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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*

#111

Post by next_xibalba »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #103

One thing that makes no sense about Sam Altman hiding the Q* progress from the board is that Ilya Sutskever was part of the board too. As he is the technical lead and Altman isn't technical at all, how would it be a secret from Sutskever? NB: I know nothing about these people and don't track it, but my consistency check failed on this claim based on the flood of news over the past week.

Where did the myth of Sam "not being technical at all" come from?

Patrick Collison seemed satisfied with Sam's tech chops [1]. If that isn't enough of a vouch, god help the rest of us.

[1] https://www.quora.com/Is-Sam-Altman-highly-technical-Has-he-...

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

#112

Post by gexla »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #103

One thing that makes no sense about Sam Altman hiding the Q* progress from the board is that Ilya Sutskever was part of the board too. As he is the technical lead and Altman isn't technical at all, how would it be a secret from Sutskever? NB: I know nothing about these people and don't track it, but my consistency check failed on this claim based on the flood of news over the past week.

It makes no sense because nobody but Sam and the board knows what actually happened.

My guess is that they arrived to an inflection point. The company was on the cusp of taking an investment which would have valued it at 80 billion. One of the board members mentioned that self destruction would have been in line with their mission of safety for humanity. It seems like at some point you have to ditch the "we're doing this for the benefit of humanity" act and act like a profit hungry machine with a startup CEO going balls out. In this case, "balls out" won. The board was way too late. The AGI escaped with the creation of the for-profit company.

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

#113

Post by zyang »

lordfrito wrote: post #110

I dunno all this talk about OpenAI lately really feels more and more like hype to me. What they've accomplished so far is really impressive. But until I see AGI for real I won't hold my breath. Just feels to me like some expert/wizard level PR is going on right now.

It feels more like spin to distract people from the insane board coup drama.

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

#114

Post by sangnoir »

loveparade wrote: post #106
__loam wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They have the scale in terms of hardware, but they likely don't have the infrastructure to experiment efficiently on this scale on LLMs specifically. OpenAI has been building LLM-specific infrastructure for years. Why do you think Google Bard sucks so much? It's not because there's some special magic secret that only OAI knows. It's because you need a huge amount of purpose-built infrastructure and trial-and-error it…

> They have the scale in terms of hardware, but they likely don't have the infrastructure to experiment efficiently on this scale on LLMs specifically

This reads like wishful thinking, in the absence of a real moat. Do you think the hyperscalers who are buiding data centers as quickly as they can get permits do not have the infra scale to match OpenAI? Who do you suppose has been providing ever-increasing revenue to Nvidia these past few years? They didn't start doing ML experimentation when ChatGPT was announced.

I agree that they aren't specifically giving LLMs all of their attention - their infrastructure still has to support existing, profitable products that bring in real revenue. I disagree that they can't experiment to the same scale.

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

#115

Post by flagrant_taco »

wkat4242 wrote: post #108
eigenvalue wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, Altman separately alluded to a recent big discovery/breakthrough in a talk shortly before all the drama went down.

Could it have been due to him breaking some kind of NDA? After all that would make sense then that they're so mysterious about it, after all they don't want to release more information.

If the original reasoning of Sam's lack of honest communication with the board was an indication, it would make more sense if that comment tipped the board off to a breakthrough they weren't made aware of.

That's not to say it must be deeper than the usual power plays and politics, but breaking an NDA doesn't seem to fit well fromwhat I've seen.

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

#116

Post by flagrant_taco »

zmgsabst wrote: post #97
hackinthebochs wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The default position should be based on risks and unknowns, I don't think the GP was making any recommendation based on personal feelings.

The fact is we don't know how current ML actually does what it does, we don't know what we'll have next month, and we wouldn't know how to recognize an AI or AGI if we developed one. The risks and unknowns are high, the default position should be to not develop the technology unless and until someone proves without reasonable doubt why we can and should do it, and how we'll do it safely.

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

#117

Post by liquidpele »

zyang wrote: post #113
lordfrito wrote: post #110

I dunno all this talk about OpenAI lately really feels more and more like hype to me. What they've accomplished so far is really impressive. But until I see AGI for real I won't hold my breath. Just feels to me like some expert/wizard level PR is going on right now.

It feels more like spin to distract people from the insane board coup drama.

That’s just what the AGI wants you to think.

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

#118

Post by flagrant_taco »

qualifiedai wrote: post #76
naasking wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The default in science is that the side arguing a point has the burden of proving it correct Right, and Yann is arguing the point that AI and LLMs are not or will not be dangerous. Where's his proof? As the parent posters have said, he has none.

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

How would you define or recognize a level of intelligence or autonomy that is sufficient to raise concerns? Would you be able to recognize it before its too late?

An early GPT-4 test ended up with GPT successfully solving capchas by tricking a TaskRabbit worker into doing it for them [1]. When asked by the worker if it was a robot, GPT decided to lie to the worker and claim it had a visual impairment that made it difficult to solve the puzzle. That sounds like a level of autonomy and social engineering skills that could be concerning to a reasonable person.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/gpt4-openai-chatgpt-taskrabb...

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

#119

Post by __loam »

loveparade wrote: post #106
__loam wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They have the scale in terms of hardware, but they likely don't have the infrastructure to experiment efficiently on this scale on LLMs specifically. OpenAI has been building LLM-specific infrastructure for years. Why do you think Google Bard sucks so much? It's not because there's some special magic secret that only OAI knows. It's because you need a huge amount of purpose-built infrastructure and trial-and-error it…

> But due the global shortage on hardware right now, nobody has that, not even Google.

Google has nearly unlimited resources to pursue this shit.

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

#120

Post by drngdds »

qualifiedai wrote: post #3

Yann has been a refreshing source of reason and common sense with regards to AI safety, regulation and open-source. I wish we had more people like him and less AI doomer cultists.

Yann LeCun is a clown lol. The Chief AI Scientist at _Facebook_ of all companies expects me to just trust him when he says "it'll be safe guys, we'll figure it out, we wouldn't release anything that was harmful :)"
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