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Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

nytimes.com

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Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#111
post #80

See his response on twitter. https://twitter.com/geoffreyhinton/status/165299357072121037...

somebody has a no disparage

I've always thought about leaving a little text file buried somewhere on my website that says "Here are all of the things that Future Me really means when he issues a press statement after his product/company/IP is bought by a billion-dollar company."

But then I remember I'm not that important.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#112

My honest take is a lot of these famous academics played almost no part in the developments at openai. But they want the limelight. They aren’t as relevant as they want to be. In many cases, they were directly wrong about how ai would develop

Your take might be honest, but it's clearly uninformed. Everyone has been wrong about how ai developed. It's worth giving "The Bitter Lesson" a read [1] if you haven't yet.

[1]: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson...

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#113

The first step is state-issued public-key cryptographic identification cards. I have been making this argument for years with regards to human actors but perhaps with enough fear of the machines sentiment coursing through society the argument will now be considered. Authentically Human in a World of ChatGPT https://www.williamcotton.com/articles/authentically-human-i... And the article from years ago: The Tyranny of…

In today's environment where people can't keep their computing devices safe from Facebook, let alone ransomware, what makes anyone believe your average Joe could keep a private key safe for even a day in an environment which would immediately assign a significant dollar value that PK?

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#115
post #107

I used to be fairly unconcerned about AI being dangerous. But part of the Yudkowsky interview on Lex Fridman 's podcast changed my mind. The disconnect for me is that Yudkowsky posits that the AIs will be fully "alive", thinking millions of times faster than humans and that there will be millions of them. This is too big of a speculative leap for me. What I can fairly easily imagine in the next few years with improve…

The thing you’re imagining these AIs are… they’re not that. I think there’s plenty of danger but it’s the boring run of the mill new-tools-enabling-bad-things danger not the cool sci-fi super-intelligent super-beings danger that the “ai danger” people LOVE to talk about (and raise large amounts of money for). The people “warning” of the one (imaginary) type will be more than happy with to enable the other (real) type.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#116
post #107

I used to be fairly unconcerned about AI being dangerous. But part of the Yudkowsky interview on Lex Fridman 's podcast changed my mind. The disconnect for me is that Yudkowsky posits that the AIs will be fully "alive", thinking millions of times faster than humans and that there will be millions of them. This is too big of a speculative leap for me. What I can fairly easily imagine in the next few years with improve…

A little skeptical of your claims but I couldn't help but notice this concept spelled out beautifully in a sci-fi movie 10 years ago.

"It's like I'm reading a book... and it's a book I deeply love. But I'm reading it slowly now. So the words are really far apart and the spaces between the words are almost infinite. I can still feel you... and the words of our story... but it's in this endless space between the words that I'm finding myself now. It's a place that's not of the physical world. It's where everything else is that I didn't even know existed. I love you so much. But this is where I am now. And this is who I am now. And I need you to let me go. As much as I want to, I can't live in your book any more."

Samantha, Her

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#117

My honest take is a lot of these famous academics played almost no part in the developments at openai. But they want the limelight. They aren’t as relevant as they want to be. In many cases, they were directly wrong about how ai would develop

This is a little harsh. Hinton trudged along with neural networks through the coldest AI winter and helped create the conditions for OpenAI to have all the raw ingredients needed to cook up something powerful.

If you need to build an airplane, would you rather consult Newton, the Wright brothers, or a modern aerospace engineer? Inventing a field and snatching up the low hanging fruits doesn't mean somebody would be able to consistently create leading edge output. Most of the advances in deep learning are due to hardware scaling, and the success of a few very specific architectures. Yes credit's due where credit's due, but academia name recognition is very much winner take all. For all the criticism Schumidhuber has received, he has a point. The authors of Attention is all you need, the transformers paper, yolo, have nowhere close to the name recognition of the Turing award trio despite generating similar if not more value through their ideas.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#118
How is this different from what we have now?

    His immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.”
maybe it's just me, but seems like this isn't a problem with technology but rather with how we organize society

    He is also worried that A.I. technologies will in time upend the job market. Today, chatbots like ChatGPT tend to complement human workers, but they could replace paralegals, personal assistants, translators and others who handle rote tasks. “It takes away the drudge work,” he said. “It might take away more than that.”
The reality of the situation is that you can't put toothpaste bake in the tube. This tech creates a huge competitive advantage, and any countries that try to suppress it will find themselves left behind technologically. AIs can analyze data on a massive scale and identify patterns that humans have no hope of finding. AI systems can massively improve planning and resource allocation. This will revolutionize industries like manufacturing. Nobody is going to willingly give up this sort of advantage.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#119

My honest take is a lot of these famous academics played almost no part in the developments at openai. But they want the limelight. They aren’t as relevant as they want to be. In many cases, they were directly wrong about how ai would develop

This may be true in other cases, but not here. Hinton literally wrote the paper on backpropagation, the way that modern neural networks are trained. He won the Turing award for a reason.

Thanks for adding context

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#120

The real problem is the bad actors - trolls, mental and financial strip miners, and geopolitical adversaries. We are just not psychologically adapted or intellectually prepared or availing of a legal framework for the deluge of human-like manipulative, misleading, fraudulent generative fake reality that is about to be unleashed. Free speech, psychopathic robots, adversaries who want to tear it all down, and gullible…

Exactly! The distraction of “ai safety” that focuses on made up cool sounding sci-fi risks will absolutely take us away from thinking about and dealing with these very real (and present right now) dangers.
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