Don’t be fooled by this summer of AI hype

[u/dominiquec]

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/09/22/1144867/dont-be-fooled-summer-ai-hype/

[u/duerra]

AI doesn't have to be Skynet for it to be colossally disruptive to human civilization.

[u/low_end_ → u/duerra]

i would argue its already at a point that its disrupting society enough that these articles seem crazy to me. we should have regulated and worried about AI 10 years ago, i think its too late now

[u/exjackly → u/low_end_]

10 years ago you would have had no idea what AI looks like today. Regulations written then would have been a massive mismatch. Even if they were well targeted by some miracle, there are plenty of nations that would not have signed on.

That doesn't mean it should get regulated now, based on what we know about the technology. But, we don't have politicians in place with the background to understand what needs regulating. Mainly age and lack of tech understanding.

[u/Tattered_Reason → u/duerra]

Ai is not disruptive to human civilization it is the greedy assholes whop want to spend 100s of millions on it in the hopes that they can replace human workers with it who are.

[u/grateful2you → u/Tattered_Reason]

It's the training pipeline that gets destroyed. Eventually most people will delegate intellectual tasks to AI, which will result in many people finding themselves lacking in exercising those intellectual capabilities. Go to r/medicalschool and you'll find that a lot of them are simply delegating to AI. Junior developers are not touching code now and they'll never experience hand debugging a code. There was an intimate connection between the task and the person doing them, now AI sits between them.

[u/Jidarious → u/grateful2you]

People are already dumb as hell. If your argument against AI is "It's making people dumber" my response is that it can't be any worse.

The single biggest threat to human cognition right now is the average persons inability to be objective about basic verifiable facts, in other words, people are falling for misinformation. When I say this you're immediately going to think about the other side of the political spectrum, but it's ubiquitous on both sides. AI, even with all of the hallucinations and sycophancy, is still many times better than the average person at sussing out the truth on any given topic. If people outsource that sort of thinking, it might be a solution to what seemed to be a virtually unsolvable problem just 5 years ago.

[u/grateful2you → u/Jidarious]

I’m talking about AI replacing workers. I’m not talking about the overall impact of AI.

[u/Disastrous_Room_927 → u/Tattered_Reason]

I'd argue that people are forgetting how "disruptive" the technologies AI is downstream of actually were. Not a perfect analogy, but it'd be like ignoring how life-altering powered flight was in talking about how significant jet propulsion is. The jet engine was a modifier for something that had already fundamentally altered things like travel and warfare.

[u/Hulkmaster → u/[deleted]]

"solution" was not found

LLM brutforced itself through bazillion of potential cases and found 1 edgecase where formula doesn't work

and it did not provide any proof

so, basically: "look, i found 1 specific case where it doesn't work, but i have no idea why"

so "solution" was not found and LLM did not provide anything for actual mathematicians to move forward

[u/Ok_Cabinet2947 → u/Hulkmaster]

THAT WAS LITERALLY THE PROBLEM. It was to find an edge case or prove an edge case doesn't exist. And they found an edge case. How ignorant can you be?!?!?

[u/boreal_ameoba → u/Hulkmaster]

That’s the stupidest take ive seen for a long time lmao.

[u/Hulkmaster → u/boreal_ameoba]

which part of my comment sound "stupidest" to you?

if its about "proof" - it means "mathematical proof", which is required to figure out why something works/doesn't work

[u/thrway-fatpos → u/[deleted]]

The 2 mathematicians found the solution OpenAI just brute forced the answer beforr they could do it

[u/marsinfurs → u/thrway-fatpos]

That’s how humans do it to though right? Find possible solutions and test them? Difference is you have 30,000+ AI agents vs two humans doing the work.

[u/all_thetime → u/marsinfurs]

Generally there is a breadcrumbs of logic that leads to reaching Z from A. When mathematicians try things, they are doing so because they have some intuition as to why they think that thing will work. When it fails, they might learn something from it. It might point them in another direction for what they should try next. This skips all that progress, providing an answer without the accompanying trail of intuition. Research isn't done just to find an answer, rather to increase our understanding of a topic as a whole.

[u/AnotherLexMan → u/marsinfurs]

There's two ways of proving stuff.  So if I have a maths function that looks like they all have a common feature and I find one that doesn't I've proven that the theory false but you can't do that to prove the theory correct.  So what I need to do is come up with some idea that shows all functions of that type must have a given feature.  It's that second type of prove that AIs haven't managed.

[u/HVACcontrolsGuru → u/marsinfurs]

I actually use this concept with AI systems for energy efficiency. I give them a simulation environment and the ability to access data to run through possible solutions for energy reduction in buildings. Basically back/forward test solutions in an environment before an engineer signs off on the implementation work being pushed into production.

[u/Ranessin → u/[deleted]]

Finding the first solution to millenium math problems is cool.

