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Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

economist.com

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Re: Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

#11

Post by slowmovintarget »

personjerry wrote: post #2

Hmm I spent a good amount of time in big tech, now work in AI, and I minored in philosophy at Berkeley back in the day (Parmenides, Socrates, Plato etc.) How do I align myself with such a job?

Find non-Utilitarian alternative to Effective Altruism by somehow channeling Dostoevsky? Propriety and Reward?

Re: Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

#13

Post by Terr_ »

geye1234 wrote: post #7

For those of us who have read Paul Graham's submarine essay, should the last paragraph be a giveaway? The "AI theoretician's" quote seems to have nothing to do with the rest of the article.

> Paul Graham's submarine essay

To save a few clicks: https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

> [The] PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.

Re: Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

#15

Post by felooboolooomba »

Terr_ wrote: post #13
geye1234 wrote: post #7

For those of us who have read Paul Graham's submarine essay, should the last paragraph be a giveaway? The "AI theoretician's" quote seems to have nothing to do with the rest of the article.

> Paul Graham's submarine essay To save a few clicks: https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html > [The] PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.

>more than half probably come from PR firms

Imagine how bad it is on social media.

Re: Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

#19

Post by YuechenLi »

Strangely, I found that LLMs responds better to philosophical explanations alongside instructions when writing code than simple imperative tasks of "do this". For example, if you tell a frontier model "This is the feature I'm trying to implement, and this is the problem I intend to solve with it and the reasoning behind it.", you usually get a lot more reliable results that both pass tests as well as function as you intended, even if your spec isn't as detailed overall.
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