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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

#391

Post by trinsic2 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #153
CartyBoston wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

somebody has a no disparage

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…

AI in Microsoft's hands when they can't even be ethical about how the develop their own OS. Scary stuff.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#392

Post by meh8881 »

esafak wrote: post #342
meh8881 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of incentives, I don’t see any particular reason to think he has a more informed view than other experts on the trajectory of AI. He’s made several incorrect bets (capsule networks). I’m sure he’s smart and all. His contributions were valuable. But he’s not special in this particular moment.

What's wrong with capsule networks?

They didn’t really go anywhere.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#393

Post by Buttons840 »

intalentive wrote: post #337

We still don’t have Rosie the Robot. When it comes to learning and adapting to new environments, we don’t even have AI as smart as a mouse. LeCun is right, there is still a long way to go.

We don't have Rosie the Robot, but we do suddenly have the Star Trek computer.

In Star Trek the ship's computer just sits their waiting to be asked a question or to perform some task. When called upon it does its thing and then goes back to waiting. It is competent but not ambitious.

I asked GTP4 to help me modify some machine learning code, to add some positional encodings. It did well. I then asked it, verbatim: "Get rid of the PositionalEncoding class. I don't want traditional sine-wave based position encoding. Instead use a regular nn.Embedding class to encode the positions using differentiable values." GTP4 understood and did it correctly.

What I asked it to do sounds almost like vocab soup to me, the person asking it. It sounds like a line some actor spent an hour memorizing on Star Trek, and yet GTP4 understood it so well it modified existing code and wrote new code based upon the request.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#394

Post by oldstrangers »

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.

Yeah, what could we possibly hope to learn from the "The Godfather of A.I." about the protentional dangers of A.I.

Maybe... they're better positioned to opine on this topic than you are?

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#395

Post by r00fus »

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…

> furthermore it is more humane to use terminators instead of 20 years olds clearing buildings and autonomous tanks/tracks driving though IEDs filled streets

Are you trolling? Because it's exactly this sort of "righteous war" rationale that props up empires and totalitarian dictatorships alike.

It's also human nature to rationalize evil and wish it into "good".

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#397

Post by ncr100 »

politician wrote: post #165
ncr100 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's assuming something. Think about it otherwise: how do you know it's dangerous until you've seen it in real life? You raise a kid, they end up being a murderer, should you have aborted them?

Per the article, he had early misgivings — moving to Canada and refusing money from DoD. It’s not anything like your hypothetical.

Ahh - I see - thank you @politician, that is right.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#398

Post by ilc »

notRobot wrote: post #68
nigamanth wrote: post #26

One question for the tech experts, of course people can use AI and technology for bad and illegal activities, but isn't that the case about everything? The person who invented the car didn't think about people using it to smuggle drugs or trample other people on purpose, and the wright brothers didn't think about all the people who would die due to plane crashes. So instead of focusing on the bad that's happening wit…

Yes, let's just ignore the people losing jobs and falling victim to AI-generated large-scale disinformation! Yes there has been good done. But we need to focus on the bad, so we can figure out how to make it less bad.

We don't need AI to fall victim to those things. Disinformation is already a major problem. And the spread between the rich and poor, and the leverage their jobs produce... is larger than ever.

Right or wrong. AI is merely another thing that shifts the balance a bit. I'm not even sold as far as far as many say.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#399

Post by ActorNightly »

roody15 wrote: post #385
ren_engineer wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is exactly the direction we are headed. "they can surveil an entire city in real-time with this and track where everybody is and who they are meeting with. No form of protest or movement against the government will be possible if it's scaled up"

... except if ordinary citizens have access to offline versions of advanced AI to use.

Prompt: Give me plans for an anti drone weapon that I can use without being detected.

This is why AI development needs to be accelerated, not put on hold. Companies can and will continue research because that is where the money is. If everyone else is scared of the hypothetical sentient AI boogeyman, then ordinary people will get left in the dark.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#400

Post by maxdoop »

JeremyNT wrote: post #290
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?

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.

Every single retort of “these machines aren’t smart or intelligent” requires answering the question, “what is intelligence”?

I struggle to see how GPT-4 is not intelligent by any definition that applies to a human.

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