This is the denialist Hy-Brasil line of thought. But superintelligence won't be a tool or a toaster and it would be reckless in the extreme for policy makers to adopt your line of thought.
> There's issues where bad people with bad intentions use AI to do bad things. But to an extent the guardrails already built-in are sufficient. The real danger in AI is how it impacts society, our economy, and our perception of self worth.
I agree with you those dangers exist, but you seem to have ignored the specific threat described in the article, from a superintelligence capable of manipulating human beings indetectably, where we'll be at its mercy and only able to hope it's fully aligned with humanity's interests. The risks you describe are grave, though - especially economically, if governments don't grow to outmuscle the power of the oligarchal owners of these systems, which seems wholly unlikely at the moment in the West, with its neoliberal orthodoxies.
Without international treaty and regulation restricting frontier capabilities globally, any attempt to outlaw open source models will only be as effective as King Canute ordering the tide to turn. Unless the USA fancies bombing those who refuse.
It depends on how far your own development tasks are beneath the higher levels of complexity and sophistication. The trade-offs for most ordinary developers will be minimal or nothing.
I believe my development tasks are some of the most complex and sophisticated out there (high performance mathematical optimization and modeling), and to me Opus 4.6 is pretty good.
Which sort of development tasks do you believe are still out of reach?
I'm interested to hear what architecture and regulations prevent the use of something that is foundational to web develpment and backwards compatible by design? Which also, by the way, comes with the advantage of not incinerating other parts of the restaurant (accessibility, user experience...), forcing expensive countermeasures or total rebuilds of the things destroyed every time you turn it on.
> I think these authors are making a much stronger claim that AI is proficient or even an expert at software engineering.
The author specifically says:
> I am sure it is not perfect (I only spent an hour working with the results), but a software engineer would iron out the remaining potential bugs that I could not find quickly (which is one reason we may need more, not less, coders in the future, to help with the explosion of new uses for software)
which acknowledges pretty clearly that engineers bring a level of insight and experience still missing from Mythos. Saying that, I totally disagree with his contention that this will always be true. It's pretty weird that the author of an article stressing the steep improvements in a model's capability can't seem to imagine further improvements in that capability. As if Mythos is where development ends or whatever gap remains between models and experts won't steadily narrow or eventually widen in reverse.
GB News has emerged out of the Reform movement, which in turn is the child of UKIP. And there are good grounds to think UKIP was bankrolled in part by Russia. It's covered in part by Carol Cadwallader in the excellent "Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring". Alexander Udod (A Russian diplomat) seemed to be the handler for senior UKIP figures.
> The question you always have to ask is what problems does it directly solve
Most directly, human labour. Labour is always a problem for capital. At a certain level of AI competence, businesses don't need to pay humans to complete the work they need doing in order to operate. I don't think anyone would dispute AI competence isn't growing steadily.
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