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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

#161

Post by revelio »

vbezhenar wrote: post #54
archerx wrote: post #36

There is part of me that thinks that this A.I. fear-mongering is some kind of tactic by Google to get everybody to pause training their A.I.s so they can secretly catch up in the background. If I was to do some quick game theory in my mind this would be the result. Imagine being Google, leading the way in A.I. for years, create the frameworks (tensorflow), create custom hardware for A.I. (TPUs), fund a ton of researc…

The fear is from people who can extrapolate. Who can remember state of AI 20/10/5 years ago. And compare it to 2023. Whether that extrapolation makes sense, nobody knows. But fear is understandable.

Everyone can extrapolate. One of the most irritating tendencies of public intellectuals is the assumption that only they understand the word exponential, and then insist on asserting that every trend they can lay their eyes on must be an exponential trend (or if it's clearly not, then it will be soon).

Progress comes in fits and spurts. Sometimes there's fast progress, and then the field matures and it slows down. It was ever thus. Measured in tech demos, AI progress has been impressive. Measured in social impact it has way underperformed, with the applications until November of last year being mostly optimizations to existing products that you wouldn't even notice unless paying close attention. That's what 10+ years of billion-dollar investments into neural nets got us: better Gmail autocomplete and alt tags on facebook images.

Now we have a new toy to play with at last, and AI finally feels like it's delivering on the hype. But if we extrapolate from past AI experience it's going to mostly be a long series of cool tech demos that yields some optimizations to existing workflows and otherwise doesn't change much. Let's hope not!

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#162

Post by ttul »

yogthos wrote: post #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 lik…

Here’s another, perhaps more pressing problem: people will have to prove it WASN’T them saying something in that Instagram post or that YouTube video. It’s one thing for Joe Biden’s team to debunk a deep fake. Quite another for some teenager to convince all the other kids at school that he didn’t say something embarrassing in a TikTok.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#163

Post by hackerlpd »

ogogmad wrote: post #136
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #114

This made me think of Clarke's first law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

I've heard this before, but why would it be true? Serious question. I've seen Chomsky argue that LLMs can't regurgitate his linguistical theories - but ChatGPT can! I've seen Penrose argue that AI is impossible, and yet I think that ChatGPT and AlphaZero prove him wrong. I know about Linus Pauling and quasicrystals. Is this a general rule, or are people sometimes wrong regardless of their age? There's also a danger t…

You just reinforced OP's point with your examples.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#164

Post by ttul »

0zemp2c wrote: post #122

countdown until he starts his own AI company and gets hundreds of millions in seed investment... can't say I blame him, everyone in AI who can make a cash grab should do so

Nah, Hinton is already incredibly rich. His first startup was bought by Google for $44M. And Google paid him millions more for a decade. Dr. Hinton is in a rare position of having no reason to work for anyone, not even venture capitalists.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#165

Post by politician »

ncr100 wrote: post #155
politician wrote: post #81

After reading the NYT interview, I don’t understand why he still chose to invent, in his words, a dangerous technology and publish the results openly. Not a criticism of the man, but of the article.

That's assuming something. Think about it otherwise: how do you know it's dangerous until you've seen it in real life? You raise a kid, they end up being a murderer, should you have aborted them?

Per the article, he had early misgivings — moving to Canada and refusing money from DoD. It’s not anything like your hypothetical.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#166

Post by stareatgoats »

lumost wrote: post #158
stareatgoats wrote: post #137

We are barely scraping the surface when it comes to understanding the future dangers of AI. Geoffrey Hinton is uniquely positioned to point out where the dangers are, and from what I've gleaned from interviews one of his main concerns atm is the use of AI in the military: fully autonomous military robots might not be possible to curtail. The tried and tested method is international agreements. The current focus on ar…

There is such a blurry line for autonomous munitions. militaries used dumb imprecise munitions for decades - then precision weapons. A2A missiles used to lock on radar signature leading to huge risks related to accidentally shooting airliners/friendly craft. Now antiship missiles dynamically select their target over 300km away to maximize the chance of hitting a big ship. During the war on terror, ML models would dec…

> Where do you draw the line? What would an appropriate agreement look like?

Good questions. I'm not sure, but that line needs to be drawn somewhere. Thousands of experts should be pouring over questions like these, and likely will.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#167

Post by tivert »

dlkf wrote: post #6
nmstoker wrote: post #3

Hinton responded on Twitter: https://twitter.com/geoffreyhinton/status/165299357072121037...

Cade Metz is the same hack who tried to smear Scott Alexander. This guy is the personification of journalistic malpractice.

> Cade Metz is the same hack who tried to smear Scott Alexander. This guy is the personification of journalistic malpractice.

He didn't "smear" Scott Alexander. That's just the hit-job framing pushed by Alexander's fans, who were mad he didn't write a puff piece and they couldn't just make up rules on about stuff on their websites (e.g. about using people's self-disclosed real names) and have the rest of the world be obligated to follow them.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#168

Post by neel8986 »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #157
neel8986 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Hinton dont need openAI to be relevant. He literally invented back propagation. He sticked to deep learning through 1990s and 2000s when almost all major scientist abandoned it. He was using neural networks for language model in 2007-08 when no one knew what it was. Again the deep learning in 2010s started when his students created AlexNet by coding deep learning in GPU. Chief Scientist of OpenAI Ilya Sutskev…

Hinton didn’t invent back prop. > Explicit, efficient error backpropagation (BP) in arbitrary, discrete, possibly sparsely connected, NN-like networks apparently was first described in a 1970 master's thesis (Linnainmaa, 1970, 1976), albeit without reference to NNs. BP is also known as the reverse mode of automatic differentiation (e.g., Griewank, 2012), where the costs of forward activation spreading essentially equ…

I mean he was one of the first to use backprop for training multilayer perceptron. Their experiments showed that such networks can learn useful internal representations of data[1]. 1987. Nevertheless he is one of the founding fathers of deep learning

[1]Learning representations by back-propagating errors

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#169

Post by godshatter »

ilaksh wrote: 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…

> Take the perspective of one of these things. You think 100 times faster than a person. That means that if it takes 30 seconds for a user to respond or to give you your next instruction, you are waiting 3000 seconds in your loop. For 50 minutes.

These things don't have a "perspective". They simply guess based on a lot of statistics from a large language data source what they should say next. They are not going to strategize, when they start improving their code they are not going to have an overall objective in mind, and the more they use their own output for training the more likely that things will go off the rails.

They will be useful, as we've already seen, but if you're looking to create real AI this is not the path to take. We'd be better off resurrecting semantic nets, working on building a database of concepts gleaned from parsing text from the internet into it's underlying concepts, and working on figuring out volition.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#170

Post by neilk »

meh8881 wrote: post #128
greatpostman wrote: post #98

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

Regardless of incentives, I don’t see any particular reason to think he has a more informed view than other experts on the trajectory of AI. He’s made several incorrect bets (capsule networks). I’m sure he’s smart and all. His contributions were valuable. But he’s not special in this particular moment.

Your viewpoint is fascinating. So the inventor of backpropagation, Turing award winner, Google researcher, mentor to the CTO of OpenAI, doesn’t have any special insights about AI and the tech industry that’s forming around it? He might as well be some guy off the street?

Who, in your opinion, _does_ have enough context to be worth our attention?

Because if you’re waiting for Sam Altman or the entire OpenAI team to say “guys, I think we made a mistake here” we’re going to be knee-deep in paperclips.

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