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Armin Ronacher Reads Dario Amodei's Pacing the Frontier, Argues Open Weight Models Are the Real Pacing Mechanism

Armin Ronacher Reads Dario Amodei's Pacing the Frontier, Argues Open Weight Models Are the Real Pacing Mechanism

  • Armin Ronacher responds to Dario Amodei's 'Pacing the Frontier' and the viral P(doom) discussion, arguing he shares the observations but not the conclusions, and that the frontier is effectively just Anthropic and OpenAI plus an evaluator (METR) with ties to both.
  • Dario Amodei's stated probability of something bad happening sits at 10 to 25% on the P(doom) Wikipedia page, and Sam Altman and Elon Musk both publicly echoed the pacing sentiment within days.
  • Ronacher argues open weight models carry built-in pacing, calling it the truest form of MAD, and credits Chinese labs with distilling American models, which is why latest Anthropic API restrictions target distillation.
  • Ronacher contends the two labs trained on decades of public data and now strain public resources like PyPI, RubyGems and GitHub, yet want a few American corporations to decide who trains what.
  • Ronacher's main worry is not nukes, rockets or a US-China culture war but what closed weight, subsidized token faucets do to people not working on them; the HN thread notes Dario's post landed after Astra.

Hacker News opinions

I'm not a big Ed Zitron fan, but his line stuck with me: OpenAI and Anthropic keep warning us about powerful AI getting into the wrong hands. It's already in the wrong hands.

The fact that Musk jumped into this conversation, one of the most hated people on the planet, should make anyone wonder if we want these folks in charge of our future at all.

It could be worse, Sama may be no saint, but I'd rather have it in his hands than Aum Shinrikyo fanatics.

This is the closest thing to my own feelings on this mess I've ever read. I have huge respect for Armin's work, so it's nice to see him lay it out, and I hope it wakes some people up.

He really skipped over his thoughts on the RSI business. Wish he'd gone deeper there, still a good post.

I can't imagine RSI produces anything useful in practice. Alignment drift and model collapse are serious obstacles, and we still can't solve the accuracy problem on current frontier models.

I don't know anything here, but I assume Astra's weird coding is more a result of RSI than intentional behavior. If not, it's some other change in their training process.

How does P(doom) relate to existential risk from AI? How would open source models create MAD between humans and AI? If he means we could wield aligned AI against nonaligned AI, he should say so and elaborate.

I think AI diversity protects against rogue AIs. More models, different weights, different actors, and no single AI can take over. The benevolent dictatorship scenario worries me more than AI deciding to kill everyone.

If you think AI won't usher in an extinction event, your p(doom) is basically zero, and then sure, worry about market concentration or losing the fun of software engineering.

Problem with p(doom) is I have no way to seriously evaluate anyone's percentage. I rely on domain experts, like the virologist who made the case that no teenager is prompting a doomsday virus into existence because one doesn't exist and is unlikely to be made.

It's telling that Dario's post arrived after Astra. The call to pace the frontier may be genuine, but it also protects the position of the companies already at the frontier.

That's unfair. Dario signed the Pacing the Frontier letter when Fable/Mythos looked like an insurmountable lead, and he's said versions of this for as long as anyone's listened. His strategic interest is higher now, but that doesn't erase his consistent position.

If you agree with Dario, your p(doom) is zero.

He casually dismisses every other lab, including US labs that might be nearing RSI right now, and treats 'right now' as if GPT-2 seven years ago was the distant past.

Are these other labs in the room with us? I'm all for a multipolar world, but he's right that the frontier is just those two companies. Google is behind, xAI is a joke, Thinking Machines aren't on the frontier, SSI's main output is its announcement post.

We should be glad China is bailing out the world with open weight models? This feels like the whole hackable IoT and smarthome story repeating again.

His MAD analogy undermines his whole point. If everyone had equal access to nuclear weapons, society would end quickly. It only takes a few bad actors, and if OpenAI and Anthropic stopped tomorrow, someone else would just take their place. The real problem is coordination.

Everyone needed to agree to stop is the challenge, and these situations usually need government intervention. We got cursed with the most venal administration in history instead.

How do you intensely work on a problem you genuinely believe has a 10 to 25% chance of causing immense harm or extinction, and still be okay with it?

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