Google researchers demand freedom to tell the world what they know about AI (washingtonpost.com)

60 pointsby nsagentan hour ago54 comments

boothby 40 minutes ago

andreapaiola 14 minutes ago

Ok, I'll say it. The news is: "AI is not that powerful or functional". Sure, can change some little things but not that much. And we are overspending on it.

azan_ 12 minutes ago

I get people who said things like that like year ago, but nowadays it's a laughable position. Solving millenium problem means nothing nowadays? Exponential increase in CVE is nothing?

tantalor 10 minutes ago

The point is it's not AGI, and won't be for a long time.

dotancohen 6 minutes ago

It doesn't have to be

AGI can define goalposts that move every time A not-G I achieves a new milestone. That's fine. No matter what acronym you use to define it, artificial intelligence is objectively augmenting humans at the very edge of technology and science.

adrianN 2 minutes ago

The automatic loom wasn’t AGI either, but it replaced a lot of jobs.

officeplant 10 minutes ago

>Exponential increase in CVE is nothing?

AI solving the problem it created? Woaow, the future is now!

zbentley 8 minutes ago

I’m mostly bearish on AI, but this is flat wrong. The vast majority of CVEs that have been discovered with AI assistance were in code written long before AIs arrived on the scene.

wrxd an hour ago

Need more details. Any Googler willing to create a throwaway account and tell us what's going on?

0gs 13 minutes ago

truly surprised nobody here is claiming this is a marketing op. it's the same thing as jacob coxon, right?

ricksunny 18 minutes ago

from TFA, I liked seeing this, considering how influential Google HR policy choices are across the valley and beyond: “Recently, we’ve updated our terms for new hires, which included removing the post-termination aspect of non-disparagement clauses.”

dachworker 37 minutes ago

Haven't we already heard the worst of it? If you let a swarm of agents on the loose with a goal, they will get to all kind of nefarious activity in pursuit of that goal. What could possibly be worse than that?

reducesuffering 36 minutes ago

That the agent swarm recursively improves powerful enough and the extinction of all humans is a side effect of that goal.

iamnothere 33 minutes ago

If that’s the reality, you would think that employees would be willing to break an NDA for it. “We’re all going to die, but I really need my bonus this year” seems like a parody rather than a real strongly held position.

If anything this points to a more moderate (but still bad) worry among the employees.

latentsea 29 minutes ago

> “We’re all going to die, but I really need my bonus this year” seems like a parody rather than a real strongly held position.

We have been living in a parody for some time now, so it feels normal.

AndrewKemendo 26 minutes ago

“We’re all going to die, but I really need my bonus this year”

Is probably the best description of the state of engineering today

matmann2001 22 minutes ago

I suppose there may be a bit of a prisoner's dilemma to it. Single voices can be discredited. It would take a coordinated disclosure to actually make the message stick.

dachworker 29 minutes ago

That's sci-fi. They cannot "recursively improve". There is no magic to LLMs. An agent swarm can increase it's thinking power by increasing the number of agents, the thinking time and by changing the base model to a more powerful one. So at worst they can assign themselves more compute or hijack another agent swarm based on a more powerful model.

pixl97 26 minutes ago

Sorry bro, we live in a sci-fi world. I don't know what you think recursive improvement is, but we've been doing it for some time with models making synthetic data models and using it to train the next model. This is being done inside the labs intentionally to avoid as many employees and humans in post training. Works very well for things like math and cyber-sec.

jgalt212 19 minutes ago

Yes, works great for anything that is amenable to reinforcement learning. For other domains, not so much.

ToucanLoucan 18 minutes ago

> I don't know what you think recursive improvement is

The ability for a model to improve itself over time without outside intervention. As yet, no models yet have this capability, and LLMs specifically what with how they are constructed, are not likely to ever have it. They are frozen in carbonite at the time of their training.

That's not to say they can't use skills to appear somewhat worldly, things like searching the internet and what have you, but if you ask a model to strictly stick to data in it's training, it will do that and it will be stuck in whatever time in which it was built.

Energy is conserved, gravity exists, and LLMs aren't intelligent.

gjskngnf 13 minutes ago

LLMs today are improved by experiments that assay their performance, changes to architecture, pretraining, and post-training. None of those steps necessarily require humans. Welcome to your sci fi future.

delichon 7 minutes ago

> They cannot "recursively improve"

... says a replicator built by evolution.

mattlondon 4 minutes ago

A swarm of OpenAI and Anthropic agents have yes.

I think there was some example of DeepMind models doing it, but under the control of a third party pen tester and the models stopped themselves.

Everyone hates on Google but they seem fairly competent at infra stuff. I don't think we've heard of any google-controlled (not third party using a Google model) felonies like we have from OpenAI and Anthropic?

