Arvind Narayanan

So this is the best method that we have.

So these probabilities are all bogus, and that's my strongly held view.

We should not think in terms of probabilities.

I do think the risks are potentially real.

I'm not advocating for ignoring the risks, but I think the right response cannot be, let's try to stop all this.

There are two big problems with that.

One, it's just not going to work.

The only way it could work is if you have an authoritarian world government that can control every AI developer everywhere.

This is not true at all.

It might be true that absolutely the most powerful Frontier models can only run on powerful GPUs, but you have slightly smaller models that are maybe one step below that can run on consumer-grade hardware.

And the cost of running these models is dropping by something like somewhere between a factor of 10 to a factor of 100 every year.

the cost is dropping very rapidly, both because the hardware is getting faster per dollar and because algorithmic improvements are allowing us to squeeze more juice out of smaller models.

Now, again, I completely disagree with this.

I think historically, this is very easily falsified.

When OpenAI built GPT-2, which was two generations before ChatGPT, which was when the world started noticing, they thought that model was so dangerous that they were not going to release it for people to download and use.

And that's something that my grad students can build today just for fun and learning in a day or two.

And so historically, when we look back, our ideas around what constitutes the threshold level of danger have kind of been comically off.

And I don't think there is really any clear relationship

between the power of a model in terms of how computationally heavy it is and what dangerous things it might potentially be able to do in terms of enabling cyber attack, in terms of various things that worry about in terms of bio risk.

Actually, some of those models can be much, much smaller and faster than these large language models because those biological capabilities are not about language at all.