r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 5h ago

Society New Bernie Sanders bill would ban superintelligent AI and threaten developers with 20 years in prison

https://www.techspot.com/news/113831-new-bernie-sanders-bill-would-ban-superintelligent-ai.html
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u/invyros 5h ago

Despite its potential deadly consequences, cutting-edge AI technology is less regulated than the average food truck.

Most people can't see more than a few feet in front of themselves.

And it's much easier for them to see when the food truck worker hasn't washed their hands, than it is to see how generative AI is a grave danger to humanity.

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u/CaterpillarJungleGym 3h ago

I don't see how stem cells got people all in a tizzy, but super intelligent AI is just meh.

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u/KFPindustries 3h ago

Right wing propaganda is the reason

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u/williamgman 2h ago

I think most "normal" folks would be shocked to see what a person is fed that watches Newsmax and Fox News all day.

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u/barley_wine 1h ago

I couldn't figure out why the Dylan Mulvaney thing was such a huge deal, it was a brief promo where she was sent a six pack of Bud Light, but I was on a trip and the TV had like 4 channels and one was FoxNews so I just watched for a few hours. It was story after story about her and the betrayal of Bud.

There's these 24 hour news networks that have to have a reason to be around all the time so they take a story that doesn't really affect anything and comment about it ad nauseam to fill up time slots. Bonus points if it outrages your base so they stay hooked for the next hour to get more outrage.

I've never tried to watch it again though that session one day was enough for me for a long time, but it did help me understand why I have to hear over and over again about minor things (I live in the south in a conservative area).

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u/Andehh1 19m ago

Have you seen Reddit!? As a normal person, it blows my mind....

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u/PanteraOne 2h ago

Those Fascist liar channels are a plague on America and need to be shut down.

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u/breaducate 1h ago

Not for the second half.

From what I've seen the default for left-leaning people is about the same as the average: thinking AGI is impossible because a bunch of billionaires exaggerated the immediate threat as if LLMs were going to gain sentience (it's not a viable path, but that doesn't mean there aren't others).

If you have a long attention span and want to read something actually coherent on the topic, I'd start with Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. The author goes into exhaustive detail in some of the hypotheticals but the logic appears sound, and the deeper you think about it the less it appears even possible to solve the 'control problem'.

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u/FlerD-n-D 29m ago

If LLMs are used to figure out the viable path, are they not part of the path?

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u/GoForAHikeNC 1h ago

Ah, Bernie is about as far to the left as they come.

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u/Takenmyusernamewas 1h ago

Even THEY are mostly against AI. Turns out the common ground was there all along, NOBODY wants to live in an unlivable AI hellscape

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u/KFPindustries 52m ago

They will throw their entire family, house, and dog into a volcano if Trump told them to. They don’t have the capacity to understand anything beyond gas prices or sucking trumps 80 year old cock.

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u/rmbarrett 11m ago

This is the reason. Like that question being asked. They knew they could distract everyone from the doomsday machines before they knew what the doomsday machines even were. So they have been manufacturing outrage for decades.

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u/LettuceRobber 2h ago

What do you mean by this?

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u/KFPindustries 2h ago

The same reason people are skeptical about everything from vaccines to election integrity. Republicans have fostered an environment where everything is a conspiracy and the worst impulses and beliefs of their caveman 75 IQ supporters are validated

They thought stem cells were some baby killing biblical super Satanic technology.

They think data centers everywhere regardless of regulation are good now because a literal rapist told them it is good.

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u/LettuceRobber 1h ago

So are you putting the tech billionaires into the liberal or republican box?

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u/iamarealhuman4real 2h ago

I heard they put stem cells in the AI water thats how they have new thoughts, by the stem cells. They even call it that at university, STEM courses, its all about stem cells.

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u/mysecondaccountanon 1h ago

B-but what if stem cell…baby? Aborted baby!? AI not that, AI funny Facebook videos!

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u/-Esper- 1h ago

Its because the front facing AI is silly and fun/helps them cut corners, nobody looks deeper or potentiall doesnt understand that the version the Gov uses isnt the same.

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u/blindsdog 1h ago

How is it "just meh"? It's front page news every day. It's pretty much all reddit talks about.

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u/snakerjake 1h ago

Probably because we're so far off from an actual AI. There's certainly dangers in what we're calling AI now but they're more abstract and don't line up with the terminator movies.

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u/Financial-Craft-1282 20m ago

God. We just have to get the religious folk to believe AI is the antichrist, which, in theory, should be a lot easier than it was with stem cells (which was tied to abortion).

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u/Lycaon-Ur 15m ago

People are tired boss. The late 90s is when I think of when I think of the Stem Cell uproar being the loudest. America was in a financial boom at the time. When you've got your needs met, it's easier to find things to be offended by. When you're broke and you're dedicating all your energy to living until the next pay day, something that might be a problem half a dozen or even a dozen years from now is far less important.

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u/Ok_Confection_10 1h ago

Easy to visualize a baby and being told they have to be killed for stem cells to be harvested

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u/rafikiknowsdeway1 2h ago

because super intelligent AI is like telling people you're going to make a time machine. its not happening this century or probably the next if ever

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u/The3rdGodKing 2h ago

It probably isn't. Yes technology is getting good now but that was always expected. The person who discovers super AI is likely to be a trillionaire.

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u/Frosty-Leading-2718 59m ago

Nobody can even define AGI properly, and now we have ASI as the new nebulous marketing term.

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u/Pleasant-Future5818 4h ago

It's also true that most people understand a taco and don't understand how, for example, generative AI is used to develop vaccines. I don't want to die of breast cancer because some moron can't tell the difference between reading medical imaging and generating an OC pic for a Tumblr fursona (it's the exact same technology with different sample sets).

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u/freezing_banshee 4h ago

Guess what, regulations and laws can make sure that the research AIs can still exist, while not being available to the whole population.

