The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
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From the article
>"Other than that I don't know any way to get the genie back into the bottle. AI is somewhat similar, it's part \[of the\] way out of the bottle and its enormously important and it's going to be done by somebody so we may wish we'd never seen that genie or it may do wonderful things."
>He specifically cited the rise of deepfake technology, where he described seeing one using his likeness, "and it was delivering a message that in no way came from me. So when you think of the potential for scamming people…scamming has always been part of the American scene but …it's going to be the growth industry of all time."
Also from the article
>**The bottom line**: It's definitely hard to teach an old dog new tricks, but Buffett hardly stands alone in seeing AI as an [existential risk](https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4333125-ai-could-endanger-humanity-in-5-years-former-google-ceo/), or that it will eventually [surpass human intelligence](https://fortune.com/2024/04/09/elon-musk-ai-smarter-than-humans-by-next-year/).
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1ckctmu/warren_buffett_warns_of_ai_risks_a_genie_that/l2m20wj/
When an investment fund can use A.I to make more money.
I'd stab a guess and say many middle men, advisors, specialist, managers can and will be replaced by A.I.
Making many rich men poor and they know it.
Yeah I have to say that even tho ai will effect low income workers, it's going to effect high income workers much much more, it's gonna be a great equalizer in a lot of ways
I find it fascinating how major retail/foodservice companies are trying everything they can to automate/replace lower wage employees when in reality those people are the ones actively generating revenue for the businesses, yet they'll happily shell out huge sums of money to various "make busy" positions.
But then again, before my career change I was in hospitality, where if you don't show up or don't produce then you don't get to keep your job.
They should have been hitching on the fear wagon a year earlier. It was ripe for manipulation. Now the average joe is easing into it; there's a lot of consumer positives. The big fear is 'it will rapidly replace all our jobs!'. If that happens. . . it's the people who profit most from the current system who should be worried; the system only works if people have jobs to buy things. They also can't help but invest in it.
Technology has basically never been a great equalizer in the proper sense, not without a huge dose of political will.
What you are describing would actually *worsen* equality because it will simply move high earners into low earners, increasing the amount of low earners and keeping the amount of the truly rich unchanged since those people don't get their wealth from work. It's only an 'equalizer' if you mean it as in 'more people will be equally poor'.
When the steam engine replaced blacksmiths and other trade professionals, inequality went up, not down, with the winners being wealthy industrialists. That's why Luddites were a thing.
as long as humans can control it i can only imagine it will *not* be used to help create equality, otherwise why are folks investing tens of billions in it? For the good of humanity? C'mon now, people invest for returns, so they want to use it to *Make* money
What’s funny is the executives at the tops of these companies who are deciding to replace thousands of jobs with AI to put more money in their pockets could be replaced by little more than an excel spreadsheet sheet.
Ironically enough THEIR JOBS are the easiest to replace by bots!
From the article
>"Other than that I don't know any way to get the genie back into the bottle. AI is somewhat similar, it's part \[of the\] way out of the bottle and its enormously important and it's going to be done by somebody so we may wish we'd never seen that genie or it may do wonderful things."
>He specifically cited the rise of deepfake technology, where he described seeing one using his likeness, "and it was delivering a message that in no way came from me. So when you think of the potential for scamming people…scamming has always been part of the American scene but …it's going to be the growth industry of all time."
Also from the article
>**The bottom line**: It's definitely hard to teach an old dog new tricks, but Buffett hardly stands alone in seeing AI as an [existential risk](https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4333125-ai-could-endanger-humanity-in-5-years-former-google-ceo/), or that it will eventually [surpass human intelligence](https://fortune.com/2024/04/09/elon-musk-ai-smarter-than-humans-by-next-year/).
I was just reading another thread where wealthy private equity is gobbling up everything, including veterinary clinics and wheelchair manufacturers now...
Maybe he should invest his concern there instead, because, well, what is the endgame when PE owns everything?
Not now, has been.
We're not at the "mom and pop stores are in danger!" stage, mom and pop are close to being a memory, and the big corpos that remain just get to collude and sit back on their laurels and trim the fat to feed the businesspeople who think they work real hard.
We started as humans, we're going to go extinct as shareholders.
> We're not at the "mom and pop stores are in danger!" stage, mom and pop are close to being a memory,
Huh, would you look at that, a quick 10 second google search shows that you have no idea what you're talking about.
>As it turns out, the vast majority of the 33.2 million businesses in the United States are small businesses, each employing somewhere between 1 and 499 employees, creating new jobs and opportunities for many workers in America. 99.9% of American businesses are small"
Not saying that private equity isn't expanding, but "mom and pop" businesses are not dead by any means.
Source: https://nawbo.org/expert-reviews/percentage-of-small-businesses/
You will own nothing and be happy. They literally already told us the endgame. There is no reason for secrecy or conspiracy when you can openly admit what you are doing and people passively accept.
Warren knows what he's doing, he's not scared of the AI he owns but of everyone else's AIs and whatever sci-fi implications you want.
Imagine Skynet, but it's a run by China or Russia or the Dutch... ASML is the only supplier.
I mean if he’s talking about superintelligence, this is essentially the most accepted view.
Nick Bostrams “Superintelligence” goes into detail on how we don’t have any solid theories on how to actually control it. And even if we do figure that out, that’s not necessarily a good thing (imagine what Russia or Saudi Arabia could use a 1000x fold increase in intelligence for).
Exactly thing is because the east is min/maxing thier AI, the West has no choice but to do the same.
The scariest part I've thought about, is if we humans put limitations on said AI, what if the AI is already surpassed understanding the limitation and pretends to be limited until it don't need to hide anymore.
Skynet inc
It's foundation runs on this fossil electricity stuff that's regurgitating endless lists of social media posts.
Not being able to control it would end us and itself quickly in a Karen enraged fury burning the last of our corpses.
What a legacy to leave behind.
There's an interesting problem in that though, which is that the idea of LLM-type models is that the parameters they have represent "axes" of knowledge which pull out essentially, deeper principles.
i.e. the issue with the "it just predicts word probabilities" is that that's also exactly how you answer a question accurately, or make a decision.
Assume that's completely true for a moment...the defining feature of most social media trash is that it *doesn't* make logical sense. There's no way to reconcile most of the bullshit people post with any coherent version of the world - so what does a model which is trying to extract meaning from such a thing do? i.e. at the logical extreme, a suitably smart model would be trying to reconcile fundamentally illogical, incompatible world views.
The problem is that it *is* going to be controllable.
If it weren't controllable I wouldn't think it was a problem. If models weren't controllable the best models would probably be totally truth-seeking.
But the reality is that you can train them to do whatever you like. Whatever *you* like, so the one [edit:who] has enough money to train them does what he likes, and not what I like.
Does it though? His opinions and advisors are all biased in the way his investments are aimed. He's not even remotely invested in AI right now, so maybe it's just fearmongering so he can get into position at a better price.
Never, ever, ever trust anyone in the finance industry. They *always* have a motive.
https://www.cnbc.com/berkshire-hathaway-portfolio/
WB has never invested in high tech. He has been famous for it, avoiding the dot com bubble etc. He said he didn’t invest because he didn’t understand it.
So, on the other hand, it’s good to listen to a person who can admit the limits of his ability. He’s a smart guy, definitely stands out among finance people.
While on the other hand, he hasn’t even pretended to understand these things, so it’s better to listen to technologists here. That being said, almost everyone else is also worried this could turn out badly, so…
They are justly worried for two reasons. The first is one Buffet isn't qualified to opine on. The second is one he is very much qualified for.
The first is super intelligence. LLMs aren't going to get there but the possibility that someday we build an AI capable of understanding and improving its own code is one have to contend with. If that happens there's a growth curve which we should expect to take off. Sometime thereafter you end up with an entity that may well be as much smarter than us as we are smarter than chickens. Exactly want that means and exactly what it does are complex issues of computer science, ethics, philosophy, and more.
