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Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

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Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#161

Post by akiselev »

yblu wrote: post #149
fwlr wrote: post #33

> The large language models are a little surprising. I’ll give you that. I think this is the key point about LLMs that kind of explains the wide and polarized views on whether it understands or parrots, whether it can think or is the precursor to thinking or is a dead-end, whether it will catastrophically destroy the world, or “merely” make it steadily worse with bullshit, or just put a few industries out of a job. A…

What I found disheartening was many of those scientists, especially those on the "nothing to worry about" camp, seemed not to entertain the thought that they could be wrong, considering the scale of the matter, i.e. human extinction. If there's a chance AI poses an existential threat to us, even if it is 0.00000001% (I made that up), should they be at least a bit more humble? This is uncharted domain and I find it in…

Meh. Add it to the pile. The number of world ending risks that we could be worried about at this point are piling up and AI exterminating us is far from the top concern, especially when AI may be critical to solving many of the other problems that are.

Wrong about nuclear proliferation and MAD game theory? Human extinction. Wrong about plasticizers and other endocrine disruptors, leading to a Children of Men scenario? Human extinction. Wrong about the risk of asteroid impact? Human extinction. Climate change? Human extinction. Gain of function zombie virus? Human extinction. Malignant AGI? ehh... whatever, we get it.

It's like the risk of driving: yeah it's one of the leading causes of death but what are we going to do, stay inside our suburban bubbles all our lives, too afraid to cross a stroad? Except with AI this is all still completely theoretical.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#162

Post by transcriptase »

yblu wrote: post #149
fwlr wrote: post #33

> The large language models are a little surprising. I’ll give you that. I think this is the key point about LLMs that kind of explains the wide and polarized views on whether it understands or parrots, whether it can think or is the precursor to thinking or is a dead-end, whether it will catastrophically destroy the world, or “merely” make it steadily worse with bullshit, or just put a few industries out of a job. A…

What I found disheartening was many of those scientists, especially those on the "nothing to worry about" camp, seemed not to entertain the thought that they could be wrong, considering the scale of the matter, i.e. human extinction. If there's a chance AI poses an existential threat to us, even if it is 0.00000001% (I made that up), should they be at least a bit more humble? This is uncharted domain and I find it in…

Debatable, since there are plenty of other unavoidable existential threats that are far more likely than the best estimates that AI will wipe us out. E.g. supervolcano eruption, massive solar flare, asteroid impact, some novel virus.

At least we can take comfort in the fact that if an AI takes us out, one of the aforementioned will avenge us and destroy the AI too on a long enough time scale.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#163

Post by blowski »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #107
fwlr wrote: post #33

> The large language models are a little surprising. I’ll give you that. I think this is the key point about LLMs that kind of explains the wide and polarized views on whether it understands or parrots, whether it can think or is the precursor to thinking or is a dead-end, whether it will catastrophically destroy the world, or “merely” make it steadily worse with bullshit, or just put a few industries out of a job. A…

> My current (tentative) resolution of the surprise is that language encoded way more information about reality than we thought it did. I think you are close to the mark, but you have been subtly mislead: language is not the data we are working with. We are working with text . Once you fix that particular failure of word choice, everything else becomes much more clear: text contains much more information than languag…

I don't really understand your distinction between language and text, but it sounds intrguing. Would you be able to give more detail? I searched but couldn't find anything that seemed to explain it.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#164

Post by LouisSayers »

cageface wrote: post #119
yberreby wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is distinguishing between these parts requires me to be be an expert in the area I’m inquiring about - and then why the heck do I need to ask some idiot bot for answers to questions that I already know an answer to? Because it can be significantly faster to check something for correctness than to produce it? More so when the correctness check can itself be automated to some extent.

My experience with Github copilot is that the time it saves me typing out boilerplate has been more than lost when I have to spend time carefully debugging bugs in the code it produces. And those are the bugs I catch right away. I expect this will improve but it's certainly not always the case that checking something is cheaper or easier than generating it in the first place.

I was torn on Copilot - it seemed like it was saving me time, but I found myself getting way more value out of just copy / pasting code into GPT4.

