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Interview with gwern

dwarkeshpatel.com

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Re: Interview with gwern

#251

Post by Vecr »

throw05678931 wrote: post #249
Vecr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Wordcel" is roon terminology, right? I highly doubt Aschenbrenner is an EA, and if he's a "wordcel" he somehow managed to do mathematical economics without too much problem. Gwern's probably not a "wordcel" either, he can program, right? I've never seen any of his publications though. It's called Situational Awareness too, not "Situation Report", and Yudkowsky said he didn't like it. Not that Yudkowsky is an EA eith…

I didn't claim Gwern was a wordcel. He's clearly not. Dwarkesh, yes. I didn't claim Yudkowsky was an EA. He's not. He's a rationalist who originated many thoughts about AI doom, which have influenced EAs. Look, Gwern and Dwarkesh and Yud are all AI doomers, which is where the rationalists and the EAs overlap. Gwern is all over LessWrong, which kind of springs out of the rationalist community and has all sorts of EAs…

I didn't know he wrote novels. Is there a list somewhere? I know he wrote an "autobiography" (before he did anything) and his various fan fictions (including the infamous one), but I thought everything else was either compendiums of his writings edited by others or books written by other people about him.

Re: Interview with gwern

#252

Post by gwern »

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…

I think people tend to wildly overestimate how expensive hosting a large dataset has to be, because of cloud.

If you only need a few terabytes, you can rent from Hetzner for more like > Also, I thought these lesswrong folks were all about "effective altruism" and "earning to give" and that stuff.

Some people are, some people aren't. I'm not. (I have intellectual sympathy with EA, but not emotional.)

Re: Interview with gwern

#253

Post by gwern »

demaga wrote: post #78

> I love the example of Isaac Newton looking at the rates of progress in Newton's time and going, “Wow, there's something strange here. Stuff is being invented now. We're making progress. How is that possible?” And then coming up with the answer, “Well, progress is possible now because civilization gets destroyed every couple of thousand years, and all we're doing is we're rediscovering the old stuff.” The link in th…

> The link in this paragraph goes to a post on gwern website. This post contains various links, both internal and external. But I still failed to find one that supports claims about Newton's views on "progress".

Could you explain further what part of https://gwern.net/newton you thought didn't support my description of Newton's view?

I thought the large second blockquote in https://gwern.net/newton#excerpts , which very prominently links to https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THE... , fully justified my claims, which are taken directly from Newton's statements to his son-in-law, and also closely parallel other historical statements, like Lucretius, which I also present with clear references and specific blockquotes.

I'm a little mystified that you could describe any of this as not supporting it at all, and I'm wondering if you are looking at the wrong page or something?

Re: Interview with gwern

#254

Post by keiferski »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #245
keiferski wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cre…

And my point is that if you can't tell the difference -- and you won't be able to -- the question of validating one's humanity will be moot. Any technology capable of distinguishing between machine- and human-created text or artwork will simply be placed in a feedback loop and used for training the next generation of models. If this indeed turns out to be a fight, humans won't win it. So let's not bother with the fig…

I don’t think this is nearly as difficult as you are implying. All it would take is for a social network to require some kind of verified ID that is renewed on a regular basis. You might even need to verify this ID in person, physically. This might seem excessive today, but if the internet becomes unusable due to excessive AI content, it’s not that big of a deal. The infrastructure is practically already here via banking and government apps.

The alternative is that everyone just accepts the internet as a place where you can’t tell if anyone is real. I don’t think that will be a happy state of affairs for anyone.

Even if this isn’t a “required” thing, it will become a desired one by consumers. Who would you rather follow - the verified Taylor Swift account, or the unverified one? Non-verified creators will be relegated to niches where it doesn’t matter as much if they’re real or not.

Then you might say - but a person can just use AI tools and paste them into their verified account. Which is fine - I’m not saying that people aren’t going to use these tools to create content. I’m saying that these tools aren’t going to eliminate the possibility of an individual person creating content on the Internet as a human being, and being verified as such.

Re: Interview with gwern

#255

Post by sph »

raverbashing wrote: post #69
resiros wrote: post #12

>Wait if you’re doing $900-1000/month and you’re sustaining yourself on that, that must mean you’re sustaining yourself on less than $12,000 a year. What is your lifestyle like at $12K?" >I live in the middle of nowhere. I don't travel much, or eat out, or have health insurance, or anything like that. I cook my own food. I use a free gym. There was this time when the floor of my bedroom began collapsing. It was so ol…

Honestly I've become skeptical of people who end up in high-intellectualized "pursuits" neglecting their own personal and social interactions and the larger societal reactions Maybe it works for maths, physics and such, and of course it's ok to philosophize, but I think those "ivory tower" thinkers sometimes lack a certain connection to reality

Which reality? Does a middle class Californian FAANG worker spending its day on Twitter know more about, I don't know, the Congo or Thai mangrove forests than a philosopher in a hut?

Unless by reality you mean YOUR slice of the world, a sheltered place of its own.

Re: Interview with gwern

#257

Post by mapt »

wavemode wrote: post #237
mapt wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You believe I'm overestimating current AI. While my estimations are probably a bit higher than yours, mostly I think you're overestimating hydrogen bombs. They're not that complicated, and not that secret in 2024. These AI models have every unclassified scientific paper and every nonfiction book ever published on the subject at their disposal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon

It's a mechanistic process featuring well-tread factual, verbose discourse. Scientists reasoning about facts and presenting what they found. "Tell me a joke about elephant mating habits in the form of a rap song" is a dramatically more complex task of synthesis.

Re: Interview with gwern

#259

Post by nl »

sourcepluck wrote: post #143
michaelt wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Living on ramen by choice? Sure, you do you. But living on ramen + $12k/year + no healthcare + collapsing floor? That's sounding a lot like poverty to me.

I'm aware that it sounds like poverty. I'm just saying it's going to depend on the details. To people who live ordinary western lifestyles, everything outside of that sounds weird. - ramen =/= cheap pot noodle type things. Ramen restaurants in Japan attest to this. It'll depend on context what that actually means in this case. - 12k/year =/= no money, numbers like that make no sense outside of context. It depends on…

He literally says:

> Yeah, it is mostly just money stopping me at this point. I probably should bite the bullet and move anyway. But I'm a miser at heart and I hate thinking of how many months of writing runway I'd have to give up for each month in San Francisco.

> If someone wanted to give me, I don’t know, $50–100K/year to move to SF and continue writing full-time like I do now, I'd take it in a heartbeat.

It sounds a little like you are arguing without any reference to the actual evidence here.

Re: Interview with gwern

#260

Post by Quinzel »

dash2 wrote: post #62
Quinzel wrote: post #9

I don’t believe Gwern lives as frugally as he’s described in this (if this even actually is the real Gwern). I’m 100% sure that he has a persona he likes to portray and being perceived as frugal is a part of that persona. When it comes to answering the question “who is gwern?” I reckon Gwern’s a plant a seed in people’s mind type of guy, and let them come up with the rest of the story. Still, I like a lot of his writ…

Have you got any real evidence behind your first paragraph?

Do people need evidence for an opinion?
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