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Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI

davidgerard.co.uk

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Re: Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI

#41

Post by storkhm »

gregjor wrote: post #10
deltaninenine wrote: post #7

>People’s susceptibility to anthropomorphizing an even slightly convincing computer program has been known since ELIZA, one of the first chatbots, in 1966. It’s called the ELIZA effect. I'm tired of these arguments. Very very few people are anthropomorphizing chatgpt.. very few. The majority of people both technical and non technical who have played with chatGPT in a non trivial way are aware of the chatbots limitati…

Wrong. Too many people do anthropomorphize LLMs. And few people actually understand how LLMs work, or how to detect errors and hallucinations. Calling LLM autocomplete "AI" deliberately conflates the tech with sci-fi tropes that many people already confuse with reality. Numerous examples, from ELIZA to Watson, internet-based scams and frauds, full self-driving, to all of crypto demonstrate human credulity and gullibi…

I would say the most interesting thoughts I have read on this are from Blaise Aguera y Arcas from Google last summer.

He believes we basically anthropomorphize each other. He made a great point how every child basically anthropomorphizes a doll. Anthropomorphizing is just second nature to us.

I would highly recommend reading his two longish medium essays on the subject.

The part about AI and Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is just utter bullshit. Come on. I am sure you don't really believe that.

Re: Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI

#42

Post by Spivak »

maxbond wrote: post #6

The first third of the article is kinda polemic, it won't really convince anyone needing convincing. This however I thought was the substance of it: > The VCs’ actual use case for AI is treating workers badly. > The Writer’s Guild of America, a labor union representing writers for TV and film in the US, is on strike for better pay and conditions. One of the reasons is that studio executives are using the threat of AI…

Which really is just the latest in the time honored "capitalism was the real villain all along" tradition.

Wow look at this thing that has the potential to do labor that previously required a human's time and effort. When you capture the value it means you can either do more or have more leisure. When you don't capture the value it means the treadmill of "being valuable to my employer" just got faster.

Re: Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI

#43

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

Spivak wrote: post #42
maxbond wrote: post #6

The first third of the article is kinda polemic, it won't really convince anyone needing convincing. This however I thought was the substance of it: > The VCs’ actual use case for AI is treating workers badly. > The Writer’s Guild of America, a labor union representing writers for TV and film in the US, is on strike for better pay and conditions. One of the reasons is that studio executives are using the threat of AI…

Which really is just the latest in the time honored "capitalism was the real villain all along" tradition. Wow look at this thing that has the potential to do labor that previously required a human's time and effort. When you capture the value it means you can either do more or have more leisure. When you don't capture the value it means the treadmill of "being valuable to my employer" just got faster.

> Wow look at this thing that has the potential to do labor that previously required a human's time and effort.

Yes, but also it still does "require a human's time and effort", what else is the required training data for these models except a large amount of "human time and effort". It's just scraped for free and all munged together. Bulk, unpaid labour.

Re: Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI

#44

Post by deltaninenine »

gregjor wrote: post #26
deltaninenine wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just your opinion. I say we need to prove this out. If a significant portion of the tech and non techy population anthropomorphized LLMs to the point where they don't understand that LLMs hallucinate then surely some of those people exist on HN. If one of you readers is one such person who honestly has no idea what it means for chatGPT to "hallucinate" then let us know (and be honest, please don't troll). My b…

You're arguing that something observed so often and consistently that it has had a name for decades -- the ELIZA Effect [1] -- doesn't actually happen often enough to care about. I have referred to ChatGPT hallucinations with multiple friends and family, some in tech and some not (like my parents and my kids), and with one exception none of them knew what I was talking about. Like most people they think computers can…

>doesn't actually happen often enough to care about.

That's my entire point. It doesn't happen often enough to care about.

Sounds like you have some anecdotal experience of it happening to your entire family and a lot of your friends.

I experience the opposite. It has happened to exactly none of my friends and family.