So I decided to stop my copilot subscription and just see how I go without it.

I've been off copilot for a few days now and other than having to do more code lookups it's not a terrible experience not having it. It does feel like something that should be baked into the IDE for free though.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#165

Post by krainboltgreene »

beardedwizard wrote: post #105
krainboltgreene wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's "read" a significant fraction of everything we've ever written about chess I doubt heavily that a significant fraction of chess's writings are even available in digital format, much less inside of CommonCrawl and correctly trained on.

Why would common crawl NOT contain a chess manual? the rules are explained in detail on wikipedia. the simplest conclusion is that it has indeed been trained on a chess manual and is good at predicting what the next word in a chess manual is. it is not synthesizing anything.

I never said that CommonCrawl doesn't have a chess manual, whatever the hell that might be.

> the simplest conclusion is that it has indeed been trained on a chess manual

That is an absurd conclusion that is based on literally fantasy.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#166

Post by krainboltgreene »

klipt wrote: post #106
krainboltgreene wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so why would it surprise us that it encodes much of the information of civilization? The Humanities are largely considered superfluous in the tech world, why are you surprised that they are surprised?

To clarify, I'm including stuff like Python code under language , because these large language models are also trained on Python code.

Very very few people in tech are even experts in the meta analysis of programming languages, much less the importance of languages.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#167

Post by seanhunter »

morkalork wrote: post #160
usaar333 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure you can't get GPT-4 to do 8 digit multiplication with any prompt. For what it's worth, I'm not even sure if chain of thought provides much value to GPT-4. The RLHF it went through seems to have encouraged more logical thinking already.

Now you have me wondering if you could prompt it to solve it step by step, using the same method an elementary student would do on paper.

You can. One thing that I've found fun is to prompt it for some maths problems without solutions, then I provide solutions and for any that I get wrong ask it to explain my mistakes.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#168

Post by krainboltgreene »

ramraj07 wrote: post #158
krainboltgreene wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The issue with all these experts is they still think it's human nature to be able to fully understand the world before they speak about it None of the experts think this.

Is Chomsky an expert? Try reading his infuriatingly tone-deaf NYTimes editorial.

Chomsky is an expert of a few things, but I doubt that's what you actually mean to ask.

Regardless his editorial matches how scientists think of the human mind and how OpenAI's own creators describe GPT's design.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#169

Post by zmmmmm »

JoshTko wrote: post #38
fwlr wrote: post #33

> The large language models are a little surprising. I’ll give you that. I think this is the key point about LLMs that kind of explains the wide and polarized views on whether it understands or parrots, whether it can think or is the precursor to thinking or is a dead-end, whether it will catastrophically destroy the world, or “merely” make it steadily worse with bullshit, or just put a few industries out of a job. A…

The more I think about it the more I'm convinced I am basically just predicting/saying my next word whenever I speak.

Honestly I feel like one reason people are struggling with this is they can't accept a critical part of the truth : most people are stochastic parrots themselves most of the time. True, creative genuine deep thinking is an exceptional state of thinking for us.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#170

Post by onethought »

yblu wrote: post #149
fwlr wrote: post #33

> The large language models are a little surprising. I’ll give you that. I think this is the key point about LLMs that kind of explains the wide and polarized views on whether it understands or parrots, whether it can think or is the precursor to thinking or is a dead-end, whether it will catastrophically destroy the world, or “merely” make it steadily worse with bullshit, or just put a few industries out of a job. A…

What I found disheartening was many of those scientists, especially those on the "nothing to worry about" camp, seemed not to entertain the thought that they could be wrong, considering the scale of the matter, i.e. human extinction. If there's a chance AI poses an existential threat to us, even if it is 0.00000001% (I made that up), should they be at least a bit more humble? This is uncharted domain and I find it in…

> considering the scale of the matter, i.e. human extinction.

There is literally no evidence that this is the scale of the matter. Has AI ever caused anything to go extinct? Where did this hypothesis (and that's all it is) come from? Terminator movies?

It's very frustrating watching experts and the literal founder of lesswrong reacting to pure make believe. There is no disernable/convincing path from GPT4 -> Human Extinction. What am I missing here?

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