131–140 of 195 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really think we need a UBI so that people who want to can afford to do science how many drug addicts less motivated to quit is a scientist less motivated to maximize clicks worth? It's gotta be more than zero.
No thanks. I'm not willing to pay higher taxes just so that we can have a few more academics doing low-value AI research.
As a theorist in AI, the premise is funny but also really sad. And yet it is a very pervasive premise in the field. OpenAI is not doing science. They are building a big shiny thing, showing it off, keeping it closed, and making money off of it. That is not part of the scientific process. It is as if, every time SpaceX launched a rocket a little bit higher, every aerospace department ooh'd and aah'd and threw up their…
OpenAI provides me with a real, useful tool, something that directly improves mine and many others' lives. Your papers do not have that effect on my life.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the mystery of why we're not just philosophical zombies was never going to have some eureka moment, given that it's quite plain it's an emergent property. Was there a creature in history that wasn't sentient that gave birth to a creature that was? Clearly not. The reason recent results are significant in this discussion is because: - Larger networks are already displaying emergent behaviours that couldn't hav…
it's quite plain it's an emergent property That is not at all quite plain. Respectable philosophical views include the proposition it is at least as fundamental as space or time.
As a theorist in AI, the premise is funny but also really sad. And yet it is a very pervasive premise in the field. OpenAI is not doing science. They are building a big shiny thing, showing it off, keeping it closed, and making money off of it. That is not part of the scientific process. It is as if, every time SpaceX launched a rocket a little bit higher, every aerospace department ooh'd and aah'd and threw up their…
This applies pretty much to ..euh every field. The wow factor attract investors and money. The way the current economy is structured, it incentives these tactics since these individuals will be able to draw on significant funds and will have a comparative advantage even if they have a worse return ratio.
And then it'll pass and a new thing will kick again. Investors have no memory, and I am talking about institutional ones. The supposedly sophisticated folks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Science" is not solely the scientific method - it's the democratization of your methodology to enable the replication of the results, towards the goal of determining their soundness.
So if the government does science research that is classified, that doesn't count as science because it's not publicly shared?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a function of the people who hang out here. If you like reading and text in general, you are both more likely to comment here and additionally regard language as the most important part of sentience/consciousness. This leads to believing that GPT has solved many of these issues.
There is a huge difference between a human saying they like ice cream and an LLM saying they like ice cream, but that seems to get completely disregarded in these types of discussions. Which leads to people making very wild declarations that we are close to AGI or solving consciousness.
Earlier 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…
Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
lmao even in my university (the serbian uni), we have at least calculus+linear algebra before any nn course. also to "learn" what's a cnn you just need gradients not integrals (unless you use some kind of non-lipschitz function as activation?), plus the idea of what a convolution is... but even Mobius knew it back in the 800s. anyway i think your statement that industry is light years away from unis is just misleadin…
You might be able to understand what a convolutional network "is" without calculus, but you'll be woefully unequipped to ask even obvious questions like "what if we put Fourier transforms around the convolutional layers" (a cursory search suggests it provides the expected speedup but is for some reason not a standard thing to do?). As someone outside of the industry, I'd also imagine any effort to explain what NNs ar…
What do you mean? Processing a CNN layer takes an amount of time that does not depend on the input data, only the input/output sizes. Fourier transform is just a change of basis. Why should anything speed up?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, that is exactly the point. "Research" and "Scientific Research" are not inextricably linked - I work in an R&D department, and not all research we do is scientific. We do have scientific research, but it's handled very differently from the PoC type of work that occurs more broadly. We are forced to choose between handing out trade secrets in exchange for gaining more soundness in our theories, or keeping them sh…
Sounds like a lot of pedantry tbqh
Earlier quoted context omitted.
lmao even in my university (the serbian uni), we have at least calculus+linear algebra before any nn course. also to "learn" what's a cnn you just need gradients not integrals (unless you use some kind of non-lipschitz function as activation?), plus the idea of what a convolution is... but even Mobius knew it back in the 800s. anyway i think your statement that industry is light years away from unis is just misleadin…
>just my two cents, to conclude i think a good analogy to the current climate is the 700-800s with electromagnetism: plenty of people discovered "empirical" laws but didn't understand really the phenomenon. Sounds dead on. Do these large """language""" models actually even implement any concepts from linguistics? Or is the entire "language" part of the model merely derived from the fact that it's inherently part of t…
btw, in other languages i guess it is decent although it depends on which language, at least gpt4.