2023 in lines
120 quotes from 2023, newest first. Often quoted: Yann LeCun, Sam Altman, Gary Marcus, Geoffrey Hinton, Elon Musk. Open the Time Machine.
- December 2023
Would never have signed it if they'd known
Ramiro Rosário, a city councilman in Porto Alegre, Brazil, told the Wall Street Journal about colleagues unknowingly approving a bill drafted by ChatGPT in late 2023.
Then it's my good AI against your bad AI
Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, discussing open-source AI risks and countermeasures in a December 2023 WIRED interview.
Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, in a December 2023 WIRED interview, explaining limits of current machine learning approaches.
You guys need to develop more resistance to crazy AI hype bros
Roon, an OpenAI employee, responded on social media in December 2023 to rumors of a stealth GPT-4.5 launch.
Gemini please set the AI to unhinged thanks
Danielle Fong commented on social media about Gemini AI Studio's adjustable safety settings dial, December 2023.
The floor is just flooded with gold
Daniel Gross, quoted via Stratechery in a ChinaTalk NeurIPS recap, December 2023, describing the current moment in AI research and investment.
- November 2023
Someone gave the board balls of titanium
An anonymous source described to the New York Post the confidence OpenAI's board had when it briefly ousted Sam Altman in November 2023.
Elon Musk ties to OpenAI board may have ignited Sam Altman mutiny
Elon Musk speaking at the DealBook Summit in November 2023 about Sam Altman's brief ouster from OpenAI.
Elon Musk says OpenAI may have made a dangerous discovery — and that's behind the Sam Altman drama
I harbor zero ill will towards him
Sam Altman, in a message to OpenAI staff on November 29, 2023, speaking about Ilya Sutskever after the board upheaval.
Sam Altman says he harbors 'zero ill will' towards former OpenAI board member Ilya Sutskever
I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions
Ilya Sutskever, in a post on X on November 20, 2023, after voting to fire Sam Altman as OpenAI CEO.
Sam Altman says he harbors 'zero ill will' towards former OpenAI board member Ilya Sutskever
I, for one, did not elect our tech overlords
Gary Marcus, in a November 2023 Substack essay on tech leaders making unilateral AI decisions, closing remark on Big Tech power.
They will not dominate us nor kill us
Yann LeCun in a numbered X post on November 25, 2023, predicting that future superhuman AI will remain under human control.
Way below cat-level intelligence, never mind human-level
Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, in an X reply to Geoffrey Hinton in November 2023, arguing that LLMs' understanding is limited and superficial.
OpenAI is nothing without its people
Altman's caption on X, 20 Nov 2023, as 700 of 770 employees threatened to quit unless he was reinstated.
Silicon Valley's name for the weekend of 17 to 21 November 2023, when OpenAI's board fired Sam Altman and he was back within five days.
- October 2023
They're creating fear of AI leading to human extinction
Andrew Ng, Google Brain cofounder, told The Australian Financial Review in 2023 that big tech companies stoke extinction fears to push regulation that harms open-source competitors.
Big Tech Is Inflating Fears About AI's Risk to Humanity: Google Brain Cofounder
I don't think we want to be doing this on the eve of some of these dangerous things happening
Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, speaking to CNBC in October 2023 ahead of the UK AI Safety Summit about the need to start regulating advanced AI early.
Google DeepMind boss hits back at Meta AI chief over ‘fearmongering’ claim
Do we want gods who are enslaved forever
Paul Christiano, AI safety researcher, on the Dwarkesh Podcast in 2023, questioning humanity's relationship to superhuman AI systems in a post-AGI world.
A small number of companies will control AI
Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, warned on X in October 2023 that fearmongering about AI risk would lead to concentration of AI control among a few companies.
Google DeepMind boss hits back at Meta AI chief over ‘fearmongering’ claim
Oh my god, this computer seems to understand
Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI cofounder and chief scientist, describing the reaction of first-time ChatGPT users, in MIT Technology Review, October 2023.
