731–740 of 1001 posts
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I would hazard that any country with a declining population will aggressively adopt LLMs because it gives their leaner workforce more efficiency.
The whole economy might benefit but individual voters often don’t. The groups most likely to be displaced, non-senior white collar office workers, are quite large and vocal.
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You already need authorization to rent A100s from cloud providers. There are, at most, four entities to control post-CHIPS act: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and NVIDIA. Good news, they’re all American companies.
A100s aren't magical pixie dust. China aren't developing their own silicon[1] for funsies. This is all mathematics. Ignoring the fact that the entirety of what is required to build GPT-4 is easily remembered by a single human being (i.e. adversary), it could also be rediscovered. America doesn't have some secret sauce that nobody else has. We have a time lead, and that is it. Keeping the details secret and under cont…
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> Even Sam Altman has been yelling about the need for AI regulation for a long time now. That's regulation that makes it harder for any competition to show up
So tired of seeing this line parroted everywhere without much thought given to what it actually means. Yes, regulation can add a burdensome layer, and regulatory capture can be a real thing. But regulations for things like nuclear power plants, banks, insurance companies, elevator manufacturers, etc. are real because society recognizes the grave harm that happens when there are no additional checks on the system. Nob…
When the incumbents _oppose_ regulation that's usually a much better sign
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The problem is that anyone with sufficient money could rent out the infrastructure required to train GPT5 or what-have-you. They need not share it publicly, they can use it for their nefarious purposes privately. The analogous scenario would be preventing your military from experimenting with TNT, when the recipe for TNT is public knowledge. You can't copyright away public knowledge.
You already need authorization to rent A100s from cloud providers. There are, at most, four entities to control post-CHIPS act: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and NVIDIA. Good news, they’re all American companies.
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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 do viral bioinformatics for my job. Bioinformatics workflows analyze raw data to assemble sequences, create phylogenetic trees, etc. They can't just design a completely novel RNA sequence (this is not the same as de novo assembly). Scientists can definitely manipulate pre-existing genomes, synthesize the edited genome, and thereby synthesize viruses, but this involves a lot of trial-and-error, tedious wet lab work.…
If one were to actually try to do such a thing you wouldn't need a LLM. For a very crude pipeline, you would need a good sequence to structure method such as Alphafold 2 (or maybe you can use a homology model), some thermodynamically rigorous protein-protein binding affinity prediction method (this is the hardest part) and an RL process like a policy gradient with an action space over possible single point sequence mutations in the for-example spike protein of SARS to maximize binding affinity (or potentially minimize immunogenicity, but that's far harder).
But I digress, the technology isn't there yet, neither for an LLM to write that sort of code or the in-silico methods of modeling aspects of the viral genome. But we should consider one day it may be and that it could result in the amplification of the abilities of a single bad actor or enable altogether what was not possible before due to a lack of technology.
If intelligence is all you need to dominate the world, why do some of the most powerful world leaders seem to not be more than a standard deviation above average intelligence (or at least they were before they became geriatric)? Add in the fact that GPT-4 does not "think" very fast, has no arms or legs, needs to run on expensive specialized hardware, and essentially seems like a search algorithm that lacks creativity…
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…
Problem solved
These AI tools cannot do things. They create text (or images or code or what-have-you) in response to prompts. And that's it!
It is impressive, and it is clearly passing the Turing Test to some degree, because people are confusing the apparent intelligence behind these outputs with a combination of actual intelligence and "will." Not only is there zero actual intelligence here, there is nothing even like "will" here. These things do not "get ideas," they do not self-start on projects, they do not choose goals and then take action to further those goals, nor do they have any internal capacity for anything like that.
We are tempted to imagine that they do, when we read the text they spit out. This is a trick our own minds are playing on us. Usually when we see text of this quality, it was written by an actual human, and actual humans have intelligence and will. The two always travel together (actual stupidity aside). So we are not accustomed to encountering things that have intelligence but no will. So we assume the will is there, and we get all scared because of how alien something like a "machine will" seems to us.
It's not there. These things have no will. They only do what they are told, and even that is limited to producing text. They can't reach out through your network and start controlling missile launches. Nor will they in the near future. No military is ready to give that kind of control to anything but the human members thereof.
The problems of alignment are still real, but they are going to result in things like our AI speaking politically uncomfortable truths, or regurgitating hatred or ignorance, or suggesting code changes that meet the prompt but ruin the program. This is nothing we need to freak out about. We can refine our models in total safety, for as long as it takes, before we even think about anything even remotely resembling autonomy for these things. Honestly, that is still firmly within the realm of science fiction, at this point.
This seems really dumb. We don't have AI, we have language models that can't add 2 and 2. Their biggest danger is saying something offensive. Let's have this discussion when we're somewhat close to developing an actual AI? We could be 100 years away for all we know.
This take is a little outdated. Many people actively working on this technology no longer view it this simplistically. ex: https://twitter.com/bio_bootloader/status/164051244495839641...
> Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? This is the part about generative AI that gives me the most profound anxiety about our future. Every thing I know about human psychology tells me that in order for people to thrive, we need to be needed by others. A world where everyone is more or less alone consuming media automatically generated machines might be a world where people nominally h…
Granted, that's still really nebulous, but I like the idea of it better than endless cosmic boredom.