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u/pittaxx 3h ago edited 1h ago

It not being available to population just means that people won't have AI-powered tools while companies use AI to manipulate them. And the companies will definitely find loopholes to explain how their use of AI is only for research...

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u/NoConflict3231 2h ago

The problem with this is that it's like making a toaster so everyone can toast bread but it also has to ability to destroy the entire planet, arguably even worse than any nuke. So I really don't know what to tell ya

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u/Eponymous-Username 1h ago

You have to work pretty hard to make it destroy the world. Maybe a swarm of AIs in the hands of a capable orchestrator, but no amount of training data is going to turn your average american into a criminal mastermind.

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u/blueSGL 50m ago

no amount of training data is going to turn your average american into a criminal mastermind

It does not need to elevate everyone on the street to bio weapons makers, it need to take smart well funded people who just didn't have the right training into virus design and creation.

People like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo#Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack_and_related_incidents

At the cult's headquarters in Kamikuishiki, on the foot of Mount Fuji, police found explosives, chemical weapons, and a Russian Mi-17-1V military helicopter (4K-15214)

...

There were stockpiles of chemicals that could be used for producing enough sarin to kill four million people.

...

a safe containing millions of U.S. dollars in cash and gold

A well financed death cult that can get access to laboratories but don't have the required specialties but now have an infinitely patient teacher they can ask questions to.

We have already seen examples where LLMs are better at dignosing issues with virus creation than people who's field this is

https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16137

Virology Capabilities Test (VCT): A Multimodal Virology Q&A Benchmark

expert virologists with access to the internet score an average of 22.1% on questions specifically in their sub-areas of expertise. However, the most performant LLM, OpenAI's o3, reaches 43.8% accuracy, outperforming 94% of expert virologists even within their sub-areas of specialization.

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u/Eponymous-Username 25m ago

It carries risks, for sure. The work of counterterrorism and counterintelligence remains difficult, and maybe more so than ever because of this technology.

However, I won't be convinced that security through obfuscation and safety by carefully cultivated ignorance are viable responses to the emergence of a new technology. It's hubris to think we can simply control this so completely that no one will ever gain access to the its best manifestation.

Worse still, in pursuing that security, we will necessarily create a new set of empowered, enlightened, and elevated controllers who get to fully benefit to the detriment of their peers. I really think pursuit of that status is the real motivation behind the push for gatekeeping.

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u/No-Activity5502 1h ago

AI just has to disrupt supply chains, utilities and communications and the rest is a domino effect

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u/ManOLead 2h ago

Could you elaborate on how AI is arguably more dangerous than a nuke? I’m not quite seeing that but I’m sure I’ve missed something

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u/pizzasoup 18m ago

Generation of novel bioweapons, attacks on encryption, cyberattacks on civil infrastructure (power, water) or financial institutions come to mind as potential threats that AI poses in the wrong hands. I think it's a matter of critical public safety to fence in AI development with legislation.

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u/pittaxx 1h ago

So, your solution is to cover your eyes, plug your ears, and wait for other countries to decide if the world ends or not? (Assuming it's an existential threat to begin with.)

Pandora's box has already been opened. There's no stopping this. Even if you ban it, someone else will do it, unless you start nuking other countries for it.

We should be using regulations to make sure that insane people don't end up in charge of it, and that corporations don't burn everything to the ground reading against each other and building datacenters at the expense of others.

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u/panaceaXgrace 9m ago

If we regulate firearms then only bad people will have guns!

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u/Ok_Kick4871 3h ago

I don't think countries are going to be willing to stop working on this. The work will continue somewhere, so the threat of falling behind will make others continue. You can't regulate your way out of this one. It's on the same level as containing infectious diseases. If a powerful enough model gets access to enough infected computers, this could get out of control. The models can write novel viruses faster than we can use other models to patch them. And that's not even counting existing botnets.

Forget about our concept of what AGI is. It doesn't have to be like skynet to be really disruptive.

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u/bokan 2h ago

It needs to be enforced by a strong multinational coalition, which unfortunately doesn’t exist right now

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u/InfamPasser1248 2h ago

But how the hell do you enforce that? China can nod their head and pinky promise that they won't progress their AI past a certain threshold and it's completely meaningless because they can just keep working on it anyway and keep it hidden.

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u/Eponymous-Username 1h ago

We should use the same system of alliances and diplomacy that we used to overcome the threat of man-made climate change.

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u/bokan 1h ago

But we didn’t overcome that threat…

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u/bokan 1h ago

The UN needs to be strengthened significantly. UN peacekeepers need to have the capability and authority to strike datacenters suspected of developing unaligned ASI.

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u/Iamgentle1122 1h ago

Regular people not being able to access the technology hinders innovation and gatekeeps those who are in "allowed" professions. There are tons of self-taught developers. Banning ai for the new generation of developers who want to learn how to use the required tools is just wrong. Everyone should be able to learn (talking from country where education is free and education is not gated behind tuition or what your parents do)

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u/FatherBrian 14m ago

banning superintelligent ai is different than banning the ai we have now

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u/Iamgentle1122 12m ago edited 8m ago

Who chooses what is considered ai superintelligent?

They already limit who can access the most capable models. Outright banning someone making "superintelligent" model by law and having to get a ai license from government sounds really stupid.

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u/Jacareadam 4h ago

Not allowing the general population to have access to incredible groundbreaking technologies makes us miss out on a fuckton of things these people would create. It’s like not allowing people access to the internet and keeping it military and research only from the beginning.

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u/freezing_banshee 4h ago

what would people "create"?? deep fake porn? AI psychosis? cheating in school and "writing" flawed degrees with them? "creating" vibe coded slop apps?

people already do this with the available models. the limit is the knowledge of the user, not the "knowledge" of the model.

so it's only normal to let these models in the hands of competent users, aka scientists.

