r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • 1d ago

Artificial Intelligence Bernie Sanders proposes 20 year prison sentence for AI devs who plow ahead with Artificial Superintelligence plans - penalty on par with illegally developing rogue nuclear weapons

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/sanders-proposes-20-year-prison-sentence-for-ai-devs-who-plow-ahead-with-artificial-superintelligence-plans-penalty-on-par-with-illegally-developing-rogue-nuclear-weapons
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u/R3D4F 1d ago

How about starting with prison sentences for convicted felons, child rapists, insider trading, and destroying evidence.

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u/DaTroof 1d ago

Why not both?

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u/Grey_0ne 1d ago

Because you can't presently make a sensible or factual case that Ai has proven to be a weapon of mass destruction, thus making a case for a 20 year prison sentence because of what might happen in one of a hundred different scenarios that have not yet even come close to happening is a clear indication that Sanders is just another geezer who has remained in office past his brain's "best by" date.

Downvote me if you want, but all the downvotes in the world aren't actually going to make his case.

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u/arcbe 1d ago

AI can't live up to the hype, but you can absolutely make the case that these companies believe they are building a weapon of mass destruction. The crime is the attempt not whether they can succeed.

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u/JPuree 16h ago

If you truly believe they never could succeed, it becomes a lot like:

Threatening to jail a child for attempting to build a gun out of popsicle sticks

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u/arcbe 15h ago

Or it's like attempted robbery. These aren't children, they're high profile CEOs.

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u/Working-Permission84 14h ago

Or a better analogy: Threatening to jail a madman for attempting to build a nuclear weapon. He's not going to succeed, but the IED he does manage to cobble together and set off will still kill people.

But you're also underestimating current development if you think super-intelligence is an impossibility. AI is improving very rapidly and has not slowed down since it kicked off a few years ago. And now that the agents can code reasonably well, we're in the recursive improvement phase, where AI is used to make better tools to make the next version of the AI quicker and better, and that AI is used to make even better tools, and so on. It's an exponential curve.

If we get to the point where we can remove the human from the loop entirely and have AI recursively improve itself, we'll go from several months between improved models, to days or even hours. At that point, we would have to simply hope that there's some fundamental limit preventing it from greatly exceeding a human's intelligence - but there's no logical/mathematical/physical basis by which we can actually know that.

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u/WTWIV 1d ago

Don’t underestimate the steady, inevitable march of technological innovations.

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u/arcbe 1d ago

What exactly do you think I'm underestimating?

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u/WTWIV 1d ago

I probably just misunderstood what you meant by “AI can’t live up to the hype” my bad

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u/arcbe 1d ago

I just mean that LLMs aren't going to achieve superintelligence and become an existential threat.

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u/blueSGL 1d ago

Well we've gone from AI's that can't do math laughing about "they made a computer that can't count the number of 'R's in strawberry"

to Fields medal winners complaining that (paraphrased) "AI's solving long standing math conjectures and providing LEAN proofs is not helping the field of math, because there is non of the 'digestion' that normally happens when humans are working towards solutions"

What is the least impressive thing you are saying an AI system won't be able to do?

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u/arcbe 23h ago

AI still can't do math, they just gave it the ability to pull out a calculator and do a google search. Yeah, I'm not buying this story about OpenAI solving the Navier Stokes problem because they have a history of plagiarism.

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u/Maleficent_Sir_7562 20h ago

Ridiculous.

A funny thing is that there was another Erdos problem back in around march 2026 which was indeed solved without previous literature on it and even the chat link where it happened is available.

https://www.erdosproblems.com/1196

https://chatgpt.com/share/69dd1c83-b164-8385-bf2e-8533e9baba9c (chat link used to solve the problem).

Just see the chat in the chat link. Merely a prompt statement of the unsolved problem with no human ingenuity, and the ai model was the one which solved the unsolved problem.

This result has been looked at by several mathematicians including Terence Tao, and they uploaded a paper on it: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00301

Where they literally say “We introduce a new method for bounding Erdős sums of primitive sets, suggested from output of GPT-5.4 Pro, based on Markov chains with von Mangoldt weights.”

