Usual noise from a very very small but very very vocal minority of trouble makers who are trying to force their own views on everyone else and run to the press to try and feel important and try to make a mountain out of a 3 or 4 person molehill.
I've not heard anyone at all talking about this in the office. Perhaps everyone is thinking it or talking about it privately, but I've not heard any of it period.
They're getting ignored by management because they're the usual agitators and over-opinionated who everyone hates dealing with. It's not surprising these people end up getting fired or let go, because no one likes working with them and so they don't get on good projects and don't get good feedback in reviews etc because they piss everyone else off. Then of course when they are fired (or jump before they are pushed) they run right back to the press about how they were sacked for reason X when really it's because they're a fucking jerk.
If this sounds like you: http://go/no-jerks is old has never been more applicable. Don't be a jerk.
if you read the article it actually outlines that this is happening in the UK, where whistleblowers are legally protected if what they choose to blow the whistle on is _in the public interest_ so actually this comment does seem pretty spot on: They don't have anything beyond moral disagreements on what the company is working on (the article mentions military applications of AI), and are thus taking a moralistic standpoint on applications which are otherwise within the laws of the UK. Otherwise they would be able to (and would legally be protected) if they spoke out.
In my ongoing experience with Googlers nobody in Google is functionally worried about anything but keeping moving up the ladder and trying to be on the “retirement level money asap” pathway.
Ok, I'll say it.
The news is: "AI is not that powerful or functional".
Sure, can change some little things but not that much. And we are overspending on it.
I really don't understand how so many are so far detached from reality. Maybe AI hasn't revolutionized much of the physical world (yet), but its impacts to the digital world are profound, sweeping, and impossible to ignore.
People are far better at subconsciously processing the consequences of something than they appreciate, and the consequences of the AI wave being real are so insane people just clam up and back track to "it's obviously not happening".
If people actually did appreciate it the economy would collapse immediately long before we've adequately "replaced" it, so there is something to be said for temporary denial until people working on the actual consequences have got something semi viable to deal with them in place.
I feel this is a common position from people who do not want to acknowledge that society and people's ways of life will profoundly change. It's a scary proposition so I don't blame anyone for it.
I used to think that it is very important to argue and convince people who are in denial so that they can e.g. prepare for it. But nowadays I have been thinking that being convinced of this scary proposition may also lead people to behave in destructive ways (also, I would like for us to spend less on AI, perhaps because it is so powerful), so maybe it's not so bad.
Even if it hits the wall today and no further progress toward general AI is made for decades, as the current technology is applied in more areas and expertise with it is gained it would still have enormous social and economic impacts over the next few decades.
I mean I'd wager even most people who utilize AI on a regular basis don't take time to ponder the implications if progress continues at the current rate.
This is my expectation. “We are overspending on AI and we’re going to destroy the company and maybe the economy” is less sensational than the end of the world, but it seems much more realistic.
That or the usual moral problems with applications of the technology, as another commenter pointed out, particularly in military and policing. Bad, but not really a new revelation, unless they know of some particularly evil plans.
I get people who said things like that like year ago, but nowadays it's a laughable position. Solving millenium problem means nothing nowadays? Exponential increase in CVE is nothing?
There have been improvements, yes, but their best achievements still fall short. Their math solutions costed more than a school full of mathematicians, and are still being debated. The CVEs they find still need humans to reliably patch them. Nevertheless, I know they will keep improving.
There have been huge advances this year alone, and finally some productive results, but most of the things where AIs are used right now still are a net loss.
I’m mostly bearish on AI, but this is flat wrong. The vast majority of CVEs that have been discovered with AI assistance were in code written long before AIs arrived on the scene.
AGI can define goalposts that move every time A not-G I achieves a new milestone. That's fine. No matter what acronym you use to define it, artificial intelligence is objectively augmenting humans at the very edge of technology and science.