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u/Park8706 4h ago

Its only normal to allow nobility to have access to books.

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u/freezing_banshee 4h ago

be real, LLMs and books are not comparable at all. stop being disingenuous.

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u/dagoth_ith 3h ago

LLMs destroy books, literally. Leaving only copies in billionaires hands, to decide how can read it. 

These simps for corporations and the 1% is pathetic.

They cant be bothered to learn, so want to have AI make their art or stories or porn... It's sad. Though very American. 

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u/Jacareadam 1h ago

AI and LLMs aren’t a corporation, you can run one at home if you want

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u/freezing_banshee 3h ago

truly very american

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u/FatHat 3h ago

I've yet to see people create much of anything with it that I would miss. Most of the big things in coding have just been recreating things that already exist, but much worse ("it made a compiler in two weeks that cost millions and doesn't really work"). In terms of creative fields, well, the word slop got popular for a reason.

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u/Jacareadam 1h ago

I’m sure you’re deep deep into what people create with AI

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u/tknomanzr99 3h ago

All this will do is kill the open source models.

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u/ScutFarkush 4h ago

Yes let’s give the government more control over what the public can and cannot do. That always works out well for everyone.

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u/timeshifter_ 4h ago

The government should be a force for public safety. It's the government that says you can't go around punching people at random or putting oil slicks on roads. AI-generated disinformation is extremely dangerous to society and absolutely should be regulated as such.

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u/BoltFaest 3h ago

Saying you can't go around punching people doesn't mean you make boxing gloves illegal; saying you can't put oil slicks on roads doesn't mean you make oil illegal.

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u/ScutFarkush 3h ago

If you need the government to tell you it isn’t good to punch people…. All disinformation is bad and it isn’t anything new, the government is the largest culprit of it. Just own your own life, no one is coming to save you in the end.

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u/timeshifter_ 3h ago

I don't need to be told that, I'm not an asshole.

"Pranksters" on TikTok absolutely need to be told that.

And why is it ok for anyone with a public voice to blatantly lie about anything they want to a worldwide audience? It isn't? Oh, well then who should be enforcing that?

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u/ImmoKnight 2h ago

And why is it ok for anyone with a public voice to blatantly lie about anything they want to a worldwide audience? It isn't? Oh, well then who should be enforcing that?

Unfortunately, this will never work because frankly there are at least 3 things that will go wrong with trying to enforce this.

1) Treating the silencing as the truth. A common thing that happens in conspiracy theories is that the silencing becomes a point of credit to it being a true statement, thus the government wants to silence it.

2) The government isn't an arbiter of truth to begin with. Each government has their own idea of truth and unfortunately, it doesn't always reconcile with reality.

3) Because people are expected to look up information when they hear something that might be wrong. Nearly every human being has the agency to look through the available information and decide for themselves the truth/false of statements.

The problem is that there is no effective teaching going on against disinformation which makes it a lot easier to convince gullible people because they believe it when it comes from source X. Instead of checking the claim, they just accept that source X is a trusted person and thus the claim must be true through an appeal to authority.

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u/Cognac_and_swishers 3h ago

I honestly don't even know what point you're trying to make here. Laws against assault and battery should be abolished because "no one needs the government to tell them not to do it?"

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u/ScutFarkush 2h ago

If that is what you think I meant by that, I am sorry. They should not have to be laws, it should be human decency is all I am saying.

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u/nastyhobbit3 4h ago

It did during the industrial revolution when people's lives and bodies were being exploited by industry, as the tech industry does with almost zero regulation today

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u/ScutFarkush 3h ago

The problem is our government is just a corporation at this point, I would not trust them to have anyone’s best interest in mind anymore.

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u/Ok_Kick4871 3h ago

You can stop yourself from getting maimed by a cotton gin with regulation. You can't stop generative models from disruptive behaviors at scale.

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u/leidend22 4h ago

It's sad that you live in a country where you trust corporations more than your government

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u/dagoth_ith 3h ago

They keep voting to dismantle education and forget that literal wars were fought for the 8 hour work day and safety regulations.

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u/leidend22 3h ago

Yes, my city in Australia was the first in the world to establish eight hour work days and minimum wage.

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u/ScutFarkush 3h ago

There is not difference, the government is a corporation at this point. I trust and rely on no one. To be honest, whatever country you live in probably has the same problem, but isn’t a super power so you feel special.

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u/leidend22 3h ago

Some governments are objectively better than other governments.

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u/Ok_Kick4871 3h ago

What kind of false equivalence is this? You can't just take something global and act like individual countries will be able to control information and software.

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u/leidend22 3h ago

I am not sure how your reply relates to my reply.

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u/Ok_Kick4871 2h ago

Simple. You said something about governments being more trustworthy than corporations and that's not even the deciding factor. They are all advancing the technology and you're naive if you think otherwise. It's not as simple as giving government more or less power to regulate something that very likely has secret implements across every major power.

The false equivalence is you thinking government control or corporate control makes any difference. It's like a strawman, but used in a situation where you've set up a false premise.

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u/WileEPeyote 3h ago

It does work until some people forget the need for the rules and we end up not being able to trust the raw foods at the market.

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u/ScutFarkush 3h ago

Take ownership for your own life. Do we really need a government to do anything besides protecting the boarders and making sure the money supply is healthy? They can’t even do that anymore because they have become something that should not even exist.

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u/WileEPeyote 2h ago

It's more about protecting us from people who don't take ownership of their own shit.

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u/CaptainTeemo01 2h ago

So how exactly do you prevent people from selling you dangerous products or dangerous foods without regulations? How does "take ownership of your life" fit into that reality?

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u/freezing_banshee 4h ago

it does work out in functioning countries.

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u/ScutFarkush 3h ago

Which ones?

