291–300 of 475 posts
If the government tries to prohibit training these models, I think we should find a way to keep it going somehow. Yes, civil disobedience.
Same argument as for encryption programs, eh?
Why are we even bothering talking about this? It's Gary Marcus "neural networks don't really work" suddenly discovering they do, and literally trying to shut down research in that area while keeping his prefered research areas funded. We know a bunch of the people whose names are on the letter didn't sign it (eg Yann Lecunn who said he disagreed with the premise and didn't sign it). I'm so offended by the idea of thi…
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There are actually no relevant experts in the field of artificial general intelligence, or the safety thereof. No one has defined a clear path to build such a thing. Claiming to be an expert in this field is like claiming to be an expert in warp drives or time machines. Those calling for a halt in research are merely ignorant, or attention seeking grifters. Their statements can be dismissed out of hand regardless of…
I'd also guess the correct take to see LLMs as human magnifiers more than human replacers* -- most technology does this, magnifying aspects of the human condition rather than fundamentally change it.. But that doesn't make me sanguine about them. The printing press was amazing and it required new social conceptions (copyright). Nuclear weapons did "little" other than amplify human destructive capability but required…
Yes. This line of argument terrifies me not only because it's fatalist, but because the logical result of it is that it results in the worst possible outcomes.
It smells a lot like "we need to destroy society because if we don't do it, someone else will." Before anyone jumps on me about this, I'm not saying LLMs will destroy society, but this argument is almost always put in response to people who are arguing that they will destroy society.
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Of course they would. It's just ridiculous. If people are genuinely concerned about lack of access to the OpenAI models then work at training open ones! OpenAI has a maybe 6 month lead and that's nothing. Plus it's much easier being the follower when you know what is possible. (To be clear, I know at least a few of the projects already working on this. I just want to make it clear that is the intellectually honest ap…
I think their lead might be a bit bigger than that. ChatGPT 3.5 was released 4 months ago and I still haven't seen another LLM come close to it.
prompt: what is the third word in this sentence gpt4: third why are we afraid of this thing exactly? sure, it will improve, especially with the plugin story, but the fundamental shortcomings that underpins how it actually works won't go away anytime soon. Many people are spooked, because for the first time ever a computer can somewhat coherently understand and output natural language. As Stephen Wolfram pointed out,…
I was able to get it to play tic-tac-toe perfectly by having it carefully check everything before moving forward to the next move. It took a lot of prompt engineering. But I did it. And I'm not very experienced at prompting these things.
(Btw, I was unable to get to GPT-3.5 to play reliably... it definitely seems "less smart"...)
I was able to easily get GPT-4 to multiply large numbers perfectly by having it show its work. It's slow, but it does it.
GPT-4 can definitely solve problems. We have no idea what the limits of this technology are.
What will GPT-5 or GPT-6 be capable of? What happens if you use those models as components of a system that takes action in the world?
You are being incredibly myopic about the core capabilities of advanced GPT-like systems. Right now, today, there are countless examples of people using GPT in ways that you say aren't possible.
Why are we even bothering talking about this? It's Gary Marcus "neural networks don't really work" suddenly discovering they do, and literally trying to shut down research in that area while keeping his prefered research areas funded. We know a bunch of the people whose names are on the letter didn't sign it (eg Yann Lecunn who said he disagreed with the premise and didn't sign it). I'm so offended by the idea of thi…
Why are we even bothering talking about this? It's Gary Marcus "neural networks don't really work" suddenly discovering they do, and literally trying to shut down research in that area while keeping his prefered research areas funded. We know a bunch of the people whose names are on the letter didn't sign it (eg Yann Lecunn who said he disagreed with the premise and didn't sign it). I'm so offended by the idea of thi…
> I'm so offended by the idea of this that I'll personally fund $10k of training runs myself in a jurisdiction where it isn't banned if this ever became law in the US. And this is exactly the risk. These things will just go other places while the US trips over its salty billionaires trying to create political red tape to allow their own businesses to catch up. Surely Elon has no reservations about putting premature s…
I'm not convinced that he's wrong.
[0] https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-no...
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You don't even have to look at other "fads" like 3D televisions and VR to be skeptical of the claim that recent advancements in ML* represent a major technological revolution that will change society like the Internet or the Printing Press did. Just look at ML's own history. A few years ago we had the "deepfake" scare. People were terrified that now videos are going to surface of politicians saying and doing things t…
> What we have now is a tool that is able to generate text-based content that is indistinguishable from that written by an 8th grader. To be fair, this 8th grader passed the bar exam..
In all seriousness, I know of a few lawyers who would tell you that's not as impressive as non-lawyers think it is.
And the reality is, it did not technically "pass" the bar exam. That's media spin and hype. It doesn't have personhood, it's not a student, it's not being evaluated under the same strict set of conditions. It was an engineering exercise done specially crafted conditions and that makes all the difference in the world.
I'm a magician and this reminds me of ESP tests in the 70s where frauds like Uri Gellar fooled scientists (at NASA no less) into believing they had psychic powers. The scientists were fooled in large part because it's what they wanted to believe, and the conditions were favourable to the fraudster doing parlour tricks.
The most interesting part about the results are that it "passed" the essay portion, otherwise we would expect any computer software to be answer questions correctly that have a single correct answer. But who is evaluating those essays? Are they top lawyers who are giving the essays extremely close scrutiny or are they overworked university professors who have a hundred to read and grade and just want to go home to their families?
And what is the objective criteria for "passing" those essay questions? Often times the content, in a formal education setting, is not as relevant as the formatting and making sure that certain key points are touched upon. Does it need to be an essay that is full of factually-verifiable data points or is it an opinion piece? Is the point to show that you can argue a particular point of view? I mean when it comes to something open-ended, why wouldn't any LLM be able to "pass" it? It's the subjective evaluation of the person grading the essay that gets to decide on its grade. And at the end of the day it's just words that must conform to certain rules. Of course computers should be "good" at that sort of thing. The only thing that's been historically very challenging has been natural language processing. That's ChatGPT's contribution to advancing the field of ML.
So I'm not that that shaken by a chat-bot being able to bullshit it's way through the bar exam since bullshitting is the base job qualification for being a lawyer anyway :P (couldn't help bookending with another lawyer joke .. sorry).
There are real threats, but those aren't it.
More likely near term problems:
- Surveillance becomes near-total. Most communication is monitored, and people profiled to to detect whatever deviance the authorities don't like. China tries to do this now, but they are limited by the number of censors.
- Machines should think, people should work. Organizations will have few managers. Just a a very few policy makers, and people doing physical work. Amazon is trying to go that way, but isn't there yet.
- If everything you do for money goes in and out over a wire, your job is at risk.
- New frontiers in scams and crime. You can fool some of the people some of the time, and if you can do that at scale, it pays well. More scams will become automated high-touch. This will include political scams and much of marketing.
- If you accept Milton Friedman's concept of the corporation, the sole goal of corporations is to maximize return to shareholders. That's exactly the kind of goal a machine learning system can get into. At some point, measured by that criterion, AI systems will start to outperform human corporate leaders. Then AI systems have to be in charge. Investors will demand it. That's almost inevitable given our current concept of capitalism.