We do live in contradictory universes where you experience one thing and I experience another thing. Given the contradiction let's refer to the shared experience: nobody on this entire HN thread has experienced the Eliza effect. The shared experience proves my pov.

>Almost everyone I know is much more likely to believe AIs have already or will soon put them out of a job

This first part of your sentence has a higher likelihood of being true. The reason is because there are instances of it are already happening. It's limited given the limitations of LLMs but we are at a point where if the hallucinations are fixed then it can very much replace many jobs.

Nuclear strikes and slavery is a bit far fetched.

Re: Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI

#45

Post by deltaninenine »

gregjor wrote: post #33
deltaninenine wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A significant portion of the American population doesn't accept the results of the 2020 election. No amount of proof will change their mind. This is different. There's obvious bias here. Many people don't want to believe the election is legit because of team and group mentality. People tend to believe what they want. Additionally, people can't "see" the results. It can't fully be proven because there is always a lay…

> There is no layer of indirection. There is no room for someone to lie to themselves. Additionally, the bias for chatGPT is actually in the other direction. Bing search and customer service chatbots, for example, give a layer of indirection. Spam emails, LLM-generated legal briefs and term papers have indirection when the recipients (judge, professor) don't interact directly with the LLM. Since interacting directly…

>Bing search and customer service chatbots, for example, give a layer of indirection

There is no layer of indirection you are directly chatting with the AI. You are not having a third party describing his experience with the AI to you.

>I argue that too many people already have a bias towards believing ChatGPT/LLMs equals AGI, because the media has primed them to believe that.

No point in arguing if you don't have some form of evidence. My evidence is there isn't a single person on this thread who is fooled by AI or isn't aware of the limitations of current gen AIs.

You just need to find one person in this entire thread who fits your description, link it here and you'll be right as you falsified my statement. This is the data driven Conclusion.

Let's use data to get to the bottom of this. Seriously.

Re: Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI

#46

Post by maxbond »

Spivak wrote: post #42
maxbond wrote: post #6

The first third of the article is kinda polemic, it won't really convince anyone needing convincing. This however I thought was the substance of it: > The VCs’ actual use case for AI is treating workers badly. > The Writer’s Guild of America, a labor union representing writers for TV and film in the US, is on strike for better pay and conditions. One of the reasons is that studio executives are using the threat of AI…

Which really is just the latest in the time honored "capitalism was the real villain all along" tradition. Wow look at this thing that has the potential to do labor that previously required a human's time and effort. When you capture the value it means you can either do more or have more leisure. When you don't capture the value it means the treadmill of "being valuable to my employer" just got faster.

I can see you understand the criticism being made, and I can see you're dismissing it, but I don't see why. You've accurately described mechanisms at play, but you don't justify them.

Why should VCs continue to "capture the value" of our leisure time and drive it towards zero? I understand that makes them lots of money, but why is that a good way to run society?

Consider the same reasoning in a different scenario:

I'm so tired of people complaining about their cancer. Yeah, your cells divide. When they divide the way they're intended to, you live a normal life. When they divide out of control, your health suffers. Thems the breaks.

I think we can all agree this argument is ridiculous. It describes the mechanism at work, acknowledges the harm that's taking place, but ultimately the argument here is "if we have an explanation for what's happening, then it isn't a problem, it's a fact of life." Clearly that's not so - just because we understand cancer, doesn't mean we accept it.

Help me understand why your argument is different?

Re: Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI

#47

Post by deltaninenine »

gregjor wrote: post #34
deltaninenine wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Some experts, and lots of people who have not themselves built LLMs, such as Elon Musk, Yuval Noah Harari, Steve Wozniak. Never denied this. I did not intentionally hide this. I will say your statement did not mention that one of the signers is the premier expert. The person who reignited interest in neural networks, Geoffrey Hinton. It's not "some" experts. It's many many preeminent experts. It's more accurate to s…

> Nobody fully understands these networks. Not even the people who build them. The "experts" admit this. That's repeated a lot but it's not entirely accurate. No one can explain how an LLM gives the answers it does (not even the LLM). LLMs have a vast search space of tokens and use probabilities to make their responses non-deterministic. But the people who build and train LLMs do know how they work -- obviously since…

>That's repeated a lot but it's not entirely accurate. No one can explain how an LLM gives the answers it does (not even the LLM).