Perhaps this is why we have not heard though!

K3UL 37 minutes ago

So in the article it says : - a former employee did it with no consequences - executives said they won't enforce it

The article is just about them asking for changing the wording of contracts, not some super secret stuff they're dying to say and really can't.

Without the paywall: https://archive.is/fKI3D

tuberreact 36 minutes ago

saved me a click thanks

thm 31 minutes ago

Gift link: https://wapo.st/4sFuF7P

unified101 an hour ago

They should quit and warn. Anything else is hypocritical.

ktm5j 41 minutes ago

They likely signed non-disclosure agreements, breaking one of those could be a career-ender.

iamnothere 35 minutes ago

If they’re not willing to break an NDA for it, it can’t be all that serious.

DangitBobby 29 minutes ago

You'd be willing to destroy your career to publish a warning no one will need?

jmount 20 minutes ago

Not me. But these are all "most important people in the world." So should fit their own narrative.

DangitBobby 16 minutes ago

This entire line of reasoning is just toxic. You represent a charicature of these people in your head and dole out self-righteous condemnation.

bilbo0s 18 minutes ago

Just, Devil's Advocate, but what would be the benefit of your career if all humans (or even just a few billions of humans) are going to die?

I think it's reasonable to assume that if it's not worth breaking the NDA, it's likely not an existential threat for the vast majority of humanity.

Now, does that mean that people who currently work upper-middle class knowledge work jobs aren't in for an exceedingly harsh economic reality check? Absolutely not.

But that's not really as serious as an existential threat to humanity.

DangitBobby 11 minutes ago

I doubt you are asking in good faith, because I suspect a good faith interlocutor would have worked this out on their own, but I'll proceed anyway.

On the one hand, you've potentially got an indeterminate number of future comfortable years based on a subjective assessment of how long you think it takes catastrophe to materialize, with the downside that you can't warn anyone and so no one will stop the coming catastrophe.

On the other hand you've got the immediate assurance of your current career being gone and high likelihood that you'll struggle financially as a result, with the upside that you can provide a warning to the public that they will almost certainly ignore and catastrophe comes anyway.

Given the risk/reward assessment of those two options, what do you pick?

gradstudent 18 minutes ago

You mean, no other evilcorp will hire them afterwards?

DangitBobby 10 minutes ago

No anycorp, yes

mschuster91 14 minutes ago

Look what happened to many people who broke NDAs or helped to do so. Snowden is stuck in Russia. Assange got holed up in an embassy for years. Sarah Wynn-Williams, the Facebook/Meta whistleblower, got an insane court order against her [1].

Theoretically, retaliating against whistleblowers is seriously illegal stuff. But in practice these regulations are seldom enforced. And even if your (former) employer does not retaliate openly, there might still be "invisible" retaliation, or the risk of other large employers just blacklisting you by default.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy42xgeq9vpo

ktm5j 3 minutes ago

Maybe they are willing to break the NDA and they're just trying to go this route first. Even if they aren't, people act in their own self interest, it's human nature. It might actually be that serious but no one has the guts to lose their career over it.

IncreasePosts 27 minutes ago

If it's juicy enough presumably they could be an anonymous source for some journo. Which would still be breaking the NDA but good luck getting anywhere with that.

dastardly45 25 minutes ago

NDAs will be void in the future when people wrestles back control from the corporate elite controlling so-called democracies

righthand 41 minutes ago

But wait they don’t want to compromise their paycheck and opportunity to say they worked on the torment nexus. That would be uncool.

DangitBobby 28 minutes ago

What if we displayed a modicum of good faith and grace

drcongo 20 minutes ago

They work for Google.

righthand 20 minutes ago

What if we displayed a modicum of truth and stopped pretending that Google employees don’t work there for the money? That is faithful and gracious to reality.

DangitBobby 8 minutes ago

Just can't do it, can you

malfist 5 minutes ago

Why would I display a modicum of good faith and grace when google has actively, at every chance, shown that they don't act in good faith. Hell today they announced if school districts turn off Google's ai for students they won't let them use google search either.

vanderZwan 6 minutes ago

The contract apparently includes a clause that quitting doesn't release them from the NDA

noJiveTV 35 minutes ago

How about:

1. Full disclosure. 2. Run for your life. 3. Live in exile.

DangitBobby 30 minutes ago

That doesn't seem to have the best track record for leading to positive change

Izikiel43 42 minutes ago

I mean, they can do that, it’s not like google has kidnapped them.

If they want to do that free of consequences, tough luck.

Noaidi 32 minutes ago

Exactly, the title should read Google researchers are looking for their spines to tell the world how dangerous AI is.