In the US, in order to file win a lawsuit, one needs standing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_(law), which essentially means one needs to show one has been harmed by the action in question or one is specifically given permission to sue by a specific law. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm having trouble seeing how the people suing can argue they have enough harm that is a form that matters that they'll be able to persuade a judge they have standing.

I'm not sure any of those have money at that level. Aaronson in the past when he was doing quantum computing work refused to take payment or stock from quantum computing companies, so I'd be shocked if he has any money. As for monetary concerns, Hinton explicitly quit his well-paying job at Google so he would be free to talk about AI risk. So the narrative here is the exact opposite. And when the companies talked about deliberately slowing AI growth, stock in AI related companies went down, which undermines the idea that this is anything about their investments. But there's also a serious problem here if someone like Coxon can be dismissed as not having enough knowledge or experience, but people who have been involved in the industry for a long time can be dismissed because they may have financial ties. So can absolutely anyone be dismissed as irrelevant, either lacking in expertise or being too tied in to the industry?

I'm not sure what an hour memory here means, since context windows are measured in tokens. Even six months ago, LLMs could think for well over an hour before producing an output.

This seems odd at multiple levels. First, the people in the foundation labs if anything have more of an idea what is happening than the general population. They are seeing how models are made, what they contribute, and how they go run off the rails. I'm also puzzled by the claim that we're not at the exponential. Two years ago, AI systems could barely do AMC and AIMIE problems, basic high school math contests. Then the AI got to be good enough to do well on Putnam results. Then, early this year, AI got to be good enough to solve multiple open unsolved math problems, including Erdos 1196 https://www.erdosproblems.com/1196 , the Unit Distance Conjecture https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20695 and many others, and the trends there are just continuing. That's one field, but it is one where the standards are most objective about what is happening. That certainly looks like exponential growth. I'm also puzzled by seeing the labs cannot get the AI to improve themselves is a good standard. From the perspective of a lot of people who are concerned, once that's happening, it is likely too late.

What you mean here is you agree with Yann. But the point is that lots of people who are as qualified as Yann, disagree. So if, as in your first comment, your primary problem with Coxon is lack of experinece, you should find this situation alarming. Worse, your complaint about Coxon was lack of lab experience, but in your new comment you object to people being too deep in the labs to be objective. This leads to the weird situation where no one is in a position to be relevant to listen to.

It is possible that LLM tech has its limits. But people were saying it was hitting its limit 4 years ago, and 3 years ago, and 2 years ago, and a year ago. 4 years ago, people who were saying LLMs were limited would not have predicted they'd be solving unsolved math problems. All those predictions turned out to be wrong. Why should saying it now be more likely? And what if you are wrong here?

So if the concern is these need to come from someone from a company not run by Altman, then we already have that. The OP is about that. And we've had containment breaches reported by Anthropic also. We also had a smaller scale but similar problem reported by an independent security group running an open-weight Kimi. You don't need to trust Sam Altman or anyone associated with him here.

A flyover isn't the problem here. The statement is.

If you want to dismiss Coxon feel free, but he isn't the only one in the article. And outside the article, we have a lot of people who are concerned who are hard to argue aren't experts. Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio both got Turing Awards for their work in Deep Learning. (The third who got it is Yann LeCun who isn't worried at all, but Hinton and Bengio is 2/3.) Similarly, Scott Aaronson, who wasn't even that worried about this a few years ago is now highly concerned. Aaronson is one of the world's leading experts in computational complexity, who discovered the algebraization barrier among other things, and whose work lead to the AI watermarking systems. Aaronson just wrote this essay https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=10062. So sure, go dismiss Coxon, but it doesn't impact remotely all the others who are clear experts and are sounding an alarm here.

What needs to happen to decide these aren't PR campaigns and are actual warnings? What would need to occur? Knocking out a power grid? Hacking the Pentagon? Wrecking with air traffic control and making planes crash? I ask in part because when these incidents started happening two months ago, people said that they were just PR and that if they were real we'd start seeing more of them and that seems to be exactly where we are, and yet these are still getting labeled as PR campaigns.

