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Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

nytimes.com

351–360 of 1001 posts

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#352
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?

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.

I had lunch with Yoshua Bengio at the AGI 2014 conference in Laval, CA. This was just before his talk on pathways to AGI via neural networks.

Everyone at that conference, including myself, have assumed we will eventually create smarter than human computers and beyond.

So it’s not a new position for people who have been in AI for a long time, though generally it was seen as an outsider position until recently.

There’s a ton of really great work done prior to all of this around these questions and technical approaches - I think my mentor Ben Goertzel was the pioneer here holistically, but others were doing good technical work then too.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#353
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

GPT-4 is absolutely more generally knowledgeable than any individual person. Individual humans can still easily beat it when it comes to knowledge of individual subjects. Let’s not conflate knowledge with intelligence though. GPT-4 simply isn’t intelligent.

So here in this forum right now, convince everyone that you are intelligent.

….

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, all the governments would LOVE this! I'll take my chances with AI fake posts. At least I can just ignore them.

Public policy is a little more nuanced than shooting from the hip with Tweet-sized morsels. Please, read the second article, it addresses your concerns. It’s maybe a 5 minute read. I spent a lot of time making it concise.

Fair enough. I'll at least have a look at it.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#355

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.

If that was true we could have had GPT-3/etc years ago. It's a bit like saying that college graduates are dumb because after all what have they learnt but a bunch of knowledge in text books.

The success of these LLMs comes down to the Transformer architecture which was a bit of an accidental discovery - designed for sequence-to-sequence (e.g. machine translation) NLP use by a group of Google researchers (almost all of who have since left and started their own companies).

The "Attention is all you need" Transformer seq-2-seq paper, while very significant, was an evolution of other seq-2-seq approaches such as Ilya Sutskever's "Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks". Sutskever is of course one of the OpenAI co-founders and chief scientist. He was also one of Geoff Hinton's students who worked on the AlexNet DNN that won the 2012 ImageNet competition, really kicking off the modern DNN revolution.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#356

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…

Military application of AI drones isn't even the worst possible use, it's nations using them to completely subjugate their own population(although the same tech could be used against non-peer nations). Combination of things like Gorgon Stare to direct smaller AI controlled drones like what they are using in Ukraine would be a police state nightmare. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare https://longreads.com/201…

IF we can already see the remnants of what is to come, its probably already in motion behind the scenes somewhere.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#357
post #162

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.

Another thing people will do is exculpate themselves by pointing at a real video and saying, "That was made by an AI. I'd never do something like that."

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#358
post #297

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…

I wonder at what point does alingment become an issue for AI systems ? Given sufficiently large distances, assuming no FTL communication, if you're spawning copies with the same goals you're risking misalignment and creating equally powerful adversaries outside of your light cone.

> creating equally powerful adversaries outside of your light cone.

If we're still bound by special relativity (since you said no FTL), there is nothing outside of your light cone.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That reminds me of this, more optimistically: Matter and energy had ended and with it space and time. Even AC [Automated Computer] existed only for the sake of the one last question that it had never answered from the time a half-drunken computer technician ten trillion years before had asked the question of a computer that was to AC far less than was a man to Man. All other questions had been answered, and until thi…

> reverse the direction of entropy This is unironically my spiritual belief in a greater power and purpose for living even if I can’t directly do anything to affect it. I think it is one of the most fundamental dogmas of any religion, that ultimately there is order.

I think that life itself is the struggle against entropy and evolution (or rather, selective pressure) is the optimization test function for it. The heat death of the universe is an inevitability, but maybe some multi-galactic superorganism will find a way to build truly self-sustaining sources of energy eventually; but it won't be us.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was going to mention this exact same quote. At the end of the movie, all the AI combine into another, shall we say, plane of existence. I do wonder though who's actually running the hardware they're running on. Her is remarkably prescient in terms of where we're headed, at least the beginning of the movie, with regards to being able to talk to a fairly intelligent assistant, unlike Siri or Google Assistant of today…

This also happens in the new Westworld.
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