Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Interview with gwern

dwarkeshpatel.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 262 posts

Re: Interview with gwern

#231

Post by ALittleLight »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #164
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sure hope nobody ever remembers you being confidently wrong about something. But if they do, hopefully that person will have the grace and self-restraint not to broadcast it any time you might make a public appearance, because they're apparently bitter that you still have any credibility.

Point taken and I warned my comment would sound vituperative. Again, the difference is that I'm not an AI influencer, and I'm not trying to make a living by claiming an expertise I don't have. I don't make "public appearances" except in conferences where I present the results of my research. And you should see the criticism I get by other academics when I try to publish my papers and they decide I'm not even wrong. A…

What is the point of saying "I warned my comment would sound vituperative"? Acknowledging a flaw in the motivation of your comment doesn't negate that flaw, it means you realize you are posting something mean spirited and consciously deciding to do it even though you recognize you're being mean spirited.

Re: Interview with gwern

#232

Post by keiferski »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #221
keiferski wrote: post #56

By writing, you are voting on the future of the Shoggoth using one of the few currencies it acknowledges: tokens it has to predict. If you aren't writing, you are abdicating the future or your role in it. If you think it's enough to just be a good citizen, to vote for your favorite politician, to pick up litter and recycle, the future doesn't care about you. These AI predictions never, ever seem to factor in how actu…

Having an obviously AI-generated header image on your blog post was cool two years ago, but now it is passé and marks you as behind the trends. This is true only because publicly-accessible models have been severely nerfed (out of sheer panic, one assumes), making their output immediately recognizable and instantly clichéd. Dall-E 2, for instance, was much better when it first came out, compared to the current incarn…

My point is that having work that is obviously AI-generated is now a negative thing.

If, in the future, there is a way to validate humanity (as I mentioned in my comment), then any real writers will likely use it.

Anyone that doesn't validate their humanity will be assumed to be an AI. The reaction to this may or may not be negative, but the broader point is that in this scenario, the AI won't be eating all human creations.

Re: Interview with gwern

#233

Post by michaelt »

sourcepluck wrote: post #194
michaelt wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 12k/year =/= no money [...] live in a hut with no rent, you grow food, you've no kids, no mortgage, no car, etc, these all matter. I agree that 12k goes a long way when you're a subsistence farmer, living alone in a collapsing hut in the middle of nowhere, with no health insurance. Nonetheless, that's sounding a lot like poverty to me.

> a subsistence farmer, living alone in a collapsing hut in the middle of nowhere, with no health insurance. "no health insurance" is the only thing in your list there that isn't hyperbole or a twisting of what was said. But anyway, again, no-one is arguing about whether 12,000/year "officially" is or is not below the poverty line, except you, with yourself. Did you read the part about him having savings in bitcoin t…

I never said there's anything bad or wrong about living in poverty, if you choose to. Religious vows of poverty have a long history.

I'm just saying what's described in the article sounds a great deal like poverty.

Re: Interview with gwern

#234

Post by mapt »

keiferski wrote: post #113
mapt wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With AI you need to think, long and hard, about the concept (borrowed from cryptography), "Today, the state of the art in is the worst it will ever be". Humanity is pinning its future on the thought that we will hit intractable information-theoretic limitations which provide some sort of diminishing returns on performance before a hard takeoff, but the idea that the currently demonstrated methods are high up on some…

I don’t disagree that it’ll change a lot of things in society. But that isn’t the claim being made, which is that some sort of AI god is being constructed which will develop entirely without the influence of how real human beings actually act. This to me is basically just sci-fi, and it’s frankly kind of embarrassing that it’s taken so seriously.

It is enormously easier to code for an AI agent which pursues a task doggedly by iterating down its list of available tools, without any consistent human moral values, than to code in some kind of human morality manually. For that, you need to have solved philosophy. Mathematically, as a proof, and with a high degree of certainty that you are correct.

Good luck.

Re: Interview with gwern

#235

Post by mapt »

wavemode wrote: post #214
mapt wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With AI you need to think, long and hard, about the concept (borrowed from cryptography), "Today, the state of the art in is the worst it will ever be". Humanity is pinning its future on the thought that we will hit intractable information-theoretic limitations which provide some sort of diminishing returns on performance before a hard takeoff, but the idea that the currently demonstrated methods are high up on some…

> dramatically higher performance this year than last year, and were dramatically better last year than the year before Yeah, but, better at _what_? Cars are dramatically faster today than 100 years ago. But they still can't fly. Similarly, LLMs performing better on synthetic benchmarks does not demonstrate that they will eventually become superintelligent beings that will replace humanity. If you want to actually me…

Humans could engineer a hydrogen bomb in the 1960's from publicly available research and multiple AI models from unrelated firms could do it right this moment if you unlocked its censors.

Turning that into an agent which builds its own hydrogen bomb using what amount to seized resources and to do it covertly at a pace that is faster than human agencies notice is a different sort of thing, but the middleware to do that sort of agent directed project is rapidly developing as well, and there is strong economic incentive for self-interested actors to pursue it. For a very brief moment in time, a huge amount of shareholder value will be created, and then suddenly destroyed.