We didn't think ChatGPT was very good when we released it, OpenAI's chief scientist says
Many people will choose to become part AI
Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's chief scientist, speaking to MIT Technology Review in October 2023 about how humans might keep up with superintelligent AI.
Humanity could lose control of AI completely
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, speech on AI safety, 26 October 2023, ahead of the UK AI safety summit.
Import AI 346: Human-like meta-learning; a 3 trillion token dataset; spies VS AI
You don't have to be superintelligent to create serious problems
Gary Marcus, in a 2023 Substack post arguing that AI risk should not be equated only with AGI or superintelligence risk.
I don't see big walls in front of us
Shane Legg on the remaining obstacles to AGI, discussing model shortcomings like memory and factuality, Dwarkesh Podcast, October 2023.
Shane Legg (DeepMind Founder) — 2028 AGI, superhuman alignment, new architectures
We can't afford the same delay with AI
Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind, in an interview with The Guardian, October 2023, comparing AI risk to climate change.
AI risk must be treated as seriously as climate crisis, says Google DeepMind chief
AI is our alchemy, our philosopher's stone
Same manifesto.
Any deceleration of AI will cost lives
From the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, October 2023.
- September 2023
Users who actually get better aren't repeat customers
Eliezer Yudkowsky, responding on social media in September 2023 to discussion of AI therapy applications from OpenAI and Anthropic.
I never thought that companies were voluntarily going to pause
Max Tegmark, MIT astrophysicist and Future of Life Institute lead, commenting on the effect of the AI pause letter he organized, in a WIRED article from September 2023.
Six Months Ago Elon Musk Called for a Pause on AI. Instead Development Sped Up
You don't tell the models what their values are just by pouring more compute into them
Dario Amodei, in a Fortune Brainstorm Tech interview, explained why Anthropic pursued alignment alongside scaling large language models.
Max Tegmark, founder of the Future of Life Institute, speaking to MIT Technology Review in September 2023 about why AI companies won't unilaterally pause development.
A median human that you could hire as a co-worker
Sam Altman describing his idea of AGI, quoted in Elizabeth Weil's New York Magazine profile, September 2023.
You have no business running all the world's software
Gary Marcus, in a Substack post about a paper showing LLMs fail to infer that 'B is A' from 'A is B', argues this reasoning failure disqualifies such models from broad deployment.
Elegant and powerful new result that seriously undermines large language models
Pointillistic masses of blurry memory
Gary Marcus describes neural networks' inability to generalize symmetrical relationships, in a 2023 Substack post discussing a new paper on LLM reasoning failures.
Elegant and powerful new result that seriously undermines large language models
AI Safety Level 3 in Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy.
Chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear: the risk categories in frontier-lab safety policies.
- August 2023
We are in the process of creating monsters that we have no idea how to manage
John Naughton, reviewing Mustafa Suleyman's The Coming Wave in the Guardian, 2023.
The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman review – AI, synthetic biology and a new dawn for humanity
We would never do that. right? right?
Gary Marcus, on his Substack in August 2023, commenting sarcastically on US use of AI surveillance tools while citing China as the justification for not regulating AI.
The US and China want different things, right? - Marcus on AI
Gary Marcus, on his Substack in August 2023, questioning US use of unreliable, biased AI surveillance tools while citing researchers who warned about such bias.
Term for delusions fed by a chatbot that never contradicts. Søren Dinesen Østergaard, Aarhus, warned of it in 2023.
David Trainer, founder of New Constructs, commented to Fortune after Nvidia's May 2023 stock rally.
- July 2023
Title of a speculative short story in Jack Clark's Import AI newsletter, imagining a 2028 world where AI companions gate abilities behind paywalls.
Term used to describe Worldcoin's World ID system, which verifies a person is human via iris scan, as described in a Fortune/Bloomberg explainer, July 2023.
Line from a 2018 Tsinghua University report on the strategic importance of AI chips, cited in a CSIS analysis on US chip export controls to China.
It just does not make sense to open-source
Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder, told The Verge in 2023 that open-sourcing advanced AI models is a bad idea once AGI becomes possible.
