The Death of AI Idealism

AI has drifted from its idealistic origins.

TL;DR

AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have moved away from their founding principles of safety and public good.
These companies are now competing fiercely for market share, enterprise, consumer, and government business.
Pentagon deals with AI companies, such as those with Anthropic and Google, have terms that allow for "any lawful government purpose," contrasting with earlier rejections based on usage restrictions.
Elon Musk is suing OpenAI, arguing that its for-profit structure compromises its original mission, though he himself leads a competing for-profit AI company, xAI.
The danger of AI and its potential existential threat have been central to arguments in Musk's lawsuit, though judicial scope has limited this line of questioning.
AI CEOs like Dario Amodei acknowledge AI's potential to disrupt the job market while also being a "civilizational challenge."
Jensen Huang of Nvidia has criticized AI CEOs for using apocalyptic warnings, suggesting they have a "god complex."
OpenAI's president acknowledged the shift from a nonprofit mission to significant personal financial stakes in the for-profit arm.
The Trump administration is considering new oversight for AI, including a working group to vet new models.
The current situation is a significant departure from the initial do-good idealism of AI founders.

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Elon Musk reposted

Viv 🪩

AI morality should be grounded in durable principles like being maximally truth seeking, enabling human agency, freedom of thought + humility under uncertainty

Instead of inheriting the moral fashion of the moment and mistaking it for truth

Elon Musk

True

Yann LeCun reposted

Logan Dobson

Appreciate it when the AI doomer crowd occasionally lets the mask slip a little (Allen is a co-founder of the anti-AI group Humans First and frequent guest on conservative podcasts pushing, uh, Unabomber messaging) https://t.co/Js0cXLmRcq

Yann LeCun reposted

nic carter

"AI is hiking your energy bill" is the most popular political talking point of 2026. The data doesn't support it. A thread: https://t.co/jkmrdr5MEV

clem 🤗 reposted

Nathan Lambert

For a long time, academic researchers being at the cutting edge of new technologies has been a great social equilibrium. Neutral, unbiased technologists have been the people to spread new ideas to the world.

As AI research takes off in velocity, it is also going behind closed doors. The tech industry has sewed distrust, and now they are the ones trying to tell the world about incredible changes coming. It's a big loss to a form of social contract in America.

There's been a history of scientists helping society understand new technologies. There is a public service in the culture of science that I want to see continue.

It's being exacerbated by feelings of FOMO, especially finically driven, where I'm seeing many people who previously wanted to be professors -- and likely still do deep down -- feel a need to conform and chase money, in a pocket of industry. I get it, I grapple with this.

For those with a safety net, there will be great returns to some who choose to zag, and try to build something good, for people who need something different. For me, this is building interesting, fully-open models, to show what you can do with a variety of open weight sizes.

Yes, AI's immediate future is dictated by the frontier, but it's long-term trajectory still deeply includes academic institutions and open science. Knowledge will always diffuse, but to whom?

As of today, I think China is positioned to be the global home of AI research in a few years. The home of research is where ideas are accessible, spread rapdily, and are nurtured. The U.S. seems to be unwinding many institutions and relationships.

The largest returns go to people who build something differentiated, at least in reputation, and a lot of people are not being shown that this path exists.

clem 🤗 reposted

David Sacks

The Pope rightly warns that AI must serve human dignity, not become a tool of domination or exclusion.

But if we hand governments sweeping power over AI development in the name of safety, how do we prevent it from being used to censor, surveil, and control citizens — as Orwell foretold in 1984?

This is the real alignment problem.

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes.” Who will guard the guardians?

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The oldest questions of human nature and authority don’t disappear in the AI age. They become newly relevant.

clem 🤗 reposted

Pope Leo XIV

Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. #MagnificaHumanitas

Yann LeCun reposted

The All-In Podcast

Bill Gurley: Anthropic Thinks It’s Building God

@Jason: It is the ultimate level of narcissism and delusion of grandeur to think you can create God.

@bgurley:

“Anthropic is a mystery to me. I've never, ever seen a company that is both leading their field and the most negatively outspoken commenter on what they do.

And my initial theory was the regulatory capture theory. Quite frankly, I think they're very close to achieving that.

But then they just got so loud that I've literally, in the past 30 days, read everything I can about Anthropic, and I've come up with a new theory.

