As with anything else, the best way to look at things when you're unsure if someone is right or they are lying: imagine four scenarios: 1. It's true and you believed/supported them 2. It's true and you didn't support them 3. It's a lie and you believed/supported them 4. It's a lie and you didn't support them Now for each of these think of the worst-case scenario. Find out which one is the _worst case_ scenario and...…
Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
561–570 of 1001 posts
Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
#562It's interesting that no one has really considered the possibility that an individual outside these megacorps reimplements GPT4 while they're all pausing. We've seen several examples of CPU-optimized code (textsynth, llama.cpp) indicating that there is a lot of performance to be gained from writing optimized versions of our inference routines; I doubt it's outside the realm of possibility that a single player writes…
Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey GPT-5, write the code implementing a bioinformatics workflow to design a novel viral RNA sequence to maximize the extermination of human life. The virus genome should be optimized for R-naught and mortality. Perform a literature search to determine the most effective human cellular targets to run the pipeline on. Use off the shelf publicly available state-of-the-art sequence to structure models and protein free-e…
I've been trying to use GPT-4 for my hard science startup, and it really has nothing to offer when you push the boundaries of what has been done by even a little, but it's great for speeding up coding. Once we do have an AI capable of extraordinary innovation (hopefully in 10 years! But probably a lot longer), it will be obvious, and it will unfortunately be removed from the hands of the plebs based on fearmongering…
For example, the Hershey/Chase and Avery/McCleod experiments convinced the entire biological community that DNA, not protein, was almost certainly the primary molecular structure by which heredity is transferred. The experiments had the advantage of being fairly easy to understand, easy to replicate, and fairly convincing.
There are probably similar simple experiments that can be easily reproduced widely that would resolve any number of interesting questions outstanding in the field. For example, I'd like to see better ways of demonstrating the causal nature of the genome on the heredity of height, or answering a few important open questions in biology.
Right now discovery science is a chaotic, expensive, stochastic process which fails the vast majority of the time and even when it succeeds, usually only makes small incremental discoveries or slightly reduces the ambiguity of experiment's results. Most of the ttime is spent simply mastering boring technical details like how to eliminate variables (Jacob and Monod made their early discoveries in gene regulation because they were just a bit better at maintaining sterile cultures than their competitors, which allowed them to conceive of good if obvious hypotheses quickly, and verify them.
Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
#564It's interesting that no one has really considered the possibility that an individual outside these megacorps reimplements GPT4 while they're all pausing. We've seen several examples of CPU-optimized code (textsynth, llama.cpp) indicating that there is a lot of performance to be gained from writing optimized versions of our inference routines; I doubt it's outside the realm of possibility that a single player writes…
There is absolutely no one who has managed to do anything close to these models on a single CPU when it comes to _training_, so that is why no one is considering the possibility.
Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
#565To those saying "this is impossible in our society", there is a long history of scientific fields mutually agreeing to pause certain work until safety and regulations could be put in place. The Asilomar Conference is an example. [1] The idea that "you can't put the genie back in the bottle" is very popular in tech culture, but many have suggested that simply extending elements of copyright or tort law to AI would be…
The GPTs are at the point where anyone with money can buy cloud compute and train one. The methods for doing so are fairly well known. It won't be long before a teenager can train a GPT on commodity cloud VMs.
Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
#566GPT-4 might be close to the best we'll get on the general LLM model front for a while since they trained on a huge chunk of web text. Next real advances will probably be in tuning them for specific applications in medicine, law, accounting, marketing, coding and etc. As someone running a one man company I can't wait for the cost of accounting, legal and copywriting to approach 0. Cost of shipping products will also g…
Wrong https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/gpt-5-artificial-gen...
Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
#567Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
#568Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
#569>Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable This statement by itself sounds reasonable. But for me an interesting thought experiment is to take this letter and imagine the equivalent for some other technology, for example semiconductors in the 1960s, the world wide web in the 1990s, or social media in the late 2000s-early 2…
Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In my darker thoughts about this, this is why we see no aliens. If AI would be a common great filter we'd expect at least one of them to expand outwards after being the filter?
Or maybe the AI is sufficient to act as a filter, but insufficient to surpass it itself. It stagnates. After all, an AI that can destroy a civilization isn't necessarily "intelligent" in the same way humans are. Or even capable of self-improvement. It could be sophisticated enough to (accidentally?) destroy its creators, but no more than that, and without evolutionary pressure, it may let itself die.