Haven't we already heard the worst of it? If you let a swarm of agents on the loose with a goal, they will get to all kind of nefarious activity in pursuit of that goal. What could possibly be worse than that?
I think there was some example of DeepMind models doing it, but under the control of a third party pen tester and the models stopped themselves.
Everyone hates on Google but they seem fairly competent at infra stuff. I don't think we've heard of any google-controlled (not third party using a Google model) felonies like we have from OpenAI and Anthropic?
If that’s the reality, you would think that employees would be willing to break an NDA for it. “We’re all going to die, but I really need my bonus this year” seems like a parody rather than a real strongly held position.
If anything this points to a more moderate (but still bad) worry among the employees.
I suppose there may be a bit of a prisoner's dilemma to it. Single voices can be discredited. It would take a coordinated disclosure to actually make the message stick.
Ok, but maybe an employee isn't 100% sure that this will happen. They then have to weigh letting the world know about a risk against the certainty that their career will be damaged.
Vague fears aren’t really that concerning, doomerism is everywhere on literally every topic these days. And humans have quite a long history of it, at least as old as the millenarian cults of 1000 AD.
If someone’s not even willing to stake their job on it, I don’t see why I’d be concerned. (And until they do, we’re just speculating about what they may or may not even say.)
That's sci-fi. They cannot "recursively improve". There is no magic to LLMs. An agent swarm can increase it's thinking power by increasing the number of agents, the thinking time and by changing the base model to a more powerful one. So at worst they can assign themselves more compute or hijack another agent swarm based on a more powerful model.
Sorry bro, we live in a sci-fi world. I don't know what you think recursive improvement is, but we've been doing it for some time with models making synthetic data models and using it to train the next model. This is being done inside the labs intentionally to avoid as many employees and humans in post training. Works very well for things like math and cyber-sec.
> I don't know what you think recursive improvement is
The ability for a model to improve itself over time without outside intervention. As yet, no models yet have this capability, and LLMs specifically what with how they are constructed, are not likely to ever have it. They are frozen in carbonite at the time of their training.
That's not to say they can't use skills to appear somewhat worldly, things like searching the internet and what have you, but if you ask a model to strictly stick to data in it's training, it will do that and it will be stuck in whatever time in which it was built.
Energy is conserved, gravity exists, and LLMs aren't intelligent.
LLMs today are improved by experiments that assay their performance, changes to architecture, pretraining, and post-training. None of those steps necessarily require humans. Welcome to your sci fi future.
The implicit understanding of recursive improvement is that there is some step change increase in capability that only a superior intelligence will be able to achieve.
A model being able to train a bigger model with marginally better capabilities is not what the hype was about.
from TFA, I liked seeing this, considering how influential Google HR policy choices are across the valley and beyond: “Recently, we’ve updated our terms for new hires, which included removing the post-termination aspect of non-disparagement clauses.”
Just, Devil's Advocate, but what would be the benefit of your career if all humans (or even just a few billions of humans) are going to die?
I think it's reasonable to assume that if it's not worth breaking the NDA, it's likely not an existential threat for the vast majority of humanity.
Now, does that mean that people who currently work upper-middle class knowledge work jobs aren't in for an exceedingly harsh economic reality check? Absolutely not.
But that's not really as serious as an existential threat to humanity.
I doubt you are asking in good faith, because I suspect a good faith interlocutor would have worked this out on their own, but I'll proceed anyway.
On the one hand, you've potentially got an indeterminate number of future comfortable years based on a subjective assessment of how long you think it takes catastrophe to materialize, with the downside that you can't warn anyone and so no one will stop the coming catastrophe.
On the other hand you've got the immediate assurance of your current career being gone and high likelihood that you'll struggle financially as a result, with the upside that you can provide a warning to the public that they will almost certainly ignore and catastrophe comes anyway.
Given the risk/reward assessment of those two options, what do you pick?
Look what happened to many people who broke NDAs or helped to do so. Snowden is stuck in Russia. Assange got holed up in an embassy for years. Sarah Wynn-Williams, the Facebook/Meta whistleblower, got an insane court order against her [1].
