Live data from Hacker News

Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

twitter.com

421–430 of 508 posts

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT-4 won't kill us, and probably neither will the next generation of models. But if we keep building more and more powerful AI systems, eventually we will reach a point where one will become an existential threat. Present dangers of AI include Fake News, impersonation through deepfakes, biases and discrimination in the models, job loss and economic instability, loss of human purpose through individuals becoming…

If being able to write lots of convincing text could give you immense power why haven't any of the billions of humans that can already do that done so?

Have a look at government, academia, religion, all instances of immense power acquired through convincing text. There are probably other examples.

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#422
post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> General intelligence arises as skillful adaptive control over one's environment, through sensory-motor concept aquistion, and so on. This isn't a generally accepted definition or process. And indeed it seems to preclude people like Stephen Hawkins who had little control over his environment (or to be pedantic, people who had similar conditions from birth).

For the purposes of my criticism of the Turing test, any discussion whatsoever about what capacities ground intelligence is already entertaining what Turing ruled out. He made the extremely pseudoscientific behaviourist assumption that no such science was required, that intelligent agents are just input-output relata on thin I/O boundaries. Any even plausible scientific account of what capacities ground intelligence…

I don't understand your argument well at all.

> So questions such as, "what would the latest SpaceGuys TV show be like if Elon handed just launched BlahBlahRocket5 ?" cannot be given fit answers

I don't understand this at all. ChatGPT can do a great job imagining a world like this right now, and there is no substantial difference in the output of a LLM based "imagination" vs a human based "imagination".

> These require the actual faculty of imagination, along with being in the world and so on.

I think you are implying by this that human's imagination requires a consistent world model and that because LLM's don't really have this they can't be intelligent. Apologies if I have misinterpreted this!

But human imagination isn't consistent at all (as anyone who as edited a fiction story will tell you). Our creative imagination process generates wrong thoughts all the time, and then we self-critic and correct it. It's quite possible for LLMs to do this fine too!

Basically I think my point is that I believe a perfect simulation of intelligence is intelligence, whereas I suspect you don't think it is, maybe?

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not like Microsoft’s CEO was behaving very admirably or free of ego.

For some reason people give Satya a pass. I guess because he comes off as a nice guy. Somehow no one associates all the anti competitive stuff MS does with him - like bundling Teams into Office, or forcing a Copilot button onto OEMs, or dark pattern nagging about default apps, or inserting ads into the start menu, or whatever. But that mode of operation is classic MS, and it makes sense they are still this way, since…

Satya is a canny player, he knows how to give with one hand and take away with the other like a magician so you don't see the trick. I wish he was pushing Microsoft to be a bit more ethical, but he has done good stuff and he's a good model CEO, since he hasn't done any one genius thing, but he's consistently positioned and executed well which is something the "average" leader can model.

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will cull them like we did when we invented the sewing machine and the loom... them luddites were right then and they can be again /s

I am half /s, half dead serious. The sarcastic half is me playing along with AGI singularity maximalists like Sama. The other half is me dead scared that he is right. LLMs/GPTs != cryptocurrency. There are actual use cases other than money laundering. If you are paying attention, then the insane scaling in capabilities should have us all dumbfounded. I agree with Linus Torvalds: "just" predicting the next token is no…

Attention will be scarce, influeism will replace capitalism.

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re 1 - aren't people mostly doing bullshit jobs already? Re 2 - fakery in videos and images has been a part since their inception. So, don't worry, I guess? The only thing is the scale of bs that could be put out, and whether the wider population lose trust in what they see on screens. Which would be a good thing, imo.

The “computers are replacing our jobs” line is very emotive and I feel both sides of the argument are looking at the problem too binary. Yes some jobs are menial but they are still some people’s literal livelihoods. And yes, industries need to evolve and job preservation shouldn’t be the #1 criteria for holding back change. The real question we should be asking ourselves isn’t either of those two former points but ac…

Humans can never run out of economic activities we call for each other. Period!