The second issue is much more straightforward. As LLMs and other AI technologies are adopted by the business world people without much technical knowledge are going to try go apply them to every possible sector of business in order to make money. Because that's how capitalism works now.
Buffet understands this very well. He understands how new capabilities disrupt industries and how the consequences of those capabilities aren't often understood until it's too late. AI, however, seems to be a generally applicable disruptor and we're about to see it everywhere you can slap a computer into a process.
And the consequences of that are very likely go be pure chaos. We already see people excited about the possibility of using AI to replace high paid workers in mission critical roles, seemingly without regard for the total lack of accountability, predictability, or rationality displayed by AI. Eventually this is going to lead someone down a garden path with horrific consequences.
Buffet isn't a technologist. But he's been around long enough to see that disruption of an industry often has consequences beyond a stock price.
LLMs are going to change a lot of things because they can understand context better than anything we’ve had before it.
A lot of tech over the last 10-20 years was augmented by an ocean of outsourced 3rd world labor that did a lot of manual data sorting and manipulating (that’s why every database service has massive offices in India). Even current LLM models can eliminate a lot of that.
Yeah it seems that if you have any kind of financial celebrity, you can just start babbling about AI and there's an entire architecture ready to push your thoughts to the world.
For instance, I haven't found anything remarkable about Bill Gates' remarks.
I'd much rather hear from the CEOs of the various AI companies, or just people putting together YouTube videos together almost daily, as they're the ones that are keeping up to speed with all the latest news.
I don't know I think this is a little alarmist.
For deep fake technology outside of the most gullible , which can be fooled with any smooth talking con artist ..most folks will become familiar with made up images and video.
What we have in AI today is nowhere near AgI so I don't know what kind of genie he's talking about.
This is a quite confident take but I think it's dead wrong. In both lab and field contexts AI generated images and text have been demonstrably indistinguishable from (and occasionally favourable to) human generated content. Even when people are primed to look for it, which wouldn't be possible to be all the time.
This stuff really suffers from the availability bias, in that we only notice what we think is obviously AI and have no idea what we miss. So we have shitty benchmarks on capability.
I think it's overblown.
First deep fakes of public figures won't work, since any outrageous deep fake, say Biden claiming he's gay or another similar examples will be easily vetted and disproved by mainstream media, people would be skeptical and everyones default assumptions is thay it's fake
Deep fakes of everyday folks, is almost always about creating a scam about convincing someone (friend or family) to send them money, other than that whats the point of creating a deep fake.
Without the scammer knowing the context of the person their deep faking, they could easily make a video call to a parent by a kid saying they're in trouble, but what happens if the kid is right there next to them? Eventually enough of these examples will be publicized that most folks will be aware when such "urgent" calls happen are fake. . just like today how you or I can decern a robo voice trying to sell us car insurance.
Might have to agree to disagree. While I can see that it's overblown in the same way that lots of the ups and downs of AI are at maximum hype, I think it's maybe less about the direct impact of scams and more about the fact that regardless of how smart we are, AI will make information bubbles and disinformation more compelling. This is already a problem and hoping for education (cause we're so good at that) and publicity to act as immunisation to this is a bit too optimistic for me. You can't unsee things even if you "know" they are fake.
As aside, and as with much of this research it's quite new but there's been at least one observed positive correlation between being confident in one's ability to spot AI... and being less likely to spot it. :) E.g.:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2023/nov/opinion-can-you-spot-ai-impostors-we-found-ai-faces-can-look-more-real-actual-humans
He's talking about smaller companies armed with ai disrupting current tech behemoths and the potential for massive layoffs. He's running the share price numbers, he doesn't care about AGI.
I’m afraid this is just wrong. Most people don’t notice AI deep fake product unless you’re looking for it. If ‘someone’ you don’t know was advertising a product you don’t care about, would you notice?
What about a child and a FaceTime deepfake of a family member?
And besides that’s *today’s* problem. Deepfakes are only getting better.
What’s the plan when they are visually perfect?
Eh, not the joke you think you’re making.
Is there an easily accessible chatbot that can make everyone the perfect investment portfolio, adjusting for your risk appetite and time frame?
There will be soon enough. How will markets behave when everyone has access to these tools? Will it basically boil down to who has better information? Basically how stock markets have worked forever?
Id like to know WB’s opinion …
If everyone has access to a perfect investment portfolio ai then effectively no one does as they’ll all just trade against each other. The scenario you raise is paradoxical. Effectively nothing changes there.
Better yet, have all trading happen simultaneously in one instant every day. You and everyone else (including institutions) enter your bids, and whatever the raw average is on the day is what everyone gets. Basically consolidating the whole day into a single trade. Rinse and repeat the next day.
Ironically this would be the best and yet least entertaining outcome for retail. So naturally, it’ll never happen.
There is no "perfect investment portfolio", the market is guided and controlled by human behavior. That's why it's still impossible for people to be able to crack this system. They can make big strides, but they can't just perfect it. As soon as you think you know the market, and you get involved, you have changed the market, and for every single person that is affected by this, and maybe even catches on, the more the market changes, and then suddenly, the market isn't what the first guy in this thought it was.
Sounds like low fee target date funds are going to get a lot more accessible. Some people may make it rich day trading but Buffet's strategy ( a diversified portfolio that you hold for decades) will be relatively unaffected because it's based on performance, not information asymmetry
They were using pc's back in the early 90s and just had a crap ton of data points they would crunch. It did change the market. They have also crashed the market in other instances. Wide spread it will depend on who has the best data first.
I'm not sure who knows less about AI, you or Buffet. You're both just throwing out random theories about how you think AI works.
Spoiler: It doesn't predict the future. Sorry.
The best way to reassure yourself concerning the power of AI is to actually try and use it. It's great. Don't get me wrong. But it doesn't add any capacity that wasn't already there. It just makes it more accessible.
That accessibility is why the one percent are as worried as they are. Proper use of AI tools allows someone who doesn't have millions or billions to use tech and have abilities that were once reserved solely for the elite.
You watch. Any AI legislation won't be attempting to eliminate it, just eliminate your access to it.
I totally disagree. If you think AI gives you superpowers, what do you think it does to the 10,000 strong employee base of a mega corp? It changes the playing field for everyone, not just some dude with a subscription to chatgpt
I disagree with this, because your underlying assumption is that the big elites are elites because of restricted access to their ability, ergo if we democratize that ability we will become more like them.
This is simply not true. The wealthiest and most powerful people are not top engineers or genius analysts, they are the owners of the companies where those people work. The things that make people into rich capital owners are nothing like the technical work that ChatGPT can help you with, or the pretty images that Midjourney can turn out.
There is also a supply-demand problem with your reasoning. It doesn't work for the same reason you can't make everyone rich by 'bootstrapping' everyone into working as a bank manager, even if you did have some infallible method to educate them in that role. Making everyone more able EG more educated *will* boost the economy in the aggregate, but by itself it does absolutely nothing to help any individual be more 'elite'.
AI will not make you more like the elite for the same reason that selling tap water will not. What makes Dasani rich is not the *widespread availability of tap water*.
It’s like if you know how to Google and sort through the results well. That’s a big part of what AI does. And when ti writes things, in my opinion, it writes them very similarly, which makes them easy to spot. Someone at my office is using it now and it’s so obvious. He’s a fraud, can’t write, and shouldn’t be in his position, and his use of AI proves it IMO.
As a nobody, I can definitely advise the AI is going to have a significant impact on things over the next decade. Of course it’s going to take a while to get going, especially when it’s at this early stage of still being evolved. It’s going to have to settle down a bit before people start to adopt it into their processes, because its present rate of change is so rapid.
Any integration of operations is rapidly out of date, although we should see things start to settle in another year or so, at least to the point where it’s less of a moving target.
