111–120 of 1001 posts
At some point Sam has started give me E. Holmes vibes and I really don't like it. There's a level of odd/ridiculous/hilarious/stupid AI hype that he feels so comfortable leaning into that part of me starts to begin to suspect that the emperor isn't wearing any clothes.
Imagine thinking that regression based function approximators are capable of anything other than fitting the data you give it. Then imagine willfully hyping up and scaring people who don't understand, and because it can predict words you take advantage of the human tendency to anthropomorphize, so it follows that it is something capable of generalized and adaptable intelligence. Shame on all of the people involved in…
Who is to say that brains aren't just regression based function approximators?
* AGI is going to happen whether they do it or not, and it's dangerous unless properly safeguarded
* OpenAI will try to get there before everyone else, but also do it safely and cheaply, so that their solution becomes ubiquitous rather than a reckless one
* Reckless AGI development should be not be allowed
It's basically the Manhattan project argument (either we build the nuke or the Nazis will).
I'm not saying I personally think this regulation is the right thing to do, but I don't think it's surprising or hypocritical given what their aims are.
Imagine thinking that regression based function approximators are capable of anything other than fitting the data you give it. Then imagine willfully hyping up and scaring people who don't understand, and because it can predict words you take advantage of the human tendency to anthropomorphize, so it follows that it is something capable of generalized and adaptable intelligence. Shame on all of the people involved in…
100% this, I don't get how even on this website people are so clueless. Give them a semi human sounding puppet and they think skynet is coming tomorrow. If we learned anything from the past few months is how gullible people are, wishful thinking is a hell of a drug
What I feel has changed, and what drives a lot of the fear and anxiety you see, is a sudden perception of possibility, of accessibility.
A lot of us (read: people) are implicit dualists, even if we say otherwise. It seems to be a sticky bias in the human mind (see: the vanishing problem of AI). Indeed, you can see a whole lot of dualism in this thread!
And even if you don't believe that LLMs themselves are "intelligent" (by whatever metric you define that to be...), you can still experience an exposing and unseating of some of the foundations of that dualism.
LLMs may not be a destination, but their unprecedented capabilities open up the potential for a road to something much more humanlike in ways that perhaps did not feel possible before, or at least not possible any time soon.
They are powerful enough to change the priors of one's internal understanding of what can be done and how quickly. Which is an uncomfortable process for those of us experiencing it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
100% this, I don't get how even on this website people are so clueless. Give them a semi human sounding puppet and they think skynet is coming tomorrow. If we learned anything from the past few months is how gullible people are, wishful thinking is a hell of a drug
I’m open minded about this, I see people more knowledgeable than me on both sides of the argument. Can someone explain how Geoffrey Hinton can be considered to be clueless?
No one yet knows how this is going to go, coping might turn into "See! I knew all along!" if progress fizzles out. But right now the threat is very real and we're seeing the full spectrum of "humans under threat" behavior. Very similar to the early pandemic when you could find smart people with any take you wanted.
Imagine thinking that regression based function approximators are capable of anything other than fitting the data you give it. Then imagine willfully hyping up and scaring people who don't understand, and because it can predict words you take advantage of the human tendency to anthropomorphize, so it follows that it is something capable of generalized and adaptable intelligence. Shame on all of the people involved in…
The fact that these systems can extrapolate well beyond their training data by learning algorithms is quite different than what has come before, and anyone stating that they "simply" predict next token is severely shortsighted. Things don't have to be 'brain-like' to be useful, or to have capabilities of reasoning, but we have evidence that these systems have aligned well with reasoning tasks, perform well at causal reasoning, and we also have mathematical proofs that show how.
So I don't understand your sentiment.