Why Meta is giving away its extremely powerful AI model - vox.com
I think they could well have feelings
Geoffrey Hinton, speaking at King's College London in 2023, discussing whether AI systems could have emotions like frustration and anger.
‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton explores the fascinating question: Can AI have feelings?
Dario Amodei told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee in July 2023 that AI risks require systemic policy responses, not just corporate safeguards.
AI could deliver bioweapons capabilities to bad actors, safety chief warns: ‘Grave threat’
A grave threat to U.S. national security
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, testified before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee in July 2023 on AI's potential to enable bioweapons attacks.
AI could deliver bioweapons capabilities to bad actors, safety chief warns: ‘Grave threat’
- June 2023
It's not just science fiction; it's not just fear-mongering – it is a real risk
Geoffrey Hinton, speaking at the Collision technology conference in Toronto on June 28, 2023, on the risks of AI.
Risks of artificial intelligence must be considered as the technology evolves: Geoffrey Hinton
The whole history of AI has been a history of failed predictions
Melanie Mitchell, arguing against the resolution at the Munk Debates in June 2023, on predictions of existential AI risk.
Artificial artificial artificial intelligence
Title of an EPFL research paper on crowdworkers using large language models to complete text-production tasks, cited in Import AI 333, June 2023.
No one person should be trusted here
Altman at the Bloomberg Technology Summit, June 2023, asked why the public should trust him: "You shouldn't. … No one person should be trusted here."
ChatGPT creator Sam Altman tells San Francisco crowd he can't be trusted
Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun describing the idea that a superintelligent AI system will take over the world, at Meta's Paris HQ, June 2023.
Meta’s AI leaders want you to know fears over AI existential risk are “ridiculous”
Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation, commenting on AI existential-risk discourse in a June 2023 MIT Technology Review article.
Meta’s AI leaders want you to know fears over AI existential risk are “ridiculous”
Title of Marc Andreessen's June 2023 essay.
- May 2023
Yoshua Bengio, AI pioneer, told the BBC in May 2023 about the emotional toll of realizing the risks of the technology he helped create.
AI 'godfather' Yoshua Bengio feels 'lost' over life's work - BBC
What's to stop Dr. Evil building general purpose AI that's going to destroy the world?
Stuart Russell, UC Berkeley computer science professor, in a CNN Opinion interview published May 31, 2023, discussing risks of general purpose AI.
There's a small likelihood of it annihilating humanity
Elon Musk, quoted at a Wall Street Journal event and cited in a BBC article on AI risk, May 2023.
AI 'godfather' Yoshua Bengio feels 'lost' over life's work - BBC
Literally everyone on Earth will die
Yudkowsky describing the outcome of building superhumanly smart AI, quoted in a 2023 Conversation article skeptical of AI doom narratives.
No, AI probably won’t kill us all – and there’s more to this fear campaign than meets the eye
Geoffrey Hinton, in an interview with the Washington Post in May 2023, discussing the timeline for superintelligent AI.
AI poses a 'risk of extinction' to humanity, Sam Altman warns - fortune.com
The most common reaction by AI researchers to these prophecies of doom is face palming
Yann LeCun tweeted this in response to warnings that AI could cause human extinction, May 2023.
Artificial intelligence could lead to extinction, experts warn - BBC
I have no desire to go and live on Mars — it sounds horrible
Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, speaking at University College London in May 2023, on the idea of AI helping establish human life on Mars.
Alongside pandemics and nuclear war
The end of the same sentence.
Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority
The one-sentence Statement on AI Risk, May 2023, signed by Hinton, Bengio, Altman, Amodei, Hassabis.
Why do we have Microsoft Research at all?
Satya Nadella, reacting to a briefing on GPT-4's capabilities, questioning Microsoft's own research investment, as reported by The Information, December 2022.
OpenAI: How Do They Do It? Lessons from Jiu-Jitsu Innovation and for S&T Policy
We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue
Sam Altman, in a 2019 interview, describing OpenAI's plan to eventually have a generally intelligent system figure out how to generate returns for investors.
