Live data from Hacker News

What we still don’t know about how A.I. is trained

newyorker.com

121–130 of 211 posts

Re: What we still don’t know about how A.I. is trained

#121
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is the real dark future right here. It will be a continuation though. The uppermost echelons of society have waged information warfare since the dawn of modern PR in the beginning of the 20'th century. Lots of theory on this have apparently been memoryholed, but it's easy to just start with the genealogy around Edward Bernais and the plutocracy and robber baron families still existing in the interwar period…

Are you claiming that powerful people only started using their power a hundred years ago when "modern PR" was formed? That nobody ever worried about information before that? Why did you pick that as your starting point? To make things seem like a linear worsening? But even wealth inequality, which you talk about at length, got better before getting worse again during that time frame in the US... so I'm having trouble…

The Dawn of PR is just a good starting point. You can read Machiavelli or study the politics of the roman empire - all hierarchical societies tend to function like this, it's a like a mathematical distribution.

The New Deal along with social democracy in europe was a bargaining deal against the revolutionary forces existing at the time. After this was stamped out the Gini coefficient started to rise when the masses had no alternatives and global trade and outsourcing increasingly obscurred the falling realwages.

Re: What we still don’t know about how A.I. is trained

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want a conspiracy theory, consider this: it's likely there is at least one Chinese spy already working for OpenAI.

Wouldn't even have to be someone from China. Just need a big enough carrot or stick to get a well-placed employee to hand over secrets.

That is how espionage typically works. Deep cover is for exciting books and is a rarity. An employee of the Chinese government stationed at a local embassy or consulate meeting with an openAI employee with a gambling problem is far more likely than someone working there for a decade to smuggle out the weights of a hypothetical future model.

Re: What we still don’t know about how A.I. is trained

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't even have to be someone from China. Just need a big enough carrot or stick to get a well-placed employee to hand over secrets.

I haven't checked their hiring page, but I'm guessing they only hire US citizens. But it's well established that China has an industrial espionage strategy with assets active throughout many American companies. It's hard to imagine that OpenAI wouldn't have been a priority target, starting from at least five years ago.

Know at least half a dozen Open AI people in fairly senior positions who were born in China. Whether they are citizens is a matter of the US Immigration system

Re: What we still don’t know about how A.I. is trained

#124
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Third" is the 4th word in that sentence. Do one of those other words not count or something?

I think they mean if you match the word itself as a string rather than interpreting the meaning of the word, e.g., "what word in this sentence === 'third'" I can sort of see how that could be a machine's interpretation if I squint really hard

Exactly. And it happened multiple times on the original tweet, where it also replied "fifth" when asked for the fifth word of the phrase.

https://twitter.com/DeanBuono/status/1636203814419308544

Feels a bit too consistent of a mistake.

Re: What we still don’t know about how A.I. is trained

#125
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is the real dark future right here. It will be a continuation though. The uppermost echelons of society have waged information warfare since the dawn of modern PR in the beginning of the 20'th century. Lots of theory on this have apparently been memoryholed, but it's easy to just start with the genealogy around Edward Bernais and the plutocracy and robber baron families still existing in the interwar period…

Who are the "microscopic elite that controls the media"? How many people are in the "uppermost echelons of society" to where they try to influence other people? From my middle-of-the-road perspective, everyone is trying to change how everyone else thinks, from the small insignificant details to a cult-like brainwash. Even here and now both you and I are trying to change each others and everyone who reads this's mind.…

From a european perspective even asking the question "why should be scared of these so called elites" is so bizarre it's almost frightening, i'm sorry.

It's a testament to the absurd amount of philanthropic whitewashing, PR and media control these billionaries hold.

"Elites" have conspired to exploit the masses throughout 5000 years of civilisation, it's simply a fact of history.

It's almost physically impossible to comprehend the power a group of billionaires has to pull and push issues, narratives, law, war and discourse in general, especially when the masses have zero organisation as a counterweight, and when numbers like "trillion" just doesn't register in any meaningful way in regular people.

Re: What we still don’t know about how A.I. is trained

#126
post #2

The author is right we know almost nothing about the design and training of GPT-4. From the technical report https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf : "Given both the competitive landscape and the safety implications of large-scale models like GPT-4, this report contains no further details about the architecture (including model size), hardware, training compute, dataset construction, training method, or similar."

GPT-4 is an amazing achievement, however, it is just a language model. LLM (large language models) are well documented in literature and GPT-4 is just a much larger version (more parameters) of these LLM models. Training of LLM models is also well documented. GPT-4 just has been trained on a very large subset of the Internet. Of course there are proprietary models, that will be improved versions of the academic LLM m…

The individual components are well documented, but which specific arrangements produce the best results is still very much an active research area.

As far as training, the differences between GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 (the latter being a smaller model!) demonstrate just how much fine tuning and reinforcement learning is important to the quality of the model. Merely throwing more content from the Internet at it doesn't automatically improve things.

Re: What we still don’t know about how A.I. is trained

#127
> "Leaving aside [all of AI's potential benefits] it is clear that large-language A.I. engines are creating real harms to all of humanity right now [...] While a human being is responsible for five tons of CO2 per year, training a large neural LM [language model] costs 284 tons."

Presuming this figure is in the right ballpark – 284 tons is actually quite a lot.

I did some back of the napkin math (with the help of GPT, of course.) 284 tons is roughly equivalent to...

- a person taking 120 round trip flights from Los Angeles to London - 2 or 3 NBA teams traveling to all their away games over the course of a season - driving 1 million miles in a car - 42 years of energy usage by a typical U.S. household

Re: What we still don’t know about how A.I. is trained

#128
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the excuse they’ll use when they convince the government to require a special license to buy powerful GPUs.

nvidia won't go for that.

If LLMs get placed within the scope of ITAR, NVidia won't exactly have a choice.

But I suspect that they'll also be getting many government / military contracts going forward.

Re: What we still don’t know about how A.I. is trained

#129
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s amazing how one can found a nonprofit with a goal of conducting “open” research and then end up publishing something like this a couple of years later. Greed is good I guess.

You're implying that open research is a shady way to become a non profit. They're allowed to change their business model. The open research was published at the time. GPT-2 is fully open source. Even GPT-3 was open source through the beta in 2020. What they didn't release was the fully trained model (the data is more valuable than the code, in this case).

Legally, yes, they can do that.

Ethically, this is a very clear example of bait and switch.

Re: What we still don’t know about how A.I. is trained

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GPT-4 is closely resembles AGI already Thats a very bold statement and goes against everything I've read on it so far, care to backup such a claim with some facts? Of course each of us has their own bar for such things, but for most its pretty darn high

OpenAI people put out this paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712 called Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4 and as the title makes clear, they think it has hints of AGI. I guess that's a good place to start to answer your question. I don't think this is AGI, but the paper is full of examples where GPT-4 works well and does impressive stuff.

that paper is unreal... section 6 on theory of mind is downright scary
Post reply on HN