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Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

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Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#171

Post by nopinsight »

famouswaffles wrote: post #167
nopinsight wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are calling for a pause, not a stop. It’s quite clear that OpenAI has a significant lead over everyone else. The only other country outside the west that even has a chance at developing something better than GPT-4 soon is China. China has a pretty cautious culture as well so it’s quite possible that a bilateral moratorium can be negotiated with them. ADDED: Even without considering X-risks, China’s rulers cannot…

If you counted research, open ai didn't have a lead until gpt-4 nevermind a significant one. most of this is scale. their lead is a few months tops.

Engineering such a system is a harder challenge than many types of research. Even the mighty Google, the leader in AI research by many metrics, is catching up.

Another example is Meta only finishing OPT-175B, a near equivalent of GPT-3, two years after it.

——

Added to reply:

GPT-4 got much better results on many benchmarks than PaLM, Google's largest published model [1]. PaLM itself is probably quite a bit better than LamDa in several tasks, according to a chart and a couple of tables here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.02311

It's unclear that Google currently has an internal LLM as good as GPT-4. If they do, they are keeping quiet about it, which seems quite unlikely given the repercussions.

[1] GPT-4's benchmark results vs PaLM: https://openai.com/research/gpt-4

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#172

Post by knrdev »

fwlr wrote: post #104

Some of those signatories are indeed interesting. Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak. Some big companies are there: the CEOs/co-founders of Skype, Pinterest, Ripple. Some AI companies are there too. CEOs/founders/head researchers from Stability, DeepMind, Metaculus. Some Microsoft employees, but no big repsentatives. Academic AI research is there, including Stuart Russell, John Hopfield and Max Tegmark. Some major names from t…

> Wonder what sparked this.

Being left behind. Losers want to catch up.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#173

Post by GauntletWizard »

tambourine_man wrote: post #170

A few decades ago human cloning was irreversible, inevitable, the cat was out of the bag and you couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle. Yet we managed to legislate that. We need a change of atitute towards AI, recognize its danger and legislate accordingly.

Thou shalt not create a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#175

Post by bilbo0s »

cmsonger wrote: post #107
kelseyfrog wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI is a break-capitalism lottery ticket I'm willing to entertain. If the marginal cost of labor collapses to zero then either we'll get robot police or finally be free to pursue lives of leisure.

Except that it's going to be robot police. What in the current world order suggests labor wins. Who controls LLMs? Who has the compute to produce AGI?

To be fair, there is always someone on the bottom. It just historically hasn't been people we cared about. That really says more about us than it says about AI. The time to complain about these power asymmetries was prior to them affecting us. Now it just sounds like garden variety sour grape hypocrisy.

Not saying there aren't good points. Only pointing out that many, many people can all view the consequences of this dynamic differently.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#176

Post by karmasimida »

There is no stopping in this.

How to stop? No one will stop. The world won't stop or pause on getting LLM more useful until it can't be further improved.

LLMs aren't nuclear weapons. I don't know how it could be supervised TBH. The model, the data are mostly public, giving people time they will definitely get there regardless.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#177

Post by credit_guy »

nopinsight wrote: post #166
juancn wrote: post #156

Stopping now would be extremely dangerous and borderline stupid. If you stop now, you're just left behind, because there's no way everyone will stop. At this point the only logical course of action in an adversarial situation is to double down and keep researching, otherwise some other country or culture with different (and possibly worse) values ends up dominating the technology and you're left behind in the dust. T…

They are calling for a pause, not a stop. It’s quite clear that OpenAI has a significant lead over everyone else. The only other country outside the west that even has a chance at developing something better than GPT-4 soon is China. China has a pretty cautious culture as well so it’s quite possible that a bilateral moratorium can be negotiated with them. ADDED: Even without considering X-risks, China’s rulers cannot…

> The only other country

OpenAI is not a country, it's a company.

GPT models on par with GPT-4 can be trained, well, by companies. You don't need nation-state levels of resources.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#178

Post by MacsHeadroom »

pdonis wrote: post #125
sp527 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost everyone here will be fine in a world in which only certain non-renewable scarce resources have any value, combined with impending massive currency deflation. Even a rank and file tier 2/3 engineer will manage to live a princely life in that new reality assuming (s)he saved up enough. Hardly anyone in the tech community is capable of truly empathizing with the vast majority of people, who are born with none of…

> a world in which only certain non-renewable scarce resources have any value If you think this is the world "AI" is leading us toward, I think you need to think again. There are a huge range of skills that only humans can provide, and that will continue to be true. GPT-3 can't fix your plumbing or your HVAC when it breaks. It can't fix your car. It can't build houses. It can't build roads. It can't build computers.…

>Nor are AI enthusiasts trying to get "AI" to do any of these things.

We're working on getting AI to do all of those things, yes.

>GPT-3 can't fix your plumbing

GPT-3 might not. But GPT-4 fixed plumbing in a test done by Microsoft Research before it was even publicly released! It's in the "sparks of AGI" paper.

GPT-5 is almost done training now and other language models are already embodied and moving about in the physical space. Your objections are behind the times, and increasingly so.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#179

Post by paxys »

BobbyJo wrote: post #145
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #67

I'm really disappointed to see the HN reaction of straight up scoffing at this like it's irreversible and so let's just step on the gas. It's some weird combination of techno-utopianism and nihilism and good old elitism.

I personally scoff at this kind of stuff because it's asking for something no one has the power to give. It's like asking to stop the development of nukes in the 40s and 50s, it's just not gonna happen.

And during that period, and later during the cold war, the decision to make (or stop making) nukes was in the hands of maybe 5 people total. Today there are thousands of companies and tens/hundreds of thousands of people who can legitimately compete in the space. Best of luck trying to resolve a prisoner's dilemma between all of them.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#180

Post by bilbo0s »

knrdev wrote: post #172
fwlr wrote: post #104

Some of those signatories are indeed interesting. Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak. Some big companies are there: the CEOs/co-founders of Skype, Pinterest, Ripple. Some AI companies are there too. CEOs/founders/head researchers from Stability, DeepMind, Metaculus. Some Microsoft employees, but no big repsentatives. Academic AI research is there, including Stuart Russell, John Hopfield and Max Tegmark. Some major names from t…

> Wonder what sparked this. Being left behind. Losers want to catch up.

Kind of sounds like a "time out" to me too.

It would hit harder if the signatories did not have so much to gain by making the leaders slow down a bit so they can catch up.

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