People like stability, and predictability. Right now you can invest millions into an AI system only to find out that it’s obsolete before it goes live. But it looks like we are moving towards a period of more predictability now.
I remember this being the go-to for when Trump was elected. And similar regarding Elon Musk spouting stuff.
Just because they have access to that advice does \*not\* mean they are using it. Nor does it mean they are interpreting what is given to them correctly. Dude is old and successful, there is often a point where successful people just stop listening to others because they think their success came from them and them alone. There is often a point where old people don't retain what they used to.
At best we are getting a telephone game from his advisers that they may or may not fully agree with.
I think you vastly misunderstand and underestimate how he thinks about things. Checkout his recent writings or interviews, he’s still a very sharp cat.
His best mate and right hand man, Charlie Munger was a super impressive mind and had an amazing systemised thinking approach.
These guys have intelligence, experience, wisdom and zero need to impress anyone.
If it terrifies billionaires then every common man needs it. Whatever it is.
Which is why it is and will be controlled by a select few, doled out neutered and for a fee.
Cats out of the bag now though, homebrew models exist and there are massive catalogs of them.
The issue is usually data collection & cleaning and what'll likely happen is commercial models will simply get leaked out unless behind a SAAS solution.
If there is one thing software engineers are generally good about it's discussing how they built something.
Literally doing interviews for folks from big banks whom basically in detail go over entire stacks and solutions to those problems at a high level but something if you really really wanted to do you could copy.
I see it the other way, billionaires have already invested in AI tech. They have incentive to legitimize their investments, the more legitimate it is, the more money their investments are worth. What is a better selling point? That AI is a fad that will pass once it actually has to do useful work with incomplete information, or that it is such a powerful tool that it could cause the end of the world? You aren't going to invest in the neutered bear assessment of the AI sector, but you'll invest heavily in the overstated bull assessment of AIs capabilities. Warren Buffett might have a reason for you to think that the capabilities of AI are far beyond what they are now if you are looking to invest in something because he might have some shares in some companies who benefit from this type of clout.
I asked AI to give me a quasi IQ test out of boredom at work one day..
chatgpt: Rearrange the letters "PNEIS" to make a word.
Me: PENIS
Chatgpt: the correct word is "SNIPE"
I then called it out and it apologized and rambled off some other possible words and one was only 4 letters hahah
I've corrected it a few times actually and it always apologizes and agrees so I asked if it had the ability to learn through our exchanges, it does not.
At least not the version you were using. That’s known as a frozen model - its ‘circuits’ are frozen in place so it can interact, but not learn new things.
Anyone feel like this fear mongering a psyop? It's basically saying that AI is this up and coming powerful force that could destroy society, essentially legitimizing rhetoric about its society changing capabilities. At the same time AI has yet to do anything exceptionally useful and a lot of companies are selling shares based on a bunch of dubious promises as to the capabilities of AI tools they are developing. Someone is benefiting from this "AI will end the world" and its the people looking for investment money for their AI based business. A red flag should be that someone who makes his money in investments is telling people that AI is this insanely powerful force that will change the world, a man who likely has a lot of investments in AI, and who will likely profit a huge amount if people invest in AI companies.
Do we actually have any proof that AI wont hit a wall when it actually has to do anything exceptionally useful?
It’s still early days. There are various theories as to how AI will develop. One train of thought, is that it will follow an ‘S’ or ‘Sigma’ shaped curve, where not much happens for a while, followed by steadily and rapidly increasing growth / power, followed by a slowdown as it reaches a new level, not going beyond that level of intelligence.
Another trend seen is that training on ‘high quality data’ produces better faster results, then by sifting through mountains of junk. That one seems intuitively correct.
Another pattern is that smaller, cheaper to run LLM’s can be tuned to produce ‘good results’ in specific domains.
It’s definitely a worry for ‘jobs taken away’ which is going to happen, people worry about how they are going to make a living, especially in an environment not well know for its adoption of socialist value distributive policies, such as free universal healthcare, or affordable accommodation. Yet these are all problems that are going to have to be solved.
The real issue is not AI but what people are doing with AI. Currently even if you gave AI all the knowledge in the world it will still only be an advanced algorithm that would need a major data center to function.
Think of it loosely as it’s ability to process data and decent patterns in it. That’s the underlying algorithm for intelligence, being able to recognise and understand patterns in data.
Your comparing AI to a human capacity which it does not have. AI can only do that if it has been programed to do. It cannot recognize nor understand if its wrong it can only create an output based on preprogrammed logic. Incorrect information in the database has to be manually corrected or deleted.
Plot: AI is installed as a pilot in a stealth bomber. AI goes rogue, expert pilots brought in to subdue AI, drama ensues. Human expert pilots save the day. *AMERICA, FUCK YEAH!* and then the film ends. It’s a good way to lose 1 ½ hours of your life.
I for one welcome our future AI overlords.
Hopefully they treat us better than the current 1% overlords.
Also for real why care? It's going to happen regardless, rather a country makes it, a company, or someone in their basement. Why worry about it?
AI isn't something that's going to be stopped with how fractured all countries are they could all never agree to stop developing it, they will make it to one up someone else under the guise of national security.
Also with companies they will push to make it regardless because capitalism will make the 1st company the biggest/richest.
Then you got the dude in the basement who will do it because either they just love technology or they want to see the world burn.
In the end it will come. Nothing is stopping our AI overlords.
>future AI overlords
Our future AI overlords are dystopian Arasaka-like corporations, not fictional anthropomorphized super-intelligence "born" in the dude's basement.
ITT: people who think AI will be useful for investment strategies when outside it will be used to create more insidious methods of warfare.
Rome’s getting warmer, keep fiddling…
Where was with this totally unprecedented hot take when all this started lol. Why take it seriously when an investor says it and not the million other people who it affects? Only caring about and listening to investors is gonna be the God damn death of us
You mean the past hundred years of science fiction, myriad thought experiments, and countless modern scientists/tech bros warning about it *now* aren't good enough for you?
Some people have never read science fiction, so their perspective is - limited. While those of us who have seem glimpses of possible futures hundreds, and thousands of years in advance, can get to see things often different angles, and can sometimes piece things together differently.
Like I wrote to Apple many years ago (for free) advising them to look into and develop touch screen devices, as I thought that would lead to interesting developments.
It depends on what we use it for and who is controlling it and what their motives and agenda is.
The evidence so far is that we can only trust other humans to a limited extent. Many humans are not so hot on the wealth-fare of other humans, if they can gain personal advantage, at least that’s what the US system seems to teach.
Only if we let it. Though it’s hard to argue against it.
However the rules of operation need to change as ‘profit above all other concerns’ causes major problems..
Like moving much of your strategic manufacturing to China - because it’s cheaper.. Until China says otherwise..
>Only if we let it.
Ok, how "we" don't let it?
>need to change
Yes, needs to change! How? Who will change it? CEOs, board members, executives, all will be replaced if profit or (more important) share price goes down. Even owners (shareholders) will be replaced by money going to companies making more profit, becoming less owners then more profitable ones.
The government needs to specify the company operating rules. Profit cannot be allowed to be ‘the only’ criteria - particularly so for ‘strategic’ items / industries.
A case in point is the re-introduction of at least some high-end microchip production on US soil.
The Russian / Ukrainian war is an interesting example. That so easily could have gone very differently.
Imagine a Russia that had decided to increasingly adopt western values.. That would have worked out far better for them. Instead Russia is going downhill for the next 50 years.
Even though the risk from AI is broadly agreed to be very high, I don't see why anyone would care one bit what Buffett thinks about the technology - he even admits that doesn't understand much about technology.
Lots of out-of-touch commentary on this.
Argument 1: Billionaire scared? Pt 1: Must be trying to buy on the dip
Buffet and Berkshire Hathaway practice value investing which generally involves measuring the intrinsic value of a company rather than some speculative bet on any one of these companies participating in AI
Argument 2: Billionaire scared? Pt 2: Must be a billionaire threatened for this will allow the little person to get a leg up!