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#426
post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The LLM has no mechanism to be sensitive to what causes this distribution shift, which can be radical for any given topic, and happen over minutes. This sounds so logical and authoritative. And yet: me> What event would cause a change in what all people said about Ukraine/Russia pre/post a few hours of 2022 GPT4O> A significant event that caused a drastic change in global discussions about Ukraine and Russia in 202…

Right... because it's been trained on those news stories. The point is a model whose training stopped in 2021 would not produce a history of ukraine (etc.) that a person writing in 2023 would. The later GPTs are trained on the user-provided prompts/answers of previous GPTs, so this process (which isnt the LLM, but it's the activity of research staff at OpenAI) is what's inducing approximate tracking of some changes i…

> would not resolve its ability to track, say, the user changing their clothes.

In context learning works fine for this (and does for the Russia/Ukraine change too).

But yes, sure. It can be outdated in the same way a person cut off from news can be.

We've never argued that a shipwrecked person who was unaware of news became less intelligent because of that, just that their knowledge is outdated.

Additionally, the whole point of machine learning is to make systems that learn so they remain useful.

It seems likely that a model in soon (one year? five years? one month? who knows..) will be able to continually watch video broadcast news and videos of your home, continually updating its model.

In this case it would understand both the Ukraine issue and what you are wearing. Is it now suddenly intelligent? It's true it might be more useful, but to me that is a different thing.

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#427
post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most competent at that, did so, and are immensely powerful. That's basically all of politics, and not only in a democracy. You do have to be significantly above average to get there. Current generation LLMs are a bit above the human average, enough to be interesting, but probably not enough to be a personal Goebels for every would-be dictator.

What are examples of immense powerful text writers these days?

Journalists, pundits, politicians, software developers, advertisers, lawyers, propagandists. Take your pick.

Right now, the best LLMs are interns not experts at each of these things; I don't expect the transformer model to be good enough to reach the top level in each of these things, but then again I didn't expect anything like Stable Diffusion to happen before self driving cars.

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#428
post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most competent at that, did so, and are immensely powerful. That's basically all of politics, and not only in a democracy. You do have to be significantly above average to get there. Current generation LLMs are a bit above the human average, enough to be interesting, but probably not enough to be a personal Goebels for every would-be dictator.

What are examples of immense powerful text writers these days?

Donald Trump and Fox News are maybe the canonical examples in modern times. Say what you like about Rupert Murdoch and Trump, they're incredibly effective communicators who have built fanatical religions based on words alone. And what we're about to see is that level of reach and intensity multiplied by millions.

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#429
post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are examples of immense powerful text writers these days?

Journalists, pundits, politicians, software developers, advertisers, lawyers, propagandists. Take your pick. Right now, the best LLMs are interns not experts at each of these things; I don't expect the transformer model to be good enough to reach the top level in each of these things, but then again I didn't expect anything like Stable Diffusion to happen before self driving cars.

Which ones there are very powerful? Other than perhaps political leaders (which need not be great writers), power is usually low.

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#430
The talk of AI exterminating us via paperclips is an annoying one to me that detracts from the real dangers that are currently unfolding:

- scammers are having the time of their lives, and their capabilities are only going to get better and easier

- people are actively getting dumber as they trust the hallucinated outputs blindly

- regular communication is starting to break down because you can't trust that people aren't just copy/pasting some AI bullshit in lieu of an actual discussion

- I've already seen AI girlfriend products which doesn't strike much confidence in our ongoing future as a species considering the numbers I've seen on some of them

And the biggest one for me is all the psychotic C-levels and MBA types who only give a shit about squeezing every single red cent they can by any means possible, including firing off thousands of people en-masse to be replaced by some shitty chatbot owned by a corporation backed by fucking Micro$oft

I don't think AI is going to send out nukes, I do believe it's going to replace every single person's job and make the powerful even more powerful.

"Oh but UBI!", an AI sycophant will shout, as if saying the magic incantation changes the reality of the real world somehow.

Post reply on HN