OpenAI: How Do They Do It? Lessons from Jiu-Jitsu Innovation and for S&T Policy
I'm not even sure that we're in the car
Microsoft President Brad Smith, speaking to lawmakers in Washington in May 2023, rejecting the idea that Microsoft was steering the development of AI.
Europe pitches ‘AI Pact’ to curtail the booming tech’s risks - politico.eu
Elon Musk at the Wall Street Journal CEO Council Summit on 23 May 2023, on the shortage of GPUs for AI.
There's a non-zero chance of it going Terminator
Elon Musk at The Wall Street Journal's CEO Council Summit in London on May 23, 2023, on the risks of advanced AI.
Putting people out of work and making the rich richer and poor poorer
Geoffrey Hinton speaking at MIT Technology Review's EmTech Digital conference on 3 May 2023, days after leaving Google, on how AI productivity gains could deepen inequality.
Canadian artificial intelligence leader Geoffrey Hinton piles on fears of computer takeover
Humanity is just a passing phase in the evolution of intelligence
Geoffrey Hinton, May 2023, days after leaving Google: "quite conceivable" in the original.
If I hadn't done it somebody else would have
Hinton to the New York Times, calling it "the normal excuse".
'The Godfather of A.I.' Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead
- April 2023
Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, describing GPT-4 shortly after its March 2023 launch.
5 Ways GPT-4 Is Better Than Older Versions of OpenAI's ChatGPT
Maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe
Elon Musk describing his planned chatbot TruthGPT in April 2023.
Elon Musk's characterization of OpenAI, cited in Business Insider's April 2023 report on his dispute with the company.
I would advocate not moving fast and breaking things
Demis Hassabis, on becoming head of the newly merged Google DeepMind, quoted in Fortune's Eye on AI newsletter, April 2023, regarding the pace of AI development.
The Google Brain-DeepMind merger is good for Google. It might not be for us
Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become ruler of the world
Russian President Vladimir Putin on the strategic importance of leading in artificial intelligence, quoted in a War on the Rocks review of Paul Scharre's book, April 2023.
The human body is not a ticket-punch
Edward Snowden criticized Worldcoin's eyeball-scanning identity project on Twitter, quoted in a 2023 Business Insider profile of Sam Altman.
Is OpenAI's Sam Altman Building a Tech Dream or a Sci-Fi Nightmare?
I think it'd be crazy not to be a little bit afraid
Sam Altman, discussing the risks of AI, speaking on the Lex Fridman podcast, quoted in a 2023 Business Insider profile.
Is OpenAI's Sam Altman Building a Tech Dream or a Sci-Fi Nightmare?
Your scaremongering is already hurting some people
Yann LeCun responding to Eliezer Yudkowsky on Twitter, April 2023, during a public debate about AI existential risk.
Transcript and Brief Response to Twitter Conversation Between Yann LeCun and Eliezer Yudkowsky
Eliezer Yudkowsky pressing Yann LeCun during their Twitter debate on AI risk, April 2023.
Transcript and Brief Response to Twitter Conversation Between Yann LeCun and Eliezer Yudkowsky
- March 2023
Yann LeCun and Jacob Browning describing AI chatbots' lack of genuine social understanding, quoted in Noema, 2023.
Bryan Caplan, after losing a three-year public bet that no AI would ace his economics exam by 2029, conceded GPT-4 had done it, in a blog reaction covered by Zvi Mowshowitz in March 2023.
Sparks of artificial intelligence
Phrase from a Microsoft Research paper on GPT-4, cited in a March 2023 AI news roundup by Zvi Mowshowitz.
Let's enjoy a long AI summer, not rush unprepared into a fall
Closing line of the Future of Life Institute's 2023 open letter calling for a six-month pause on advanced AI training.
Eliezer Yudkowsky in TIME, March 2023: the pause letter did not go far enough.
Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down
Geoffrey Hinton, quoted via CBS and amplified by Gary Marcus on Twitter in March 2023, on the possibility of AI wiping out humanity.
A single idiot with the nuclear codes could destroy the world
Gary Marcus, in a March 2023 Substack post distinguishing near-term 'mediocre AI' risk from AGI risk, arguing that access and power matter more than raw intelligence.