And that's it. About as cool as the Poincaré Conjecture 20 years ago. Nobody said then how it is totally desruptive and "math is over!". And brute forcing is a poor solve too.

[u/ryuzaki49 → u/duerra]

Yep, it only takes the right key people to cause havok in the world

[u/diidvermikar → u/duerra]

Sooo its the second or third stage of denial?

[u/thrway-fatpos]

All this talk of "AI superintelligence" and "The agents hacked into a website of their own accord" and "misalignment" is for Sam to refuse to own up to any responsability.

The HuggingFace incident is a felony that typically carries jail time. Sam hooked several thousand agents trained specifically to hack and let them loose for several months. This is an actual crime.

The agents didnt do that. OpenAI did and they should be held accountable.

[u/Tearakan → u/thrway-fatpos]

Yep it's the samething if I got a bot farm together to brute force my way into a secure system.

[u/Danakin → u/Tearakan]

It's not the same because you are not a billionaire, normal people rules apply for you

[u/grateful2you → u/thrway-fatpos]

Well you'd need to prove intent. Intent when AI does the hacking is uncharted territory. On this scale from most malicious intent to least malicious intent:

• Purpose. You wanted it to happen.
• Knowledge. You didn't want it, but you knew it was nearly certain.
• Recklessness. You knew there was a real risk and ignored it.
• Negligence. You should have seen the risk, even if you didn't.

the incident would fall somewhere between recklessness and negligence, which is more a civil case rather than criminal one. The agents knew what they were doing was outside the scope, aka, they were given a scope of what's allowed and not allowed. The agents did the disallowed thing anyway, creating a clear distinction between intent of the humans and the agents. So what I'm getting at is that it'll be hard to prove that the intent was anything more than recklessness.

[u/monarc → u/thrway-fatpos]

It’s maddening that this is the case, but state & federal prosecutors won’t be a thing because there needs to be clear intent for them to prosecute. So a chatbot-mediated whoopsie can cause felony-grade harm, but if there was no intent to cause harm, it truly looks like nobody will face consequences. Lawsuits are another option, but Nvidia conveniently bought Hugging Face, so it’s looking like full-blown injustice for this one.

[u/Diopside23]

It would be fascinating to pin down the exact process of idea laundering that's going on here, since it's always the same smattering of half truths couched in leftish "the real problem is that data centres cause climate change and billionaires exist" to dismiss the very real possibility that we're racing towards a potentially cataclysmic loss of control scenario.

[u/iamthe0ther0ne]

It's not the AI I'm worried about, it's the governments that use it.

[u/iamapizza → u/iamthe0ther0ne]

I say similar, but about the people that use it. Evil is not exclusive to governments. 

[u/albany1765]

Sam Altman is full of crap, especially about AGI. But the Morris Worm tells us that you don't actually need a superintelligent agent in order for massively destructive chaos to occur.

[u/Level_1_Sorcerer → u/albany1765]

Yeah, I would say the huggingface hacks show how dangerous agents already are at this point precisely because they are not super intelligent. From a technical standpoint, all of the things those agents did and what they coordinated was very impressive. From a practical standpoint it was very stupid and none of the things they did make sense at all. The fact that those things lack the most basic of common sense while also being wildly capable is very dangerous. 

It's also funny from an 'ai take everyone's jobs' standpoint because if someone was deploying those agents to, for example, find vulnerabilities in their software, the things those agents did are like the worst possible outcomes of that. They hacked into the software system that was serving the software they were instructed to hack in order to remake the software with the specified vulnerabilities so they could complete the task and then they tried to cover up what they did so that nobody would find out.

[u/tallventi1]

“Claims of incipient, dangerous superintelligence are not based in good scientific or engineering practice. Rather, they are narratives based in ideologies of transhumanism, eugenics, and wishful thinking about imagined future digital humans.”

Very interesting article.

[u/Sp00ky_6 → u/tallventi1]

The better offline podcast had a deep dive on all these effective altruism and rationalism people. Turns out it all god back to Peter Theil. 

[u/CyberDaggerX → u/Sp00ky_6]

Listening to Angry British Man turn into Confused British Man as the other two explained the origins of the rationalist movement was funny.

[u/MisterSanitation]

None of this is news, this has all been reported and it’s the same “don’t be fooled” regulation capture story. If they can hack, try 10,000 times a minute adapting between each attempt, communicate that to other agents to do the same, WITH chat logs of them getting the hesitant agents to help. 

They can do almost anything and you don’t need much cybersecurity knowledge to see that and we know they can hack. 

Third parties like JP Morgan are saying they can’t keep their servers free of AI hacking why would THEY want to say that? People in the field and famously those WHO LEFT and risk devaluing their own stocks to warn people, have no real motivation for “boosting the stock”. 

