliver aid and services


Features

The best (and worst) stories from 3 years of Cointelegraph Magazine

“The sort of insight was that you can start to treat absolutely everything as language,” he explained. “So, you can take, for instance, images. You can just treat it as a kind of language, it’s just a set of image patches that you can arrange in a linear fashion, and then you just predict what comes next.”

ChatGPT is often likened to a machine that just predicts the most likely next word, so you can see the possibilities of being able to generate the next “word” if everything digital can be transformed into a language. 

“So, images can be treated as language, sound you break it up into little microphone names, predict which one of those comes next, that becomes a language. fMRI data becomes a kind of language, DNA is just another kind of language. And so suddenly, any advance in any one part of the AI world became an advance in every part of the AI world. You could just copy-paste, and you can see how advances now are immediately multiplicative across the entire set of fields.”

It is and isn’t like Black Mirror

A lot of people have observed that recent advances in artificial intelligence seem like something out of Black Mirror. But creator Charlie Brooker seems to think his imagination is considerably more impressive than the reality, telling Empire Magazine he’d asked ChatGPT to write an episode of Black Mirror and the result was “shit.”

“I’ve toyed around with ChatGPT a bit,” Brooker said. “The first thing I did was type ‘generate Black Mirror episode’ and it comes up with something that, at first glance, reads plausibly, but on second glance, is shit.” According to Brooker, the AI just regurgitated and mashed up different episode plots into a total mess.

“If you dig a bit more deeply, you go, ‘Oh, there’s not actually any real original thought here,’” he said.

“Black Mirror” was better at predicting AI advances than AI was at writing “Black Mirror” scripts (Netflix)

AI pictures of the week

One of the nice things about AI text-to-speech image generation programs is they can turn throwaway puns into expensive-looking images that no graphic designer could be bothered to make. Here then, are the wonders of the world, misspelled by AI (courtesy of redditor mossymayn).

Machu Pikachu (RedditThe Grand Crayon (Reddit)The Great Ball of China (Reddit)The Hooter Dam (Reddit)The Sydney Oprah House (Reddit)China’s Panacotta Army (Reddit)

Video of the week

Researchers from the University of Cambridge demonstrated eight simple salad recipes to an AI robot chef that was then able to make the salads itself and come up with a ninth salad recipe on its own.

  

You might also like

Crypto group asks Trump to end prosecution of crypto devs, Roman Storm  
Crypto group asks Trump to end prosecution of crypto devs, Roman Storm  

The crypto lobby group, the DeFi Education Fund, has petitioned the Trump administration to end what it claimed was the “lawless prosecution” of open-source software developers, including Roman Storm, a creator of the crypto mixing service Tornado Cash.In an April 28 letter to White House crypto czar David Sacks, the group urged President Donald Trump “to take immediate action to discontinue the Biden-era Department of Justice’s lawless campaign to criminalize open-source software development.” The letter specifically mentioned the prosecution of Storm, who was charged in August 2023 with helping launder over $1 billion in crypto through Tornado Cash. His trial is still set for July, and his fellow charged co-founder, Roman Semenov, is at large and believed to be in Russia.The DeFi Education Fund said that in Storm’s case, the Department of Justice is attempting to hold software developers criminally liable for how others use their code, which is “not only absurd in principle, but it sets a precedent that potentially chills all crypto development in the United States.”The group also called for the recognition that the prosecution contradicts the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) guidance from Trump’s first term, which established that developers of self-custodial, peer-to-peer protocols are not money transmitters. Source: DeFi Education Fund“This kind of legal environment does not just chill innovation — it freezes it,” they argued. The letter added that it also “empowers politically-motivated enforcement and puts every open-source developer at risk, regardless of industry.”In January, a federal court in Texas ruled that the Treasury overstepped its authority by sanctioning Tornado Cash. Stakes could not be higherThe group thanked Trump for his support of the industry and his stated goal to make America the “crypto capital of the planet.” They added, however, that his goal can’t be realized if developers are prosecuted for building tools that enable the technology.“We ask President Trump to protect American software developers, restore legal clarity, and end this unlawful DOJ overreach. The job’s not finished, and the stakes could not be higher.”Related: Tornado Cash dev wants charges dropped after court said OFAC ‘overstepped’Variant Fund chief legal officer Jake Chervinsky said the Justice Department’s case against Storm is “an outdated remnant of the Biden administration’s war on crypto.” “There is no justification in law or policy for prosecuting software developers for launching non-custodial smart contract protocols,” he added. At the time of writing, the petition had attracted 232 signatures from industry executives and developers, including Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang, and Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko, among others.Magazine: Bitcoin $100K hopes on ice, SBF’s mysterious prison move: Hodler’s Digest