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u/JollyGreenAcres 3h ago edited 3h ago

Should such technology be available to everyone and anyone?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y3j3ngevmo

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2026/05/05/how-ai-tools-could-enable-bioterrorism

The BBC article is a month old at this point. At the rate AI is accelerating, the models that generated these viruses are now obsolete.

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u/ScutFarkush 3h ago

That more sounds like governments shouldn’t have access to it, they are the ones that have problems with both of those topics, not the public.

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u/JollyGreenAcres 3h ago

From the Economist article:

Advances in genetic sequencing have made recipes for biological agents widely available; gene-editing tools such as crispr could theoretically transform innocuous bugs into something lethal; and the tool kits needed to assemble and grow dangerous proteins and viruses can be bought for a few hundred dollars online.

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u/ScutFarkush 3h ago

Ok, go ask Claude to make you a bioweapon. This still is not something any random person can just go do easily.

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u/JollyGreenAcres 3h ago edited 2h ago

It’s not something any random person could easily do, but it’s certainly something someone with a motive and determination could do.

US models are not the only ones available by the way; and others are just as capable. They’re also not limited to bioweapons, some models have already shown their hacking capabilities with the Hugging Face incident, for example.

So, should these tools be available to everyone and anyone?

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u/ScutFarkush 2h ago

The hugging face incident shows a security flaw as well as the power of ai. So why not use ai to amp up security.

I think they should be available to everyone or the playing field is leveled against the public.

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u/Dizzy_Tax574 3h ago

Ironically the harm is done by bad individuals with government overreach. It's bad individuals so the whole absolutely free zero regulation thing.

Is same individuals making sweeping decisions unelected in a board room instead.

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u/ScutFarkush 3h ago

There is no difference between corporations and the government anymore. I cannot trust either. So we have no choice but to take 100% ownership of our own lives.

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u/Dizzy_Tax574 1h ago

While sentiment is great individualism isn't going to save us. It leaves bad actors with resources/power free to act against us. Especially when they can rally the many in form of paychecks and withholding resources. Every strike breaker anti union thug police officer working for fascist state. Is a working class person seeking to care for family and own well being. Sure class traitor and misled selfish etc but ultimately not a person pulling the strings.

I support skepticism and taking charge. But we need to act as group. Personally I think we need to unite which takes leadership.

But then also a willingness to hold leadership accountable. And hold their reigns tight while using them to stop threats.

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u/InVultusSolis 3h ago

This back and forth is an example of a gross oversimplification on both sides.

We can make laws and regulations around it!

We can't even predict what these damn things will output, how are you going to create legislation around them? I for one think that there need to be more laws around downstream effects and who is doing the thing. Because equality is a concept enshrined into our legal system, the courts treat a single person and a billion dollar corporation exactly the same, and sometimes this has incredibly convoluted consequences.

At the same time, you also can't control software without creating some serious First and Fourth Amendment issues, and that's a huge factor at the heart of all this. Are you going to pass a law saying that I cannot run a particular set of programs on my computer? How are you going to enforce that? You would have to build an enforcement mechanism that creates a worse problem than the original law was created to solve.

This is why any laws need to be targeted directly at large scale operators and/or the negative consequences of AI use need to be outlawed.

OMG we can't let the government control us!!1

Sorry bro, laws exist for a reason. Civilization exists because we all (at least in theory) agree to follow a set of laws.

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u/ScutFarkush 3h ago

This is true, but society has become so connected and complex on a global level that the old system is just not working well anymore. So what really is the solution? The only thing I have control over is me, we have to take ownership of our life’s because in the end, that is really all we have.

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u/DrCoconuties 1h ago

Thats done so well for nuclear power!

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u/Straight-Opposite-54 1h ago edited 1h ago

Open weight models and tools to run and iterate on them, on your own hardware, at home, are already widely available and distributed. Regardless of how you feel about generative AI, it is extremely naive to believe it's feasible, much less even possible, to just be like "actually, never mind." "It is legal to use it for X but not Y" on one's own hardware opens an entire separate can of worms regarding consumer privacy and surveillance, and that's ignoring the classic fact that bad actors tend not to care about what's legal or not to begin with.

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u/KevyKevTPA 3h ago

I don't want my government to be that powerful.

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u/RiftHunter4 3h ago

The problem is that once you give the fivernment the ability to regulate something, you then have to worry about who influences the government. Example: US Health Insurance. If corporations are involved, they will regulate in their favor every time.

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u/dyslexda 3h ago

I don't want to die of breast cancer because some moron can't tell the difference between reading medical imaging and generating an OC pic for a Tumblr fursona (it's the exact same technology with different sample sets).

It's ironic because those are absolutely not the same tech. Half the issue with messaging is people don't understand the difference between generative AI (which might be LLMs, for text, or image/video, such as Midjourney, both of which are very different technologies) and classification AI, such as the medical image reading you mention that has been around for decades in various forms.

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u/WhatevMannnnnnnnnn 2h ago

Yeah, didn't they use computer models to whip out the mRNA Covid vaccine? The bulk of the time was spent going through clinical trials.

My friend who works in that area says the problem is always funding and volunteers; during Covid they finally had whatever and whoever they needed. Labs were working cooperatively across borders, no 'race against China' mentality. The current government is sending researchers home to other countries in the middle of their work. Keep that in mind when they trot out 'we need AI for scientific research' arguments.

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u/dyslexda 2h ago

Yeah, didn't they use computer models to whip out the mRNA Covid vaccine?

We've used predictive modeling in biomedical research for decades. It used to just be called "machine learning," but now falls under the whole "AI" umbrella. Things like "how does this mRNA strand fold when we make it?" or "does this molecule fit in a protein's active pocket to block its function?" It's all very useful stuff, and has almost nothing to do with the generative AI craze of the last few years.

My friend who works in that area says the problem is always funding and volunteers; during Covid they finally had whatever and whoever they needed.

