Have to keep in mind that to a lot of folks it's almost 'bitcoin === cryptocurrency', where anything cryptocurrency must be bitcoin related. Not just this field, but investing in general.

Companies have gotten big boosts just by having a similar symbol to something in the news that they had nothing to do with.

I want to agree with you, and appreciate the spin of a 'safety standards committe'.

However, they could make the argument that an agreement to 'slow down' at current prices, means an agreement to keep prices high rather than someone developing an advancement to make it cheaper.

That said, it's completely counter to the trend where they have been making it more and more expensive, and doesn't seem to be interest in more competitive pricing anyway.

We won't have 'our' side under any better control than the other side. Essentially kids playing with landmines, triggering all sorts of unexpected mess while playing with the technology.

I don't even know if you want to consider the likely ones calling the shots 'our' side. For example, a quote from Larry Ellison on AI augmented surveillance:
“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on."

Note the pronoun choices, *their* best behavior (not *our* best behavior) because *we're* constantly recording. Clearly his natural go to language has already set up an 'us versus them' scenario that puts the average citizen on the 'other side' compared to wherever Larry is sitting.

What's worse is that it came up at a time when everything else is hitting economic headwinds. It has become the one shaky pillar vaguely holding up the entire stock market. Hence Trump's panic over the only saving grace of his remaining decent economic indicator being put at risk.

The theory seems to be about the coordination. You can't sue that McDonald's refused to use some better ingredient, but if all the burger joints jointly announced they were all working together to refrain from using that ingredient, then you might have something.

This is precisely why they needed the governmental regulation they asked for, when they 'self-regulate', it can come off as anti-competitive.

Of course, plenty of examples of industries collaborating, they just generally need some spin that has it as a collaboration to improve the industry in some way. So here the pitch could be that they are collaborating to improve safety, and the 'slowing down' is a natural consequence of the improved safety.

Exactly. Most of us can recall an era where script kiddies had similar unreasonable success even if they had no actual skill or thinking behind the attacks. Just canned toolkits designed around known vulnerabilities, common password databases, understanding of common, bad security practices, and bundled up in easy to use harnesses.

So whether it not an agent can actually "think" or is just putting together a potentially workable narrative of how hacks can happen and running it against real world targets doesn't matter too much. If you wired up the script of Terminator to the real world and it somehow launched nukes, it wasn't that skynet was thinking, it was that the systems folded easily to a movie script. Either way the distinction would hardly matter.

To the extent lack of thought may matter, compromising security is a use case that heavily favors AI systems that repeatedly "get it wrong", as it can have nearly limitless tries to get it right and even if it utterly fails, no one will really notice or write about it. It only takes a few successes, even if rare, to be pretty critical.

Well, one scenario is letting the hype get ahead of the capabilities, and do the 'AI store' experiment, but for real with responsibility for something actually important.

Another is that it is far easier to just screw things up than it is to make things work. I may not have it in me to make a house of cards, yet I can trivially even accidentally destroy a house of cards someone else built without a whiff of understanding.

The assessment of the capabilities based on bottom line certainly is subjective, which is precisely why Jensen Huang is so aggressively gung-ho about we must do everything we possibly can to spend more money on nvidia stuff. The motivation for Anthrophic seems either they have legitimate concerns or are looking to rationalize a plateau after promising the world. It certainly doesn't serve their bottom line to slow down otherwise.

It's really the same problem that we see with quantum physics -- the subject matter is esoteric enough that common sense can't be used to determine whether what you're listening to is really advanced theory or utter BS (or some combination of the two); they both sound the same, and the situation isn't helped by the presence of large numbers of people who think they know what they are talking about but don't. :/

I think the distinction they are making is between technology that kills people, and technology that entertains people. If someone fitted actual weapons to a Doom engine, they'd probably object.

Of the big players, I'd say OpenAI is at the biggest risk of not really able to even stumble straight ahead, presuming stumbling/charging straight ahead is in the cards for the companies in general.

Let's make the hopeful assumption that the superintelligent AIs will not "go rogue" in any way, but will correctly try to carry out their tasks as assigned by the people who designed and trained them.

Pretty much every major nation has military AIs, at this point. So the Chinese AIs are working hard on how to defeat the Americans, and the American AIs are working hard on how to defeat the Russians, and so on. In the final analysis, no matter where you live, there is probably an AI that has been explicitly tasked by its operators with figuring out the most effective ways to do you in. Not because they've "gone wrong", but because they're working as intended.

The size of the universe is increasing...
but the rate at which it is increasing is decreasing...
but the rate at which the rate is decreasing is increasing...
but the rate at which the rate of the rate is increasing is decreasing...
but the rate at which the rate of the rate of the rate is decreasing in increasing...
[... and so on, ad infinitum...]

People commonly overestimate the possibility of "all humans dying", and simultaneously underestimate the possibility of "billions of humans dying".

People are like cockroaches that way; a disaster could wipe out 99% of us, and there would still be millions of us left to repopulate afterwards. To truly wipe out all humans would take something more severe than the asteroid that did for the dinosaurs.

Whoever set up its reward function, really. Could be any of the above. The technology doesn't care, it only follows its algorithm.

I'm not. $2K is an eye-watering amount to spend on a cell phone, even in 2026, and especially on a design that seems almost guaranteed to start wearing a vertical line into the display at the folding-point over time. I expect a number of Slashdot articles about unhappy Duo users demanding redress over that issue, even if everything else works as advertised.

Maybe in a better economy, people would splurge on something like this, but I don't think that's the zeitgest this season.