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Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics

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Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics

#141

Post by z3c0 »

Invictus0 wrote: post #130
photochemsyn wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alchemists were doing research 600 years ago but they never shared their results with others and used arcane syntax to record those results which nobody else could understand. This didn't lead to much progress in the field of chemical knowledge, because it was just continual reinvention of the wheel. The scientific (and then, industrial) revolution didn't begin until researchers started sharing their results in open…

What if the science is disseminated within a closed group? For instance, suppose the classified research is shared with other people with a security clearance. That still wouldn't be science? Or suppose scientists at universities shared their research with scientists at other universities, but not the general public: that wouldn't be science either?

That's an echo-chamber, especially if the closed group is consistently aligned in their goals so that they're predisposed to want the same things from the research. The entities would have to be arranged so that they're asserting checks-and-balances on one another.

Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics

#142

Post by kome »

bheadmaster wrote: post #127
kome wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. They are applying the scientific method, but they aren't contributing to science. it will be science when it's open and people can integrate the new knowledge in a broader set of knowledge. Science is knowledge. The etymology of science is to split stuff and understand how it work. But from late 14c in the more specific sense of "collective human knowledge". "Private" science is not science. It's some esoter…

I don't buy the argument that "public" science is the only real science. You can define it that way, but I don't see any reason to. "Public" science is just a special case of "restricted" science, such that the set of people the knowledge is restricted to is equal to the set of all humans.

I think this might get philosophical quickly, but to really understand where you're at, you need to access all knowledge. Everybody is standing on the shoulder of giants. It's a collective effort that happens through socialization and long-standing institutions like universities.

An essential part of doing science is sharing results and waiting for others to challenge, expand, or falsify them. If you skip this step, you're not truly contributing to knowledge, although you may still create new knowledge in other ways... but not all new knowledge is necessarily scientific, it can be private, esoteric, commercial knowledge.

Take the example of Ida, a 47-million-year-old lemur fossil known as Darwinius masillae. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwinius it was "discovered" and hailed as a transitional species bridging primates and mammals. Really a huge contribution to "science".

But here's the catch - Ida was actually found in 1983 and held by a private collector for 25 years, who didn't realize its significance. So we had no idea of this "discovery". It wasn't science, it was a good on a market.

OpenAI is the same. We might enjoy to toy with the technology. But I don't find it contributed to science, yet

Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics

#143

Post by bo1024 »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #132
bo1024 wrote: post #52

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…

Nothing sad about it. Keep theorizing and academizing. It's useful. It's not nearly as useful as tinkerers building usable non-theoretical things. It's no wonder that launching a rocket is more impressive and eye-catching than a guy shuffling papers. Don't dare knock down the doers, the risk-takers, the ones with skin in the game. OpenAI provides me with a real, useful tool, something that directly improves mine and…

I don't mean to knock down doers or risk-takers. On the contrary, I'm saying don't try to compete with the doers when you're not one.

> 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.

Of course, OpenAI's work is built directly on top of publicly-funded research papers of the past 5, 10, 50 years.

Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics

#144

Post by bo1024 »

foooorsyth wrote: post #106
bo1024 wrote: post #52

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…

>That is not part of the scientific process What? OpenAI is absolutely conducting science amongst themselves. They are certainly engaging in the hypothesis -> test -> result scientific method, which is science in its purest form. Sharing the secret sauce is what is done or expected in academia , but that doesn’t mean that OpenAI isn’t conducting science behind their own walls. You’re conflating institutional academia…

By the "scientific process", I mean the way scientific knowledge as a whole progresses over time, i.e. the main undertaking of the target audience of the paper.

You're right that "OpenAI is not doing science" was hyperbolic, but I tried to clarify the aspect of science that I'm referring to.

Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics

#145

Post by photochemsyn »

Invictus0 wrote: post #130
photochemsyn wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alchemists were doing research 600 years ago but they never shared their results with others and used arcane syntax to record those results which nobody else could understand. This didn't lead to much progress in the field of chemical knowledge, because it was just continual reinvention of the wheel. The scientific (and then, industrial) revolution didn't begin until researchers started sharing their results in open…

What if the science is disseminated within a closed group? For instance, suppose the classified research is shared with other people with a security clearance. That still wouldn't be science? Or suppose scientists at universities shared their research with scientists at other universities, but not the general public: that wouldn't be science either?

What happens when you have an authoritarian system in place controlling distribution of results, is that everyone in that system quickly learns that if they question the reliability or wisdom of the research, their career is over. So they go along and don't subject the results to the kind of scrutiny science relies on, because making the boss look bad or embarrassing the institution isn't an option in that situation.

There are many examples, such as the secretive public-private DOE FutureGen program aimed at "zero-emission coal-to-hydrogen plants" which wasted about ten billion dollars over twenty years with nothing to show for it (and whose data is still not available), the Trofim Lysenko plant breeding program in the Soviet Union which wrecked Soviet agriculture for decades (and falls into your latter category) and so on.

Another example could be the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, although that's more an engineering failure than a science failure, but it had similar underlying causes, i.e. managers pushing engineers to go along with a flawed protocol.

Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics

#146

Post by sgt101 »

jimsimmons wrote: post #5
ChatGTP wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So endless upside might not actually exist ?

It may or may not. I mean it’d be pretty hard to increase yields of GPU fabs or data center sizes another 100x. There are logistical limitations. Unless some Apollo level mission is created by a superpower, we will hit bottlenecks. Algorithmic innovation is the only long term bet.

10^16 -> 10^24 flops isn't 100x, it's 100,000,000x

This happened in 10 years (training cost of largest model according to the batshit crazy god AI article in the FT).

On the one hand compute power increased by about 100x and then some lunatics came and spent 10000x on it...

Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics

#147

Post by pronto-columnar »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #132
bo1024 wrote: post #52

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…

Nothing sad about it. Keep theorizing and academizing. It's useful. It's not nearly as useful as tinkerers building usable non-theoretical things. It's no wonder that launching a rocket is more impressive and eye-catching than a guy shuffling papers. Don't dare knock down the doers, the risk-takers, the ones with skin in the game. OpenAI provides me with a real, useful tool, something that directly improves mine and…

Weirdly aggressive response. do you think technologies like gpt were developed without any academic input?

Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics

#148

Post by jebarker »

MrScruff wrote: post #43
layer8 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What primitive creatures are you referring to? I don't know of any non-human creatures that can do anything close to what GPT4 does with language, but at the same time even very primitive creatures can reason in ways it's not clear that GPT4 can.

I find interacting with GPT4 feels very different to interacting with either humans or animals.

Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics

#149

Post by grantcas »

southernplaces7 wrote: post #24
MrScruff wrote: post #13

Obviously 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…

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…

[dead]

Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics

#150

Post by hospitalJail »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #33
southernplaces7 wrote: post #24

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…

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…

> do you have anything to back that up?

OP said:

> plainly programmed algorithmic systems

Compare that to a human brain which is not a linear, 1D algorithm.

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