I call it the Dr. Frankenstein theory.

The more I dig, I've met people who, I dare say, think it's their responsibility, and they're excited about, building a species that's superior to humans.

Dario wrote this blog post called ‘Machines of Loving Grace.’ It was based on a poem.

The last stanza of the poem says, ‘I like to think of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors, and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.’

Sounds like an overlord to me.

And then in Dario's post, he says, ‘It could be a capitalist economy of AI systems which then give out resources to humans based on some secondary economy of what the AI systems think makes sense to reward in humans…’

So I don't think they think they're writing software. I think they're midwifing a deity here.”

Jason:

“These are delusions of grandeur. Let's call it what it is.

They believe that they're so powerful, these individuals, that they can create God, and that by creating God, they are like this Prometheus kind of species.

It literally is the ultimate level of narcissism and delusion of grandeur to think you can create God.”

Yann LeCun reposted

Jeffrey Snover

In my Harvard fellowship I study the views of AI accelerationists, safetyists and skeptics.

What I have come to realize is that both the Accelerationists and the Safetyists believe that we are creating an AI God.

The difference is that Accelerationists believe that it is the god of the New testament.

A god of loving kindness.

The Safetyists believe that it is the god of the Old testament.

The jealous one who told Abraham to kill his son, destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, and killed everybody in the flood.

The Skeptics think it's just a damn toaster with more knobs.

Yann LeCun reposted

Daniel Jeffries

A pause continues to be utter and complete nonsense and it always will be.

1. Let's make planes safer by not making planes!

2. What exactly happens in a "pause"? Do labs get to keep working and we all just get to sit on our hands waiting for this eureka moment?

I guess someone gets to keep their checks while we just bring the economy to a crashing halt based on a few people's vague ideas about some imaginary future problems that they came up with while huffing glue and reading Dune!

3. Who will fund the labs when they are not putting out new products?

I guess VCs will continue to just give them 100s of billions out of the goodness of their hearts!

4. What actually justifies a pause?

Apparently, the wonderful world of imagination! Theoretical future problems that haven't happened yet.

Like massive job losses! Um, jobs are increasing including in the areas most affected by AI, like coding, so I guess not that.

So what? I know the jobs apocalypse is coming because I can imagine it and imagination is reality, right?

Maybe advanced AI weapons?

Ah, so the government will pause weapons research too?

Well no, they will keep doing that anyway because they always do that. It's what governments do.

Okay so we're going to ban Chat Bots while the government keeps making weapons? That should solve everything we're worried about with AI!

Well then what about recursively improving models that grow to superintelligence overnight?

Yeah that's not really a thing. That's the plot of an Avengers movie.

Models are bound by the same real world constraints we are like compute (brains/chips) and time (will this drug have side effects in twenty years can only be known in twenty years) and fuzzy multiplicity (not right or wrong but right-ish and wrong-ish means you can't make a reward signal for "is this the right decision for my business") and the subject/object paradox (the thing improving is judging its own improvement. Yeah chew on that one for a bit.)

But I imagined AI overcoming every real world constraint instantly so it's true!

5. How would we know we did everything we needed to do in a pause? How do we know when it's over?

We dont. We just want a pause now because we want it! Don't you see my pause ⏸️ emoji? It's nice right!

6. Who gets to decide we are ready to unpause?

The government or the people!

Great, because vague ass platitudes like this always go well for concrete policy design.

Looks, none of this is real.

It's theater.

It's not real policy. It has no basis in reality. It's a mass hallucination.

It's pushed by people who believe in magic and magical solutions.

And anything that comes out of it will do infinitely more damage than the imaginary thing they were trying to protect us from in the first place.

Yann LeCun reposted

Williams_Wang

Replying to @ZeffMax

Because Dario sees himself as the high priest of the AI era, the only one qualified to stand between the most advanced models and users. But this is all his fantasy, arrogance, greed, and foolishness.

clem 🤗 reposted

spor

not dunking on Dario here bc Mythos is to GPT2 what a lion is to a bumblebee,

but it’s insane that GPT-2, and successive models, have had ~0% impact on causing bad universal outcomes & so SHOULD HAVE caused AI safety folks to update their priors YET none of them seem to have??