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Interview with gwern

dwarkeshpatel.com

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Re: Interview with gwern

#131

Post by joenot443 »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #10

www.gwern.net Something I've noticed in spending time online is that there's a "core group" of a few dozen people who seem to turn up everywhere there are interesting discussions. Gwern (who also posts here) is probably at the top of that list.

It's ChrisMarshallNY for me. So frequently I'll come to a comment chain on Apple or Swift or NYC stuff with the intention to make a sweet point, only to find Chris has already said the same thing, though much more eloquently.

He's been building software for 10 years longer than I've been alive, hopefully in a few decades I'll have gained the same breadth of technical perspective he's got.

Re: Interview with gwern

#132

Post by [deleted] »

natch wrote: post #125
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> This is a bit stark: there are many great knowledgeable engineers and scientists who would not get your point about a^nb^n. It's impossible to know 100% of of such a wide area as "AI and CS". I think, engineers, yes, especially those who don't have a background in academic CS. But scientists , no, I don't think so. I don't think it's possible to be a computer scientist without knowing the difference between a regu…

Strong gatekeeping vibes. "Not even wrong" is perfect for this sort of fixation with labels and titles and an odd seemingly resentful take that gwern has being an AI influencer as a specific goal.

[deleted]

Re: Interview with gwern

#133

Post by jririnjjkfk »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #118
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, look. If a student (I'm not a professor, just a post-doc) doesn't know this stuff, I'll point them to the book so they can look it up, and move on. But the student will not tell me I'm "not even wrong" with the arrogance of fifty cardinals while at the same time pretending to be an expert [1]. It's OK to not know, it's OK to not know that you don't know, but arrogant ignorance is not a good look on anyone. And th…

@newmanpo Your comment is [dead] so I can't directly reply to it, but you're assuming thing about me that are wrong. I say above I'm a post-doc. You should understand what this means: I'm the workhorse in an academic research lab where I'm expected to make stuff work, and then write papers about it. I write code and tell computers when to jump. I'm not a philosopher by any stretch of the term and just to be clear, a…

[dead]

Re: Interview with gwern

#134

Post by wyager »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #84

This will come across as vituperative and I guess it is a bit but I've interacted with Gwern on this forum and the interaction that has stuck to me is in this thread, where Gwern mistakes a^nb^n as a regular (but not context-free) language (and calls my comment "not even wrong"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559620 Again I'm sorry for the negativity, but already at the time Gwern was held up by a certain, l…

It seems like his objection is that "parsing formal grammars" isn't the point of LLMs, which is fair. He was wrong about RGs vs CFGs, but I would bet that the majority of programmers are not familiar with the distinction, and learning the classification of a^nb^n is a classic homework problem in automata theory specifically because it's surprising that such a simple grammar is CF.

Re: Interview with gwern

#135

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

natch wrote: post #125
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> This is a bit stark: there are many great knowledgeable engineers and scientists who would not get your point about a^nb^n. It's impossible to know 100% of of such a wide area as "AI and CS". I think, engineers, yes, especially those who don't have a background in academic CS. But scientists , no, I don't think so. I don't think it's possible to be a computer scientist without knowing the difference between a regu…

Strong gatekeeping vibes. "Not even wrong" is perfect for this sort of fixation with labels and titles and an odd seemingly resentful take that gwern has being an AI influencer as a specific goal.

OK, I concede that if I try to separate engineers from scientists it sounds like I'm trying to gatekeep. In truth, I'm organising things in my head because I started out thinking of myself as an engineer, because I like to make stuff, and at some point I started thinking of myself as a scientist, malgré moi, because I also like to know how stuff works and why. I multiclassed, you see, so I am trying to understand exactly what changed, when, and why.

I mean obviously it happened when I moved from industry to academia, but it's still the case there's a lot of overlap between the two areas, at least in CS and AI. In CS and AI the best engineers make the best scientists and vv. I think.

Btw, "gatekeeping" I think assumes that I somehow think of one category less than the other? Is that right? To be clear, I don't. I was responding to the use of both terms in the OP's comments with a personal reflection on the two categories.

Re: Interview with gwern

#136

Post by natch »

tim333 wrote: post #110
robinhouston wrote: post #8

It's been a bumper week for interesting podcast interviews with an AI theme! In addition to this, there are Lex Fridman's series of interviews with various key people from Anthropic [0], and a long discussion between Stephen Wolfram and Eliezer Yudkowsky on the theme of AI risk [1]. 0. https://youtu.be/ugvHCXCOmm4 1. https://youtu.be/xjH2B_sE_RQ

Yeah, and I thought Altman + Tan was good https://youtu.be/xXCBz_8hM9w

I'm only half way through that and it IS good, but I wish they wouldn't burn so much valuable time on recaps of the history that has already been told in so many other interviews, and get on to talking about the real changes we should expect going forward.

Re: Interview with gwern

#137

Post by indoordin0saur »

sourcepluck wrote: post #67

I clicked on the video asking myself, wait, how does the title make sense, how is he anonymous if he's doing videos? Then when I saw the frankly very creepy and offputting image and voice, thinking he'd been anonymised through some AI software, thought, oh no, this kind of thing isn't going to become normal is it. Then - plot twist - I scroll down to read the description and see that that voice is an actual human voi…

Ah, that was a human voice over? I really wish they hadn't done the voice thing as I found it distracting. The emotion felt all off and misleading. I guess it's better than an AI voice at least but a traditional voice mask would have been better IMO

Re: Interview with gwern

#138

Post by Swizec »

mynegation wrote: post #85
demaga wrote: post #78

> I love the example of Isaac Newton looking at the rates of progress in Newton's time and going, “Wow, there's something strange here. Stuff is being invented now. We're making progress. How is that possible?” And then coming up with the answer, “Well, progress is possible now because civilization gets destroyed every couple of thousand years, and all we're doing is we're rediscovering the old stuff.” The link in th…

That works in reverse too. While I am in awe of what humanity already achieved - when I read fictional timelines of fictional worlds (Middle-Earth or Westeros/Essos) I am wondering how getting frozen in medieval like time is even possible. Like, what are they _doing_?

> I am wondering how getting frozen in medieval like time is even possible. Like, what are they _doing_?

Not discovering sources of cheap energy and other raw inputs. If you look carefully at history, every rapid period of growth was preceded by a discovery or conquest of cheap energy and resources. You need excess to grow towards the next equilibrium.

Re: Interview with gwern

#139

Post by nprateem »

Matticus_Rex wrote: post #28
nprateem wrote: post #11

How we're using confirmation bias to credit one out of 8 billion people with special skills.

New to the deeper internet? Just about anyone who has been aware of gwern for long comes to believe he's got some special skills, even if they disagree with him. He's a niche celebrity entirely for being insightful and interesting.

What's the Internet?

Re: Interview with gwern

#140

Post by keiferski »

michaelt wrote: post #91
dewey wrote: post #35

Interesting idea with the avatar, but I feel like just having a voice and some audio waves would be better than trying to create a talking avatar. Could just be my personal preference of not having a mental image of someone unknown I guess? Similar to reading a book after watching the movie adaptation.

It seemed weird to me too. In my country, when TV series are interviewing anonymous people they use specific visual language - pixellated face, or facing away from the camera, or face clad in shadow. Having an actor voice the words is normal. But having an actor showing the anonymous person's face is an... unusual choice.

The voice was a real person’s, but the face/head was AI.
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