131–140 of 264 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Three years ago, people were saying "LLMs just generate plausible-sounding text, they don't understand the notion of truth so they can't do verifiable work like math proofs."
They still can't. But very smart humans constructed ways to use the monkeys with typewriters (with a statistical advantage) to find correct answers to problems where they already knew how to verify the answer.
A few snippets from his full post here: https://gwern.net/guardian-angel . > "The chatbot personas are deeply misaligned with you, and aligned with their owners; and the economic incentives are to farm you with ads and subscriptions, while racing not to amplify you but to replace you." > "On my visits to the Bay Area, I would ask AI researchers or interns why they are doing their current research or projects, when in…
The last 200 years of science, technology, and engineering is a long story about eliminating work people had to do being replaced by higher level work. Each time, each wave, there was always the FUD about the work nobody had to do any more and each time there were always new things to do enabled by people no longer having to do so many of the old things.
The human won't exit the loop. The people who imagine they will have, at the same time, too much and not enough imagination. Their endgame is always some kind of hand waving magic where suddenly everything is fixed and works.
It's hard to read Gwern's accompanying article without seeing this for what it is, which is a kind of mania. I'm sure he means well and is genuine in his aspirations, but what's outlined for GA is framing LLM's as quasi-gods, which they absolutely are not. I wish him the best, and look forward to being proven wrong.
(I'm not a part of GA.) I've known gwern for the better part of a decade. Working with him has been great. We've done quite a few projects together, including being the first ones to demonstrate that GPT-2 could play chess (or rather, can be used for actual useful work instead of just being an autocomplete). He's a great person. I've wanted to do a writeup on it for some time, but what surprised me the most is his hu…
> Imagine an LLM which actually sounded like you, and to an extent, thought like you. How much would you pay to have access to a smarter version of yourself? I find the idea dehumanizing and revolting. The notion of then selling it is the spoiled cream on top.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an interesting time when the bar has moved to "It’s not like diplomacy and war will end". But that is on the table. Nuclear weapons caused the end of wars as we know them. Great powers no longer directly attack each other. And AI is much more powerful than nuclear weapons, with an equal capacity for damage and a much greater capacity for good. By the way, I donate monthly to GiveWell and the shrimp welfare proje…
Yikes
> What would it take for LLMs to make me 100× more productive? Without this, I am doomed to irrelevance. Are you, though? You will only be "doomed" if your place your value system squarely on "productivity". Then what is to differentiate you from a machine? * * * Edit: I'm not sure how I can feel confident about a proposal that puts so much value on "productivity". How can you reconcile this with "self-actualization"…
The thing is, we're all eventually irrelevant. That's the way the universe works. Every single one of us, after enough time. Claiming we're "doomed" to it is just ego talking.
(I'm not a part of GA.) I've known gwern for the better part of a decade. Working with him has been great. We've done quite a few projects together, including being the first ones to demonstrate that GPT-2 could play chess (or rather, can be used for actual useful work instead of just being an autocomplete). He's a great person. I've wanted to do a writeup on it for some time, but what surprised me the most is his hu…
> " How much would you pay to have access to a smarter version of yourself? " How much would I pay to rent my fucking self from a landlord? No, bodylord? Mindlord? Poe's Law. But looking at the post, they argue that big AI labs have an incentive problem which stops them from personalising, but Guardian Angel will make agents which are "Genuinely yours". In what sense is it genuinely mine if someone else owns it and r…
Your individual sovereignty will only survive the upcoming era if you own the hardware like you own your brain. And by "own", I mean physically owning the thing and being able to reproduce it on your own. You need to be able to manufacture an entire custom computer from scratch with raw materials, perhaps using a miniature fridge-sized silicon fab + 3D printer home appliance, at home. Otherwise, the individual gradually becomes part of a larger organism because the reproductive locus of control for the computer is at the corporation/society level - a computer cannot replicate on its own and needs a society to build it. The human gets sucked into that superorganism by evolutionary pressures and eventually integrates. Similar things happened in the past when prokaryotes combined to form eukaryotic cells, and when individual cells combined to form multicellular organisms.
Not everyone will get sucked in, though. Evolution doesn't place all of its eggs in one basket. Some people will build robots to automate humans out of the computer production loop entirely, thereby removing integration pressure and producing at least one purely digital species. We will most likely see a variety of species emerge out of this intelligence explosion, some which augment their own intelligence using self-replicating local hardware (fabs that fab fabs, like this but smaller: https://fab2.com), and some which are wireheaded to a datacenter, with varying degrees of success at various scales. They will compete. And there will still be unaugmented humans that continue to live and die the old school way like we do today, albeit with habitable zones compressed.
(I'm not a part of GA.) I've known gwern for the better part of a decade. Working with him has been great. We've done quite a few projects together, including being the first ones to demonstrate that GPT-2 could play chess (or rather, can be used for actual useful work instead of just being an autocomplete). He's a great person. I've wanted to do a writeup on it for some time, but what surprised me the most is his hu…
I can nod along when I hear and read people talking about the dangers of these technologies and the endgame of their creators; and then suddenly very weird when everyone except me is nodding along that the answer must be similar (but different) technology! It's as if technologists are stuck in a room of mirrors, unable to imagine a world in which "solutions" don't ultimately just continue to feed technology's increas…
(I'm not a part of GA.) I've known gwern for the better part of a decade. Working with him has been great. We've done quite a few projects together, including being the first ones to demonstrate that GPT-2 could play chess (or rather, can be used for actual useful work instead of just being an autocomplete). He's a great person. I've wanted to do a writeup on it for some time, but what surprised me the most is his hu…
I can nod along when I hear and read people talking about the dangers of these technologies and the endgame of their creators; and then suddenly very weird when everyone except me is nodding along that the answer must be similar (but different) technology! It's as if technologists are stuck in a room of mirrors, unable to imagine a world in which "solutions" don't ultimately just continue to feed technology's increas…
And yet, the main tangible contribution emerging from this early recognition (and obsession) was to inspire a lot of brilliant CS/math types and billionaires like Peter Thiel or Jaan Tallinn to build and fund companies like OpenAI and Anthropic which went on to literally create the very thing they were convinced will destroy the world, leading to an ever escalating arms race to “AGI”. Also lots of crypto and a murky web of non-profits doing unclear stuff.
The proximity to money in the Silicon Valley/VC world seems to limit the imagination to founding yet another new tech startup that really, definitely won’t compromise their values and will be different this time.