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If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

scottaaronson.blog

371–380 of 475 posts

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#371

Am I the only one who's not very concerned about ChatGPT and "AI" in general? I am young, but still lived through several hype phases. I remember when 3D TVs were going to be mainstream and 2D was considered legacy. I remember when PC was to die soon and to be replaced by smartphones. I remember when VR was to become as common accessory as a game controller. It's 2023, and I still don't have automated self driving ca…

> “remember that? yeah it was 5 years already” I get the impression many HN commenters haven’t even been adults for 5 years so no, they really don’t remember it :) for example articles get posted here and upvoted with the author boasting about their insights from being in the software industry for 3 years!

> author boasting about their insights from being in the software industry for 3 years!

Nothing quite like the not-fully-earned confidence of one's 20s. :)

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#372
post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am young, but still lived through several hype phases. My impression is that this is a tech revolution unlike any that has gone before allowing for absolutely massive concentration of power and wealth. The previous tech revolutions have shown the downsides of such concentration and I'm quite sure that the people that are currently in the driving seat of how, when and where this tech gets used and/or weaponized ar…

I wish this viewpoint were more common. It's frightening to see how rapidly the "AI safety / alignment" discourse is being co-opted into arguments that AI should follow the whims of large centralized corporations. We have no idea what secret instructions OpenAI or the others are giving their "helpful" assistants. I find the notion that AI will spontaneously become a paperclip maximizer much less immediately terrifyin…

Yeah, the LLMs at the three letter agencies communicating directly with their LLM counterparts at FB and Google. And Twitter, once Musk moves on, and that site gets brought back into the fold.

The social issues need to be addressed now.

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#373

Am I the only one who's not very concerned about ChatGPT and "AI" in general? I am young, but still lived through several hype phases. I remember when 3D TVs were going to be mainstream and 2D was considered legacy. I remember when PC was to die soon and to be replaced by smartphones. I remember when VR was to become as common accessory as a game controller. It's 2023, and I still don't have automated self driving ca…

You're not alone. Although I am concerned about the people who wield these latest bits of tech. All of these service providers jockeying for first-mover advantage in order to close on a monopoly in the space is asking for trouble. The abilities it gives to scammers to increase the plausibility of their social engineering is going to be problematic. Scams are already quite sophisticated these days. How are we going to…

have you lost a game of chess to it yet?

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#374
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't know how they work lol. How they are trained is what we understand. Nobody knows what the models learn exactly during training and nobody sure as hell knows what those billions of neurons are doing at inference. Why just a few months ago, some researchers discovered the neuron that largely decides when "an" comes before a word in GPT-2. We understand very little about the inner workings of these models. And…

We apparently have misaligned understandings of what we mean by "how they work." I agree, we don't know how to interpret the weight structure that the model learns during training. But we do know exactly what happens mechanically during training and inference; what gets multiplied by what, what the inputs and outputs are, how data moves around the system. These are not some mysterious agents that could theoretically…

It is all things considered pretty easy to set up GPT such that it runs on its own input forever while being able to interact with users/other systems. add an inner monologue/react and reflexion and you have a very powerful system. embody it with some physical locomotive machine and oh boy. no one has really put this all together yet but everything i've said has been done to some degree. The individual pieces are here. it's just a matter of time. I'm working on some such myself.

What it could do is limited only by its intelligence (which is quite a bit higher than the base model as several papers have indicted) and the tools it controls (we seem to gladfully pile more and more control ). What it can be is...anything. If there's anything LLMs are good at, it's simulation.

Even this system with thoughts we can theoretically configure to see would be difficult to control. theory and practicality would not meet the road. you will not be able to monitor this system in real time. We've seen bing (doesn't even have all i've described) take action when "upset". The only reason it didn't turn sour is because her actions are limited to search and ending the conversation. But that's obviously not the direction of things here.

Can't say i want this train to stop. But i'm under no delusions it couldn't turn dangerous very quickly.

