Every one of these posts is immediately pushed to the front page, this one within 4 minutes.
A statement broadly true of most things this author writes.
The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety
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Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but 4 front-page posts from the same url in 4 days surely sits at the tail of the distribution. (I guess they all capitalize on the same 'LLM-is-bad' sentiment).
It's also aphyr, who is incredibly popular. Take one very popular author, have him write a series of posts on the zeitgeist everyone can't help but talk about, and yes, the outcome is that his posts are extremely popular. I still remember his takedown of mongodb's claims with the call me maybe post years and years ago filling me with a good bit of awe.
When I worked for Basho, aphyr was highly respected by some of the smartest people I’d ever worked with. Definitely no slouch.
Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety
#23>Unlike human brains, which are biologically predisposed to acquire prosocial behavior, there is nothing intrinsic in the mathematics or hardware that ensures models are nice.
How did brains acquire this predisposition if there is nothing intrinsic in the mathematics or hardware? The answer is "through evolution" which is just an alternative optimization procedure.
Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety
#24>Unlike human brains, which are biologically predisposed to acquire prosocial behavior, there is nothing intrinsic in the mathematics or hardware that ensures models are nice. How did brains acquire this predisposition if there is nothing intrinsic in the mathematics or hardware? The answer is "through evolution" which is just an alternative optimization procedure.
There are also many biological examples of evolution producing "anti-social" outcomes. Many creatures are not social. Most creatures are not social with respect to human goals.
Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety
#25Every one of these posts is immediately pushed to the front page, this one within 4 minutes.
It's been weirdly uneven. Sections 1, 3, and 5 did well on HN; 2, 4, and 6 sank with essentially no trace. The distribution of views is presently: 1. Introduction: 33,088 ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47689648 ) 2. Dynamics: 3,659 ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47693678 ) 3. Culture: 5,914 ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47703528 ) 4. Information Ecology: 777 ( https://news.ycombinator.com/ite…
I'm not sure that HN vote count is a good indicator of interest? HN alerted me to the existence of the intro post. I read the intro, noticed that it was one in an ongoing series, and have been checking your blog for new installments every few days.
I suspect that if you'd not broken up the post into a series of smaller ones, the sorts of folks who are unwilling to read the whole thing as you post it section by section would have fed the entire post to an LLM to "summarize".
Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety
#26>Unlike human brains, which are biologically predisposed to acquire prosocial behavior, there is nothing intrinsic in the mathematics or hardware that ensures models are nice. How did brains acquire this predisposition if there is nothing intrinsic in the mathematics or hardware? The answer is "through evolution" which is just an alternative optimization procedure.
There are also many biological examples of evolution producing "anti-social" outcomes. Many creatures are not social. Most creatures are not social with respect to human goals.
There is a reason we don’t allow corvids to choose if a person gets a medical treatment or not.
Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety
#27Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety
#28>Unlike human brains, which are biologically predisposed to acquire prosocial behavior, there is nothing intrinsic in the mathematics or hardware that ensures models are nice. How did brains acquire this predisposition if there is nothing intrinsic in the mathematics or hardware? The answer is "through evolution" which is just an alternative optimization procedure.
> just an alternative optimization procedure
This "just" is... not-incorrect, but also not really actionable/relevant.
1. LLMs aren't a fully genetic algorithm exploring the space of all possible "neuron" architectures. The "social" capabilities we want may not be possible to acquire through the weight-based stuff going on now.
2. In biological life, a big part of that is detecting "thing like me", for finding a mate, kin-selection, etc. We do not want our LLM-driven systems to discriminate against actual humans in favor of similar systems. (In practice, this problem already exists.)
3. The humans involved making/selling them will never spend the necessary money to do it.
4. Even with investment, the number of iterations and years involved to get the same "optimization" result may be excessive.
Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety
#29Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety
#30>Unlike human brains, which are biologically predisposed to acquire prosocial behavior, there is nothing intrinsic in the mathematics or hardware that ensures models are nice. How did brains acquire this predisposition if there is nothing intrinsic in the mathematics or hardware? The answer is "through evolution" which is just an alternative optimization procedure.
This Veritasium video is excellent, and makes the argument that there is something intrinsic in mathematics (game theory) that encourages prosocial behavior.