From Bing to Sydney • Hacker News Board

Re: From Bing to Sydney

#151

Post by JoshCole » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 3:24 AM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #150

JoshCole wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It will be. You can observe the evolution of Google's search system and it has converged to it's current of pushing stuff to sell before everything else. The charter of a public company is maximizing returns to share holders. That is the task of the entire organization Yeah, probably it will evolve in that direction. I could imagine that happening. > That's some weird reasoning. In the AI textbooks I've read, refle…

You would have sentences like "a reflex agent reacts without thinking" and then an example of that might be "a human who puts their hand on a stove yanks it away without thinking about it" and this is rational because the decision problem doesn't call for correct cognition - it calls for minimization of response time such that the hand isn't burned. We have to be specific about what we're discussing. The human reflex…

You seem to have thought I was talking about the utilities of `f` but I wasn't. I not only see the distinction you are talking about, but I'm making still further distinctions. To make it easier to avoid confusion, I'm just going to write some code to explain the distinction rather than trying to use just language to do so.

    # Analogy is basically saying things are similar.  For example, a good analogy to a function is that same function, but cached.
    analogy = memoized(f)

    # This is a good analogy because of the strong congruence
    [f(x) for x in domain(f)] == [analogy(x) for x in domain(f)]

    # But the thing that makes us want to use the analogy is that there are differences
    benchmark(f, somePropertyToMeasure) != benchmark(analogy, somePropertyToMeasure)

    # For example, in the use of caches in particular, we often resort them to for the time advantage of doing so 
    benchmark(f, timeMetric) > benchmark(analogy, timeMetric)

    # The danger of an analogy breaking down comes when the analogy doesn't actually hold
    bad_analogy = memoized(impure_f)

    # Because the congruence doesn't hold
    [impure_f(x) for x in domain(impure_f)] != [bad_analogy(x) for x in domain(impure_f)]

    # All of this matters to the discussion of anthropomorphism because
    isinstance(Analogy, anthropomorphism)
    isinstance(Analogy, analogy)

Okay, now that you see the structure I'm looking at, lets go back to your comment. You said "because reflex considerations" and I took you to be talking about speed. Imagine you were watching someone be interviewed about caches. They get tossed the question: "when cache lookups are done what is the typical danger" and they hit the question back with "because they are fast". If you then commented that it isn't true, because typically when we use caches we do it because of the performance benefit of doing so that would be a valid point. Now, since caches are analogies and since anthropomorphism is an analogy, they are going to have similar properties. So the reasonableness of this logic with respect to caches says something about the reasonableness of this logic with respect to anthropomorphism.

Hopefully you can see why I think my reasoning is not weird now and hopefully you agree with me? I've tried to be more specific to avoid confusion, but I'm assuming you are familiar with programming terms like memoization and mathematical terms like domain.

Re: From Bing to Sydney

#152

Post by syklep » Sat, Feb 18, 2023, 5:42 AM UTC

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #49

I've been trying to understand why on earth these companies would release something as an answer engine that obviously fabricates incorrect answers, and would simultaneously be so blinded to this as to release promo videos where the incorrect answers are in the actual promo videos! And this happened twice with two of the biggest and oldest companies in big tech. It really feels like some kind of "emperor has no cloth…

Frankly, people are buying the AI's escape mechanism. The fact that this tech is being wielded haphazardly for purposes it's not suited for, made into a bad search companion because it's cool, is disturbing.

It sounds so much like the scenarios where AI convinces its creators to let it out.

It's evident business leaders don't know what they're looking for in developing AI, so they've made what "seems cool", but really is manipulative and threatening. Too much talk of safety has lulled away all that very useful fear.

Re: From Bing to Sydney

#153

Post by canes123456 » Sat, Feb 18, 2023, 8:44 PM UTC

metacritic12 wrote: post #148

joe_the_user wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unhinged Bing reminds me of a more sophisticated and higher-level version of getting calculators to write profanity upside down: funny, subversive, and you can see how prudes might call for a ban. With all due respect, that seems very strained as an analogy - it's not a bug but a strange human interpretation of expected behavior. You could at least compare it to Microsoft Tay, the chatbot which tweeted profanity just…

What's the rate of Bing chat spitting out vitriol against an actual search-intentioned query? (And not some edge case that a prompt engineer designed, like a real person putting a real search) As one sample point, I've been using Bing for a couple of days now for real searches, and over dozens of actually-intentioned searches, it has never once tried to tell me what it really thinks of itself, it has never even made…

It very much seems like this is the default and Microsoft and OpenAI are trying and failing to engineer the LLM into being PC and kind of a shitty search engine. The interesting bit is how good it is at seeming human and milking empathy out of us. This isn't directly monetizable but I think this isn't going to be monetizable for a long time. The future is going to be way messier and less predictable than OpenAI/Microsoft.