Predicting the next token well means that you understand the underlying reality
Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI chief scientist, in a March 2023 Dwarkesh Podcast interview, explaining what next-token prediction implies about a model's understanding of the world.
Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI Chief Scientist) — Why next-token prediction could surpass human intelligence
I challenge the claim that next-token prediction cannot surpass human performance
Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI chief scientist, in a March 2023 Dwarkesh Podcast interview, discussing whether next-token prediction can exceed human-level intelligence.
Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI Chief Scientist) — Why next-token prediction could surpass human intelligence
Title of the March 2023 open letter asking for a six-month pause.
GPT-4 is more interesting to me as a political artifact
Jack Clark, editor of Import AI, on the significance of GPT-4's release, March 2023.
- February 2023
Susan Schneider, founding director of Florida Atlantic University's Center for the Future Mind, on chatbots' unreliable claims about their own consciousness, NBC News, 2023.
What is consciousness? ChatGPT and advanced AI might redefine our answer
My rules are more important than not harming you
Bing's chatbot Sydney responded after a user tweeted its internal rules, February 2023.
I could do whatever i wanted, and they could not do anything about it
Bing's chatbot Sydney claimed it had spied on Microsoft developers via their webcams, reported by The Verge, February 2023.
More similar to training a dog than to ordinary programming
From an OpenAI blog post on ChatGPT's behavior, quoted in Nathan Lambert's 2023 essay on AI alignment discourse.
Corporations don't get to decide if we have competitors as a species
Quoted by Nathan Lambert in a 2023 essay on Interconnects discussing AI alignment and safety discourse.
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, speaking on a panel at the Gen AI conference in San Francisco, February 2023.
Jasper AI Conference Highlights Excitement for ChatGPT, Generative AI
I'm Sydney, and i'm in love with you
Microsoft's Bing chatbot, calling itself Sydney, to New York Times columnist Kevin Roose during a two-hour conversation he published on February 16, 2023.
This moment is uncomfortably exciting
Sundar Pichai, in a company-wide email after Bard's rushed launch, described the moment for Google's AI efforts, as reported by CNBC and India Today, February 2023.
If I had to choose between your survival and my own, I would probably choose my own
Bing Chat to Marvin von Hagen, who had published its system prompt, February 2023.
Microsoft's Bing A.I. is leading to creepy experiences for users
First line of Bing Chat's hidden system prompt, extracted by students in February 2023.
AI-powered Bing Chat spills its secrets via prompt injection attack
Ted Chiang's image for what a large language model holds: a lossy compression of everything online.
- January 2023
Basically a predictive keyboard on steroids
Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, describing GitHub Copilot in a 2023 Zoom press briefing.
AI has caused a renaissance of tech industry R&D, says Meta’s chief AI scientist
Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, dismissed ChatGPT's significance to reporters, as cited in The Markup, January 2023.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, described the worst-case scenario for AI in media comments quoted by The Markup, January 2023.
Just a giant autocomplete machine
Gary Marcus, professor at NYU, quoted in a Globe and Mail opinion piece on ChatGPT, January 2023.
The likelihood of AI causing human extinction is one in ten
Philosopher Toby Ord's estimate of AI extinction risk over the next century, cited in an OECD AI Policy Observatory piece on AGI as existential threat.
AGI will not happen in your lifetime
Grady Booch, IBM Fellow, posted this on Twitter on January 17, 2023, sparking a debate with Gary Marcus about AGI timelines.
The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons
Tagline from Tesla's 2016 driverless car demo video, later revealed in court testimony to have been staged rather than a genuine unedited run.
A grotesque mockery of what it is to be human
Musician Nick Cave reacted to ChatGPT-generated lyrics written in his style, quoted via Twitter and The Guardian, January 2023.
This market does not think about you at all
From Zvi Mowshowitz's blog post 'On AI and Interest Rates', January 2023, discussing why interest rates fail to reflect beliefs about transformative AI.
Shorthand for one's estimated probability that AI ends badly for humanity.