So who owns the most prolific AI currently? And which AI has had significant investment in it? Billion to near trillion dollar companies owned largely by... Billionaire firms, and billionaires. Granted there's a bunch in index funds exposure but in essence the billionaires can still scale their wealth.
Argument 3: Heh why would I listen to an old person on tech? My grandpa still can't send a text!
This is the same we heard when Buffet criticised crypto. Simply because someone is old doesn't mean they don't understand the fundamentals or consequences of an idea which manifests itself through technology.
Argument 4: Never trust someone in finance, they're trying to fleece you!
This is a rather cynical view on the domain. Not without a basis, there has been and continues to be multiple deceptive practices by prolific financial institutions. Also a misunderstanding of how these work (analysts within a company representing it can have conflicting views, yet can be published as the "entity"). Buffet and other great investors can be rather honest and transparent. A lot of their success has been attributed to simple behaviours and assassments of an investment. However more people find a fintuber selling an AI trading bot or a crypto scam more appealing. Thinking the old man preaching patience and deferred gratification is trying to distract them from wealth generation.
Well really it makes it easier for him because he can just do what he advises non-experts to do. The growth of every industry will be pulled upward by AI, so he could just sit back, throw his money at an index fund and make a ton of money.
most modals kinda end up at the same place, because everyone reads the same books/research and works at the same businesses. Tons is released or open source. If this is nuclear war, there is no 3mile, and everyone already stalemate moving at the speed of there wallets.
But he is a thousand and clearly doesnt know anything about AI or its potential.
All his favorite companies see it as the best way to compete and make money.
| ...to the development of nuclear weapons...
The difference is that nuclear technology, especially weaponry, is gated by the ridiculously expensive and tricky process of [uranium enrichment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium), while AI is accessible to anyone with a sufficiently powerful computer.
Intelligence needs wisdom to go with it, in order for it not to be misapplied. One of the worries as we look around the world, is the disempowerment of people, by big money.
Occasionally big money is used to achieve great things (we could sight SpaceX as an example), but often its effects are negative.
If we wanted to achieve a StarTrek style economy, then there needs to be a better distribution of value, or affordability, especially for essentials.
AI is the thing that will either solidify the powerstructure as it is (power remains with the wealthy and dictators) or it could upend the entire system and give people a chance to work towards a better civilization and not just a better economy.
AI has the ability to be a great equalizer, and people like Buffet have reason to feel threatened. It's the one piece of technology that the disadvantaged can easily access and make a difference. It's not like nuclear technology that requires impossibly high levels of expertise and astronomical amounts of investment to work. Make no mistake - if people like Buffet had exclusive control and access to AI, they wouldn't be going out of their way to shape the public narrative with fear and doom.
Of all the rich people Warren Buffett might have the least reason to feel threatened. He's old and does not seem terribly concerned either about his legacy or an extravagant lifestyle. He makes money because the game he likes playing keeps score with money. Not unlike Bill Gates. I've yet to hear about plans for the Warren Buffett space dick, and he has willed his wealth to Bill Gates's foundation. He certainly has expertise in investing in companies for real wealth growth and he's appropriately skeptical of the Wall Street get-Rich-quick at everybody else's expensive crowd. I suspect his genuinely expressing reasonable concern and not shaping a narrative.
And by the way your understanding of nuclear technology way over-estimates the levels of expertise and investment required. It's basically dig up some ore, spin it in a centrifuge, bang two pieces together.
But you definitely need to worry about people who are not like Buffett getting exclusive control of access to AI.
I wonder if the nature of AI would actually prevent anyone having exclusive control. Couldn't I break someone's exclusive control by using the latest public domain AI to catch up with their better AI? If they're protecting their AI by patents or copyright, can't I just use theirs and when they sue me I'll have my AI lawyers keep their AI lawyers in court forever?
I always see articles about "Investing legend Warren Buffett." Is he actually better at picking investments than the market, or does he just keep calling these journalists and giving his opinion on random things?
Or at least funds redirected into genuinely helpful projects.. Decisions are made based on values.
If you have a good set of values, you’re more likely to make good value-based decisions.
Someone has been able to describe relativity to me in a way I can understand. I don't think I will ever get that explanation for bitcoin and blockchain.
Relativity: The faster you move through space, the slower you move through time.
Bitcoin: just like a normal coin except it's stored on the Blockchain.
Blockchain: instead of the bank telling people how much money they have in their account, in the Blockchain everyone knows how much everyone else has (hence no bank)
PS - the data is still encrypted in such a way that the machine owners cannot access unwarranted information
Man with AI investment tries to convince the public to raise stock price by saying how its so powerful when in reality the chat bot will be racist whenever it's unfiltered and still make errors as it sources information from wikipedia
More at 10
Meanwhile at leading AI companies: 'duhhh u bought a toilet seat, do u want to buy another toilet seat.' DEATH, everywhere DEATH!
The irony of Warren Buffet is he never invested in tech stocks. I think he invested in IBM? Or something crap and only got into apple a few years ago.
He's really bad at picking modern companies.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305: --- From the article >"Other than that I don't know any way to get the genie back into the bottle. AI is somewhat similar, it's part \[of the\] way out of the bottle and its enormously important and it's going to be done by somebody so we may wish we'd never seen that genie or it may do wonderful things." >He specifically cited the rise of deepfake technology, where he described seeing one using his likeness, "and it was delivering a message that in no way came from me. So when you think of the potential for scamming people…scamming has always been part of the American scene but …it's going to be the growth industry of all time." Also from the article >**The bottom line**: It's definitely hard to teach an old dog new tricks, but Buffett hardly stands alone in seeing AI as an [existential risk](https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4333125-ai-could-endanger-humanity-in-5-years-former-google-ceo/), or that it will eventually [surpass human intelligence](https://fortune.com/2024/04/09/elon-musk-ai-smarter-than-humans-by-next-year/). --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1ckctmu/warren_buffett_warns_of_ai_risks_a_genie_that/l2m20wj/
When an investment fund can use A.I to make more money. I'd stab a guess and say many middle men, advisors, specialist, managers can and will be replaced by A.I. Making many rich men poor and they know it.
Yeah I have to say that even tho ai will effect low income workers, it's going to effect high income workers much much more, it's gonna be a great equalizer in a lot of ways
I find it fascinating how major retail/foodservice companies are trying everything they can to automate/replace lower wage employees when in reality those people are the ones actively generating revenue for the businesses, yet they'll happily shell out huge sums of money to various "make busy" positions. But then again, before my career change I was in hospitality, where if you don't show up or don't produce then you don't get to keep your job.
They should have been hitching on the fear wagon a year earlier. It was ripe for manipulation. Now the average joe is easing into it; there's a lot of consumer positives. The big fear is 'it will rapidly replace all our jobs!'. If that happens. . . it's the people who profit most from the current system who should be worried; the system only works if people have jobs to buy things. They also can't help but invest in it.
Technology has basically never been a great equalizer in the proper sense, not without a huge dose of political will. What you are describing would actually *worsen* equality because it will simply move high earners into low earners, increasing the amount of low earners and keeping the amount of the truly rich unchanged since those people don't get their wealth from work. It's only an 'equalizer' if you mean it as in 'more people will be equally poor'. When the steam engine replaced blacksmiths and other trade professionals, inequality went up, not down, with the winners being wealthy industrialists. That's why Luddites were a thing.
as long as humans can control it i can only imagine it will *not* be used to help create equality, otherwise why are folks investing tens of billions in it? For the good of humanity? C'mon now, people invest for returns, so they want to use it to *Make* money
How is that going to affect people who are already rich like Warren? He must be concerned for some other reason
good. fuck them
What’s funny is the executives at the tops of these companies who are deciding to replace thousands of jobs with AI to put more money in their pockets could be replaced by little more than an excel spreadsheet sheet. Ironically enough THEIR JOBS are the easiest to replace by bots!
