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Please ignore the deluge of complete nonsense about Q*

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Re: Please ignore the deluge of complete nonsense about Q*

#91

Post by dorkwood »

kibwen wrote: post #57
andy_xor_andrew wrote: post #14

I took an AI course in college back around 2015. Just a bit before AlphaGo. One project was to implement a simple Q-learning action/value system to play simple games, like Pacman. The crypto-bros-turned-AGI-experts on twitter are spouting the most uninformed, misguided garbage about this whole thing, it's quite amazing to watch. And I'm not saying that I am smart or an expert about Q* because I took an introductory c…

> The crypto-bros-turned-AGI-experts on twitter are spouting the most uninformed, misguided garbage about this whole thing, it's quite amazing to watch. After the LK-99 debacle where Twitter "confirmed" its superconductivity and breathless sheisters heralded the dawn of a new age, my new policy is "inverse Twitter": if Twitter thinks something is a big deal, then it's more than than 50% likely that it's unsubstantiat…

HN wasn't much better during the whole LK-99 debacle. The crowd wasn't at all welcoming to skeptics.

Re: Please ignore the deluge of complete nonsense about Q*

#92

Post by lacrimacida »

iepathos wrote: post #44
ren_engineer wrote: post #33

The leak about Q* feels like an olive branch to let the former OpenAI board and Ilya save a bit of face, probably part of the terms for Sam coming back plus it distracts from all the drama and puts a positive spin on things. >"The board didn't handle things well, but they were right to be concerned because OpenAI did have some sort of research breakthrough" Not coincidence that this leaks after Sam comes back, rather…

Good point about timing of the leak. IMO the whole fiasco still reeks of incompetence and no PR move can wash that clean.

In my opinion, the fiasco is still a reliable warning sign and is drawing attention to OpenAi/Sama/Microsoft dynamics. It may keep on giving even if things appear to have stabilized now.

Re: Please ignore the deluge of complete nonsense about Q*

#93

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #82
ethanbond wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously! The “anything except safety concerns” theses are getting more outlandish by the hour, now bordering on actual conspiracy theory stuff.

> The “anything except safety concerns” theses are getting more outlandish by the hour, now bordering on actual conspiracy theory stuff. Interesting claim. We know with certainty that there was a conspiracy to move against Sam Altman. What does "conspiracy theory" mean?

Oh, come on. This is the part where overly-literal engineers play the equivalent of the 8-year-old siblings "But I'm not touching you!!" game.

Does anyone really question what the parent commenter was referring to with the phrase "conspiracy theory" given the context of this thread?

Re: Please ignore the deluge of complete nonsense about Q*

#94

Post by 9cb14c1ec0 »

tayo42 wrote: post #62
concordDance wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who thought that? I don't know of anyone who thought that and I'm in doomer circles.

They had a phased release of gpt2 because they thought the world couldn't handle the full model

Fortunately, humanity is good at adapting. I remember when gpt2 was going to end the world. Many people can now easily identify when a piece of text was generated by gpt4. This is adaption.

Re: Please ignore the deluge of complete nonsense about Q*

#95

Post by [deleted] »

vkou wrote: post #86
orochimaaru wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was a view that was initially taken by the government for encryption as well. But everyone can agree open sourcing the algorithms and libraries has been the best move. It is the same with AI/AGI. Anything closed source and having regulatory oversight is useless, decreases innovation, increases bureaucracy and will only serve those who wish to build a “moat” to further their hold on the technology.

> Anything closed source and having regulatory oversight is useless Source isn't even the problem, unless you're a billionaire, you can't afford to train the model. This isn't the wheel, the printing press, the PC, or the public internet, which created opportunities for everyone . This is pay-to-play that is only affordable to the nation-state the mega-corporation, and the latter might let you play around as a digita…

[deleted]

Re: Please ignore the deluge of complete nonsense about Q*

#96

Post by __loam »

loveparade wrote: post #74
cgearhart wrote: post #70

Does anyone have any references to published works discussing the idea he’s pushing here that all the top labs are trying to replace next token prediction with planning? (Note: I’m not interested in using a token-prediction LLM to solve planning problems; I’m interested in work that tries to replace token sampling with action sampling by formulating the text completion problem as a planning domain.) Or is that not wh…

If you do search for Reinforcement Learning based decoding in language models (or neural machine translation) you'll find hundreds of papers. It's a super common research topic that has been around forever, way before LLMs were a "thing". Just follow the reference from there. Nothing new here, really. But doing it on the scale of something like GPT-4 is only something OAI can do, and I don't doubt that there's some b…

> But doing it on the scale of something like GPT-4 is only something OAI can do

It's shocking to me that people think Google and Meta don't have the scale to operate at this level.

