Matt Clifford

At some level, you're taking a risk that you wouldn't take with nuclear waste in your back garden.

You wouldn't be reassured for me to say, don't worry, there's only a 0.1% chance that this nuclear waste is going to wipe out your family.

You'd be like, what the hell are you doing?

Stop, right?

Can I pause on that, Arvind, for a second?

Because that's an empirical claim.

I mean, at the moment, these large language models basically can only be run by some of the largest, wealthiest companies on earth.

with enormous data centers, with enormous compute power.

So it seems plausible at the moment that if President Trump, driven by Christian nationalists, and Xi Jinping wanted to simply shut down the large language models of two Chinese companies and a small handful of American companies, we would cease to have these LLMs operating pretty quickly.

Again, I suppose to push this argument to the next phase, the claim only needs to be that the existential risk is posed by the frontier models.

And if one could shut down the full infrastructure that powers the frontier models, then one has less to worry about from the models that you're talking about.

To understand this first argument, this is a cat is out of the bag argument.

It's too late.

The stuff's built.

If these models are going to become deceptive killer robots, they're already out there, and there's nothing we can do about it.

This moves us on to a new thing.

So the first disagreement you've clearly had with Yoshua and Jeffrey Hinton and others who were calling for a stop is your cat's out of the bag.

It's too late anyway.

The earlier models can do a lot of damage.

Stopping the next frontier model is not going to make much difference.