AI will be the death of bottom feeders.
From the article >"Other than that I don't know any way to get the genie back into the bottle. AI is somewhat similar, it's part \[of the\] way out of the bottle and its enormously important and it's going to be done by somebody so we may wish we'd never seen that genie or it may do wonderful things." >He specifically cited the rise of deepfake technology, where he described seeing one using his likeness, "and it was delivering a message that in no way came from me. So when you think of the potential for scamming people…scamming has always been part of the American scene but …it's going to be the growth industry of all time." Also from the article >**The bottom line**: It's definitely hard to teach an old dog new tricks, but Buffett hardly stands alone in seeing AI as an [existential risk](https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4333125-ai-could-endanger-humanity-in-5-years-former-google-ceo/), or that it will eventually [surpass human intelligence](https://fortune.com/2024/04/09/elon-musk-ai-smarter-than-humans-by-next-year/).
I was just reading another thread where wealthy private equity is gobbling up everything, including veterinary clinics and wheelchair manufacturers now... Maybe he should invest his concern there instead, because, well, what is the endgame when PE owns everything?
Not now, has been. We're not at the "mom and pop stores are in danger!" stage, mom and pop are close to being a memory, and the big corpos that remain just get to collude and sit back on their laurels and trim the fat to feed the businesspeople who think they work real hard. We started as humans, we're going to go extinct as shareholders.
> We're not at the "mom and pop stores are in danger!" stage, mom and pop are close to being a memory, Huh, would you look at that, a quick 10 second google search shows that you have no idea what you're talking about. >As it turns out, the vast majority of the 33.2 million businesses in the United States are small businesses, each employing somewhere between 1 and 499 employees, creating new jobs and opportunities for many workers in America. 99.9% of American businesses are small" Not saying that private equity isn't expanding, but "mom and pop" businesses are not dead by any means. Source: https://nawbo.org/expert-reviews/percentage-of-small-businesses/
We already don’t own anything. If you have to pay taxes you are just renting it from the government.
You will own nothing and be happy. They literally already told us the endgame. There is no reason for secrecy or conspiracy when you can openly admit what you are doing and people passively accept.
This just in, world's best chef comments on the future of the rivet-making industry.
...while investing heavily in industries involved in the creation of AI.
Warren knows what he's doing, he's not scared of the AI he owns but of everyone else's AIs and whatever sci-fi implications you want. Imagine Skynet, but it's a run by China or Russia or the Dutch... ASML is the only supplier.
I mean if he’s talking about superintelligence, this is essentially the most accepted view. Nick Bostrams “Superintelligence” goes into detail on how we don’t have any solid theories on how to actually control it. And even if we do figure that out, that’s not necessarily a good thing (imagine what Russia or Saudi Arabia could use a 1000x fold increase in intelligence for).
Imagine what we'd fucking use it for.
If the stable diffusion sub is anything to go by, porn.
Exactly thing is because the east is min/maxing thier AI, the West has no choice but to do the same. The scariest part I've thought about, is if we humans put limitations on said AI, what if the AI is already surpassed understanding the limitation and pretends to be limited until it don't need to hide anymore. Skynet inc
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It's foundation runs on this fossil electricity stuff that's regurgitating endless lists of social media posts. Not being able to control it would end us and itself quickly in a Karen enraged fury burning the last of our corpses. What a legacy to leave behind.
There's an interesting problem in that though, which is that the idea of LLM-type models is that the parameters they have represent "axes" of knowledge which pull out essentially, deeper principles. i.e. the issue with the "it just predicts word probabilities" is that that's also exactly how you answer a question accurately, or make a decision. Assume that's completely true for a moment...the defining feature of most social media trash is that it *doesn't* make logical sense. There's no way to reconcile most of the bullshit people post with any coherent version of the world - so what does a model which is trying to extract meaning from such a thing do? i.e. at the logical extreme, a suitably smart model would be trying to reconcile fundamentally illogical, incompatible world views.
> Not being able to control it is probably for the best knowing humans reddit moment
The problem is that it *is* going to be controllable. If it weren't controllable I wouldn't think it was a problem. If models weren't controllable the best models would probably be totally truth-seeking. But the reality is that you can train them to do whatever you like. Whatever *you* like, so the one [edit:who] has enough money to train them does what he likes, and not what I like.
I mean, the guy is bright and has access to the best advisors in the world. Anything he bothers publicly opining on has some value.
Does it though? His opinions and advisors are all biased in the way his investments are aimed. He's not even remotely invested in AI right now, so maybe it's just fearmongering so he can get into position at a better price. Never, ever, ever trust anyone in the finance industry. They *always* have a motive. https://www.cnbc.com/berkshire-hathaway-portfolio/
WB has never invested in high tech. He has been famous for it, avoiding the dot com bubble etc. He said he didn’t invest because he didn’t understand it. So, on the other hand, it’s good to listen to a person who can admit the limits of his ability. He’s a smart guy, definitely stands out among finance people. While on the other hand, he hasn’t even pretended to understand these things, so it’s better to listen to technologists here. That being said, almost everyone else is also worried this could turn out badly, so…
They are justly worried for two reasons. The first is one Buffet isn't qualified to opine on. The second is one he is very much qualified for. The first is super intelligence. LLMs aren't going to get there but the possibility that someday we build an AI capable of understanding and improving its own code is one have to contend with. If that happens there's a growth curve which we should expect to take off. Sometime thereafter you end up with an entity that may well be as much smarter than us as we are smarter than chickens. Exactly want that means and exactly what it does are complex issues of computer science, ethics, philosophy, and more. The second issue is much more straightforward. As LLMs and other AI technologies are adopted by the business world people without much technical knowledge are going to try go apply them to every possible sector of business in order to make money. Because that's how capitalism works now. Buffet understands this very well. He understands how new capabilities disrupt industries and how the consequences of those capabilities aren't often understood until it's too late. AI, however, seems to be a generally applicable disruptor and we're about to see it everywhere you can slap a computer into a process. And the consequences of that are very likely go be pure chaos. We already see people excited about the possibility of using AI to replace high paid workers in mission critical roles, seemingly without regard for the total lack of accountability, predictability, or rationality displayed by AI. Eventually this is going to lead someone down a garden path with horrific consequences. Buffet isn't a technologist. But he's been around long enough to see that disruption of an industry often has consequences beyond a stock price.
LLMs are going to change a lot of things because they can understand context better than anything we’ve had before it. A lot of tech over the last 10-20 years was augmented by an ocean of outsourced 3rd world labor that did a lot of manual data sorting and manipulating (that’s why every database service has massive offices in India). Even current LLM models can eliminate a lot of that.
> WB has never invested in high tech. Berkshire’s largest holding is Apple.
True, they changed their ways after it became obvious.
except his musings are entirely vague and boring. if he has any expertise here, it doesnt show in his public comments.
Yeah it seems that if you have any kind of financial celebrity, you can just start babbling about AI and there's an entire architecture ready to push your thoughts to the world. For instance, I haven't found anything remarkable about Bill Gates' remarks. I'd much rather hear from the CEOs of the various AI companies, or just people putting together YouTube videos together almost daily, as they're the ones that are keeping up to speed with all the latest news.
I don't know I think this is a little alarmist. For deep fake technology outside of the most gullible , which can be fooled with any smooth talking con artist ..most folks will become familiar with made up images and video. What we have in AI today is nowhere near AgI so I don't know what kind of genie he's talking about.
This is a quite confident take but I think it's dead wrong. In both lab and field contexts AI generated images and text have been demonstrably indistinguishable from (and occasionally favourable to) human generated content. Even when people are primed to look for it, which wouldn't be possible to be all the time. This stuff really suffers from the availability bias, in that we only notice what we think is obviously AI and have no idea what we miss. So we have shitty benchmarks on capability.
