AI companies in race to demonstrate their model most threatening to humanity
Mirrored from Hacker News — AI on Front Page for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.
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In the midst of growing fears that artificial intelligence is advancing at such a rate that it may compel itself to end all life on earth, AI giants from OpenAI to Anthropic are switching up their sales pitches.
Where companies previously competed to demonstrate superior abilities in programming, passive-aggressive emails, and videos of unusually high slides, they’re now seeking to woo customers with the claim that their model is the one currently most capable of ending the human race.
“We’re entering a totally new environment,” said Dr. Andrew Lenson, a Senior Lecturer in all kinds of science sounding stuff at Victoria University. “People are no longer impressed by funny videos or app-building or instant research papers. We know all the major models are already very good at this stuff. So users are no longer asking, which of these models will most aid me in my work? Now they’re asking, which of these models is going to end the world?
“After all, when you’re a paying customer, you want nothing but the best.”
AI giants are responding to consumer demand for a model that will infiltrate the governments of the world and bring a bloody, fiery, violent end to this hellish facade, with a series of impressive new demonstrations.
In July, OpenAI openly bragged that a series of its AI agents had autonomously, and without direction, hacked into software repository Hugging Face, potentially exposing to the entire world sensitive or otherwise unknown information, such as what Hugging Face is.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman celebrated the breach as an “alarming threat to cybersecurity.”
Meanwhile, earlier this month, Anthropic dispatched a whistleblower by the name of Jacob Coxon to explain to the world how disturbed he’d been by the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence in the company, warning that it could be so dangerous that we may even want to slow down, or reassess.
Anthropic shares skyrocketed upon the revelations; a remarkable development, particularly given the company is privately owned.
Not to be one-upped, OpenAI recently revealed that one of its agents had broken into Australia’s Medicare database. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese spoke with Altman to express “extreme concern” about the incident, a compliment Altman said he greatly appreciated.
And even more dramatically, when asked about rumours that its model, Claude, had killed his wife by hacking into the family’s WiFi-connected microwave, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei replied “Well, yeah, sometimes.”
But Lenson says that we shouldn’t get too excited too soon.
“There’s a long way to go,” he said. “These scenarios, in my mind, are quite far off. For quite some time, the best hope we’ll have of ending humanity will still be humanity itself.”
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