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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

#371

Post by tomComb »

riku_iki wrote: post #348
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to be diplomatic, but this is such an unnecessary snarky, useless response. Google obviously did go slow with their rollout of AI, to the point where most of the world criticized them to no end for "being caught flat footed" on AI (myself included, so mea culpa). I don't necessarily think they did it "right", and I think the way they set up their "Ethical AI" team was doomed to fail, but at least they did clea…

> Google obviously did go slow with their rollout of AI, to the point where most of the world criticized them to no end for "being caught flat footed" on AI (myself included, so mea culpa). they were criticized because they are losing competition not because of rollout, their current tech is weaker than ChatGPT.

Their current generative AI is weaker because they were focused on many other facets of AI such as AlphaFold and Waymo.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#372

Post by janalsncm »

skepticATX wrote: post #229
drcode wrote: 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.

It would be very helpful to define intelligence before asserting that a thing does not have it. A cursory look at the Wikipedia page for the definition of intelligence shows there is no one, agreed-upon definition. In fact some believe that “intelligence” simply means pointing to ourselves.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#373

Post by RockyMcNuts »

ttul wrote: post #160
RockyMcNuts wrote: post #106

The real problem is the bad actors - trolls, mental and financial strip miners, and geopolitical adversaries. We are just not psychologically adapted or intellectually prepared or availing of a legal framework for the deluge of human-like manipulative, misleading, fraudulent generative fake reality that is about to be unleashed. Free speech, psychopathic robots, adversaries who want to tear it all down, and gullible…

Absolutely this. You can already use GPT-4 to have a convincing text-based conversation with a target. And audiovisual generative AI is fast reaching the uncanny valley. Since there is apparently no way to put the genie back in the bottle, everyone needs to start thinking about how to authenticate themselves and others. How do you know the person calling is your daughter? Is that text message really from the new book…

The real-time voice cloning seems ready for prime time, the video is getting there.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-cloned-myself-with-ai-she-foo...

(very not impressed by certain financial institutions who seem to be relying on the voice fingerprinting and SMS for 2-factor)

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#374

Post by 1attice »

lxe wrote: post #370

Disappointing. Yet another industry leader sewing public FUD for some reason. Why not bring rational discourse into the conversation around software safety and ethics. Automation has been the driving force of industry since the industrial revolution itself. We're not new to automation, and we are certainly not new to safety of autonomous systems. AI is no different.

Prove that "AI is no different." Its creators appear to differ with you on this point.

The burden of proof is thus yours.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#375

Post by quotemstr »

belter wrote: 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'm imagining a sampled voice intoning this quote as I research the "Artificial Intelligence" tech tree in Alpha Centauri.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#376

Post by itake »

lxe wrote: post #370

Disappointing. Yet another industry leader sewing public FUD for some reason. Why not bring rational discourse into the conversation around software safety and ethics. Automation has been the driving force of industry since the industrial revolution itself. We're not new to automation, and we are certainly not new to safety of autonomous systems. AI is no different.

I suspect there is more to it than what has been published. These are smart people that appear (to us) acting irrationally.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#377

Post by AlexandrB »

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…

> What have we got now? ChatGPT is trained to give all sides of the issue and not express strong opinions, which is better than 90% of journalists and academics manage.

I think we're experiencing the "golden age" of AI at the moment. We'll see what kind of monetization OpenAI and others will land on, but I would be shocked if messing with the model's output for commercial gain is not in the cards in the future.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#378

Post by fatherzine »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #352
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.

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…

Possibly he estimated that AGI will come after his death. Like most of us, he was content to do his best work, knowing he will not have to personally deal with the consequences of his own creation. That he is 75 and got worried, now that's an interesting development.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#379

Post by chrsjxn »

janalsncm wrote: post #367
chrsjxn wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Totally agreed that words like “smart” and “intelligent” are loaded and poorly defined. Competence is a better term since it implies some sort of metric has been used to compare to humans. However, even at human levels of competence a tool can be superior by being faster or more scalable than humans.

To be 100% clear, my main AI fear is that these tools are going to be exactly as dumb as people but much, much faster.

We know optimization engines (like social media algorithms) can cause harm by amplifying human speech. And even without algorithmic biases, moderation is expensive. We know disinformation is easy and effective online.

Add in AI tools that can be very convincing, even if they're wrong. AI tools that have been trained on human text to hide biases and build up extremely one sided narratives.

It's not like these things are particularly difficult for human beings to do. And AI might even do it unintentionally, like we've seen with biased models trained on hiring data. But the AI tools are definitely going to do it _faster_.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#380

Post by lifeinthevoid »

lxe wrote: post #370

Disappointing. Yet another industry leader sewing public FUD for some reason. Why not bring rational discourse into the conversation around software safety and ethics. Automation has been the driving force of industry since the industrial revolution itself. We're not new to automation, and we are certainly not new to safety of autonomous systems. AI is no different.

What are your credentials in the field if I may ask?
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