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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*

#131

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.

People like his takes because he gives an authoritative gloss to what they already believe. But his points are usually lacking in argument or rigor. Anyone that essentially expects the public to trust them when it comes to the outcome of AI/AGI should be view with suspicion.

But the post links to Twitter (X.) That's the wrong place for argument or rigor. But do you really need that? Seems to me like his post is essentially saying "Pay attention to all this stuff which people have been working on for a long time." He's just casting a vote. The argument and rigor is already there for further reading. That's interesting for me, because I don't know much about the topic. If you already know all this stuff, then maybe it's not interesting.

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

#132

Ah! Is Q* a play on the A* pathfinding algorithm, but with a Q presumably for the Query vector of attention mechanisms? Clever, and actually does reveal something about the project.

If you are basing off the names, it could just as well be a play on the perfect market price in economics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterisk#:~:text=In%20econom...).

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

#133

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

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 dif…

flagrant_taco says >"How would you define or recognize a level of intelligence or autonomy that is sufficient to raise concerns?"

If it asks for the right to vote?

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

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is moot anyway. If someone can build it someone will. Laws and impending Doom or not. It's probably going to be better if it's us than Russia or China.

That's a reductive argument, and won't work with me. What we have is tantamount to an arms race, and trying to suppress another country's development of tech that could be used against them is a thing. We have already restricted access to our microchips to China specifically and Russia through broad sanctions. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/17/business/economy/ai-chips... Russia isn't poised for the current crop of…

> We have already restricted access to our microchips to China specifically and Russia through broad sanctions.

LOL and how is that working?

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

#135

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…

What is human-level intelligence is a normative and philosophical question, which means it will not be resolved in some objective manner. There's no requirements for us to know, there's only requirements for us to propose in the form of norms.

The only approach we will be able to claim objectively can produce systems with human-level intelligence is procreation.

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

#136
post #86

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…

The model is the instance because the instance is what is being used at inference time. The training simply produces some set of weights.

Open source would mean someone could see and run the model code locally/independently to create an instance. For an LLM, this is much less insurmountable of an issue in terms of resources needed.

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

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s kinda proven that it’s a problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TYT1QfdfsM

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

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

A conspiracy is an understanding between people to facilitate action toward a purpose. A theory about a conspiracy is when outsiders to the conspiracy try to reason about motives without being privy to the actual motives (if any) of the conspiracy. By their nature, conspiracy theories can be far more wide ranging than the actual motives of any conspiracy will be. This is one of the things that makes conspiracy theori…

Given that we already know that there was a conspiracy (by the now-ousted OpenAI board to remove Sam Altman), and that people here on HN have been theorizing about this for almost a week now, your definition makes everyone who commented about it a "conspiracy theorist".

In actual "language game" usage, it's just a derogatory term meaning "I don't like these unproven claims, even though I can't disprove them".

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

#140
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A conspiracy is an understanding between people to facilitate action toward a purpose. A theory about a conspiracy is when outsiders to the conspiracy try to reason about motives without being privy to the actual motives (if any) of the conspiracy. By their nature, conspiracy theories can be far more wide ranging than the actual motives of any conspiracy will be. This is one of the things that makes conspiracy theori…

Given that we already know that there was a conspiracy (by the now-ousted OpenAI board to remove Sam Altman), and that people here on HN have been theorizing about this for almost a week now, your definition makes everyone who commented about it a "conspiracy theorist". In actual "language game" usage, it's just a derogatory term meaning "I don't like these unproven claims, even though I can't disprove them".

No it’s actually a derogatory term meaning “excessively complicated theory to support my priors.”

Such as casting clear evidence toward the “safety/commercialization of next gen tech was a point of contention among the board” thesis instead as:

> 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.

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