The bigger question is whether the paper reflects the views of insiders at OpenAI.
Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?
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Re: Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?
#12It’s pretty bizarre how SV decision makers have shifted from talking about ML to LLMs to straight up Artificial Intelligence.
I think one of the reasons is that LLMs are very good at what the execs do every day for a living and because of that, use as a way of assessing each other’s mental capacity: producing coherent-sounding speech (1).
Now that the LLM can do what any VP has dedicated their entire life to mastering, they assume that the system will be able to handle any task that they delegate, including programming, system design, project management, etc. Since the people doing this are paid less than them, surely it must be simply easier.
By this intuition, LLMs have now become intelligent, and are capable of handling anything at all. It is a must we find a way to integrate them in all of our products. And so, they’re now AI.
(1) That speech doesn’t necessarily have to carry a lot of meaning. Its main purpose is establishing the competence of the speaker.
Re: Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?
#13It starts with the sentence "You can see the future first in San Francisco" and while the following paragraphs make a good, positive upbeat point, reading it out of context I cannot help thinking about homeless people in the streets and a pretty dark and dystopian future. It's interesting how a place can be so radically different things at the same time.
Indeed, my perception of SF is pretty much Thunderdome.
Re: Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?
#14The tone of Aschenbrenner's paper is odd. It's somewhere between his wet dreams and his nightmares. In fairness he seems to be aware of that but it's like someone grinning reflexively while they tell you bad news.
He's convinced and it's going to be terrible and it's going to be important and he's going to be part of it.
I guess for sure in 5 years it will be much clearer.
Re: Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?
#15My question after reading the paper is: if he believe with conviction everything he wrote, why did he recently become an investor instead of either working in policy or working on the tech itself?
If the tech is going to transform humanity into a new economic paradigm and give the country controlling it a decisive advantage to be the sole superpower, being an investor is either futile or meaningless. Even doing nothing and just enjoy the ride seems to be more rational.
Re: Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?
#16I love how the author of this article makes no intent to give even a start on why he thinks the author of the paper is naive or even describe what the paper is about and give an abstract.
Re: Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?
#17It’s pretty bizarre how SV decision makers have shifted from talking about ML to LLMs to straight up Artificial Intelligence. I think one of the reasons is that LLMs are very good at what the execs do every day for a living and because of that, use as a way of assessing each other’s mental capacity: producing coherent-sounding speech (1). Now that the LLM can do what any VP has dedicated their entire life to masterin…
5 years ago we felt like we had to write programs that always get the right answer. We never realized that all it had to do was apologize and people wouldn’t mind.
Eliezer Yudkowsky is up in arms about it because it can bullshit better than he can and never has to take a break. It can replace the authors of The New York Times opinion page if not the actual reporters. Can it replace the CEO?
Re: Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?
#18Asked the smartest person I know and got a prediction of AGI in 1 to 2 centuries. This is basically a self-assessed IQ test.
Did you make sure you agreed on what was meant by "AGI"? I ask because ever since InstructGPT I've been noticing that people not only don't agree on any letter of that initialism, but also sometimes mean by it something not present in any letter. So for me, even InstructGPT counts as a general purpose AI; for OpenAI, it's not what they mean by AGI (they require it to be economically significant); and it definitely is…
I don't think we will agree on a definition of AGI, nor should we. To me this is settled by freedom of religion being a universal human right.
This is why the AGI in X years is such an interesting perspective.
(And why I'm deeply concerned about my downvoters.)
Re: Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?
#19Few times seen a blog post touching on so many subjects, without actually saying anything. Is there an argument, point, story, poem, news, analysis or something being made here?
WHich is a proof this blog post was written by a smart human.
Re: Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?
#20Here is a summary of Aschenbrenner's paper:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zmRTWsYZ4ifQKrX26/...