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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

#321

Post by Izkata »

chrsjxn wrote: post #315
neatze wrote: post #99

“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?

That statement seems like such science fiction that it's kind of baffling an AI expert said it. What does it even mean for the AI to be smarter than people? I certainly can't see a way for LLMs to generate "smarter" text than what's in their training data. And even the best case interactions I've seen online still rely on human intelligence to guide the AI to good outcomes instead of bad ones. Writing is a harder tas…

> I certainly can't see a way for LLMs to generate "smarter" text than what's in their training data.

By combining contexts from different fields. People are already using it with non-English languages and it responds in that language with something they couldn't previously find in that language.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#322

Post by drawnwren »

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…

This comment appears to be getting upvotes, so I am going to jump in and say that it is very clear to anyone who knows that this commenter has no idea how AI is being used in the military or how military targeting works in the West.

These things are generally classified, but algorithms are nowhere close to being considered decision-capable and human-in-the-loop targeting will be the norm for quite some time.

Even next generation systems that are being considered are still human queued and the AI comes in during the engagement step.

If you look at the stages of the F3EA cycle (Find, Fix, Finish, Analyze) there is no single step which is currently offloaded to an algorithm.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#323

Post by fatherzine »

kalimanzaro wrote: post #45
tdullien wrote: post #7

When channelling Oppenheimer, it is worth remembering that von Neumann quipped: "Some people profess guilt to claim credit for sin."

Love the parallels people these days draw between OpenAI and Oppenheimer (ok, the Manhattan Project, but maybe thats part why OpenAI call themselves that, to alliterate) Especially the part where Sama is trying to gather in one place the most talented, uh, anti-fas?

Manhattan Project, that can be copied and duplicated for practically free. Interesting times.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#324

Post by defgeneric »

Version467 wrote: post #305
JeremyNT wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This quote is the first thing I've seen that really makes me worried. I don't think of ChatGPT as being "smart" at all, and comparing it to a human seems nonsensical to me. Yet here is a Turing award winning preeminent expert in the field telling me that AI smarter than humans is less (implied: much less) than 30 years away and quitting his job due to the ramifications.

He is far from the only one. If you're interested in exploring this further I can really recommend taking a look at some of the papers that explore GPT-4's capabilities. Most prominent among them are the "Sparks of AGI" paper from Microsoft, as well as the technical report from openai. Both of them are obviously to be taken with a grain of salt, but they serve as a pretty good jumping off point. There are some pretty…

> Also I think it's important to mention that just a short while ago virtually no-one thought that shoving more layers into an llm would be enough to reach AGI.

This was basically the strategy of the OpenAI team if I understand them correctly. Most researchers in the field looked down on LLMs and it was a big surprise when they turned out to perform so well. It also seems to be the reason the big players are playing catch up right now.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#327

Post by fatherzine »

revelio wrote: post #145
nologic01 wrote: post #4

> the average person will not be able to know what is true anymore We barely held things together as society without AI unleashing cognitive noise at industrial scale. Somehow we must find ways to re-channel the potential of digital technology for the betterment of society, not its annihilation.

Society will be fine, actually AI will make things much better, just as the internet did. People have been making these kind of extreme predictions for decades and it was always wrong. The only people still upset about better communications tech are the people who pine for the days when all that was expected of respectable people was automatically trusting anyone working for the government, a university or a newspape…

"AI will make things much better, just as the Internet did." We must be living in very different worlds. I sometimes wonder if the numbers behind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disease_of_despair (roughly tripled in 20 years of Internet) are just the first steps of a hockey stick.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#328

Post by licebmi__at__ »

neatze wrote: post #222
lumost wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The line already drawn, no indiscriminate killings of civilians, all this technology only minimizes civilian suffering, furthermore it is more humane to use terminators instead of 20 years olds clearing buildings and autonomous tanks/tracks driving though IEDs filled streets. War is deeply in human nature, it is not going away, question is; how to make it more humane and minimize indiscriminate killings and suffering…

Yet rhetoric against war seems to be about poor American soldiers who give their lives abroad, rather than civilians. I don’t think it’s far fetched to think that people will care less about humanity and civilians if the mortality is reduced for your own army.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#329

Post by jimwhite42 »

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…

> What I can fairly easily imagine in the next few years with improved hardware is something like an open version of ChatGPT that has a 200 IQ and "thinks" 100 times faster than a human.

It seems unlikely that if we can achieve "200 IQ and thinks 100 times faster than a human" in the next decade or two, it going to be on cheap and widely available hardware. Perhaps such an AI could help optimise the creation of hardware that it can run on, but this also isn't going to be quick to do - the bottlenecks are not mainly the intelligence of the people involved in this sort of thing.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#330

Post by [deleted] »

chrsjxn wrote: post #315
neatze wrote: post #99

“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?

That statement seems like such science fiction that it's kind of baffling an AI expert said it. What does it even mean for the AI to be smarter than people? I certainly can't see a way for LLMs to generate "smarter" text than what's in their training data. And even the best case interactions I've seen online still rely on human intelligence to guide the AI to good outcomes instead of bad ones. Writing is a harder tas…

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