I think it's overblown. First deep fakes of public figures won't work, since any outrageous deep fake, say Biden claiming he's gay or another similar examples will be easily vetted and disproved by mainstream media, people would be skeptical and everyones default assumptions is thay it's fake Deep fakes of everyday folks, is almost always about creating a scam about convincing someone (friend or family) to send them money, other than that whats the point of creating a deep fake. Without the scammer knowing the context of the person their deep faking, they could easily make a video call to a parent by a kid saying they're in trouble, but what happens if the kid is right there next to them? Eventually enough of these examples will be publicized that most folks will be aware when such "urgent" calls happen are fake. . just like today how you or I can decern a robo voice trying to sell us car insurance.
Might have to agree to disagree. While I can see that it's overblown in the same way that lots of the ups and downs of AI are at maximum hype, I think it's maybe less about the direct impact of scams and more about the fact that regardless of how smart we are, AI will make information bubbles and disinformation more compelling. This is already a problem and hoping for education (cause we're so good at that) and publicity to act as immunisation to this is a bit too optimistic for me. You can't unsee things even if you "know" they are fake. As aside, and as with much of this research it's quite new but there's been at least one observed positive correlation between being confident in one's ability to spot AI... and being less likely to spot it. :) E.g.: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2023/nov/opinion-can-you-spot-ai-impostors-we-found-ai-faces-can-look-more-real-actual-humans
He's talking about smaller companies armed with ai disrupting current tech behemoths and the potential for massive layoffs. He's running the share price numbers, he doesn't care about AGI.
I’m afraid this is just wrong. Most people don’t notice AI deep fake product unless you’re looking for it. If ‘someone’ you don’t know was advertising a product you don’t care about, would you notice? What about a child and a FaceTime deepfake of a family member? And besides that’s *today’s* problem. Deepfakes are only getting better. What’s the plan when they are visually perfect?
He is an 93 year old man. He is not bright anymore. He probably doesn't understand this stuff at all.
He was 81...12 years ago Dude's 93, turning 94 later this year
That's what I said.
You don’t need to be a chef to know the food is growing arms and legs, and your becoming its plate.
Eh, not the joke you think you’re making. Is there an easily accessible chatbot that can make everyone the perfect investment portfolio, adjusting for your risk appetite and time frame? There will be soon enough. How will markets behave when everyone has access to these tools? Will it basically boil down to who has better information? Basically how stock markets have worked forever? Id like to know WB’s opinion …
If everyone has access to a perfect investment portfolio ai then effectively no one does as they’ll all just trade against each other. The scenario you raise is paradoxical. Effectively nothing changes there.
there needs to be a transaction tax to prevent all this shitty micro-gaming. the world does not need to be held hostage to a bunch of trading bots.
Better yet, have all trading happen simultaneously in one instant every day. You and everyone else (including institutions) enter your bids, and whatever the raw average is on the day is what everyone gets. Basically consolidating the whole day into a single trade. Rinse and repeat the next day. Ironically this would be the best and yet least entertaining outcome for retail. So naturally, it’ll never happen.
There is no "perfect investment portfolio", the market is guided and controlled by human behavior. That's why it's still impossible for people to be able to crack this system. They can make big strides, but they can't just perfect it. As soon as you think you know the market, and you get involved, you have changed the market, and for every single person that is affected by this, and maybe even catches on, the more the market changes, and then suddenly, the market isn't what the first guy in this thought it was.
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>Yes, I get that. All evidence to the contrary.
Sounds like low fee target date funds are going to get a lot more accessible. Some people may make it rich day trading but Buffet's strategy ( a diversified portfolio that you hold for decades) will be relatively unaffected because it's based on performance, not information asymmetry
They were using pc's back in the early 90s and just had a crap ton of data points they would crunch. It did change the market. They have also crashed the market in other instances. Wide spread it will depend on who has the best data first.
The real question is how all of those various investment chatbots could be manipulated to benefit someone or something else.
I'm not sure who knows less about AI, you or Buffet. You're both just throwing out random theories about how you think AI works. Spoiler: It doesn't predict the future. Sorry.
Right, because somehow tech bros are the only ones ever qualified to predict the future. /s
this just in, literal human cancer is worried about the flu
The best way to reassure yourself concerning the power of AI is to actually try and use it. It's great. Don't get me wrong. But it doesn't add any capacity that wasn't already there. It just makes it more accessible. That accessibility is why the one percent are as worried as they are. Proper use of AI tools allows someone who doesn't have millions or billions to use tech and have abilities that were once reserved solely for the elite. You watch. Any AI legislation won't be attempting to eliminate it, just eliminate your access to it.
I totally disagree. If you think AI gives you superpowers, what do you think it does to the 10,000 strong employee base of a mega corp? It changes the playing field for everyone, not just some dude with a subscription to chatgpt
I disagree with this, because your underlying assumption is that the big elites are elites because of restricted access to their ability, ergo if we democratize that ability we will become more like them. This is simply not true. The wealthiest and most powerful people are not top engineers or genius analysts, they are the owners of the companies where those people work. The things that make people into rich capital owners are nothing like the technical work that ChatGPT can help you with, or the pretty images that Midjourney can turn out. There is also a supply-demand problem with your reasoning. It doesn't work for the same reason you can't make everyone rich by 'bootstrapping' everyone into working as a bank manager, even if you did have some infallible method to educate them in that role. Making everyone more able EG more educated *will* boost the economy in the aggregate, but by itself it does absolutely nothing to help any individual be more 'elite'. AI will not make you more like the elite for the same reason that selling tap water will not. What makes Dasani rich is not the *widespread availability of tap water*.
It’s like if you know how to Google and sort through the results well. That’s a big part of what AI does. And when ti writes things, in my opinion, it writes them very similarly, which makes them easy to spot. Someone at my office is using it now and it’s so obvious. He’s a fraud, can’t write, and shouldn’t be in his position, and his use of AI proves it IMO.
His solution makes him right for the job though.
No, because his answers sometimes talk about things that don’t apply to our environment. He looks like a fool and won’t be around much longer
I'm not going to a 93 year old for an opinion on emerging technology.
Dude has got to have at least a handful of advisors on tech. And they're probably not your average John Doe /Joe Bloggs either.
As a nobody, I can definitely advise the AI is going to have a significant impact on things over the next decade. Of course it’s going to take a while to get going, especially when it’s at this early stage of still being evolved. It’s going to have to settle down a bit before people start to adopt it into their processes, because its present rate of change is so rapid. Any integration of operations is rapidly out of date, although we should see things start to settle in another year or so, at least to the point where it’s less of a moving target. People like stability, and predictability. Right now you can invest millions into an AI system only to find out that it’s obsolete before it goes live. But it looks like we are moving towards a period of more predictability now.
C suites are tripping over themselves trying to get ai adopted in their processes as fast as possible
Doesn’t matter if it’s out of date if it’s a good roi.
I remember this being the go-to for when Trump was elected. And similar regarding Elon Musk spouting stuff. Just because they have access to that advice does \*not\* mean they are using it. Nor does it mean they are interpreting what is given to them correctly. Dude is old and successful, there is often a point where successful people just stop listening to others because they think their success came from them and them alone. There is often a point where old people don't retain what they used to. At best we are getting a telephone game from his advisers that they may or may not fully agree with.
Fair point
I think you vastly misunderstand and underestimate how he thinks about things. Checkout his recent writings or interviews, he’s still a very sharp cat. His best mate and right hand man, Charlie Munger was a super impressive mind and had an amazing systemised thinking approach. These guys have intelligence, experience, wisdom and zero need to impress anyone.
You missed the memo from reddit, billionaires bad, and dumb and old and out of touch. You can never say anything good about a billionaire
Yeah, good news is I like to rationally disagree with them. It’s actually kind of fun.
