I love that the citation to GPT-4 is a Rickroll :)
Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics
41–50 of 195 posts
Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics
#42I think this paper is a joke but like all good jokes has a grain of truth. I would imagine that most AI academics are very excited by recent developments, if you worked on conversational language models you are more likely to view recent progress at OpenAI as a vindication than a threat. That said there must be some sadness that it wasn't you.
I think the frustration is less about that they weren’t involved in the recent successes, but rather that they can’t build on models like GPT due to their scale and non-openness.
Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics
#43Obviously AI academics are uniquely challenged by the 'scaling is (nearly) everything' reality, but I feel like a lot of the mixed emotions being expressed towards the latest results are also because we're actually seeing the mystery of self starting to unravel. Like any good mystery, the fun was in the build up and as we move towards a resolution there's a bitter sweet aspect to the slightly mundane reality of it 'm…
While I agree that it will unravel in the end, we still haven’t learned much at this point about how the self actually works. I would also disagree that ChatGPT constitutes a self. If anything, it constitutes a normal distribution over possible selves, where you get a random pick at the start of each conversation, and confined to the length of its token buffer.
I didn't claim ChatGPT constitutes a self. I agree with the description of 'stochastic parrot'. But the underlying intelligence GPT4 is demonstrating in order to be a better stochastic parrot appears to be, while it's obviously difficult to directly compare, at least comparable to primitive creatures.
Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics
#44I think it's always been the case that if industry really gets interested in making progress in some particular area, they make it, and way faster than academia ever could. Not just in computer science but also in fields like chemistry or engineering. Academia is great for doing basic science where there is no profit motive for industry to do something about it. That's what the niche/"few care about" sections talk about, where IMO the strength of academia lies. computer science is I think in general comparatively in a good position compared to other sciences in how easy it is to get funded.
Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing about current AI models profoundly challenges the unknowns of what makes consciousness work in any mystery-resolving way. People who confuse plainly programmed algorithmic systems like GPT 4 or Midjourney with the still unresolved issues of sentience as we know it so far are drinking far too much of the current batch of AI punch. Sadly, it's a sentiment I see all too often on HN, a site in which i'd assume mo…
That is pretty dismissive, do you have anything to back that up? Just saying one group is so out there it isn't worth arguing is typical when someone doesn't actually have an answer. I have found the opposite, the people that are dismissing that AI can be conscious or sentient, also don't have any definition for those terms. It's just the same "i think therefore i am" self viewpoint. I've found this typically with pr…
The burden of the proof that AI techniques of today can approach consciousness is on who believes they do, not the other way around.
Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing about current AI models profoundly challenges the unknowns of what makes consciousness work in any mystery-resolving way. People who confuse plainly programmed algorithmic systems like GPT 4 or Midjourney with the still unresolved issues of sentience as we know it so far are drinking far too much of the current batch of AI punch. Sadly, it's a sentiment I see all too often on HN, a site in which i'd assume mo…
Yeah, it reads so bizarrely to me... How are we confusing biological human (or other animal) sentience in some embodied creature with queries as a service to some model instance. I cannot see anything that remotely makes these two contexts architecturally, practically, or ethically similar, except in the narrow sense of query responses that might have been mistakenly thought of as defining sentience in earlier decade…
I think you're missing the point. It's not that GPT4 is sentient, not that successor LLMs will be. It may be we never create something that's sentient, by our definition.
My argument is just that:
- Sentience is variable. We might regard primitive organisms as biological machines. As some of these machines have slowly evolved to become more complex, sentience/consciousness has emerged, effectively by 'redesigning' and scaling the same hardware. It is an emergent property. At the same time this has been happening, other aspects of what we call intelligence have been developing.
- Artificial networks being scaled, are also displaying emergent behaviours, some of which overlap with aspects of intelligence. This does not imply they are sentient, but it does strongly support some previous assumptions that sentience, like intelligence, is emergent and hence there will be no better answer coming.
Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is pretty dismissive, do you have anything to back that up? Just saying one group is so out there it isn't worth arguing is typical when someone doesn't actually have an answer. I have found the opposite, the people that are dismissing that AI can be conscious or sentient, also don't have any definition for those terms. It's just the same "i think therefore i am" self viewpoint. I've found this typically with pr…
The burden of the proof that AI techniques of today can approach consciousness is on who believes they do, not the other way around.
Maybe there is also some burden on other side to providing a definition of terms for the other party to argue against. I agree the burden of proof is on the AI side, but there is some burden on the deniers to provide some definitions if they wish to continue denying. AI Side: look here is my proof, Deniers: NO That isn't what I meant.
I'd say GPT is already by its existence proof enough to start at least discussing consciousness. To dismiss it entirely because there is no proof, is just ignoring the proof.
Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics
#48I like how they release what reads more like a blog post as a paper.
Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think they are putting themselves on a pedestal. It's more that they made the choice to remain in academia, because they believed that were trading a higher salary for the academic freedom and the chance to work with really cool problems. And then it turns out, industry are the ones really working with the really cool problems. (Disregarding the fact that ~85% of machine learning academics do not have what it…
I think your response is very narrow in defining what a "really cool problem" is. If in the 1970s you imagined that the cool problem in ECE/CS was "building ever-more-powerful computer processors" then you basically got smoked by Intel and other industry labs. But there's a different way to look at it. Because industry went off and solved the now-"boring" problem of building ever-more-powerful computer processors, th…
Public key cryptography was invented in the 70s, commercialized in the 80s.
In machine learning we already had back-propagation in the 1970, but had to wait another 40 years for Intel and Nvidia to create ever more powerful processors to tackle useful problems.
Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
> These CS academics need to understand that this is what it feels like to be in other fields like physics or bio where you can’t do jack unless you have costly equipment. This is what people in developing countries deal with all the time. This was my thought too. It cost approximately $4.75 billion to build the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. My educational background is in physics, but I would not be the least bit u…
I don't know, core physics leading to Fusion reactors and FTL travel seen much more important to me than AI that can make convincing robocalls and generate furry porn stories.
How about AI that can do physics better than any human?