Most Questionable Details in 'AI 2027'

post by scarcegreengrass · 2025-04-05T00:32:54.896Z · LW · GW · 4 comments

Contents

  Caveats
  Core Disagreements
  Minor Details
  Overall
None
4 comments

My thoughts on the recently posted story.

Caveats

Core Disagreements

Minor Details

Overall

In my opinion, this story is realistic except for a few big 'fast-forward' moments. It's a story of businesses succeeding incredibly fast.

Most of AI 2027's scenes are sober & realistic extrapolations of the previous scene. Some are so realistic they make me laugh! But keep in mind that sci-fi technology is inserted into this story at 3 or 4 places. This does of course happen in real history! But you must be carefully skeptical of each of these insertions.

4 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.

comment by gwern · 2025-04-05T18:17:02.627Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I don't really understand how a local copy of the weights gives the terrorists more practical control over the software's alignment. I don't think it's easy to manually tweak weights for so specific a purpose. Maybe they just mean the API is doing a good job of blocking sketchy requests?

You can finetune models for any specific purpose: just provide a few datapoints and train. The more specific the purpose, the easier tweaking the weights is, not harder. (Surely, if nothing else,  you've seen all of the LoRAs and other things for finetuning image generation model to generate a specific character?) There is an extensive literature at this point on how it is trivial to strip away all of the friendly chatbot persona from released checkpoints, such as LLaMA, if you are able to access and modify the model slow weights and fast weights directly.

Replies from: scarcegreengrass
comment by scarcegreengrass · 2025-04-06T00:00:23.085Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thank you for the info!

comment by Brendan Long (korin43) · 2025-04-06T02:12:35.930Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

We haven't really established why OpenBrain's market dominance is inevitable.

I think they gave OpenBrain a generic name to indicate that they don't know which company this would be, so I think it's tautologically defined that OpenBrain is dominant because the dominant company is the one we're looking at.

comment by Carl Feynman (carl-feynman) · 2025-04-06T00:37:27.112Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Nitpick: No single organism can destroy the biosphere; at most it can fill its niche & severely disrupt all ecosystems.

Have you read the report on mirror life that came out a few months ago?  A mirror bacterium has a niche of “inside any organism that uses carbon-based biochemistry”.  At least, it would parasitize all animals, plants, fungi, and the larger Protozoa, and probably kill them.  I guess bacteria and viruses would be left.  I bet that a reasonably smart superintelligence could figure out a way to get them too.