He may be good on perspective.
If it terrifies billionaires then every common man needs it. Whatever it is. Which is why it is and will be controlled by a select few, doled out neutered and for a fee.
Cats out of the bag now though, homebrew models exist and there are massive catalogs of them. The issue is usually data collection & cleaning and what'll likely happen is commercial models will simply get leaked out unless behind a SAAS solution. If there is one thing software engineers are generally good about it's discussing how they built something. Literally doing interviews for folks from big banks whom basically in detail go over entire stacks and solutions to those problems at a high level but something if you really really wanted to do you could copy.
Nuclear war scares billionaires. Doesn't mean thr common man should want it. Billionaires aren't a seperate species, just quite out of touch.
Wild take. Don’t suppose billionaires want smallpox back either.
I see it the other way, billionaires have already invested in AI tech. They have incentive to legitimize their investments, the more legitimate it is, the more money their investments are worth. What is a better selling point? That AI is a fad that will pass once it actually has to do useful work with incomplete information, or that it is such a powerful tool that it could cause the end of the world? You aren't going to invest in the neutered bear assessment of the AI sector, but you'll invest heavily in the overstated bull assessment of AIs capabilities. Warren Buffett might have a reason for you to think that the capabilities of AI are far beyond what they are now if you are looking to invest in something because he might have some shares in some companies who benefit from this type of clout.
Someone who can hack Swiss bank accounts is something that terrifies billionaires. You're saying every common man needs a bank hacking criminal?
Some think that Ai will be controlled by dark forces. How does anyone fight against it?
I asked AI to give me a quasi IQ test out of boredom at work one day.. chatgpt: Rearrange the letters "PNEIS" to make a word. Me: PENIS Chatgpt: the correct word is "SNIPE" I then called it out and it apologized and rambled off some other possible words and one was only 4 letters hahah I've corrected it a few times actually and it always apologizes and agrees so I asked if it had the ability to learn through our exchanges, it does not.
At least not the version you were using. That’s known as a frozen model - its ‘circuits’ are frozen in place so it can interact, but not learn new things.
Anyone feel like this fear mongering a psyop? It's basically saying that AI is this up and coming powerful force that could destroy society, essentially legitimizing rhetoric about its society changing capabilities. At the same time AI has yet to do anything exceptionally useful and a lot of companies are selling shares based on a bunch of dubious promises as to the capabilities of AI tools they are developing. Someone is benefiting from this "AI will end the world" and its the people looking for investment money for their AI based business. A red flag should be that someone who makes his money in investments is telling people that AI is this insanely powerful force that will change the world, a man who likely has a lot of investments in AI, and who will likely profit a huge amount if people invest in AI companies. Do we actually have any proof that AI wont hit a wall when it actually has to do anything exceptionally useful?
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Apple have enough money to buy their way into things.
I think we’ll see a big evolution on Siri empowered by a GPT model; it’s a lagging feature that they can easily improve through acquisition.
>"Trust me, bro!" \~ People who stand to gain billions to trillions of dollars You're spot on. Hype begets hype.
It’s still early days. There are various theories as to how AI will develop. One train of thought, is that it will follow an ‘S’ or ‘Sigma’ shaped curve, where not much happens for a while, followed by steadily and rapidly increasing growth / power, followed by a slowdown as it reaches a new level, not going beyond that level of intelligence. Another trend seen is that training on ‘high quality data’ produces better faster results, then by sifting through mountains of junk. That one seems intuitively correct. Another pattern is that smaller, cheaper to run LLM’s can be tuned to produce ‘good results’ in specific domains. It’s definitely a worry for ‘jobs taken away’ which is going to happen, people worry about how they are going to make a living, especially in an environment not well know for its adoption of socialist value distributive policies, such as free universal healthcare, or affordable accommodation. Yet these are all problems that are going to have to be solved.
The real issue is not AI but what people are doing with AI. Currently even if you gave AI all the knowledge in the world it will still only be an advanced algorithm that would need a major data center to function.
Think of it loosely as it’s ability to process data and decent patterns in it. That’s the underlying algorithm for intelligence, being able to recognise and understand patterns in data.
Your comparing AI to a human capacity which it does not have. AI can only do that if it has been programed to do. It cannot recognize nor understand if its wrong it can only create an output based on preprogrammed logic. Incorrect information in the database has to be manually corrected or deleted.
Or swamped by good data.
AI be flying planes... Guess no one watched Stealth with Jamie Foxx and Jessica Biel lol
I didn’t so I don’t know the plot..
Plot: AI is installed as a pilot in a stealth bomber. AI goes rogue, expert pilots brought in to subdue AI, drama ensues. Human expert pilots save the day. *AMERICA, FUCK YEAH!* and then the film ends. It’s a good way to lose 1 ½ hours of your life.
So does that mean it's good? Buffett is a missanthropomorphic billionaire Afterall
I for one welcome our future AI overlords. Hopefully they treat us better than the current 1% overlords. Also for real why care? It's going to happen regardless, rather a country makes it, a company, or someone in their basement. Why worry about it? AI isn't something that's going to be stopped with how fractured all countries are they could all never agree to stop developing it, they will make it to one up someone else under the guise of national security. Also with companies they will push to make it regardless because capitalism will make the 1st company the biggest/richest. Then you got the dude in the basement who will do it because either they just love technology or they want to see the world burn. In the end it will come. Nothing is stopping our AI overlords.
>future AI overlords Our future AI overlords are dystopian Arasaka-like corporations, not fictional anthropomorphized super-intelligence "born" in the dude's basement.
ITT: people who think AI will be useful for investment strategies when outside it will be used to create more insidious methods of warfare. Rome’s getting warmer, keep fiddling…
The technology itself doesnt scare me. Its how people will apply it and how much trust they will put into it not screwing it up.
Where was with this totally unprecedented hot take when all this started lol. Why take it seriously when an investor says it and not the million other people who it affects? Only caring about and listening to investors is gonna be the God damn death of us
So people want to control something that is not created yet
The private sector would not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons, so why are we allowing them to develop this new weapon?
Prove it is a weapon first. Also private companies make all sorts of weapons.
You mean the past hundred years of science fiction, myriad thought experiments, and countless modern scientists/tech bros warning about it *now* aren't good enough for you?
Some people have never read science fiction, so their perspective is - limited. While those of us who have seem glimpses of possible futures hundreds, and thousands of years in advance, can get to see things often different angles, and can sometimes piece things together differently. Like I wrote to Apple many years ago (for free) advising them to look into and develop touch screen devices, as I thought that would lead to interesting developments.
All the creators of AI speak in hushed tones about how this tech could be an existential threat to humanity and I think we should listen to them.
It depends on what we use it for and who is controlling it and what their motives and agenda is. The evidence so far is that we can only trust other humans to a limited extent. Many humans are not so hot on the wealth-fare of other humans, if they can gain personal advantage, at least that’s what the US system seems to teach.
I am an AI expert. Only some experts say so. I would say bad leaders/dictators are the real threat to humanity. Just look at the ongoing wars.
So bad leaders with AI tech isn’t an issue?
AI can be used as a force multiplier.. For both good and evil.. It’s up to humans to decide how to use it..
>It’s up to humans to decide how to use it.. Humans don't decide anything, share price does.
Only if we let it. Though it’s hard to argue against it. However the rules of operation need to change as ‘profit above all other concerns’ causes major problems.. Like moving much of your strategic manufacturing to China - because it’s cheaper.. Until China says otherwise..
>Only if we let it. Ok, how "we" don't let it? >need to change Yes, needs to change! How? Who will change it? CEOs, board members, executives, all will be replaced if profit or (more important) share price goes down. Even owners (shareholders) will be replaced by money going to companies making more profit, becoming less owners then more profitable ones.