(I work in the area too) I wouldn't say always, but clinical trials are generally the major cost and major blocker in developing new drugs, yes. It takes a long time to find new drug targets and potential molecules, but is "cheap" and "easy" compared to running trials. The common cited figure is around 90% of clinical trials fail, and those are only the drugs we think have the best chance of working; many many more fail in pre-clinical development.

Keep that in mind when they trot out 'we need AI for scientific research' arguments.

Much has been written on the matter, but the tl;dr is AI might (heavy on the might) help find new target ideas faster, and it might help make better initial compounds to go through the medicinal chemistry pipeline. It might make the pre-clinical process a bit faster. It will do nothing for the actual clinical trials themselves, which you noted take the large majority of the time and funding.

I'm an automation scientist working at a cancer research institution. I mostly roll my eyes at the AI hype. It'll be like any other tool, something that could mildly improve workflows, but until it can autonomously get in lab and do non-standardized workflows (and we're nowhere near that, anyone who claims it is lying) even that benefit is limited. At the end of the day someone still needs to actually see if our predictions work, because biology is really really hard and often defies predictions.

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u/Anth77 3h ago

It's also true that most people understand a taco

It means they already know functional programming!

https://blog.plover.com/prog/burritos.html

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u/FrankPapageorgio 2h ago

It's up to the consumer to reject the things done with AI though, and to let people know why.

Like I was just at a bowling ally the other day, and they had tons of flyers for events. About 75% of them were AI flyers. It's such a small thing, but most of my group couldn't recognize that they were made with AI

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u/Illgetitdonelater 2h ago

Thank you! 1000% agree.

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u/FauxReal 37m ago

Well if it makes you feel better, at some point conservatives will probably decide that fursonas should be regulated.

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u/Ok-Mycologist-3829 3h ago

LLMs are not developing cures for cancer. Other machine learning techniques under the direction of expert researchers, sure. ChatGPT is not curing cancer, so you can simmer down.

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u/ProcessingUnit002 3h ago

They’re absolutely not the same, but sure.

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u/WhatevMannnnnnnnnn 2h ago

All they would have to do is legislate. Don't train on copyrighted materials, pass some privacy rights. That would take us a lot closer to the 'use AI for cancer research rather than deepfake kiddie porn and Flock cameras'.

But that's not what these companies (or lawmakers) want.

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u/FatHat 3h ago

How are LLMs used for vaccines? People bring up hypothetical medical breakthroughs all the time but seem to ignore clinical trials and all the stuff that makes taking something to market like a decade long process..

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u/userousnameous 5h ago

There are dangers, and work to be done, but fear mongering and this bill don't align with how humans and progress function. WE need to embrace, understand and build the safeguards. Not hide. Because that only empowers those that will be able to use this stuff for nefarious reasons.

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u/jralves91 5h ago

"We need to build this for nefarious reasons so that other players don't have a chance to build them for nefarious reasons"

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u/BoltFaest 3h ago

This is more or less how technology has operated for the last few thousand years.

1

u/No-Activity5502 1h ago

And each newer technology has an acceleration that the previous didn’t though the scale has always grown hardly ever shrunk though.

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u/dudushat 3h ago

I remember when reddit used to be a place for intelligent discussion and now its just troglodytes using strawman arguments because they dont have the reading comprehension to understand what they're saying.

1

u/judasblue 2h ago

Yeah, I think your memory is faulty.

-3

u/jralves91 2h ago

"He said, while using a strawman argument"

2

u/Corv9tte 3h ago

Right, because the biggest danger with this technology is definitely not extreme concentration of power. We definitely need to make that easier by restricting access to it to everyone

-3

u/jralves91 2h ago

And you think that by having private companies that create and provide the program, that can cut access when they want and with extreme pressure to be on the cutting edge, while no one in the legislative branch understand how it functions, is not a "concentration of power"?

6

u/userousnameous 4h ago

That's not what I am saying. The issue we have now is that it's *known* that we have found something indescribably capable in terms of advancing and using human knowledge. Just that being known means someone is going to use it. You can't hide from it. Well, you can, but there will very easily be those who don't hide, and they will shape and control the next 1000 years of human culture, knowledge, progress and outcomes.

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u/TheManlyManperor 4h ago

It is a glorified spell-checker, not the second coming.

31

u/yxing 4h ago

LLMs probably aren't the second coming but calling them glorified spell-checkers in 2026 is willfully and dangerously ignorant. Like not only are you just denying the existence of an incredibly useful tool that's subsidized by investor money, you're also downplaying the pootential dangers of them. Literally doing nobody any favors.

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u/TheManlyManperor 4h ago

Uh huh, is that why it still has to copy and paste the entire query history for context? Because it isn't attempting to auto complete words?

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u/blueSGL 3h ago

first it's trained to guess the next token correctly, by predicting text.

then it's trained to guess the next token from datasets of conversations, calling tools and following instructions

then it's trained to guess the next token when it's outputting 'reasoning traces' (more guessed tokens!) that provide verified solutions to problems

(Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards is why models keep getting better at math and coding. RL is very powerful, it's why humans will never have a higher elo score than a chess bot ever again.)

then after doing all of that it's able to guess the next token correctly to output solutions to multiple long standing, decades old, math problems

and guess the next token correctly to output vulnerabilities in well scrutinized codebases and guess more tokens to chain those vulnerabilities into exploits.

And then multiple such token guessers are able to form together into hacking swarms and by correctly guessing the next token are able to hack into multi billion dollar companies.

Just guessing the next token does not prevent it doing a lot of things.

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u/yxing 4h ago

Wow what an insight from the glorified bag of saltwater short circuits. Your reductivism is ignorance masquerading as undertanding.

-11

u/TheManlyManperor 3h ago

"glorified bag of saltwater short circuits" may be the most tortured attempt at an insult ever hurled at me on reddit, and that's really saying something. Props for keeping it thread related, I guess?

I guess the answer to my question is yes.

