Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient • Hacker News Board

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#131

Post by karaterobot » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 12:38 AM UTC

noncoml wrote: post #113

dekhn wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me. I used to attend private meetings with a bunch of scientists and him and spent a fair amount of time talking to him ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_Foo_Camp ). It's pretty hard to get him talking but I was very patient. Back when I started, Google was fairly small and it was easy to hang out around the founder's area in 43, and occasionally I'd have coffee with Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and Larry and…

“Trust me bro” is not a reliable source, no matter I how important or famous someone is. Edit: believing one’s anecdotal story is different to accepting the original assertion of the OP as true. Not saying they are lying, just take it with a pinch of salt.

They're saying they were an eyewitness.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#132

Post by pigtailgirl » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 12:38 AM UTC

noncoml wrote: post #113

dekhn wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me. I used to attend private meetings with a bunch of scientists and him and spent a fair amount of time talking to him ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_Foo_Camp ). It's pretty hard to get him talking but I was very patient. Back when I started, Google was fairly small and it was easy to hang out around the founder's area in 43, and occasionally I'd have coffee with Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and Larry and…

“Trust me bro” is not a reliable source, no matter I how important or famous someone is. Edit: believing one’s anecdotal story is different to accepting the original assertion of the OP as true. Not saying they are lying, just take it with a pinch of salt.

-- isn't taking someone at face value one of the more valuable merits of this community? --

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#133

Post by GauntletWizard » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 12:40 AM UTC

Reki wrote: post #118

spacephysics wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The capitalism that’s lifted more people out of poverty than any other system in human history. Hopefully it’s not over.

Just because paperclips are useful doesnt mean we should keep making more of them forever.

The nice thing about capitalism is that it has controls on it, like "Who wants to buy the products", and "Does everyone think that corporation's leader is an asshole and will buy from competitors" that a command economy doesn't.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#134

Post by civilized » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 12:40 AM UTC

psi75 wrote: post #106

dekhn wrote: post #81

Annual reminder: the reason Larry Page originally started Google wasn't to solve search or become rich, it was to develop a sustainable source of income to produce infrastructure for ML research and hire motivated ML researchers to develop the technology point where it would become AI in an externally recognizable way (say, a computer program that could play some interesting game better than anybody else, or solve a…

I believe all this, and it's terrifying. If AI emerges in the private sector (and therefore under the control of rich people) we might as well give up on the entire human experiment, because the AI will be put toward malevolent ends and we, as a species, shall fail. The good news is that we probably won't see AGI for at least 50 years. There's a decent chance of capitalism being over by then.

This is the dominant history of the next century in certain circles. It's become cliché by repetition and doesn't seem to require any justification. People just vibe with it.

Capitalism's doomsday has been predicted as relentlessly over the last couple centuries as the religious version, but neither seems any closer. By my reckoning, anyway.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#135

Post by astrange » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 12:40 AM UTC

gnramires wrote: post #74

srvmshr wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A brilliant colleague Janelle Shane works specifically on how language models fail (obnoxiously often). This is her line of research to show how LLMs are overhyped / given more credit than should be. I think her fun little experiments will give a better answer than I ever can :). She's on substack & Twitter https://janellecshane.substack.com/p/okay-gpt-3-candy-hearts

To be fair, I didn't know what a exactly a 'candy heart message' was. I probably would have failed this particular Turing test.

I think it would be fair to give you Google access or at least an encyclopedia.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#136

Post by ocdtrekkie » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 12:40 AM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #117

noncoml wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Trust me bro” is not a reliable source, no matter I how important or famous someone is. Edit: believing one’s anecdotal story is different to accepting the original assertion of the OP as true. Not saying they are lying, just take it with a pinch of salt.

Feel free to disbelieve me. But I think I got a pretty good read on the situation having talked to a wide range of the original players and a fair number of xooglers and googlers who frequent this site have probably interacted with the old leadership enough times to know what their real motivations were.

How do you feel Google today squares with the Larry Page you met who said advertising funded search engines were inherently unethical?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#137

Post by sudosysgen » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 12:41 AM UTC

grumpopotamus wrote: post #64

srvmshr wrote: post #4

LLM are definitely not sentient. As someone with a PhD in this domain, I attribute the 'magic' to large scale statistical knowledge assimilation by the models - and reproduction to prompts which closely match the inputs' sentence embedding. GPT-3 is known to fail in many circumstances which would otherwise be commonplace logic. (I remember seeing how addition of two small numbers yielded results - but larger numbers…

> GPT-3 is known to fail in many circumstances which would otherwise be commonplace logic. (I remember seeing how addition of two small numbers yielded results - but larger numbers gave garbled output; more likely that GPT3 had seen similar training data.) These things are orthogonal to sentience.

Not really. Anything that's sentient should have the general intelligence to figure out addition. Make mistakes, sure, but at least understand the concept.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#138

Post by dekhn » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 12:41 AM UTC

kareemsabri wrote: post #127

dekhn wrote: post #81

Annual reminder: the reason Larry Page originally started Google wasn't to solve search or become rich, it was to develop a sustainable source of income to produce infrastructure for ML research and hire motivated ML researchers to develop the technology point where it would become AI in an externally recognizable way (say, a computer program that could play some interesting game better than anybody else, or solve a…

So why'd he try to sell Google to Excite in 1999 for $1M. https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/29/google-excite/

Dunno- we never discussed that. also, note that the author of the article (MG Siegler), and the founder of Excite (Joe Kraus) both ended up as venture capitalists working for GV.

Edit: the CEO of Excite at the time said the issue was that Larry wanted Excite to rip out all their search servers and replace them with Google (which would have been an inside-out acquisition, where the acquired company takes over the acquiring company):

Bell, currently with General Catalyst Partners, recalls Google’s asking price between $250,000 to $500,000 and 1% of Excite. He says the issue was not in the financial terms but in the larger deal points.

“Larry page insisted that we have to rip out all of the Excite search technology and replace it with Google,” Bell said.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#139

Post by woodruffw » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 12:41 AM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #126

woodruffw wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I also accept that my experience may be an entirely artificial experience, like a movie projected on a screen, or that my brain might not be capable of comprehending the objective nature of the universe, or that even the concept of 'I' in this entire statement may in fact be objectively meaningless. This is the content of the second meditation. Because you can be deceived, you are a thinking thing. In other wor…

Not that I'm really interested in this, but... nonthinking things can be deceived.

Descartes describes the capacity for deception as a necessary condition for a thinking thing, not a sufficient one. In particular, a thinking thing must also doubt and affirm, deny and will, have sense, and contain the capacity for mental images, among other conditions.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#140

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 12:41 AM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #81

Annual reminder: the reason Larry Page originally started Google wasn't to solve search or become rich, it was to develop a sustainable source of income to produce infrastructure for ML research and hire motivated ML researchers to develop the technology point where it would become AI in an externally recognizable way (say, a computer program that could play some interesting game better than anybody else, or solve a…

[deleted]