Theoretically, retaliating against whistleblowers is seriously illegal stuff. But in practice these regulations are seldom enforced. And even if your (former) employer does not retaliate openly, there might still be "invisible" retaliation, or the risk of other large employers just blacklisting you by default.
Breaking a Google NDA carries substantially less risk than leaking classified information, I imagine. And I would expect that someone exposing true existential risk would receive plenty of support in the face of civil suits. In any case, being more afraid of the courts than the end of humanity (if that’s what they want to leak) surely calibrates how strong their belief must be.
If it's juicy enough presumably they could be an anonymous source for some journo. Which would still be breaking the NDA but good luck getting anywhere with that.
Why would I display a modicum of good faith and grace when google has actively, at every chance, shown that they don't act in good faith. Hell today they announced if school districts turn off Google's ai for students they won't let them use google search either.
What if we displayed a modicum of truth and stopped pretending that Google employees don’t work there for the money? That is faithful and gracious to reality.
For who and for what? When did Google engineers demonstrate faith and grace? When they deprecated Manifest v2 so they could strengthen their advertising monopoly? Or when they ensured the death of XSLT to ensure everyone was forced to use JS for simple templating features? These are just the tip of the iceberg, should I keep trying to find other good faith and grace examples?
May I ask? Why should I show faith and grace to the people actively involved in turning our society into a Big Brother program? People who work with the DoD to build war machines? Directly or indirectly involved, they either know what they’re doing or choose to look the other way, for money.
Please enlighten me, what is the faith and grace approach I should be stating?
can't weigh in on that; i don't think any of this stuff makes sense as astroturf. but if a news story exists, it certainly could have been planted by the company being described as having terrifyingly powerful unreleased tech.
https://archive.li/fKI3D
Need more details. Any Googler willing to create a throwaway account and tell us what's going on?
Yep
Usual noise from a very very small but very very vocal minority of trouble makers who are trying to force their own views on everyone else and run to the press to try and feel important and try to make a mountain out of a 3 or 4 person molehill.
I've not heard anyone at all talking about this in the office. Perhaps everyone is thinking it or talking about it privately, but I've not heard any of it period.
They're getting ignored by management because they're the usual agitators and over-opinionated who everyone hates dealing with. It's not surprising these people end up getting fired or let go, because no one likes working with them and so they don't get on good projects and don't get good feedback in reviews etc because they piss everyone else off. Then of course when they are fired (or jump before they are pushed) they run right back to the press about how they were sacked for reason X when really it's because they're a fucking jerk.
If this sounds like you: http://go/no-jerks is old has never been more applicable. Don't be a jerk.
The impressive thing about that post is it managed to use so many words and says nothing at all.
if you read the article it actually outlines that this is happening in the UK, where whistleblowers are legally protected if what they choose to blow the whistle on is _in the public interest_ so actually this comment does seem pretty spot on: They don't have anything beyond moral disagreements on what the company is working on (the article mentions military applications of AI), and are thus taking a moralistic standpoint on applications which are otherwise within the laws of the UK. Otherwise they would be able to (and would legally be protected) if they spoke out.
I used to work at Google and I know exactly what they're talking about lol
In my ongoing experience with Googlers nobody in Google is functionally worried about anything but keeping moving up the ladder and trying to be on the “retirement level money asap” pathway.
When I was at Google I was only worried about becoming that kind of Googler. I think if you stay past 5 years you lose all ambition.
I’m not sure, I see a good mix of true believers and competent pragmatists.
Very close in feel to what the DoD used to be in the early 2010s
Ok, I'll say it. The news is: "AI is not that powerful or functional". Sure, can change some little things but not that much. And we are overspending on it.
I really don't understand how so many are so far detached from reality. Maybe AI hasn't revolutionized much of the physical world (yet), but its impacts to the digital world are profound, sweeping, and impossible to ignore.