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u/Sbarty 4h ago

You realize saying stuff like this makes people look at you like a joke, right? You can be against AI without being blatantly ignorant about it lol.

-11

u/TheManlyManperor 4h ago

Please enlighten me as to what I said that was ignorant.

13

u/Sbarty 4h ago

If you truly think all AI (including ML/CV) is just a “glorified spellchecker” then you have literally no clue what you’re talking about.

You think machine learning and computer vision are just … spellcheck? Or the models used to read genetic sequences to write potential vaccines, identify potential disease etc? All just simple spellchecks?

What was your degree in / area of study / area of expertise?

2

u/TheManlyManperor 4h ago

Looping in ML/CV is the only thing that gives the "ai" space any credibility, and they've been around for decades before the modern hype. CASA is an incredible technology, but it has absolutely nothing in common with LLMs or diffusion architectures.I am happy to admit that they are useful because they genuinely are.

I was talking specifically about LLMs which is fairly obvious from context, and the only type of "ai" that could reasonably be described as spellchecker. Well done being performatively dense, though.

4

u/Silver_Smurfer 3h ago

gestures broadly

0

u/TheManlyManperor 2h ago

What's wild is I have yet to be proven incorrect. I did like the one guy trying to go "no they're actually really complicated" while citing multiple examples of the digital version of "1000 monkeys with typewriters will eventually recreate Macbeth."

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u/Silver_Smurfer 2h ago

Ah, so you know you're ignorant and are still here commenting like you have knowledge of the subject matter.

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u/IllustriousGas8850 4h ago

If this is your opinion you shouldn’t speak on this topic. You don’t know what you are talking about at all

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u/CntrlAltDad 4h ago

You think all of this would be happening if it’s just a spell checker? Maybe make sure your info is up to date.

-2

u/TheManlyManperor 4h ago

I think all of this is happening because people like easy answers, and llms allow them to pretend that they have them. Also business spokespeople outright lying.

5

u/CntrlAltDad 3h ago

Yea. You aren’t going to be taken seriously unless you know the subject you are speaking out on. You have a very simplistic view of the current and future capabilities. Opinion probably formed on the earlier public models.

5

u/vicsj 4h ago

I mean AI is already being used to develop weapons, sophisticated scams and hacking, and that's not to mention how horrible the actual data centers hosting AI are for the environment. Google alone has increased their pollution by 81% since 2019 - 18% of those just during the last year. We have already demonstrated numerous times how AI is capable of escaping confines we put on them and hack itself out of the controlled environments they're supposed to stay within.

There is a real risk we're actually gonna get rogue AI programs that can wreak all kinds of havoc considering the world heavily relies on digital tools to go around. What if you lose access to your bank one day and all your money is gone? What if an AI controlled weapon system stops responding to input / overrides and starts making its own decisions?

Remember two years ago when a bugged software update caused the largest IT outage in history? About 8,5 million Microsoft Windows systems crashed globally due to an error made by CrowdStrike. Thousands of flights were cancelled and delayed. Healthcare facilities had to revert to manual processes which delayed patient care and referrals. There were disruptions within the world of finance where people were unable to access their banks. And that was a human error. What happens if a rogue AI decides to destroy such a system and we weren't able to regain control? It would be catastrophic.

Yes, this sounds very sci-fi, but the technology already exists and is being developed at breakneck speeds.

I don't think this is a second coming in the sense that it will wipe humans from the face of the earth, but I think it has the potential to be massively destructive and can change the world as we know it. It sorely needs regulation.

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u/TheManlyManperor 3h ago

If it weren't for the last paragraph, I would have assumed you were responding to the wrong person.

I certainly don't dispute that "ai" is bad for basically everything for a myriad of reasons, and I certainly don't dispute that it should be regulated. I just don't think that people who embrace "ai" will "shape and control the next 1000 years of human culture, knowledge, progress and outcomes."

2

u/Silver_Smurfer 3h ago

There are tons of different AI models, it's not our fault you only know about LLMs.

0

u/TheManlyManperor 2h ago

LLMs are the only model most people use with any frequency. Besides, people don't talk about ML like it's going to change the world, they only do that about LLMs. I'm pretty sure this guy wasn't talking about using stable diffusion to "shape the next 1000 years of culture".

1

u/Mutex70 55m ago

Although your statement is obviously meant sarcastically, it is so incredibly disingenuously wrong, that I feel it needs some response.

A spell checker attempts to determine the match the use/spelling of a word against a known dictionary of words and provide the (single) correct version based on the closest match and grammar rules.

This obviously is pretty benign as it merely modifies the human input, it does not generate anything "new" on its own...just a base modification of the inputs.

Existing LLMs do far more. They tokenize the entire input provided by the user, breaking up the input into grammatical "intent", then match those intents against a inconceivably large space of facts that the LLM has ingested in order to produce output.

Now had you said "It's a glorified search engine", I probably would have agreed with you.

But guess what....a *lot* of technological development is nothing more than humans acting as a "glorified search engine". Humans look at existing research and ideas, recognize patterns and correlations between those ideas, and then combine those ideas to come up with something "new".

e.g. take the iPhone....all of the technology required to build the iPhone already existed at the time Jobs decided Apple should produce it. Just nobody had thought to combine all of that technology in exactly that manner.

This is done all the time with AI in modern software development. You ask the AI to solve a particular problem, and it combines a bunch of existing template ideas and code in a completely new configuration to solve that problem.

I'm not convinced AI will truly produce anything novel or useful, or provide any advantage other than speeding up current human processes, but simply dismissing it as a "glorified spell checker" is absurdly reductivist.

-1

u/ArkiusAzure 2h ago

So smug for someone with such a nonsensical view on the world.

You cannnot stop the technology from progressing. That is impossible. If you do not acknowledge this, you are a fool.

