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Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

nytimes.com

261–270 of 1001 posts

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

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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…

>>with things like cognitive architecture etc. That part is doing a LOT of very heavy lifting in a story that otherwise hangs together. The problem is that we are nowhere near such a thing. These LLM and generative systems produce very impressive results. So does a mirror and a camera (to those who have never seen one). What we have is enormous vector engines that can transform one output into another that is most st…

> The problem is that we are nowhere near such a thing.

How are you certain of this?

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#262

This reads as: Scientist discovers powerful genie in a bottle. Scientist releases powerful genie from bottle. Scientist now regrets releasing genie from the bottle.

Perhaps. But for the rest of us celebrating the genie and doubting its capacity for harm, maybe the scientist's opinion is worth listening to?

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

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post #213

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

GPT basically showed that scalable brute-force trumps clever theoretical models which makes many academics salty.

That's something that Microsoft research wrote two decades ago. And those results were well known in the NLP community.

Example: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... (Michele Banko published a few similar papers on that topic)

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

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post #260

Not knowing anything about Hinton's work, I am guessing there is no mystery to why he left. Many people leave after a couple of years. His initial grant of RSUs has vested and he wasn't able to make a sufficiently large impact within the company to justify him staying.

Is a 10 year vesting period normal?

The norm is a 4 year vesting period - but if you are doing important work and having a big impact, you'll be given more grants over time. Those will then come with a new vesting period. This is a very normal way for Silicon Valley companies to retain their engineering talent.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#265

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

Even developers at Open AI played almost no part in the developments at Open AI. 99.9999% of the work was done by those who created the content it was trained on.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

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post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently Indian politics is rife with false generated news stories about opponent political parties (This is according to a news article I skimmed this year, sorry I don't have any links or reference.) So it's happening, now

That's also the case in US politics as well, and has been for a while now.

For those unaware: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/19/pentagon-...

I don't know if I've seen it with US politics but it was blindingly obvious the US or someone else were using bots during the coup in Bolivia and the attempted one in Venezuela.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#267

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…

My biggest concern for military use of AI is how incompetent most military contractors are. These huge companies employ an army of not-very-good engineers whose primary purpose seems to be to over-complicate projects. Imagine the same teams that make planes which need to be hard rebooted every few days, now they're making advanced AI to dynamically target and kill people.

This reminds me of the turret robots from Futurama

https://youtu.be/MsY0PVqTleY

https://youtu.be/WzbT0Q2jh_w

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#268

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…

Outcome: Automate the economy, and employ the dispossessed to kill one another in the name of ethics (because AI military is unethical).

This seems weird and arbitrary.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

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“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” said Hinton to the NYT. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.” Calculators are smarter then humans in calculating, what does he mean by that?

I think GPT4 can converse on any subject at all as well as a (let's say) 80 IQ human. On some subjects it can converse much better. That feels fundamentally different than a calculator.

Do you frequently talk to people who you know to have an 80 IQ about a range of subjects?

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

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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…

"You release Bard and it is an embarrassing disaster, a critical fail leading to an almost 50% reduction of Google's stock price" This didn't happen so maybe you need to reexamine your entire premise.

Not 50% but they did lose 100 Billion because of the Bard demo.
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