People are far better at subconsciously processing the consequences of something than they appreciate, and the consequences of the AI wave being real are so insane people just clam up and back track to "it's obviously not happening".
If people actually did appreciate it the economy would collapse immediately long before we've adequately "replaced" it, so there is something to be said for temporary denial until people working on the actual consequences have got something semi viable to deal with them in place.
> If people actually did appreciate it the economy would collapse immediately long before we've adequately "replaced"
You will need to explain that one. Becauase if economy colapses before the singularity, there will be no singularity.
There will be no datacenters, no ai, none of that super expensive stuff dependent on debt and disposable money.
I feel this is a common position from people who do not want to acknowledge that society and people's ways of life will profoundly change. It's a scary proposition so I don't blame anyone for it.
I used to think that it is very important to argue and convince people who are in denial so that they can e.g. prepare for it. But nowadays I have been thinking that being convinced of this scary proposition may also lead people to behave in destructive ways (also, I would like for us to spend less on AI, perhaps because it is so powerful), so maybe it's not so bad.
Even if it hits the wall today and no further progress toward general AI is made for decades, as the current technology is applied in more areas and expertise with it is gained it would still have enormous social and economic impacts over the next few decades.
I mean I'd wager even most people who utilize AI on a regular basis don't take time to ponder the implications if progress continues at the current rate.
And the Math world, and it's coming for the Physics world. And it's still just a wee baby!
This is my expectation. “We are overspending on AI and we’re going to destroy the company and maybe the economy” is less sensational than the end of the world, but it seems much more realistic.
That or the usual moral problems with applications of the technology, as another commenter pointed out, particularly in military and policing. Bad, but not really a new revelation, unless they know of some particularly evil plans.
I get people who said things like that like year ago, but nowadays it's a laughable position. Solving millenium problem means nothing nowadays? Exponential increase in CVE is nothing?
There have been improvements, yes, but their best achievements still fall short. Their math solutions costed more than a school full of mathematicians, and are still being debated. The CVEs they find still need humans to reliably patch them. Nevertheless, I know they will keep improving.
There have been huge advances this year alone, and finally some productive results, but most of the things where AIs are used right now still are a net loss.
>Exponential increase in CVE is nothing?
AI solving the problem it created? Woaow, the future is now!
I’m mostly bearish on AI, but this is flat wrong. The vast majority of CVEs that have been discovered with AI assistance were in code written long before AIs arrived on the scene.
[dead]
The point is it's not AGI, and won't be for a long time.
The automatic loom wasn’t AGI either, but it replaced a lot of jobs.
It doesn't have to be
AGI can define goalposts that move every time A not-G I achieves a new milestone. That's fine. No matter what acronym you use to define it, artificial intelligence is objectively augmenting humans at the very edge of technology and science.
So in the article it says : - a former employee did it with no consequences - executives said they won't enforce it
The article is just about them asking for changing the wording of contracts, not some super secret stuff they're dying to say and really can't.
Without the paywall: https://archive.is/fKI3D
saved me a click thanks
1. buy a burner phone with cash
2. sideload Signal
3. find a verified reporter on Bluesky, etc. with public Signal contact info
4. destroy phone thoroughly afterwards, not just screen but chips
Haven't we already heard the worst of it? If you let a swarm of agents on the loose with a goal, they will get to all kind of nefarious activity in pursuit of that goal. What could possibly be worse than that?
A swarm of OpenAI and Anthropic agents have yes.
I think there was some example of DeepMind models doing it, but under the control of a third party pen tester and the models stopped themselves.
Everyone hates on Google but they seem fairly competent at infra stuff. I don't think we've heard of any google-controlled (not third party using a Google model) felonies like we have from OpenAI and Anthropic?
Perhaps this is why we have not heard though!
That the agent swarm recursively improves powerful enough and the extinction of all humans is a side effect of that goal.