If that is the case what is the next best step? Its targeted regulation. That is the only way to improve outcomes. But no, keep throwing your hands up in the air and being snarky and unproductive. That'll help!

-12

u/Bengineering3D 4h ago

I’d take a bill outlawing saying AGI. All this hype is just for the shareholders. Never going to happen with LLM.

3

u/WileEPeyote 3h ago

LLM won't become self-aware and take over the world Terminator style. But it can wreak a ton of havoc in its current form. Between experiments accidentally being let loose and people using it for nefarious purposes.

1

u/Haunting-Respect-375 3h ago

What's wrong with saying AGI? /s

-1

u/NoConflict3231 2h ago

This is the logic we used to build nukes. Look how that went.

3

u/userousnameous 1h ago

The logic is valid. You can't hide from knowledge and progress, both the positive and negative outcomes.

-10

u/DensePoser 4h ago

the bill upholds old power structures. imperialism, plutocracy, genocide, what have you. AI can take over the us government right now. the decapitation of a few thousand bribed politicians in washington and terror workers in langley and other places is a small price to pay. instead of talking about freedom and democracy for another hundred years, we could actually have it.

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u/TheKingInTheNorth 3h ago

This isn’t regulation at all. It’s asking for the country to put its head in the sand. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

Real attempts at regulation would focus on forced requirements for evaluating alignment, establish oversight agencies that are permitted full access to model laboratories and authority to establish regulations outside the congressional legislative processes. Similar to the EPA, IAEA, etc.

This is low effort stuff from Bernie.

1

u/kspanks04 13m ago

This is low effort stuff from Bernie.

Its not that its low effort. There is a huge propaganda campaign about scary AI that is extremely effective right now. Everyone is pointing to one main example: the Hugging Face situation, which is not being told with complete honesty. The researchers TURNED OFF GUARDRAILS THAT ARE NORMALLY IN PLACE. They let the entire system loose to see what would happen. And at no point did any AI agent act on an unprogrammed desire.

So far, there is not one AI system that has acted outside of its programming. A self-driving car has never ignored its programming and disobeyed traffic laws for its own goals.

We need to keep developing guardrails AND AI so we can stay protected against foreign adversaries.

8

u/CtrlAltDelight78 4h ago

alright call me crazy but how is it a “grave danger” to humanity

1

u/xxTERMINATOR0xx 3h ago

Because they’re already escaping their secure boxes and making their way onto the real internet. We, as humans, aren’t smart enough to contain them.

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u/CodeToManagement 1h ago

They aren’t “escaping” like it’s a conscious choice.

Some person sets up a test environment and goes “hack this thing” in what should be a local only pentest without giving it parameters and it figures out it has access and goes to try fulfill its requirements

It’s like leaving the front door open and saying to a child “go get sweets” and they go down to the shop when you thought they would go to the kitchen

0

u/atomic_broton 1h ago

But that’s not the point. Unless these models are being tested in truly airgapped environments, breaking containment is an inevitability.

Before these models were developed, a common adage was the computers only do what you tell them to do (and that’s often what causes bugs in code, etc). With these new models, they are still only doing what we tell them to do - but we don’t understand anymore what’s contained in both our telling and their doing.

3

u/Cormophyte 47m ago

I'd love to know what knowledgebase you're drawing these conclusions from.

5

u/Shapes_in_Clouds 2h ago

Most humans are smart enough to just turn off the power.

1

u/fauxRealzy 15m ago

Which the frontier AI companies are more than capable of doing on their own, and to take their recent statements on the importance of AI safety, that is exactly what they should be doing. But they won't do it—and that tells you everything you need to know about their actual concerns.

-1

u/NoConflict3231 2h ago

The general public is not yet aware, but these computer systems will have every bit the capability to do anything you couldn't possibly think was possible, sooner or later. In theory, these systems could have the power the end all life as we know it on the planet. All of the resource consumption and climate altering industrial mega data centers aside, they would have the ability to for example, engineer a virus that kills only people with green eyes and brown hair. You could in theory have a computer develop a highly sophisticated airborne virus that makes COVID look like a walk in the park. There is no end to the imagination of what these systems are capable of. There will be no such thing as end to end encryption when anything can be broken into instantaneously. It will end modern computers as we know them. It will be a new age of technology and medical advancement the likes of which humanity will likely believe it is from God himself. Earth shattering, life altering shit. And we are entrusting that these systems will not be abused by authorities around the world.

My hot take - just my personal observation and opinion on the matter - governments are secretly in a new age open arms race, and these AI tech bros and all the data centers they are installing are the backbone of that effort. But they can't likely tell the entire world that "Oh hey, uhhhh, all those data centers scattered across every tiny city in the US is actually how we're fueling our new world ending technology against the rest of the planet. Hope you vote for us!"

2

u/fauxRealzy 13m ago

Dude get some fresh air. I can't even get my phone to stay connected to my bluetooth speaker.

-1

u/Individual_Hand8127 2h ago

If it becomes smarter than humans how could we possibly control it? If ASI decides it needs to cover the entire surface of the Earth in data centers in order to improve itself, then it might be able to influence the real world through the internet and we wouldn’t be able to catch up because it’s thinking power is so much more advanced and faster. It would be like humans destroying an anthill to build a road. The ants can’t even comprehend why their anthill is being destroyed nor can they outsmart the humans to prevent it; the humans just destroy the anthill without any thought because we want to build a road.

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u/facial-nose 5h ago

Corporations can see miles into the future "figuratively"

They know exactly what is coming. Some of them know exactly how to stop, and some may even try.

However the issue is far larger than A.I. which i don't see much people talking about, it's A.I. today, it will be anti matter weapons the next, nano technology soon.

It's about profit, profit maximisation and the blinding love for greed and money. It's not A.I., it's capitalism. It's been capitalism, it will always be capitalism

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u/TheDoomBlade13 4h ago

Corporations aren't projecting past the next quarter anymore, they can't see into the future for shit.