Re: Please ignore the deluge of complete nonsense about Q*

#97

Post by zmgsabst »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #52
qualifiedai wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The default in science is that the side arguing a point has the burden of proving it correct. Not asking the other side to prove them wrong.

Burden of proof is a tragically misapplied concept. The question is what position should be the default given some uncertainty? This isn't decided in a vacuum. The default should be decided based on the facts and utility estimates of various outcomes where relevant. In the case where the issue is of purely academic interest, the burden of proof is on those making the claim. When the issue has real world consequences,…

You’re assuming your conclusion by saying AI is like a gun.

That’s not a rational argument for why we should be concerned — you merely asserted you were.

Why is catering to your feelings the default position?

Re: Please ignore the deluge of complete nonsense about Q*

#98

Post by zmgsabst »

harshreality wrote: post #89
qualifiedai wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show me LLM that has reached a level of automony and self sufficiency of a cat (Yann's example) or even of a simple beattle. LLMs are tools in amplifying individual human intelligence, 100% of automony and will come from their user (human). Also, even as tools they have fundamental limitations which stem from their autoregressive nature

Before the era of quantum physics, the idea of a weapon like fission or fusion weapons would've been inconceivable without resorting to magical thinking. Your argument, and Yann's, is that AGI, or what you call AGI, is a kind of quasi-intelligent golem that, despite being generally intelligent, doesn't have human-level intelligence. Your claim that it will never be human-equivalent, much less trans-human/ASI, is buil…

They don’t share your assumption a super intelligent AGI is a problem.

Re: Please ignore the deluge of complete nonsense about Q*

#99

Post by daneel_w »

dorkwood wrote: post #91
kibwen wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The crypto-bros-turned-AGI-experts on twitter are spouting the most uninformed, misguided garbage about this whole thing, it's quite amazing to watch. After the LK-99 debacle where Twitter "confirmed" its superconductivity and breathless sheisters heralded the dawn of a new age, my new policy is "inverse Twitter": if Twitter thinks something is a big deal, then it's more than than 50% likely that it's unsubstantiat…

HN wasn't much better during the whole LK-99 debacle. The crowd wasn't at all welcoming to skeptics.

Nor to optimists.

Re: Please ignore the deluge of complete nonsense about Q*

#100

Post by Lerc »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #51
ren_engineer wrote: post #33

The leak about Q* feels like an olive branch to let the former OpenAI board and Ilya save a bit of face, probably part of the terms for Sam coming back plus it distracts from all the drama and puts a positive spin on things. >"The board didn't handle things well, but they were right to be concerned because OpenAI did have some sort of research breakthrough" Not coincidence that this leaks after Sam comes back, rather…

I don't buy this at all. Just going to leave a previous comment I wrote about people coming up with semi-outlandish reasonings behind why something occurs, when there is nothing wrong with the straightforward assumption (that is, the board was concerned about the direction of AI, which is wholly unsurprising given the board's makeup, the Q* stuff was just another concerning point, and there were obviously personality…

Quite frankly the wild speculation is the part of this entire event that I have found most fascinating. When it comes to the business side of things I am far enough removed to not really have an opinion. I don't know the internal thoughts of any of the players and I know sufficiently little about them that I couldn't guess. So I'm not in a position to tell what should have happened. I'm naturally inclined to believe that everyone was doing what they thought was right.

In contrast to that have been these wild theories that are mutually exclusive claiming to know the beliefs, emotions, and plans of practically anybody involved.

In all I have found it to reveal far more about the speculators than it has about events themselves.

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