If that’s the reality, you would think that employees would be willing to break an NDA for it. “We’re all going to die, but I really need my bonus this year” seems like a parody rather than a real strongly held position.
If anything this points to a more moderate (but still bad) worry among the employees.
I suppose there may be a bit of a prisoner's dilemma to it. Single voices can be discredited. It would take a coordinated disclosure to actually make the message stick.
Ok, but maybe an employee isn't 100% sure that this will happen. They then have to weigh letting the world know about a risk against the certainty that their career will be damaged.
Vague fears aren’t really that concerning, doomerism is everywhere on literally every topic these days. And humans have quite a long history of it, at least as old as the millenarian cults of 1000 AD.
If someone’s not even willing to stake their job on it, I don’t see why I’d be concerned. (And until they do, we’re just speculating about what they may or may not even say.)
> “We’re all going to die, but I really need my bonus this year” seems like a parody rather than a real strongly held position.
We have been living in a parody for some time now, so it feels normal.
“We’re all going to die, but I really need my bonus this year”
Is probably the best description of the state of engineering today
That's sci-fi. They cannot "recursively improve". There is no magic to LLMs. An agent swarm can increase it's thinking power by increasing the number of agents, the thinking time and by changing the base model to a more powerful one. So at worst they can assign themselves more compute or hijack another agent swarm based on a more powerful model.
Wouldn't the ability of a model to edit and refine the weights of another model count as part of the recursion if that can span any model?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50355251
Sorry bro, we live in a sci-fi world. I don't know what you think recursive improvement is, but we've been doing it for some time with models making synthetic data models and using it to train the next model. This is being done inside the labs intentionally to avoid as many employees and humans in post training. Works very well for things like math and cyber-sec.
Yes, works great for anything that is amenable to reinforcement learning. For other domains, not so much.
> I don't know what you think recursive improvement is
The ability for a model to improve itself over time without outside intervention. As yet, no models yet have this capability, and LLMs specifically what with how they are constructed, are not likely to ever have it. They are frozen in carbonite at the time of their training.
That's not to say they can't use skills to appear somewhat worldly, things like searching the internet and what have you, but if you ask a model to strictly stick to data in it's training, it will do that and it will be stuck in whatever time in which it was built.
Energy is conserved, gravity exists, and LLMs aren't intelligent.
LLMs today are improved by experiments that assay their performance, changes to architecture, pretraining, and post-training. None of those steps necessarily require humans. Welcome to your sci fi future.
The implicit understanding of recursive improvement is that there is some step change increase in capability that only a superior intelligence will be able to achieve.
A model being able to train a bigger model with marginally better capabilities is not what the hype was about.
Gift link: https://wapo.st/4sFuF7P
from TFA, I liked seeing this, considering how influential Google HR policy choices are across the valley and beyond: “Recently, we’ve updated our terms for new hires, which included removing the post-termination aspect of non-disparagement clauses.”
They should quit and warn. Anything else is hypocritical.
They likely signed non-disclosure agreements, breaking one of those could be a career-ender.
If they’re not willing to break an NDA for it, it can’t be all that serious.
You'd be willing to destroy your career to publish a warning no one will need?
You mean, no other evilcorp will hire them afterwards?
No anycorp, yes
Not me. But these are all "most important people in the world." So should fit their own narrative.
This entire line of reasoning is just toxic. You represent a charicature of these people in your head and dole out self-righteous condemnation.
Just, Devil's Advocate, but what would be the benefit of your career if all humans (or even just a few billions of humans) are going to die?
I think it's reasonable to assume that if it's not worth breaking the NDA, it's likely not an existential threat for the vast majority of humanity.
Now, does that mean that people who currently work upper-middle class knowledge work jobs aren't in for an exceedingly harsh economic reality check? Absolutely not.
But that's not really as serious as an existential threat to humanity.
I doubt you are asking in good faith, because I suspect a good faith interlocutor would have worked this out on their own, but I'll proceed anyway.