Uh I literally said no one fully understands these networks. And you go on to say that my statement isn't accurate then confirm my statement by saying:

>No one can explain how an LLM gives the answers it does (not even the LLM).

I mean this is exactly what I said. We can't explain it... Because we don't fully understand it..

>But the people who build and train LLMs do know how they work -

No they actually don't. The surprising accurate responses of chatGPT were actually not predicted. Many experts literally do not fully understand what's going on. This is categorically true and I can quote them if you need it, but this is easily googable.

>I could feed my younger children that same misinformation and they wouldn't question it. I could tell my parents that their Alexa listens to everything they say and records it forever on a big disk on a satellite in orbit, and they would believe me.

>A Google researcher said that publicly (he got fired), and much discussion took place here. If I was more interested in the topic I could poll people,

I already polled people and did a Google search of HN. My other post was a poll. And a Google search of yielded nothing. This is actually quite strong proof. HN has multitudes of users, not being able to find one is a nearly 0 ratio.

The researcher who got fired by Google is an interesting case. The reason is because he's not referring to gpt4 or gpt3.5 or bard. In subsequent interviews he has said that he's referring to lamda. An internal google LLM that hasn't been released. He said that one is "awake" and specified directly that it's different from the LLMs the public currently plays with.

Nobody can confirm or deny that statement because we can't directly interact with the lamda AI as Google has it locked down pretty hard.

Re: Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI

#48

Post by gregjor »

deltaninenine wrote: post #44
gregjor wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're arguing that something observed so often and consistently that it has had a name for decades -- the ELIZA Effect [1] -- doesn't actually happen often enough to care about. I have referred to ChatGPT hallucinations with multiple friends and family, some in tech and some not (like my parents and my kids), and with one exception none of them knew what I was talking about. Like most people they think computers can…

>doesn't actually happen often enough to care about. That's my entire point. It doesn't happen often enough to care about. Sounds like you have some anecdotal experience of it happening to your entire family and a lot of your friends. I experience the opposite. It has happened to exactly none of my friends and family. We do live in contradictory universes where you experience one thing and I experience another thing.…

I think you misread my first sentence.

Re: Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI

#49

Post by deltaninenine »

JdeBP wrote: post #35
deltaninenine wrote: post #7

>People’s susceptibility to anthropomorphizing an even slightly convincing computer program has been known since ELIZA, one of the first chatbots, in 1966. It’s called the ELIZA effect. I'm tired of these arguments. Very very few people are anthropomorphizing chatgpt.. very few. The majority of people both technical and non technical who have played with chatGPT in a non trivial way are aware of the chatbots limitati…

It is ironic that you just anthropomorphized it yourself by using "it forgets".

When you delete things from your hard drive that fits the definition of making your computer forget something.

Look up the definition of forget. It is not a human exclusive action. Therefore it is not "anthropomorphizing": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/forget

Re: Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI

#50

Post by deltaninenine »

davidgerard wrote: post #40
deltaninenine wrote: post #7

>People’s susceptibility to anthropomorphizing an even slightly convincing computer program has been known since ELIZA, one of the first chatbots, in 1966. It’s called the ELIZA effect. I'm tired of these arguments. Very very few people are anthropomorphizing chatgpt.. very few. The majority of people both technical and non technical who have played with chatGPT in a non trivial way are aware of the chatbots limitati…

co-author here: I warn you, I've got a paperclip and I'm not afraid to use it.

Don't actually understand your joke here.
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