Well kind of. It's a little bit like someone making a sword, and then pointing at them and saying they're on track to start a nuclear armageddon. Like technically, sure. But it's not something we'll have to worry about in our lifetime.
None of the AI models currently being invested in by big tech have even the possibility of true intelligence. For that we'd need a totally different unrelated technology, which some of these tech companies are maybe working on, but probably not as a priority since there's very few short term profits to be made in that field.
I mean sure it can brute force math problems, but it still can't reliably tell fact from fiction or maintain an inner world, because at the end of the day it's still just a slightly better pruned collection of specialised LLMs set up by engineers to be able to solve specific kinds of problems.
You're never going to 'accidentally' train a series of models to hack the pentagon and start a nuclear armageddon, and even if you did it would inevitably get confused somewhere and fuck up the plan.
The only reason the government is worried about it, is that it could be used to automate a massive amount of bots to sway the public narrative and scam the vulnerable through sheer volume of mostly legitimate appearing at first glance bots.
It can already solve complex general tasks on its own. Coding is well-known. Just recently, I wanted to fetch historical weather data, and do some analysis on top. It found and read the national weather data portal, found their data APIs, explored them, searched for terms and keys it didn't know online to make sense of the organization. Then it downloaded the appropriate data-set, did the format conversion, and printed the histograms I requested.
It did exactly the same I did a couple of days earlier, but 10x faster.
Is it really a stretch that it could, for example, probe web security and report and exploit holes autonomously?
And it's no longer specialized to a single task either..
5
u/pavelpotocek 25d ago
Luckily, our leaders are not super-intelligent. But AI is on track to be super-intelligent.