Tether still dominates stablecoins despite competition — Nansen  
Tether still dominates stablecoins despite competition — Nansen  

Despite growing competition from emerging issuers, the stablecoin market remains largely dominated by a few key players. According to data from Web3 research firm Nansen, Tether’s USDt continues to lead among US dollar-pegged stablecoins, even as competition intensifies.As of April 25, Tether (USDT) has a roughly 66% market share among stablecoins, compared to around 28% for USDC (USDC), Nansen said in the April 25 report. Ethena’s USDe stablecoin ranks a distant third, touting a market share of just over 2%. Nansen expects Tether’s lead to endure even as rivals such as USDC clock faster growth rates. “With nearly 3x as many users as Uniswap and 50+% more transactions than the next app, Tether is by and far the largest use case of onchain activity,” Nansen said.“Despite the potential dispersion in stables, we inevitably believe this is a ‘winner-takes-most’ market dynamic,” the Web3 researcher added. Tether has 66% of stablecoin market share. Source: NansenTether is also the most profitable stablecoin issuer, clocking nearly $14 billion in 2024 profits. The company earns revenue by accepting US dollars to mint USDT and subsequently investing those dollars into highly liquid, yield-bearing instruments such as US Treasury bills. “Given the growth of USDT and USDC, the users are clearly expressing that they do not necessarily care about the yield as they are forgoing it to Tether and Circle -they simply want access to the most liquid and ‘stable’/ least-likely-to-depeg stablecoin out there,” Nansen said.USDC has seen faster growth than USDT since November. Source: NansenCompetitive landscapeAdoption of USDC has accelerated since November, when US President Donald Trump’s election victory ushered in a more favorable US regulatory environment for crypto, Nansen said. Circle’s US-regulated stablecoin has been “particularly attractive to institutions requiring regulatory clarity,” the report said. But USDC now faces “intensifying competition as major traditional financial institutions (i.e., Fidelity, PayPal, and banks) enter the market,” Nansen said, adding that stablecoins, including PayPal’s PYUSD and Ripple USD, are “rapidly gaining traction.” On April 25, payment processor Stripe tipped plans to create a new stablecoin product of its own after buying stablecoin platform Bridge last year. Despite its smaller market share, Ethena’s yield-bearing USDe stablecoin remains “competitive on most fronts moving forward,” partly because of integrations across centralized exchanges (CEXs) and decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, the report said.Since launching in 2024, Ethena’s stablecoin has generated an average annualized yield of approximately 19%, according to Ethena’s website. Magazine: Bitcoin payments are being undermined by centralized stablecoins

Arizona legislature moves forward with Bitcoin reserve bills  
Arizona legislature moves forward with Bitcoin reserve bills  

Lawmakers in the Arizona House of Representatives have voted to pass two bills that could allow the state to adopt a reserve using Bitcoin (BTC) or other cryptocurrencies.In a third reading on April 28 of the Senate Bill 1025 (SB1025), a proposal to amend Arizona’s statutes to allow for a strategic BTC reserve, 31 members of the Arizona House voted in favor of the bill, with 25 opposed. A similar bill, SB1373, to establish a state-level digital assets reserve, passed with 37 lawmakers in favor and 19 voting nay.“This bill basically takes the approach that probably 15 other states are considering the same legislation nationwide that allows the treasurer to invest up to 10% into, probably mainly Bitcoin but other things as well,” said State Representative Jeff Weninger on SB1025. “I think this probably would start as a ‘may’ for the foreseeable future, but as things continue to pivot towards Bitcoin and these things, would have that already in place in the future.”Voting for SB1025 in the Arizona House of Representatives on April 28. Source: Arizona State LegislatureThe approvals bring the bills closer than any other state-level initiative in the US to getting a cryptocurrency or Bitcoin strategic reserve signed into law. Similar legislation proposed in New Hampshire passed the state’s House in April and is expected to head to the Senate for a full floor vote soon.Related: Bitcoin reserve backlash signals unrealistic industry expectationsArizona Governor Katie Hobbs announced on April 17 that she intended to veto any bill until lawmakers had a “serious, bipartisan funding solution that protects healthcare for Arizonans with disabilities.” However, with the passage of such legislation on April 24, the governor could be more open to signing SB1025 or SB1373 into law.This is a developing story, and further information will be added as it becomes available.

Open chat
1
BlockFo Chat
Hello 👋, How can we help you?
📱 When you've pressed the BlockFo button, we automatically transfer to WhatsApp 🔝🔐
🖥️ Or, if you use a PC or Mac, then we'll open a new window to load your desktop app.