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Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

nytimes.com

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Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#241

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

archerx wrote: post #36

There is part of me that thinks that this A.I. fear-mongering is some kind of tactic by Google to get everybody to pause training their A.I.s so they can secretly catch up in the background. If I was to do some quick game theory in my mind this would be the result. Imagine being Google, leading the way in A.I. for years, create the frameworks (tensorflow), create custom hardware for A.I. (TPUs), fund a ton of researc…

I think a comment on the reddit thread about this is somewhat appropriate, though I don't mean the imply the same harshness:

> Godfather of AI - I have concerns.

> Reddit - This old guy doesn't know shit. Here's my opinion that will be upvoted by nitwits.

Point being, if you're saying that the guy who literally wrote the paper on back propagation is "fear mongering", but who is now questioning the value of his life's work, then I suggest you take a step back and re-examine why you think he may have these concerns in the first place.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#242

Post by karaterobot »

politician wrote: post #81

After reading the NYT interview, I don’t understand why he still chose to invent, in his words, a dangerous technology and publish the results openly. Not a criticism of the man, but of the article.

I imagine there will be a lot of people who agree that AI is dangerous, but continue to use it, because provides something of value to them in the short term. In his case, he might really believe AI is a potential danger, but also wanted to get the notoriety of publishing, and the money and excitement of founding a successful startup. There's not a big difference between our kind of hypocrisy — supporting something we suspect is destructive in the long term because it is neat, convenient, or popular in the short term — and his kind. Both are part of the reason things get worse rather than better. His kind is more lucrative, so it's actually less surprising in a way.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#243

Post by non_sequitur »

This was his Tweet from several weeks ago, which I thought was insightful, both from a technical as well as socieconomic perspective when you think about data usage etc in these models - "Caterpillars extract nutrients which are then converted into butterflies. People have extracted billions of nuggets of understanding and GPT-4 is humanity's butterfly."

Did he see enough in the past 6 weeks that made him change his mind?

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#244

Post by MichaelBosworth »

skepticATX wrote: post #229
drcode wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GPT4 can converse on any subject at all as well as a (let's say) 80 IQ human. On some subjects it can converse much better. That feels fundamentally different than a calculator.

GPT-4 is absolutely more generally knowledgeable than any individual person. Individual humans can still easily beat it when it comes to knowledge of individual subjects. Let’s not conflate knowledge with intelligence though. GPT-4 simply isn’t intelligent.

Would be curious to hear an elaboration on this perspective. In your opinion, on which measures of intelligence would GPT-4 fail to out-perform a human with an IQ of 80? Conversely, on which measures do you imagine it would succeed at doing so? Are the latter less significant or valid than the former?

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#245

Post by tenebrisalietum »

ben_w wrote: post #35
tenebrisalietum wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it will be so bad. All Internet comment sections, pictures, video, and really anything on electronic screens will become assumed false by default. Therefore the only use of the Internet and most technology capable of generating audio and video will be entertainment. I already distrust-by-default most of what is online that isn't hard reference material, even if not AI generated.

Three men make a tiger. - 龐蔥, some time c. 350 BC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_men_make_a_tiger

Stupid people who use bad heuristics to determine the existence of tigers will exist with or without AI.

If AI will make it more dangerous for stupid people, then AI can also make it safer.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#247

Post by michael_nielsen »

greatpostman wrote: post #98

My honest take is a lot of these famous academics played almost no part in the developments at openai. But they want the limelight. They aren’t as relevant as they want to be. In many cases, they were directly wrong about how ai would develop

He played key roles in the development of backprop, ReLU, LayerNorm, dropout, GPU-assisted deep learning, including AlexNet, was the mentor of OpenAI's Chief Scientist, and contributed many, many other things. These techniques are crucial for transformers, LLMs, generative image modelling, and many other modern applications of AI

Your post suggests that you know almost nothing about how modern deep learning originated.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#248

Post by ryan93 »

stareatgoats wrote: post #137

We are barely scraping the surface when it comes to understanding the future dangers of AI. Geoffrey Hinton is uniquely positioned to point out where the dangers are, and from what I've gleaned from interviews one of his main concerns atm is the use of AI in the military: fully autonomous military robots might not be possible to curtail. The tried and tested method is international agreements. The current focus on ar…

No one is uniquely positioned. Literally no one knows how powerful it will get.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#249

Post by pmoriarty »

endtime wrote: post #240
sudhirj wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this seems like more of a problem than vague statements about AGI. We're still in the scope of ML - ChatGPT can't play chess, for example, and a self driving model can't write Haiku. An AGI would be able to do all of them. It seems much more likely that a fleet of autonomous (in the name of cutting costs) war machines will be created with relatively simple ML models that work in intended (or otherwise) ways to…

> ChatGPT can't play chess, for example Do you really expect this claim to age well? I wouldn't be at all surprised if GPT5 could play chess quite well. The time to worry about AGI...well, was 20 years ago when Yudkowsky started talking about it, but the worst possible time to start worrying about it is when we unquestionably have it. Because the whole point is that that is too late.

"The time to worry about AGI...well, was 20 years ago when Yudkowsky started talking about it"

He was far, far from the first.

Warnings about the threat of intelligent machines have been around for over 100 years. The first instance I know of is E. M. Foster's "The Machine Stops"[1]. which was published in 1909, though I wouldn't be surprised if there were even earlier warnings. They've been well worn scifi tropes ever since.

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#250

Post by O5vYtytb »

stareatgoats wrote: post #137

We are barely scraping the surface when it comes to understanding the future dangers of AI. Geoffrey Hinton is uniquely positioned to point out where the dangers are, and from what I've gleaned from interviews one of his main concerns atm is the use of AI in the military: fully autonomous military robots might not be possible to curtail. The tried and tested method is international agreements. The current focus on ar…

My biggest concern for military use of AI is how incompetent most military contractors are. These huge companies employ an army of not-very-good engineers whose primary purpose seems to be to over-complicate projects. Imagine the same teams that make planes which need to be hard rebooted every few days, now they're making advanced AI to dynamically target and kill people.
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