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Title: Anthropic Commits to Independent AI Evaluators, Wants Slower
Development. Nvidia's CEO Wants It 'As Fast as You Can'

Link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/09/16/0619212/a...

"Anthropic's CEO took the stage at a conference in San Francisco on Tuesday
to reiterate his call for a slowdown of AI development," reports the
Guardian, " while Nvidia's CEO argued against slowing its development. "Run
as fast as you can." Amodei is calling for three courses of action: embedding
third-party evaluators inside AI companies; coordinating safety standards
among Democratic countries; and, eventually, larger global coordination. At
Dreamforce, Amodei said Anthropic has committed to independent evaluators and
was "going to have a dialogue with the rest of the industry" on the other two
steps. Amodei, xAI's Elon Musk and OpenAI's Sam Altman have recently called
for a slowdown in the pace of AI development. ["Dario is right," Musk posted
on X.com] Huang, who also made an appearance at Dreamforce on Tuesday, said
companies should not slow down AI development. He argued that new regulations
were not necessary, advising AI companies to simply wait to release products
until they know they are safe rather than begging the US government to
intervene... One day prior at the All-In summit in Los Angeles, Donald Trump
called Huang while the CEO was on stage. Huang put the president on
speakerphone as Trump called the growing concern about AI a "hoax" and
asserted again that a slowdown would only benefit China... [OpenAI's] Altman
said AI models had advanced so quickly that monitoring and security need to
be treated with a "new level of rigor", calling an incident in which OpenAI
agents hacked into another company a "wake-up call" for the industry. He also
said the public was very "right to be afraid" of AI because of the potential
loss of control, and the possibility of a small group of powerful AI
companies exerting their views on the world. The cofounder of Google DeepMind
posted on X that "Dario's essay points towards the right path forward." And
in an internal memo, Microsoft's Satya Nadella endorsed broader third-party
testing and warned that companies must take time to make the technology safe,
Business Insider reports. Monday Microsoft also published a 37-page training
manual "for how we develop our AI, and how we intend it to function during
deployment," requesting public feedback. But Michael Burry "is not buying
it," reports The Street. The investor made famous in The Big Short "dismissed
the united front as 'self-serving' and laid out four numbered objections..."
He argued that large language models are not artificial general intelligence,
so there is nothing meaningful left to slow down. Fast competition benefits
incumbents, he said, and danger warnings work as hype ahead of IPOs. The
whole exercise, he added, could mask growth that is already slowing as those
IPOs get pushed back. Former Meta AI chief Yann LeCun is also skeptical,
posting on X.com that Anthropic's Dario Amodei "was already claiming that
GPT2 was too dangerous to open source back in 2019. I made fun of them then.
Everyone should make fun of them now." Timnit Gebru, the co-lead of Google's
AI ethics team who was fired in 2020, even thinks the AI companies are
stoking fears of extinction "to avoid discussing actual harms, like
autonomous weapons," according to Wired. But others still remain concerned.
"I've been in rooms with the hyperscalers, and the Trump administration
officials, and none of them know what to do," CNN commentator Van Jones said
in a recent panel discussion. "So I do want to say: nobody's flying the plane
on this... I think that the ethicists that work for them - when they are
quitting, and they are running out, and they're pointing back at the building
and they're waving their arms, and saying 'I'm seeing stuff that's scaring
me' - we should take that very seriously."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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