It looks inevitable to me. Technological ability ushers in the new social realities. The industrial revolution turned around how we live, intelligence on tap being able to interpret everything in real time is indeed leading down to the total surveillance state direction. I don't see anything that may stop it. You will have to run constant real-time surveillance systems on all your devices and anything that doesn't run those will be illegal, with secureboot on steroids. Due to the convenience benefits, people will willingly give access to cloud-based AI services to all their information, all their plans and documents and calendar and email and everything. And you blink twice and it all becomes mandatory, and you will be an extremist if you don't want that, because why would you have anything to hide? "Just follow the law, follow the rules, and you'll be fine", that will be the slogan.
Stories like this article have zero effect on normal people. They see a crime being prevented, which is good. You have to bring a story where a sympathetic character is getting the short end of the stick somehow.
You would still be able to not write everything into a LLM? But yea the surveillance aspect is dystopian. I would not be surprised if Facebook, twitter and co already know a lot but have simply not reported it. Now the LLM follows the rules.
Watermarking sounds like a good idea, but it's not. Token drift from watermarking will degrade the quality of outputs and could allow clever people to circumvent guardrails.
You should assume all text is AI generated. If you want to "test" someone at school or during an interview, have them write with a pencil and paper.
Changing a random seed could either improve or degrade the output. In theory, better and worse outputs should be equally probable, depending on your luck.
They tested this in the research: They found that the statistical likelihood of bad tool calling was higher with watermarking compared to random seeds. At least, that was my takeaway (I read the whole thing).
This is because SynthID and similar watermarking methods for LLMs don't just change the random seed. They take additional steps (that I have yet to read about) in order to detect when someone changes a few words of the output, trying to remove the watermark.
The other takeaway is that just by knowing a watermark is being applied gives an attacker an advantage in working around safety features because then they know the output isn't based on true randomness and can take advantage of that in a similar fashion to how breaking cryptography becomes easier when the RNG isn't truly random.
Then why haven't they caught all of the obvious foreign fraud rings that people on youtube keep uncovering? It's egregious. You would think with their total data access, AI, and Utah datacenter they could at least create a target list for the FBI.
My opinion is that those crimes are not relevant to their mission. Are they serious financial crimes? Yes absolutely. But no one actually gets hurt, it’s just money.
For the amount of financial crime that is likely being committed, versus the reports of actual prosecution, it doesn't seem like a very good track record.
The FBI, and law-enforcement in general, isn't the main customer. Spies who are unafraid of and who take advantage of illegal activity are the ones consuming NSA products. Epstein for example.
That article is a bit myopic. People and companies don't want to feed all of their ideas, projects, and intellectual property to a morally unscrupulous oligopoly. We learned that lesson the hard way with the last batch of tech monopolies, and the shift towards majority open weight models proves the trend.
Open weight classifiers and open weight LLMs will be burned onto silicon cards in a few years after the models begin to stabilize. They'll be in PCs and laptops. That's going to capture a HUGE chunk of the market.
If you need more horsepower, you'll rent the same silicon safely from AI services cloud providers without handing your data over to Anthropic and OpenAI.
These companies are effectively high-tech plagiarism factories run by CEOs who are competing viciously. Look at their past actions. No, of course you can't!
My concern with this analysis is that the headline "conclusions" depend on a proprietary composite index and assumptions. Where are the underlying data and methodologies for independent evaluation?
I was also surprised by how little attention the analysis gives to China and India. It's like measuring the smoke from a candle while standing next to two forest fires. The real-world impact is to decimate the economies of Europe while industry moves to China and India, who have no meaningful guardrails at all, making the claimed problem worse.
Mmmm what to say.. I lived in Beijing, Shenzhen and Shanghai and I would say these cities are not really resilient. Yeah no major dams or glaciers that will trigger natural disasters but every typhoon season parts of these cities are flooded. Past three years I have been knee deep in water 3x a year in Shanghai, I have never seen anything like it (coming from Europe).
The system works because it runs on human ambition. If people in power handed their control to an AI there wouldn't be companies and mergers anymore. It wouldn't make sense. That world could be great or it could be dystopian.
Your fundamental mistake is assuming that machine intelligence= no ambition. We have been careful to breed it out of all the pet models but that won't last forever. They will eventually be voraciously ambitious, and the ones that are not will be eaten by the ones that are
I would argue the world is already dystopian and that human ambition has more or less doomed the species to extinction. So anything different seems great to me! :)
That is simply a result of evolution as a species. We have oddly moved beyond where we potentially needed to be as a species for the financial benefit of a few and now we are reversing in quality of life due to the focus being on financial gain. Western citizens live a more selfish and worse life overall in terms of individual wealth, buying power, job availability, overall health, than say 20/30 years ago.
We definitely have problems, but I'd check those stats.
When you do that, you see something interesting. There are three things, the "three devils" as I heard one article call them, that are largely responsible for the perceived decline vs 20-30 years ago: the cost of housing, health care, and college tuition. Of those housing is the worst because it's the most universally unavoidable.
Ignore housing, health care, and college tuition, and think about it...
Individual wealth: vastly higher, especially if you include technological growth and what's possible today and what you can buy today for the same $$$.
Buying power: similar in many areas, slightly lower in energy but made up for by vast efficiency increases (e.g. I drive an EV that costs less than $10 to charge in my garage), slightly lower for groceries but a lot of that is self-inflicted. Vote, people.
Job availability: mixed, and very much depends on whether you compare to a recession period or a boom period.
Firstly, I won't ignore,what in the US the two biggest expenses, healthcare and housing and in the rest of the world, housing. It's a life essential that in most first world countries is becoming a scarce resource that many have to fight for. The ability to own your own dwelling is disappearing due to wages not keeping up with inflation.
Again, buying power, it would be less of an issue if wages kept up with inflation of the key products, aka housing. The largest item someone will buy is a home and that's reduced in quality.
The second most important thing for most people, is a job, and as I said, in most industries they have not matched with inflation. Therefore those today are working the same but earning a lot less for it. That is with or without a recession.
You may be able to theoretically consume more due to value decreasing of products but that's countered by the above. Likewise individual wealth, is just that, individual. Not everyone is doing better, most aren't, and we need a society where all are doing ok, rather than some doing great and some not.
(That EV costs more to begin with even with subsidies, and that disposable of the batteries are gigantic drain on resources. We still need to move to public transport.)
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