Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims • Hacker News Board

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

#441

Post by zer00eyz » Sun, May 19, 2024, 1:08 PM UTC

consumer451 wrote: post #303

zer00eyz wrote: post #260

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…

>> This will be near-post-scarcity society. Capitalism will soon have become so successful

Not even close.

Take something like the iPhone. Everyone will want a pro max latest version. Great we can make 8 billion of them. How do you hand them out... we have to get in line I think.

The person at the back of the line, looking at 8 billion assholes in front of them is gonna get stabby...

The chart you're pointing out is showing us that an increase in productivity and/or creativity only will serve to exacerbate disparity, not improve it. Who goes first when there are more firsts is going to be a bigger problem.

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

#442

Post by onthecanposting » Sun, May 19, 2024, 1:08 PM UTC

renegade-otter wrote: post #434

sensanaty wrote: post #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 ar…

I sort of cover that in "SkyNet is not coming to kill you": https://renegadeotter.com/2024/04/22/artificial-intelligence... AI can generate a lot of automated output, that is true, but my argument is that it's almost always mediocre at best. There is a LOT to be said about the dangers of AI coming from the people running and funding it - not the AI itself. That stuff is complete bullshit.

The productive output of many people is also just mediocre. I think of chat AIs as near-zero cost interns or the boss's nephew. Probably doesn't know what it's talking about, but can get a lot done with supervision.

I hope the net result will be a shift toward upskilling employees to achieve the expertise handle the difficult edge cases and less time spent on the routine or the trivial. Seems like a win-win. Incentive structures might make this hard.

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

#443

Post by renegade-otter » Sun, May 19, 2024, 1:12 PM UTC

onthecanposting wrote: post #442

renegade-otter wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sort of cover that in "SkyNet is not coming to kill you": https://renegadeotter.com/2024/04/22/artificial-intelligence... AI can generate a lot of automated output, that is true, but my argument is that it's almost always mediocre at best. There is a LOT to be said about the dangers of AI coming from the people running and funding it - not the AI itself. That stuff is complete bullshit.

The productive output of many people is also just mediocre. I think of chat AIs as near-zero cost interns or the boss's nephew. Probably doesn't know what it's talking about, but can get a lot done with supervision. I hope the net result will be a shift toward upskilling employees to achieve the expertise handle the difficult edge cases and less time spent on the routine or the trivial. Seems like a win-win. Incentiv…

I think it was on the Ezra Klein show where he dropped the statistic? Almost 70% of employees are using ChatGPT in one way or another.

In many cases the bosses don't even know, but all it will do long-term is require everyone to produce more output. AI is not about to create 3-day work weeks and everyone living their best lives off of Universal Basic Income.

Literally nothing will change - except that all of us will be expected of more and we will be more stressed out and overworked.

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

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Post by RandomLensman » Sun, May 19, 2024, 1:17 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #440

RandomLensman wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I feel we may be disagreeing about one or both of "very" and "powerful", because otherwise that question makes no sense? Some random member of the, say, Australian parliament, someone I've never heard of, is (relatively speaking) much more powerful than 99% of the planet. A journalist who has an audience of millions, likewise. A software developer whose work is economically valuable either through a broad audience or…

Very powerful would mean someone can effect a lot of change if they so desire (change what a lot of people do, have a new and material law put in, change large financial flows, ...).

Not sure I agree with the 99% of planet. Even if a single member of the Australian parliament could command all of Australia, it would still only amount to commanding 0.3% the global population (or maybe 2% of NATO plus Japan). Maybe within Australia the individual member's power is more than 99% of population?

I don't know much about Australian politics, but in some places vanilla members of parliament or not very powerful within the parliament (compared to party leadership, whips, etc.).

Software developers need people that sell stuff, admin for larger organizations etc. They also very rarely have unchecked ability to change things when those things are high risk etc. Zuckerberg, for example, is a huge exception, not the norm.

Journalists, even with a large readership, typically would not have much ability to get their readership to just act a certain way. There is not a great command relationship.

Most individuals just don't hold much power.

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

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Post by RandomLensman » Sun, May 19, 2024, 1:21 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #439

RandomLensman wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not at all convinced that it is really down to the specific communication vs just seizing an opportunity in one of many possible ways. If they were really super effective broadly, then Trump would have won any popular vote easily.

