Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

futureoflife.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 1001 posts

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#91

Post by versteegen »

contravariant wrote: post #35
brucethemoose2 wrote: post #5

"Please stop training these AI" is almost comical, even if they are right and the signers are significant. It would be far more effective to lobby for legislation on, say, liability related to the use of AI, data privacy (especially when it comes to training datasets), psycological manipulation, actual AGI research bounds and so on. They are just burning donator money with messages like that, and the research is not…

Is anyone even trying to develop an AGI by the way? I mean a language model is neat, may even pick up some emergent features, but in the end it has no real identity. It's basically a memoryless computer doing improv where it tries to pick continue a conversation someone else had.

It used to be that only a few academics were actually working on AGI, and even they had to pretend they were working on narrow AI to get funding. But now, plenty of big labs are. For example, DeepMind's About page states:

> Our long term aim is to solve intelligence, developing more general and capable problem-solving systems, known as artificial general intelligence (AGI).

In the long term, I still think DeepMind will get there before OpenAI, due to the direction of their research program, which has always been about embodied agents. I have heard Shane Legg say that embodiment is probably necessary for AGI.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#92

Post by joegibbs »

petilon wrote: post #68

> Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? You don't necessarily need jobs because you don't need money. What you need is wealth. I am going to leave it to PG to explain the difference [1]: Wealth is not money. Wealth is stuff we want: food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on. You can have wealth without having money. If you had a magic machine that cou…

If we had that magic machine, then there would be something else that money could buy that everyone would want, and spend their whole lives competing over. Maybe it would be a house with a specific view or an original of a painting or whatever.

I think most people want social status, and money is a good proxy of that. Even in a hypothetical moneyless society there would still be things to compete over. Due to the hedonic treadmill, in an automated society where anyone can have any good then those things will become worthless. We'll probably still have poor people, and from their perspective they'll be poor, but from ours they'll be very wealthy.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#93

Post by computerex »

JohnFen wrote: post #31
dougmwne wrote: post #3

[flagged]

I don't think laughing at people for their concerns is helpful. Especially when you don't seem to be bothered by the possibility that this is a civilization-ending development. For the record, I don't think it is, personally. But people are terrified, and not taking their fear seriously and dealing with it compassionately is a recipe for serious, and unnecessary disaster.

I think global climate change is also a civilization ending development but we don't see the world activate to battle that in unison.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#95

Post by bawolff »

JohnFen wrote: post #31
dougmwne wrote: post #3

[flagged]

I don't think laughing at people for their concerns is helpful. Especially when you don't seem to be bothered by the possibility that this is a civilization-ending development. For the record, I don't think it is, personally. But people are terrified, and not taking their fear seriously and dealing with it compassionately is a recipe for serious, and unnecessary disaster.

> Especially when you don't seem to be bothered by the possibility that this is a civilization-ending development.

Lots of people freak out based on concerns divorced from reality. I laughed at the people who thought the mayan calendar meant 2012 was the end of the world. I laughed at the people who thought the LHC would create a black hole that would gobble the earth. I laughed at the people who thought covid vaccines were a eugenics mass sterialization campaign.

Why shouldn't I? The magnitude of the risk they propose does nothing to change the sheer ridiculousness of it.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#96

Post by gordian-mind »

sp527 wrote: post #77
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #67

I'm really disappointed to see the HN reaction of straight up scoffing at this like it's irreversible and so let's just step on the gas. It's some weird combination of techno-utopianism and nihilism and good old elitism.

Almost everyone here will be fine in a world in which only certain non-renewable scarce resources have any value, combined with impending massive currency deflation. Even a rank and file tier 2/3 engineer will manage to live a princely life in that new reality assuming (s)he saved up enough. Hardly anyone in the tech community is capable of truly empathizing with the vast majority of people, who are born with none of…

[flagged]

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#97

Post by JohnFen »

davesque wrote: post #90
sp527 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost everyone here will be fine in a world in which only certain non-renewable scarce resources have any value, combined with impending massive currency deflation. Even a rank and file tier 2/3 engineer will manage to live a princely life in that new reality assuming (s)he saved up enough. Hardly anyone in the tech community is capable of truly empathizing with the vast majority of people, who are born with none of…

> Hardly anyone in the tech community is capable of truly empathizing with the vast majority of people This is a gross exaggeration.

It is a gross exaggeration -- but it is also the image that SV has been giving off for a long time now.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#98

Post by larve »

dougmwne wrote: post #3

[flagged]

This is a pretty disappointing opinion to share. Clearly something huge is happening already that we don't need yet another model to throw everything into disarray once more. I still work with GPT3, and think we haven't even begun to understand how to use even that. GPT3 is enough to disrupt entire industries, amongst which programming and tech will be IMO the most "vulnerable."

At least you are putting your disillusioned cynicism on full display, clearly showing that you think you already lost.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#100

Post by layer8 »

AlbertCory wrote: post #82
layer8 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how it will be able to do that for the tech that will be current in 10 years, if mostly everyone will be using AI by then instead of asking on Stack Overflow.

Stack Overflow is headed for oblivion? What's the downside?

Lack of training data for the AI. Stack Overflow is just an e exemplary stand-in, you can replace it with any other resources you like.
Post reply on HN