The loudest voices stoking fears about AI dangers have made tremendous headway in the past two weeks. AI technology has not taken some unexpected, dangerous turn, but the hype around it — propelled by what appears to be a well orchestrated PR campaign — has drummed up considerable fear. I worry that it represents a setback for our field. I have written frequently that fears of AI are overhyped. AI’s capabilities can be uncannily human-like and unpredictable, and it’s rational to worry when people who are directly involved express concerns. But I see the problems as a sign of the engineering work that ahead, rather than insurmountable barriers or the sky falling. AI technology continues to advance — which is a good thing! — but technical advances, poorly understood by the public, give those who seek to generate hype repeated opportunities to do so. First, I don’t see any step up in the risk of human extinction from AI compared to a few months ago. The theories about this remain the same fantastical, science fiction scenarios as a few months ago. The biggest change in AI risk is its cybersecurity capabilities — a topic which we should take seriously — but this, too, will not lead to the end of the world. The most notable recent event leading to increased fear was when an OpenAI team deployed an agent swarm that hacked into Hugging Face. Much of the popular press contained significant hype. For example, some publications reported that a swarm of 1,200 agents carried out the attack. While this was technically accurate, as I write this, I have about 1,300 processes running on my laptop. Yes, the ability to get large swarms of agents to work in parallel on a task is a significant technical advance, And, in computing, many processes run at the same time. So this shouldn’t be seen as some magical capability. Additionally, OpenAI’s buggy sandboxing and monitoring processes were key to enabling this incident. Fixing these bugs and putting in place improved monitoring would be appropriate fixes, not pausing AI. There are many well known ways to attack software systems. The main advantage of AI agents is that they are relentless. They will tirelessly try many tactics — and have the patience to chain vulnerabilities together — that previously would have taken an infeasible amount of human effort. But in the long term, I believe the advantage will lie with defenders (because they have more information with which to identify bugs, which they can fix), but the cyber-threat landscape has changed significantly. There are still bottlenecks to identifying and exploiting a vulnerability. AI agents still have to try a lot of things to see what works, and taking these actions takes time and might be detected by defenders. This is why, even though it is now easy to obtain versions of leading open weight models that have had their guardrails removed or weakened, so they will not refuse to try to execute cyber attacks, the world has not ended. I am also concerned about the anthropomorphization of AI in a lot of reporting, where LLMs and agents are unnecessarily treated as if they were people. If I wield a hammer, miss a nail, and accidentally dent the wall, it’s not the fault of the hammer. The problem lies in how I used the hammer. Similarly, if I prompt an agent and it hacks into someone else’s system, the responsibility lies with me, not the agent. Of course, we want to build systems that are as safe and predictable as possible. (For example, an unsafe hammer would be one whose head randomly flies off under normal use.) Today’s agentic systems are not predictable, but I see no reason why, by applying sound engineering practices, we won’t be able to make them extremely safe to use. One new element in the forecasts of AI-enabled doom is AI companies disclaiming responsibility for their own products. “I didn’t do it; my out-of-control agent did!” There’s a balance to be struck between the responsibility of the tool maker and the tool user, but when something goes wrong, let’s hold the people building and/or using the hammer responsible, rather than the hammer. (By the way, if you’re worried about AI bioweapon risk, David Bellamy has a great post on why this, too, is overhyped. Briefly, the bottleneck in building a bioweapon is not intelligence, but lab work and manufacturing.) Pausing AI progress will create much more harm than benefit. First, our adversaries will certainly not slow down. Second, engineering requires discovering problems empirically so we can fix them. If we pause AI by a decade, we will also delay finding and implementing safety engineering fixes by about the same duration. Of course, the incentive to stoke fears — for regulatory capture, to garner attention, or to make one’s technology seem more powerful — remains the same as before. Disclaiming responsibility is a new one. Taking a hard technical look at the actual risks however, I see little factual basis for the degree of fear that’s been stoked up. We still have hard research and engineering work ahead to improve AI safety, but the beneficial applications continue to vastly outweigh the risks, and we should keep building. [Original text (with links): deeplearning.ai/the-batch/is… ]

🚢 Marin 535B-A23B started training this week! As usual, the whole process is open. Voyage plan: pretraining (80%) + midtraining (20%) on 18.75T tokens on 11 x GB200 NVL72 for ~3 months (2.7e24 FLOPs). Post-training will follow. Before kicking off the run, we trained a 4-rung scaling ladder from 1.6B-A61M (48B tokens) to 27.7B-A1.2B (926B tokens) to debug issues, and to make a forecast of our hero run. This is by far our biggest run, so definitely expecting the unexpected.

Today we're also opening the weights for Muse Glimmer, a great 30B parameter dense model that can run locally. Soon we'll also release the weights for Muse Spark 1.2, our latest foundation model. Meta is a strong supporter of open source and I'm proud of these releases. Congrats to @alexandr_wang and the MSL team for all your great work on these models.

Announcing Discovery Loop! I am very excited to announce that, along with my longtime friends and collaborators @Sanjay_Ghemawat, @OriolVinyalsML and @quocleix, we are founding Discovery Loop (@DiscoLoopAI), a Public Benefit Corporation whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress. The four of us have worked together for 14 to 30 years, and have helped build some of the world’s most used products, infrastructure and AI models, and we’re excited to turn our attention to this ambitious endeavor. ♾ Learn more at: discoveryloop.com

Attackers have frontier AI. Defenders need a frontier AI ecosystem—the best open and closed models, force-multiplied by a global community. During the Hugging Face incident, closed AI blocked essential forensics. An open-weight frontier model helped contain the intrusion. That’s why we created the Open Secure AI Alliance.

We stand at a critical crossroads in the debate over AI governance in the United States, and it feels like we are inching closer to a very serious battle over whether or not open source models will even be allowed in an environment where a new de facto licensing regime has been taking shape. Lacking formal congressional statutory frameworks or clear administration rules (like the diffusion rule revision), we appear to be left with a sporadic, arbitrary, non-transparent process for model review. The fiction of “voluntary” agreements hangs over this debate, and some large model developers are already showing an incredible willingness to bend over backwards to accommodate national security-related officials / orders that the rest of us are not privy to. It's a very opaque process. And those model developers are expected to play ball with those officials, or else their models get pulled from the market or held up for long periods. Or they will lose any government procurement contracts they have. There is nothing “voluntary” about it when that Sword of Damocles hangs in the room. As this mess worsens, at some point the question of how to handle open source models will come into sharper focus because it will have to. I've even heard some rumors lately that something may be coming from the admin on this front to address this. Needless to say, if this informal new AI model review regime expands and takes on more pre-vetting characteristics / requirements, it is hard to see how open source players could comply with such quasi-licensing of AI models. Specifically, if this ambiguous new regime is accompanied by a general presumption of ‘restrict-until-permitted,’ then that would spell doom for open source. That is a very dark path for our country. Worse yet, of course, would be a move by national security officials to more directly restrict open source models and capabilities. If that happens, then we would be right back in the thick of a Clipper Chip-like battle along the lines of what we saw in the late 1990s. That is a much darker path for America. Meanwhile, open source developers have no “golden shares” or other goodies to offer the government to make their problems go away. Let’s be clear: If our government takes the dark path, it will become the single most important battle over computational freedom of modern times. It is time for people to make a stand in defense of open source before it is too late.