> If they were really super effective broadly, then Trump would have won any popular vote easily Trump is up against all the other equally effective communicators who are both allowed to and motivated to hold that specific office.

Yes, but again it shows there isn't necessarily a dominant way to communicate. Convincing people is hard.

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

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Post by rubyfan » Sun, May 19, 2024, 1:22 PM UTC

Something about the use of first names “Sam and Greg” to communicate a friendly relationship with corporations is bothersome to me. It strikes me as phony in its attempt at being casual and human, and at the same time attempting to elevate these people by first name in the popular culture seems pompous.

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

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Post by gosub100 » Sun, May 19, 2024, 1:26 PM UTC

Terretta wrote: post #128

tummler wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference here is that these aren't standard-issue HR/legal issues. The technology they're working on poses the gravest of dangers. This is uncharted territory, not just for the tech sector, but period. Whether the recent public back-and-forth is just internal drama/politics spilling out, or there really is a lack of gravitas around the handling of these issues within the company-- neither is good. Others have s…

Text continuation poses "the greatest of dangers"?

I haven't read all the replies to see if this has been posted yet, but one of the consequences is erosion of trust in reality itself: we're starting to see the comments "are you a bot?/is this real? I can't tell if you're serious or if this was from ChatGPT".

It's quite possible that soon the majority of comments online will be with bots, or people will just avoid discourse more and more because they don't know/believe they are talking to a human.

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

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Post by grob-gambit » Sun, May 19, 2024, 1:31 PM UTC

wk_end wrote: post #334

Terretta wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Text continuation poses "the greatest of dangers"?

I’m a bit of an AI skeptic and find the way people talk vaguely about the “dangers” of AI weird and maybe just more hype (or efforts for regulatory capture) rather than actual cause for concern. Still, to me, it seems like the two big scary things that might fall out of recent developments in generative AI are: 1. It might vacuum up an enormous number of jobs very quickly; enough jobs and quickly enough to cause seri…

We already have a worse form of what you are talking about with #2. Youtube is already overwhelmed with convincing bullshit videos put out by humans in order to make money, truth and reality be damned.

The best thing that can happen is we get so many AI videos that the entire bullshit video ecosystem collapses.

The greatest danger we face are all these delusional, ubiquitous, central planning ideas of "what could be done".

Luckily for everyone, what we will actually do in this area is absolutely nothing because that is what we always do.

AI safety is good for twitter content and nothing more. Anyone who believes we are going to do more than nothing and the chips will fall as they may is a complete fool.

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

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Post by thornewolf » Sun, May 19, 2024, 1:31 PM UTC

Aloisius wrote: post #48

MVissers wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at compute scaling and model improvement on that compute, we’re going to get there pretty fast. Both compute, architecture and cost matter, and those have been improving like crazy. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t expect GPT-4o to come out at half the price one year later, with real-time voice, image and text. There is zero sign of slowing, Nvidia keeps building beefier GPUs specialized in LLMs, the…

LLMs don't reason. Without reasoning, you don't have AGI. I can't wait until we're past the peak on the hype cycle because people's understanding of what these models can and can't do or how close we are to AGI isn't grounded in reality.

LLMs do reason. We already have AGI.

Sometimes they mess up when reasoning. Still reasoning.

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

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Post by _heimdall » Sun, May 19, 2024, 1:32 PM UTC

gcr wrote: post #432

_heimdall wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I no longer agree that the "safety" people want the same things we do. I suspect after the bard debacle a bit back that "safety" looks a lot more like 1984. AI Safety will inevitably look a lot like DEI programs. They're trying to thread a needle with two fundamentally opposed ideas, and with a bit of time it turns into little more than a combination of Cover Your Ass policies. The ridiculous thing is that we actua…

I’m confused. How are AI safety and DEI opposed?

They aren't opposed, I may not have been clear enough there.

I raised DEI as an example of a system that, in my opinion, is further down the path that I see AI safety going down. They both started with strong intentions to help guide or redirect an industry but, again in my opinion, both fields have ended up playing a role of PR and "cover your ass" more than anything else.