A large-scale nuclear exchange is no longer the worst case scenario, in point of fact.

Assuming we don't hit those information-theoretic barriers, and we don't develop a host of new safeguards which nobody at the present time seems interested in developing.

Re: Interview with gwern

#236

Post by nl »

sourcepluck wrote: post #79
nl wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh. He's living in a place where the floor collapsed and eats (good) ramen. If it's 12k or 20k I'm not sure it makes a meaningful difference to the narrative.

Eating (good) ramen is being used here as evidence that he's doing poorly, or something? I don't get it. Ramen is delicious, and can be very healthy. I hereby politely demand that you explain what exactly you are insinuating about the wonder that is ramen. A floor collapsing and not bothering to replace it sounds more serious, sure, but that can mean a lot of different things in different circumstances. Imagine, for…

I mean this politely and aware it's not great etiquette but have you read the interview or listened to the podcast? Because in that context it's pretty obvious this isn't the reason...

The narrative is that he isn't living a life of luxury or even comfort.

He has priorities other than his comfort.

That's the narrative and from that viewpoint it isn't important if he's living on 12k a year or 20k a year because of his BTC investment.

Re: Interview with gwern

#237

Post by wavemode »

mapt wrote: post #235
wavemode wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> dramatically higher performance this year than last year, and were dramatically better last year than the year before Yeah, but, better at _what_? Cars are dramatically faster today than 100 years ago. But they still can't fly. Similarly, LLMs performing better on synthetic benchmarks does not demonstrate that they will eventually become superintelligent beings that will replace humanity. If you want to actually me…

Humans could engineer a hydrogen bomb in the 1960's from publicly available research and multiple AI models from unrelated firms could do it right this moment if you unlocked its censors. Turning that into an agent which builds its own hydrogen bomb using what amount to seized resources and to do it covertly at a pace that is faster than human agencies notice is a different sort of thing, but the middleware to do tha…

> multiple AI models from unrelated firms could do it right this moment if you unlocked its censors

ok buddy

Re: Interview with gwern

#238

Post by jddj »

notahacker wrote: post #76
keiferski wrote: post #56

By writing, you are voting on the future of the Shoggoth using one of the few currencies it acknowledges: tokens it has to predict. If you aren't writing, you are abdicating the future or your role in it. If you think it's enough to just be a good citizen, to vote for your favorite politician, to pick up litter and recycle, the future doesn't care about you. These AI predictions never, ever seem to factor in how actu…

I think the wider question mark about that sentence is that even if LLMs that ingest the internet and turn it into different words are the future of humanity, there's an awful lot of stuff in an AI corpus and a comparatively small number intensively researched blogs probably aren't going to shift the needle very much I mean, you'd probably get more of a vote using generative AI to spam stuff that aligns with your opi…

There is plenty of low wage RHLF stuff in western/southern Europe for now as well.

Re: Interview with gwern

#239

Post by itake »

esdf wrote: post #154
michaelt wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow gwern's work closely. But I do know he created an enormous dataset of anime images used to train machine learning and generative AI models [1]. Hosting large datasets is moderately expensive - and it's full of NSFW stuff, so he's probably not having his employer or his college host it. Easy for someone on a six-figure salary, difficult for a person on $12k/year. Also, I thought these lesswrong folks we…

Hosting large datasets can be expensive but the hosting for the danbooru datasets was not. It's "only" a few terabytes in size. A previous release was 3.4TB, so the latest is probably some hundreds of GB, to a TB~, in size larger. The download was hosted on a hetzner IP, which is a provider known for cheap servers. You can pay them $50/m for a server with "unmetered" 1gigabit up/down network + 16TB of disks. $600 a y…

$600 a year is a lot of money..

Re: Interview with gwern

#240

Post by mlsu »

motohagiography wrote: post #148
keiferski wrote: post #56

By writing, you are voting on the future of the Shoggoth using one of the few currencies it acknowledges: tokens it has to predict. If you aren't writing, you are abdicating the future or your role in it. If you think it's enough to just be a good citizen, to vote for your favorite politician, to pick up litter and recycle, the future doesn't care about you. These AI predictions never, ever seem to factor in how actu…

I've been writing for decades with the belief I was training a future AI and used to say that the Turing test wasn't mysterious at all because it was a solved problem in economics in the form of an indifference curve that showed where peoeple cared whether or not they were dealing with a person or a machine. the argument against AI taking over is we organize around symbols and narratives and are hypersensitive to wan…

This is an interesting comment. Let's extend it further.

The pop industry is a:

- machine

- which takes authentic human meaning

- and produces essentially a stochastic echo of it ("slop")

- in an optimization algorithm

- to predict the next most profitable song (the song that is most "likely")

So, this sounds an awful lot like something else that's very in vogue right now. Only it was invented in 1950 or 1960, not in 2017.

Post reply on HN