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LaMDA: Google's New Conversation Technology

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Re: LaMDA: Google's New Conversation Technology

#31

>“I just started taking guitar lessons.” >You might expect another person to respond with something like: >“How exciting! My mom has a vintage Martin that she loves to play.” Not really IMO, I think they just pushed it to just say "whatever's related to the topic". People who behave like that irl come off as self-absorbed and obnoxious most of the time, hope future AIs are not like that!

What would your response be?

Re: LaMDA: Google's New Conversation Technology

#32
post #19

We really need to stop calling things "lambda". You'd think Google would grasp the concept of unique names on the internet, but I suppose they can always push their own stuff to the top.

Unless the title has a typo, this is not called "lambda". It's "lamda".

Re: LaMDA: Google's New Conversation Technology

#33
post #31

>“I just started taking guitar lessons.” >You might expect another person to respond with something like: >“How exciting! My mom has a vintage Martin that she loves to play.” Not really IMO, I think they just pushed it to just say "whatever's related to the topic". People who behave like that irl come off as self-absorbed and obnoxious most of the time, hope future AIs are not like that!

What would your response be?

That's amazing! What have you learned to play so far?

---

You could even ask to hear them play when you see them next.

Re: LaMDA: Google's New Conversation Technology

#34

>“I just started taking guitar lessons.” >You might expect another person to respond with something like: >“How exciting! My mom has a vintage Martin that she loves to play.” Not really IMO, I think they just pushed it to just say "whatever's related to the topic". People who behave like that irl come off as self-absorbed and obnoxious most of the time, hope future AIs are not like that!

So much this! Nothing like “are you enjoying them?”... Totally weird.

Re: LaMDA: Google's New Conversation Technology

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, the thought of AI doing therapy (and it's reliance on big data) sounds very black mirror to me. How long do you think it'll take ad companies to do an end run around patient protections and start serving ads based on "metadata"? Got anxiety? Try our new meds! Worried about the future? How about some life insurance or annuities? Etc. Things will get very exploitative very fast.

Tech companies don't need a specific therapy app to know if you have anxiety. If they wanted to be nefarious in this way, they could just mine your chats and emails and get a great idea about your state of mind. They wouldn't even have to get around potentially legally privileged information. My go-to related example of this: People often worry that Facebook is listening to their conversations because they'll see an…

I think the “Facebook is listening” position is common because realizing how predictable people’s current interests are is a bit unsettling.

Re: LaMDA: Google's New Conversation Technology

#39
The animated figure is excellent. Interesting to train on dialogue text to model: structure of statements and response, and a model for predicting good responses. I am not surprised that this works really well.

Getting data to train BERT is fairly simple: any text can be used to drop out words and predict them. The LaMDA training text must have been more difficult to curate.

Re: LaMDA: Google's New Conversation Technology

#40
post #31

>“I just started taking guitar lessons.” >You might expect another person to respond with something like: >“How exciting! My mom has a vintage Martin that she loves to play.” Not really IMO, I think they just pushed it to just say "whatever's related to the topic". People who behave like that irl come off as self-absorbed and obnoxious most of the time, hope future AIs are not like that!

What would your response be?

"Hey, that's nice", "How's that going?" or something like it.

Also, no response is also a response, you could just listen to them. No one's going to say "I just started taking guitar lessons" and remain silent for the rest of the evening; for sure they have much more to say about it.

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