Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

We can be certain of this by 1) looking at the structure of these engines, 2) looking at the kinds of errors that they make, and 3) looking at their learning methods.

The engines are basically indexes of common associations, maps of frequency of occurrence. Regurgitating a bunch of stuff that has a high correlation to your input is NOT intelligence, it is the result of having an insanely large map. This can often produce impressive and useful results, but it is not intelligence or wielding concepts.

For errors, the image generators provide some of the best illustrations. They produce images most associated with the inputs. One error illustrates this very well, asked to produce an image of a woman sitting on a sailboat, the bikini-clad woman looks great, until you see it — her face and torso are facing mostly towards the camera, but also, her buttocks are facing the camera and legs sitting pointing away from us. No intelligent person or concept-wielding "AI" would produce such an error - it'd know the relationships with head, torso, buttocks and legs. These don't. Another telling type of error is when asked to produce an image of Person X on a new background, when the training set had only a handful of images of Person X. It cannot do it - it returns essentially one of the full training images, with no new background. There is obviously zero concept of what a person is, or what the boundaries of a human shape would be. They can only produce these results with hundreds of thousands of images, so what is built up is the set of things that match or don't match the label (e.g., "astronaut" or "Barack Obama".), so that the actual images are statistically separated from the thousands of backgrounds.

Which brings us to how they learn. Intelligent beings from worms to humans learn and abstract on incredibly small data sets. By the time a child can use a crayon, having seen only hundreds of humans, s/he can separate out what is a human from the background (might not make a good drawing yet, but knows the difference). Show a child a single new thing, and s/he will separate it from the background immediately. In contrast, these LLMs and GANs require input of nearly the entire corpus of human knowledge, and can only some of the time output something resembling the right thing.

It is entirely different from intelligence (which is not to say it isn't often useful). But the more I learn about how they work and are built, the less I'm worried about this entire generation of machines. It is no more cause for worry than an observation 25 years ago that Google could do the work of 10000 librarian person-hours in 0.83 seconds. Great stuff, changes values of some types of work, but not an existential threat.

Nah it’s just circular semantic wank. Criticize does not need to be interpreted through negative emotions.

He left Google because he would not be allowed to work there will pooping in the roadmap they’re putting together to counter OpenAI.

STEM minded folks need to eat their own science; the emotional response to certain language is not evenly distributed. It’s thought policing af to take your reaction to “criticize” as a universal one.

International treaties can hold to an extent. The greatest damage will be its internal use. Where countries can tell others to 'not interfere' in local business. Each country will run its own nefarious program and it will take a violent revolution to overthrow governments - and the next one will pick up the AI baton where the previous one left with a slogan of 'making sure no one does what the previous govt did'. So instead of an international global AI issue we will have strong national AI abuse. In either case, democracy will be put under strain.

The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe -- ninety-six billion planets -- into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.

Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then after a moment's silence he said, "Now, Dwar Ev." Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel. Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath.

"The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn." "Thank you," said Dwar Reyn. "It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer." He turned to face the machine. "Is there a God?" The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay. "Yes, now there is a God." Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch. A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.

     (Fredric Brown, "Answer")

The flip-flopping of AI critics is completely explainable by flip-flopping morals of the architects.

> Dr. Hinton said that when people used to ask him how he could work on technology that was potentially dangerous, he would paraphrase Robert Oppenheimer, who led the U.S. effort to build the atomic bomb: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”

If anyone outside the core architects changes their mind on AI either way, I don't think negatively at all. It's all confounded by the naivete of a few, which by definition is open to constant change. The critics just did or didn't think someone so naive could rise to so much power.