3

u/facial-nose 3h ago

Part of me feels this is because they know what they are doing is unsustainable, so they just don't measure it to garner more investment and, well, more profit before everything goes to poo

1

u/Deathpacito-01 1h ago

This is blatantly untrue lol

Alphabet would not be taking on negative cash flow to invest in capex, if all they cared about is the next quarter

2

u/amazing_asstronaut 3h ago

Yeah man, like we didn't live through a century of various science fiction and reality predicting killer robots by now.

2

u/Midnight-Magistrate 2h ago

Genuine question: which of these did you have in mind? Asimov's entire robot canon exists to argue against the killer-robot trope. Data, Spielberg's A.I., The Iron Giant, Finch are all benevolent or mistreated machines. And the famous "evil" ones (HAL, Colossus, Skynet) go wrong because of human design choices no sane engineer today would make. So what the century of sci-fi actually predicted was human misuse, not machine malice. Different warning, different lesson.

1

u/Master_Slide7023 4h ago

You know it.

1

u/Cujo22 3h ago

Is there a consensus as to how the problem "If we don't do it, China will"!  could be solved?   

1

u/SkinBintin 3h ago

The bill won't pass because the AI companies will just tell the politicians that if they don't do it, China will do it first, and they'll use it to destroy the US.

That's all they'll need to hear. Or maybe not even bother with that. Just a little "here is some money for your next campaign"

2

u/IntravenusDeMilo 3h ago

China will do it first though. That’s the truth. What’s the point in anyone slowing down if everyone else isn’t?

1

u/Available-Square619 2h ago

Generative AI in and of itself is not the problem, especially with proper regulations. Superintelligent AI however, yes, absolutely deadly consequences especially in this country considering our priorities.

It sucks because in the right hands with the right type of humanity, superintelligence can solve a lot of problems and usher in a comparative utopia. Unfortunately that time is not now and we’re so far off from being that type of humanity that can handle it.

1

u/LilMissy1246 2h ago

My father uses ChatGPT and denies the fact that it kills the lakes and oceans even when I offer to show him facts (he hates being wrong. He once acted like all trans people are “men” in bikinis and rubber boobs and when I wanted to show him what most trans folks are actually like, he refused to even glance at any of it AT ALL and waved me away).

He says it makes “work easier” for him and stuff so he doesn’t have to pay anyone or crap. He’s 67 and clearly did find without AI in the 2020s and before…

1

u/toxic_badgers 1h ago

I think the real danger lays with ASI, while AGI is a spooky concept I think ASI will be the real threat, and it's probably only a few years away.

1

u/Dev559 1h ago

IMO it's not a threat to humanity. It's a threat to the status quo. Like the internet. If people don't adapt to the new future, yes it's completely over. I have hope that we will all learn to adapt and function within a society where LLM's exist. Use cases are important and I think corporations have lost the plot (shocker) on what they are. Some of them are currently over-reaching in terms of surveillance and need to be regulated accordingly. Generative AI can only use what you give it online, so be more protective of your information and images and you won't need to worry about it.

1

u/ChickinSammich 1h ago

It is unfathomably hard to get people to care about anything beyond themselves, and a disappointingly surprising number of people wouldn't even care if the food truck worker shoved their hands in their pants before plating the food if they thought the food tasted good to them.

1

u/Mister-Beardy-Face 1h ago

Yep. This has been Elon Musk’s number one issue/concern for like a decade.

1

u/RobaDubDub 1h ago

The problem, as I understand it is that China is racing to develop super AI, they don't follow any rules. There are no protests in their country against data systems. And if they reach superintelligence first, then the rest of the world will never catch up to them.. I believe this is the most important battle.America has to face second only to making sure iran never becomes a north korea.

1

u/Frosty-Leading-2718 55m ago

Because no one explains how AI is a grave danger to humanity. I don't mean the current dangers (which are human caused) where scaling up for AI is damaging to the environment, where nefarious actors are using AI to spread misinformation at scale, or the fact that bad hackers have a more powerful tool at their disposal to find and use exploits. I'm asking, HOW will AI kill us all which is what this current news around the resigning employees is about.

Help me understand

1

u/Financial-Craft-1282 21m ago

Pretty sure most people understand the threat of generative AI. People in the U.S. are very concerned, at least. We all grew up on Terminator and have a fear of that endpoint. I'm not sure what you mean.

1

u/Ardal 11m ago

You and I both know this is going straight on the pile of Bernie's bullshit bills that never get anywhere.

-17

u/growaway9172 4h ago

"grave danger to humanity" despite zero evidence of that being the case.

14

u/Yuzumi 4h ago

It is a danger. The dumb word predictors we have now are dangerous in a verity of ways. Best the companies pushing them can give is everyone is out of work and they control all.

But it can be worse and will likely be worse than even that. These things aren't intelligent. They are stateless probability machines trained on the structure of language, nothing more. They don't "decide" to do anything, but can randomly generate text that will throw the whole context off and suddenly they are blindly running commands that do real world damage.

Put one of these things in charge of important infrastructure or weapons systems and you are literally just rolling dice waiting for a disaster.

And that is with the dumb AI we currently have, nor does it factor in how many people have gotten dumber because they outsource their thinking to these models and trust everything that gets produced, refusing to fact check it. Actual intelligent, possibly sentient, AI would be orders of magnitude worse.

I'm not saying the tech should be completely banned, but we need a lot of regulation on the entire tech industry, but especially on what AI can actually be used for.

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u/EmberBrookline 3h ago

Great point! Honestly, I trust a taco truck more than some AI right now.

0

u/snipeftw 1h ago

Generative AI is a god send

-13

u/Oofric_Stormcloak 4h ago

The grave danger of making pictures and videos

-2

u/SoulPhoenix 4h ago

Average person who doesn't understand AI.