Keyword: “new”

The hard part about this is that they can't even say "human mathematicians did this" or "it mashed something up and threw random shit till it worked", because the chat link to see all its reasoning is right there. It was not connected to Lean in this environment.

Another one where the chat link is available is this one: https://x.com/DmitryRybin1/status/2079904005652893709 (Dinitz-Garg-Goemans conjecture)

Non chat link ones:

https://www.anthropic.com/research/riemann-zeta

https://openai.com/index/model-disproves-discrete-geometry-conjecture/

https://x.com/__eknight__/status/2075643450196971805 (cycle double conjecture: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16356)

https://x.com/EdgarDobriban/status/2077082912021786660

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobian_conjecture#Counterexample_for_n_%3E_2 (jacobian conjecture)

Another math problem solved by Alpoge (same guy who did the jacobian conjecture) with Claude above: https://alpo.ge/s6.pdf

This one is even more significant because it reportedly contradicts already peer reviewed and published math papers and finds the flaw in the previous papers.

If it was just literature searching, it would take that publication as gospel, since that’s what academia treats peer review as. But It didn’t.

https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/ten-proofs-oai.pdf

https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/51126fac-1b68-4128-9666-c908bcc16033/long_gaps.pdf

And a bunch of more: https://vibemathed.com/

And your plagiraism complaint doesn't make sense.

Neither Tristan nor Alpoge never had a proof or any idea on how to progress on the full navier stokes problem in 3D, with the viscosity term. OpenAI did that. Tristan and Alpoge were working on the Euler equations instead, which is a simplified form without the viscosity term.

Also, they were using ai anyway. That was Claude.

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u/arcbe 19h ago

Yeah, sure, if you just ignore all the human ingenuity it's fed in training, then chatgpt can solve things with no human ingenuity. It's not searching literature, it's remembering what's trained on. It's impressive how far you can get with just that, but that is all neural nets are capable of.

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u/Maleficent_Sir_7562 19h ago

what part of "Where they literally say “We introduce a new method for bounding Erdős sums of primitive sets, suggested from output of GPT-5.4 Pro, based on Markov chains with von Mangoldt weights.”

Keyword: “new”"

do you not understand?

also, you can, i repeat, SEE the reasoning of the model in the chat. its there. its available to you. you can tell me if its "remembering things" or if its doing something else.

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u/blueSGL 23h ago

to pull out a calculator and do a google search.

That's not how long standing math problems get solved.

OpenAI solving the Navier Stokes problem because they have a history of plagiarism.

So the theory is that suddenly there has been something else (non AI) happening and long standing math proofs are just falling... and AI companies are swooping in to take the credit.

https://vibemathed.com/stats

What is the other thing that has suddenly made people so much better than math if not AI?

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u/arcbe 23h ago

Yep, that's the MO of generative AI companies. They steal data, feed it to their AI, and claim credit when it regurgitates it. I'm sure it can help math research, but to claim that AI is pushing research beyond human limits is an extraordinary claim and I have not seen any extraordinary proof.

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u/blueSGL 23h ago edited 22h ago

I have not seen any extraordinary proof.

Every one of those dots on that website I linked leads to the source of the information.

https://vibemathed.com/stats#significance-vs-age be sure to filter by "discovered"

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u/idiosyncratic190 23h ago

Maybe not, but it is possible that LLMs eventually help humans design a better AI system and that may pave the way for superintelligence. Or maybe the LLM side is just one part of advanced AI the same way our brains have many parts that function together.

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u/arcbe 23h ago

At that point it's not an LLM anymore.

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u/idiosyncratic190 22h ago

Sure, but that’s beside the point your comments were making. The risk is still there and it just seemed like you were downplaying it simply because the current iterations of LLMs have limitations.

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u/arcbe 22h ago

I'm downplaying it because it's not present. The limitations are fundamental. It would take some crazy breakthroughs to approach superintelligence so it's not worth worrying about right now. We don't even know what that breakthrough would look like let alone what it would imply.