The original quote they are riffing on is "The beatings will continue until morale improves." Essentially this is a variant of the "make a threat, but in a joking fashion, but really functionally a threat" sort of thing that dangerous and abusive people will do. Trump uses versions of this all the time, and it isn't surprising that Hegseth and his people have picked up on this. I'd call this another warning sign about fascism but given everything else that's going on, including a grossly illegal war in Iran, Trump functionally threatening to undermine the upcoming election, and Trump having removed generals and other higher-ups in the military that he sees as insufficiently loyal (read, more likely to actually follow the law and morality when given an illegal order), and this incident becomes almost part of the rounding error.

When the predicted event is ten years out, that means that it is still pure science fiction.

The federal government has always (for at least several decades) used the threat of removing federal funding to force states to do things that they don't want to do. This is nothing new, and is not, as this summary implies, setting a dangerous precedent.

The difference is that normally, this is used to do things that add standards intended to make things better/safer for the general public or serve some legitimate public need.

This is being done to remove standards intended to protect the general public. As a general rule, states have always been allowed to have stricter laws than the federal government, just not more lax laws. Using the threat of removing federal funding to take away laws intended to protect the public's rights, reduce competition among content providers, and push the Internet more and more towards a content monopoly is doing the opposite of that.

It's not the federal government using the threat of withdrawing funding to push its agenda that is bad. It is the agenda itself that is bad. It is fundamentally antithetical to the rule of law, fundamentally contrary to the regulatory powers required to maintain a functioning capitalist system, and fundamentally contrary to the public interest. It is putting greedy corporations ahead of the American people.

Additionally, the executive branch taking such an action without authorization from Congress is also bad. The long history of doing this has, to my knowledge, been limited to the executive branch acting on laws passed by Congress that give them the authority to withhold funds for specific non-compliance reasons. Doing so in the absence of such laws is likely a violation of the separation of powers.

But unfortunately, the current administration has a long history of violating that separation of powers, doing various illegal acts, knowing full well that it will take months for the courts to strike down those acts, and that the damage will have been done by then, and using the threat of such illegal executive orders as a way to extort concessions out of states, government agencies, corporations, nonprofits, and individuals. And that right there — the repeated willful commission of unconstitutional acts for borderline felonious purposes — is a fundamental abrogation of their oath of office.

So the way I see it, there are only three ways to fix the problem:

A. Pass laws clarifying that Congress has exclusive power of the purse, and that the executive branch shall not retract funding to any state, any agency, or any individual for any reason unless the right to retract funding for that specific reason is explicitly codified in the relevant law as an executive power, and that this rule shall apply to all government agencies, without exception, superseding all previously assumed authority, and providing criminal liability for anyone acting in contravention of this law, with no statute of limitations. That way, federal agency heads who act on such executive orders will no longer be protected by any assumption of legality or constitutionality, and will risk future criminal charges if they act on an executive order that violates the separation of powers in this way.

B. Remove the people who are pushing this agenda, whether through the ballot box, through impeachment, or both.

C. Do both A and B.

Everyone acts in their own best interest.

Big Tech messaging about what kids should learn is designed to benefit Big Tech in some way. Any truth-value to their statements would be secondary.

The fact that a message comes from "Big Tech" should never be used to give it credence, but merely to determine who would benefit. Evaluation of benefits to anyone else must be done independently.

May AI will acquire control of the orbital weapons and use them to kill all humans!

We might create a powerful AI that manages to acquire control over weaponized robots, and send them out to do the job.

But humans are so frightened of this that anything we might call "warbot" or "killerOS" or whatever will be dead on arrival. It would require a different marketing strategy.

Someone will sneak it under the radar by making it sound like some sort of positive, joyful AI operating system. Maybe we would call it something like....

Joyful OS.....
HappyOS....

Or maybe...

GLaDOS........

"Staying ahead of everyone else is hard. It costs a lot of money, and we don't have effective monetization in place yet. So, we want everyone else to slow down so it will be easy for us to maintain our position of top dog while we figure out how to become profitable."

That's what I took away from the call for a slowdown, anyway.

Getting scooped by someone else is a thing. It happened to me twice when I was in grad school. Going out of one's way to to work on a problem one wasn't concentrating on specifically to beat someone else to getting a solution published is not the same thing.