Artificial Iconoclasts
“Here’s to the crazy ones…” so kicks off Apple’s iconic "Think Different" 1997 advertising campaign.1 It has been in my head for the past few weeks, ever since reading the thoughts from Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf fretting that AI may be driving us towards “a country of yes-men on servers.” Those thoughts were in response to Dario Amodei's essay “Machines of Loving Grace” and in particular, his assertion that AI will deliver us a “country of Einsteins sitting in a data center”. That is, the notion that AI will allow the breakthroughs of the 21st century to be achieved in just 5 to 10 years. Wolf is essentially saying that we’ll get the opposite of what what Amodei is saying we’ll get.
There’s a lot in there to unpack, and I’d highly suggest reading both essays. But at a high level, Wolf’s comments are the ones that have stuck in my head over these past few weeks, reading about new AI breakthroughs on a daily basis. The technology we’re building and dealing with is clearly incredible. At the same time, I also worry it runs some real risks that Wolf speaks to...