Live data from Hacker News

Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

reuters.com

211–220 of 1001 posts

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#211
post #140
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think about the papers showing mathematical proofs that GNNs (i.e. GATs/transformers) are dynamic programmers and therefore perform algorithmic reasoning? The fact that these systems can extrapolate well beyond their training data by learning algorithms is quite different than what has come before, and anyone stating that they "simply" predict next token is severely shortsighted. Things don't have to be '…

I just don't get how the average HN commenter thinks (and gets upvoted) that they know better than e.g. Ilya Sutskever who actually, you know, built the system. I keep reading this "it just predicts words, duh" rhetoric on HN which is not at all believed by people like Ilya or Hinton. Could it be that HN commenters know better than these people?

The thing is, experts like Ilya Sutskever are so deep in that shit that they are heavily biased (from a tech and social/economic) perspective. Furthermore, many experts are wrong all the time.

I don't think the average HN commenter claims to be better at building these system than an expert. But to criticize, especially critic on economic, social, and political levels, one doesn't need to be an expert on LLMs.

And finally, what the motivation of people like Sam Altman and Elon Musk is should be clear to everbody with a half a brain by now.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#212
post #9

Imagine thinking that regression based function approximators are capable of anything other than fitting the data you give it. Then imagine willfully hyping up and scaring people who don't understand, and because it can predict words you take advantage of the human tendency to anthropomorphize, so it follows that it is something capable of generalized and adaptable intelligence. Shame on all of the people involved in…

What’s funny is that a lot of people in that crowd lambastes the fear mongering of anti-GMO or anti-nuclear folk, but then they turn around and do the exact same thing for tech that their group likes to fear monger about.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#213
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Altman and his ilk IANA senator, but if I were you lost me there. The personal insults make it seem petty and completely overshadow the otherwise professional-sounding message.

I don't mean it as a personal insult at all! The word ilk actually means "a type of people or things similar to those already referred to," it is not an insult or rude word.

TIL! https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ilk

still, there are probably a lot of people like me who have heard it used (incorrectly it seems) as an insult so many times that it's an automatic response :-(

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#215
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you're correct about the capabilities of LLMs (I don't think you are), there are still obvious dangers here. I wrote a comment recently trying to explain how even if you believe all LLMs can (and will ever) do is regurgitate their training data that you should still be concerned. For example, imagine in 5 years we have GPT-7, and you ask GPT-7 to solve humanity's great problems. From its training data GPT-7 m…

You have a very strong hypothesis about the AI system just being able to "think up" such a bioweapon (and also the researchers being clueless in implementation). I see doomsday scenarios often assuming strong advances in sciences in the AI etc. - there is little evidence for that kind of "thinkism".

Humanity has already created bioweapons. The AI just needs to find the paper that describes them.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#217
post #129

This is the message I shared with my senator (edited to remove information which could identify me). I hope others will send similar messages. Dear Senator [X], I am an engineer working for [major employer in the state]. I am extremely concerned about the message that Sam Altman is sharing with the Judiciary committee today. Altman wants to create regulatory roadblocks to developing AI. My company produces AI-enabled…

Can you please share what ChatGPT prompt you used to generate this letter template?

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#218
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it so hard to hear this perspective? Like, genuinely curious. This is the first I hear of someone cogently putting this thought out there, but it seems rather painfully obvious -- even if perhaps incorrect, but certainly a perspective that is very easy to comprehend and one that merits a lot of discussion. Why is it almost nonexistent? I remember even in the hay day of crypto fever you'd still have A LOT of fo…

I'm not against machine learning, I'm against regulatory capture of it. It's an amazing technology. It still doesn't change the fact that they're just function approximators that are trained to minimize loss on a dataset.

> It still doesn't change the fact that they're just function approximators that are trained to minimize loss on a dataset.

That fact does not entail what theses models can or cannot do. For what we know our brain could be a process that minimize an unknown loss function.

But more importantly, what SOTA is now does not predict what it will be in the future. What we know is that there is rapid progress in that domain. Intelligence explosion could be real or not, but it's foolish to ignore its consequences because current AI models are not that clever yet.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#219
post #129

This is the message I shared with my senator (edited to remove information which could identify me). I hope others will send similar messages. Dear Senator [X], I am an engineer working for [major employer in the state]. I am extremely concerned about the message that Sam Altman is sharing with the Judiciary committee today. Altman wants to create regulatory roadblocks to developing AI. My company produces AI-enabled…

The worries about AI taking over things are founded and important, even if many sci-go depictions of it are inaccurate. I’m not sure if this would be the best solution but please don’t dismiss the issue entirely

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#220
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Altman and his ilk IANA senator, but if I were you lost me there. The personal insults make it seem petty and completely overshadow the otherwise professional-sounding message.

I don't mean it as a personal insult at all! The word ilk actually means "a type of people or things similar to those already referred to," it is not an insult or rude word.

It’s always used derogatorily. I agree that you should change it if you don’t mean for it to come across that way.
Post reply on HN