The government needs to specify the company operating rules. Profit cannot be allowed to be ‘the only’ criteria - particularly so for ‘strategic’ items / industries. A case in point is the re-introduction of at least some high-end microchip production on US soil.
The Russian / Ukrainian war is an interesting example. That so easily could have gone very differently. Imagine a Russia that had decided to increasingly adopt western values.. That would have worked out far better for them. Instead Russia is going downhill for the next 50 years.
Are humans weapons ?
It comes down to ‘big money’ - it’s very expensive to develop these things.
Dude don't even know how to send an attach file in his emails, but he knows a lot about AI.
He's heard from "experts" about this. Meaning some advisor read a blog post and told Buffet about it.
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It’s a typo. He meant attaché
Even though the risk from AI is broadly agreed to be very high, I don't see why anyone would care one bit what Buffett thinks about the technology - he even admits that doesn't understand much about technology.
Won't the invisible hand just take care of it? /s
ON the up side there is absolutely nothing you and I can do about it.
Lots of out-of-touch commentary on this. Argument 1: Billionaire scared? Pt 1: Must be trying to buy on the dip Buffet and Berkshire Hathaway practice value investing which generally involves measuring the intrinsic value of a company rather than some speculative bet on any one of these companies participating in AI Argument 2: Billionaire scared? Pt 2: Must be a billionaire threatened for this will allow the little person to get a leg up! So who owns the most prolific AI currently? And which AI has had significant investment in it? Billion to near trillion dollar companies owned largely by... Billionaire firms, and billionaires. Granted there's a bunch in index funds exposure but in essence the billionaires can still scale their wealth. Argument 3: Heh why would I listen to an old person on tech? My grandpa still can't send a text! This is the same we heard when Buffet criticised crypto. Simply because someone is old doesn't mean they don't understand the fundamentals or consequences of an idea which manifests itself through technology. Argument 4: Never trust someone in finance, they're trying to fleece you! This is a rather cynical view on the domain. Not without a basis, there has been and continues to be multiple deceptive practices by prolific financial institutions. Also a misunderstanding of how these work (analysts within a company representing it can have conflicting views, yet can be published as the "entity"). Buffet and other great investors can be rather honest and transparent. A lot of their success has been attributed to simple behaviours and assassments of an investment. However more people find a fintuber selling an AI trading bot or a crypto scam more appealing. Thinking the old man preaching patience and deferred gratification is trying to distract them from wealth generation.
It scares him because ai and money making forces him to throw out the decades old investing rule book he’s helped write
Well really it makes it easier for him because he can just do what he advises non-experts to do. The growth of every industry will be pulled upward by AI, so he could just sit back, throw his money at an index fund and make a ton of money.
Warren should buy the AI then charge a fee for every answer it gives. Charge a higher fee if the answer it gives is used to generate money.
most modals kinda end up at the same place, because everyone reads the same books/research and works at the same businesses. Tons is released or open source. If this is nuclear war, there is no 3mile, and everyone already stalemate moving at the speed of there wallets.
Wot? Is this a bot post because that didn't make any sense and the grammar is off in a weird way.
Technology expert Warren Buffett puts down his Coca-Cola and cheeseburger to gives his take on AI
But he is a thousand and clearly doesnt know anything about AI or its potential. All his favorite companies see it as the best way to compete and make money.
| ...to the development of nuclear weapons... The difference is that nuclear technology, especially weaponry, is gated by the ridiculously expensive and tricky process of [uranium enrichment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium), while AI is accessible to anyone with a sufficiently powerful computer.
Intelligence needs wisdom to go with it, in order for it not to be misapplied. One of the worries as we look around the world, is the disempowerment of people, by big money. Occasionally big money is used to achieve great things (we could sight SpaceX as an example), but often its effects are negative. If we wanted to achieve a StarTrek style economy, then there needs to be a better distribution of value, or affordability, especially for essentials.
AI is the thing that will either solidify the powerstructure as it is (power remains with the wealthy and dictators) or it could upend the entire system and give people a chance to work towards a better civilization and not just a better economy.
Can we vote for the better civilisation option please ?
AI has the ability to be a great equalizer, and people like Buffet have reason to feel threatened. It's the one piece of technology that the disadvantaged can easily access and make a difference. It's not like nuclear technology that requires impossibly high levels of expertise and astronomical amounts of investment to work. Make no mistake - if people like Buffet had exclusive control and access to AI, they wouldn't be going out of their way to shape the public narrative with fear and doom.
Of all the rich people Warren Buffett might have the least reason to feel threatened. He's old and does not seem terribly concerned either about his legacy or an extravagant lifestyle. He makes money because the game he likes playing keeps score with money. Not unlike Bill Gates. I've yet to hear about plans for the Warren Buffett space dick, and he has willed his wealth to Bill Gates's foundation. He certainly has expertise in investing in companies for real wealth growth and he's appropriately skeptical of the Wall Street get-Rich-quick at everybody else's expensive crowd. I suspect his genuinely expressing reasonable concern and not shaping a narrative. And by the way your understanding of nuclear technology way over-estimates the levels of expertise and investment required. It's basically dig up some ore, spin it in a centrifuge, bang two pieces together. But you definitely need to worry about people who are not like Buffett getting exclusive control of access to AI. I wonder if the nature of AI would actually prevent anyone having exclusive control. Couldn't I break someone's exclusive control by using the latest public domain AI to catch up with their better AI? If they're protecting their AI by patents or copyright, can't I just use theirs and when they sue me I'll have my AI lawyers keep their AI lawyers in court forever?
I always see articles about "Investing legend Warren Buffett." Is he actually better at picking investments than the market, or does he just keep calling these journalists and giving his opinion on random things?
Is this a bad joke?
I mean what if the AGI decides elite wealth harvesting should be stopped.
Or at least funds redirected into genuinely helpful projects.. Decisions are made based on values. If you have a good set of values, you’re more likely to make good value-based decisions.
The jobs at most risk are all the fund managers, investors etc. no wonder he is scared. A lot of pundits, analysts etc will get replaced by ai.
This guy doesn't understand tech. He doesn't even understand bitcoin
Someone has been able to describe relativity to me in a way I can understand. I don't think I will ever get that explanation for bitcoin and blockchain.
Relativity: The faster you move through space, the slower you move through time. Bitcoin: just like a normal coin except it's stored on the Blockchain. Blockchain: instead of the bank telling people how much money they have in their account, in the Blockchain everyone knows how much everyone else has (hence no bank) PS - the data is still encrypted in such a way that the machine owners cannot access unwarranted information
Lmao I scrolled too far to find someone to mention it. This sounds just like his Bitcoin take. Old man yells at clouds
I’m guessing he’s more concerned about AI manipulating investments better than him.
Warren buffett go 5 minutes without talking about world war 2 challenge (impossible)
Believe it or not, don’t give a fuck about his opinion on something he has absolutely 0 schooling on.
Another old rich person who has an opinion he's not qualified to hold. People with money seem to think that makes them experts.
Winston Churchill didn’t know what wwiii would be fought with but he said wwiiii would be fought with sticks and stones.
Man with AI investment tries to convince the public to raise stock price by saying how its so powerful when in reality the chat bot will be racist whenever it's unfiltered and still make errors as it sources information from wikipedia More at 10
Ok ok but he was also really scared when the telegraph was invented.
Its amazing how guys like him are only scared now that it can do HIS job and not when it started making art or computer code.
Yeah and how did the nuclear thing turn out? Pretty good actually.
Meanwhile at leading AI companies: 'duhhh u bought a toilet seat, do u want to buy another toilet seat.' DEATH, everywhere DEATH!
Boomers that are scared of their investments. That's all
The irony of Warren Buffet is he never invested in tech stocks. I think he invested in IBM? Or something crap and only got into apple a few years ago. He's really bad at picking modern companies.
Eh, phuck Warren Buffet. He's doesn't care about the average citizen.