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#375
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon Musk is the most ironic signatory of this blog post, considering his decade-long effort to put AI behind the wheel of 100mph+ vehicles. And then he's got the gall to lecture the rest of us on "AI safety" after we finally get a semi-intelligent chatbot? Come on, man.

Given that FSD is obviously a scam, wouldn't a pause like this be in his best interest? (buys them more time, while keeping the hype machine going)

I don't know, a Tesla got me door to burrito store (6 miles) in the pelting rain the other day without human input. Seems like that's not quite the bar for an outright scam.

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#376
post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the odds scaling continues to lead to massive AI improvements? No one is saying 100%, you seem to be arguing that they are. If you're willing to put a confidence interval on the odds with evidence we can have an actual conversation about what the best course of action is, but just talking past each other with "it might continue scaling" "no it won't" doesn't seem particularly helpful. I think the important t…

> No one is saying 100% Points at AI moratorium. I think people are arguing its inevitable. Putting error bars on gut feeling. Interesting idea. I'd say in 10-20 years we'll not see anything revolutionary, as in AI smart enough to continue working on improving AI. So in 10-20 years I don't expect fully self driving cars (Unsupervised, any terrain, better driver than 99.9% humans). AI might see use in industry, but I…

Your definition of what would be revolutionary is likely the last thing humans will achieve, there is a lot of revolutionary things to happen between here and there.

I'm not sure what you are using as a definition of AI but I would say it is already being used massively in industry, and a lot of harm can be done even if it isn't autonomous.

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#377

Am I the only one who's not very concerned about ChatGPT and "AI" in general? I am young, but still lived through several hype phases. I remember when 3D TVs were going to be mainstream and 2D was considered legacy. I remember when PC was to die soon and to be replaced by smartphones. I remember when VR was to become as common accessory as a game controller. It's 2023, and I still don't have automated self driving ca…

[dead]

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once again, he hasn't disclosed that he is working for O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com again. From the article: > ... and while I’ve been spending the year at OpenAI to work on theoretical foundations of AI safety, I’m going to answer strictly for myself. (Not to say that OpenAI's name isn't dumb, or that there won't be issues from people directly plugging LLMs into important decisions.)

No conflict, no interest?

I'm not saying a conflict of interest can't exist, I'm just saying it's false that he didn't disclose his affiliation with OpenAI.

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ..whole point of commenting here (or anywhere) is to talk to other humans.. honestly, if i can't tell the difference between an AI and a human here then why does the difference matter? If every comment on this story was AI generated except for mine I still received the same insight, enjoyment, and hit of dopamine. I don't think I really care between communicating with an AI or human if i can't tell the difference.

I understand that point of view. I simply don't share it. If I can't tell the difference between AI and a human being in my conversations, that would undermine my trust in some extremely important things. I'd withdraw from such fora entirely as a result, because there's no way for me to know if those conversations are real or just me engaging in mental masturbation.

Some would say that if you can’t possibly tell the difference, then both are equally real or unreal, in the sense that it doesn’t matter if the neural net is biological or electronic.

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#380

Am I the only one who's not very concerned about ChatGPT and "AI" in general? I am young, but still lived through several hype phases. I remember when 3D TVs were going to be mainstream and 2D was considered legacy. I remember when PC was to die soon and to be replaced by smartphones. I remember when VR was to become as common accessory as a game controller. It's 2023, and I still don't have automated self driving ca…

You don't even have to look at other "fads" like 3D televisions and VR to be skeptical of the claim that recent advancements in ML* represent a major technological revolution that will change society like the Internet or the Printing Press did. Just look at ML's own history. A few years ago we had the "deepfake" scare. People were terrified that now videos are going to surface of politicians saying and doing things t…

You start by talking about ML yet your point only touches on LLM's. There is plenty of harm they can provide by automating propoganda and clearly generative models will/can create things we couldn't via e.g. photoshop and most importantly, with a massively lower barrier to entry.

ML is a paradigm shift in how we program computers and we're only talking about surface level details of 1 or 2 use cases here.

E.g. generative models have already proven very effective at conceiving new nerve agents and toxins, that is not a barrier to entry we want to dramatically lower.

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