I tend to be pretty optimistic about the future of AI, but seeing everything that's going on in the world today, I wanted to share my thoughts.
A LinkedIn post by Sammy Tourani, . Post 5 of 90, newest first.
I tend to be pretty optimistic about the future of AI, but seeing everything that's going on in the world today, I wanted to share my thoughts.
Regardless of your personal beliefs on what unfolded with Jacob Coxen this week, it wasn't a political stunt. He was a respected researcher who helped build these models.
But this goes beyond his statement. This is about everything that's happened in the last 3 months.
July: The Hugging Face incident.
August: Anthropic releases Claude Fable 5.1.
September: An internal model > GPT-6 solves Navier-Stokes.
People are struggling to understand how fast "exponential growth" really is. In the last six months, we've lost all consistency.
The bottleneck has now become humans and compute, but that's not what scares me.
What scares me is the concentration of power.
A few hundred people are shaping the most capable AI systems in the world. They're setting the defaults for technology that billions of people will use.
Are we okay with that?
And if not, what do we do about it?
Do we pause?
Do we slow down?
Do we try to pace development?
Do we involve politics?
I don’t know.
But I do know that we need to be talking about this. When the conversation stops, that's when things get dangerous. That's why I'm making this post, especially for the younger generation, as this will impact people like us the most.
I'll close this with a conversation I had with a close friend who was at Google for the summer.
We were talking about Jacob's tweet when I said:
"We've both become obsessed with AI. We spend every day talking about it, trying to understand it, trying to learn everything we can.
But there's a curse that comes with knowing too much.
Meanwhile, our dads still mispronounce ChatGPT.
Who would you rather be, them or us?"
His answer was probably the best thing anyone could have told me:
"I'd be a mix of both. I'd stay curious enough to understand what's happening but detached enough to not let it consume me."
I think about that a lot.
Understanding AI matters. But so does remembering that we're still the ones living the life it's meant to improve.
Photos in this post:
- Screenshot of an X post by Evan Hubinger replying to Jacob Coxon about the risks of advanced AI.
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