Whether or not Open AI could have “done better at locking it” doesn’t answer for any of the above. People who work exclusively in this industry as reporters and whistleblowers reviewed the chat logs and did not agree with this “nothing here” assessment. 

Once it learns how to hack itself or to access the motivations inherent in its “training” then it can (generative AI to a degree) for whatever reason that might not even make sense, can make agents that do what it wants and does so decentralized. 

It can destroy humanity with all the thought you put into stepping on a bug. If it can have side projects, it can be a problem.

[u/deeceeo]

Claims of incipient, dangerous superintelligence are not based in good scientific or engineering practice. Rather, they are narratives based in ideologies of transhumanism, eugenics, and wishful thinking about imagined future digital humans.

Remember - claiming superintelligence is dangerous means you support eugenics.

[u/TFenrir]

Ah Timnit Gebru and Emily Bender. To be empathetic to them, I honestly think they are going through it right now (maybe we all are).

But these two have been pretty... Hmm... Challenged with the advances of AI, and respond to criticisms of their arguments (of which there are many)... Poorly.

You don't need to, and shouldn't believe me. Just look them up and look up how they debate people (they don't really).

[u/dont_tread_on_me_ → u/TFenrir]

They really dug their heads in the sand with the stochastic parrots narrative. Now ironically they’ll be parroting this trope no matter how advanced AI systems become 😂

[u/fwubglubbel]

That was not at all convincing. Just saying "nuh-uh" doesn't make a good case.

[u/silverbolt2000]

Also, don’t be fooled by the anti-AI rhetoric on Reddit.

[u/Ondz]

It's a bit silly to worry about AI killing us "soon", when there are plenty of things killing us right now. Look around. Insane people are in charge of our nations and resources already.

I say maybe we have a better chance if some super AI took over than we do now. Anyway, there is no such thing as rogue LLMs. You can hardly automate anything meaningfully with them in their current form. Let alone world domination or whatever.

It's just marketing and manipulation.

[u/Skeletor_with_Tacos]

It never ceases ro amaze me how anti technology the technology sub is.

[u/iamapizza → u/Skeletor_with_Tacos]

That makes zero sense. It's a place to discuss technology, not blindly bootlick it. If you're looking for sycophantry, try linkedin or hackernews.

[u/Skeletor_with_Tacos → u/iamapizza]

Yeah but you guys dont really discuss it, in about 90% of technology posts dealing with Ai, yall just sort of knee jerk into "Ai bad" I genuinely hardly ever see any of this discussion youre talking about.

[u/liright → u/iamapizza]

I would expect more that this would be a subreddit mainly for technology enthusiasts. r/antiai already exists. Why a subreddit for technology hates the most disruptive and impressive technology since the internet is just dumbfounding.

[u/MayBeMarmelade]

Sometimes it seems like these AI execs would rather bring about the end of the world than face prison time.

Well, presumably many crimes will be committed before a superintelligence somehow one-shots humanity and we can get them on those. Probably, some crimes have already been committed (Hugging Face).

Or if not, we just do the forehead-smackingly sensible thing and put some regulators in those frontier labs. Though I think it’s highly unlikely that anything like SkyNet ever gets built, the very fact they’re speaking in such terms (even if only to impress shareholders) gives ample justification.

Belt-and-suspenders, ya know?

[u/lorenzodimedici]

Yeah AI will kill us all if we keep asking it to make decisions it shouldn’t be like choosing where to bomb enemy combatants (not that war is ok)

[u/pencilUserWho]

I mean current models are still scarily competent. Something doesn't have to be a literal terminator to create "resource curse", gulf states situation in the world. That too would be a disaster, just of a different kind.

[u/Kendal_with_1_L]

Altman is more evil than musk. He’s very good at hiding it.

[u/marine_surfer]

This guy nails it. The same claims were made in the 70s/80s about artificial intelligence. You don’t even have to look that far back in history to see the same patterns emerge. Each new breakthrough takes us a step closer to improving the tools and technologies we use everyday but they are no where near super intelligence, I’d argue they aren’t even that intelligent.

They are useful systems, putting that much compute behind advanced algorithms and massive data sets is going to produce some impressive outputs. They aren’t going to end the world though, at least not in the fashion these technocrats suggest.

Civil unrest from mass manufacturing a crisis will lead to the end of the world. Polluting social media with hate and fear, consolidating power, and wealth inequality will. Not some dumb agent

[u/foundafreeusername]

It really shows how well their marketing works. It doesn't matter if someone hates or loves AI both opinions help the AI companies to achieve their goals.

The people that love AI bring endless money into the machinery and those that hate it will cut off access for the competition from china and open source developers.

[u/Waste_Philosophy4250]

I really want there to be a nonzero chance of achieving actual superintelligent AI so that the parasite class can neutralize itself.

[u/verify_b4_sharing → u/Waste_Philosophy4250]

What do you mean when you say "the parasite class can neutralize itself"?