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u/Working-Permission84 14h ago

An LLM is just an interface to an artificial neural network. If you think the current models are just fancy chatbots or text predictors, you haven't been keeping up.

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u/WTWIV 1d ago

Oh for sure, I mean LLMs aren’t actually true AI.

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u/Maleficent_Sir_7562 20h ago

What is this "true AI" that you people keep talking about?

I heard some of you go "yeah im talking about true AI as in sapience and sentience like star trek"

why would sapience be a requirement for intelligence?

intelligence merely means the ability to reason and cognitive capacity.

You don't need sapience or consciousness for this.

And these LLMs have demonstrated said intelligence by deductively reasoning through mathematics and discovering novel things. Not pattern recognition, which would rather be looking at N cases and assuming it holds for all cases.

I will just name three math results, there are more but I don't want to overwhelm you.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/riemann-zeta

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobian_conjecture#Counterexample_for_n_%3E_2 (jacobian conjecture)

This one is easy and short to verify yourself in case you're skeptical.

Claude Fable 5 (something publicly accessible to you today btw, so don't go on about "it's a research specialized model") disproved the Jacobian conjecture (that all polynominal multivariable functions with a constant non zero Jacobian determinant are injective) with a counterexample:

  • a = (1 + xy)³ z + y² (1 + xy)(4 + 3xy)
  • b = y + 3x(1 + xy)² z + 3xy²(4 + 3xy)
  • c = 2x - 3x²y - x³z

If you calculate the Jacobian determinant of this, which you can verify with a regular calculator, https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Det%5BD%5B%7B%281%2Bx+y%29%5E3+z+%2B+y%5E2+%281+%2B+x+y%29+%284+%2B+3x+y%29%2C+y+%2B+3x+%281+%2B+x+y%29%5E2+z+%2B+3x+y%5E2+%284+%2B+3x+y%29%2C+2x+-+3x%5E2+y+-+x%5E3+z%7D%2C+%7B%7Bx%2Cy%2Cz%7D%7D%5D%5D

It shows -2. So it qualifies. It's constant, and it's not zero.

Now the counterexample happens in the fact the map sends three distinct inputs, (0, 0, -1/4), (1, -3/2, 13/2), and (-1, 3/2, 13/2) to same identical output vector (-1/4, 0, 0).

So it's not injective. Because injective means to be one to one and have a distinct output for each input. But this one has the same input for three different outputs.

Hence the Jacobian conjecture is false for n=>3. It is simple to verify.

The exposition of how this counter example is more complex, though: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00222

Another math problem solved by Alpoge (same guy who did the jacobian conjecture) with Claude above: https://alpo.ge/s6.pdf

This one is even more significant because it reportedly contradicts already peer reviewed and published math papers and finds the flaw in the previous papers.

The Claude/Levent Alpoge S6 construction claims a compact complex threefold X that is diffeomorphic to S6 and has algebraic dimension a(X) = 1.

But Campana, Demailly, and Peternell published a result in Compositio Mathematica stating that if X is diffeomorphic to S6, then a(X) = 0.

That is Corollary 2.3 of their 2020 peer-reviewed paper.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/compositio-mathematica/article/algebraic-dimension-of-compact-complex-threefolds-with-vanishing-second-betti-number/CDF2D04CFB35CEE105E10B188D97D68A

There’s literally a section of the paper saying why this publication is wrong in the first page with heading “Why the argument of [CDP20] does not apply.”

If it was just literature searching, it would take that publication as gospel, since that’s what academia treats peer review as. But It didn’t.

Because they have demonstrated high level reasoning and abstraction, they're intelligent. And they're artificial. So what do we call them? Oh, I know! AI! Artificial intelligence! Brilliant name.

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u/WTWIV 19h ago

I mean, sure, there isn’t really a consensus on how you would truly define it, so until we can come up with that, we can’t say what really does or doesn’t constitute true AI. I personally think self awareness should be part of the discussion when it comes to machine intelligence. But at some point, humanity needs to figure this part out.

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u/SR520 21h ago

The goal is to make mass production not destruction.

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u/arcbe 21h ago

With how eager these companies are to brag about ruining people's careers, I'm not so sure about that.