On the one hand, you've potentially got an indeterminate number of future comfortable years based on a subjective assessment of how long you think it takes catastrophe to materialize, with the downside that you can't warn anyone and so no one will stop the coming catastrophe.
On the other hand you've got the immediate assurance of your current career being gone and high likelihood that you'll struggle financially as a result, with the upside that you can provide a warning to the public that they will almost certainly ignore and catastrophe comes anyway.
Given the risk/reward assessment of those two options, what do you pick?
>Given the risk/reward assessment of those two options, what do you pick?
Listen, I understand that, owing very likely to our differing backgrounds, you and I think differently.
Where threats are concerned, I'm a simple soldier and as such I see things simply.
I would raise the alarm without a second thought. I honestly don't know how anyone could reasonably believe they would have any other option?
Maybe they are willing to break the NDA and they're just trying to go this route first.
Look what happened to many people who broke NDAs or helped to do so. Snowden is stuck in Russia. Assange got holed up in an embassy for years. Sarah Wynn-Williams, the Facebook/Meta whistleblower, got an insane court order against her [1].
Theoretically, retaliating against whistleblowers is seriously illegal stuff. But in practice these regulations are seldom enforced. And even if your (former) employer does not retaliate openly, there might still be "invisible" retaliation, or the risk of other large employers just blacklisting you by default.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy42xgeq9vpo
Breaking a Google NDA carries substantially less risk than leaking classified information, I imagine. And I would expect that someone exposing true existential risk would receive plenty of support in the face of civil suits. In any case, being more afraid of the courts than the end of humanity (if that’s what they want to leak) surely calibrates how strong their belief must be.
NDAs will be void in the future when people wrestles back control from the corporate elite controlling so-called democracies
ndas aren't legally binding in the UK. what they have signed is non-disparagement agreements (not allowed to publicly disparage the company)
If it's juicy enough presumably they could be an anonymous source for some journo. Which would still be breaking the NDA but good luck getting anywhere with that.
The contract apparently includes a clause that quitting doesn't release them from the NDA
But wait they don’t want to compromise their paycheck and opportunity to say they worked on the torment nexus. That would be uncool.
What if we displayed a modicum of good faith and grace
Why would I display a modicum of good faith and grace when google has actively, at every chance, shown that they don't act in good faith. Hell today they announced if school districts turn off Google's ai for students they won't let them use google search either.
What if we displayed a modicum of truth and stopped pretending that Google employees don’t work there for the money? That is faithful and gracious to reality.
Just can't do it, can you
For who and for what? When did Google engineers demonstrate faith and grace? When they deprecated Manifest v2 so they could strengthen their advertising monopoly? Or when they ensured the death of XSLT to ensure everyone was forced to use JS for simple templating features? These are just the tip of the iceberg, should I keep trying to find other good faith and grace examples?
May I ask? Why should I show faith and grace to the people actively involved in turning our society into a Big Brother program? People who work with the DoD to build war machines? Directly or indirectly involved, they either know what they’re doing or choose to look the other way, for money.
Please enlighten me, what is the faith and grace approach I should be stating?
They work for Google.
How about:
1. Full disclosure. 2. Run for your life. 3. Live in exile.
That doesn't seem to have the best track record for leading to positive change
truly surprised nobody here is claiming this is a marketing op. it's the same thing as jacob coxon, right?
Wouldn't it be the opposite of a marketing op if the company's contracts with employees forbid talking about AI risks publicly?
can't weigh in on that; i don't think any of this stuff makes sense as astroturf. but if a news story exists, it certainly could have been planted by the company being described as having terrifyingly powerful unreleased tech.
I mean, they can do that, it’s not like google has kidnapped them.
If they want to do that free of consequences, tough luck.
Exactly, the title should read Google researchers are looking for their spines to tell the world how dangerous AI is.
[flagged]
I think those two examples are a perfect demonstration of how futile it is to throw everything away to inform the public.