391–400 of 641 posts
“Yes, we have a super secret model, for your eyes only, general. This one is definitely not indistinguishable from everyone else’s model and it doesn’t produce bullshit because we pinky promise. So we need $1T.”
I love LLMs, but OpenAI’s marketing tactics are shameful.
> AI has started to take jobs, but has also created new ones. Yeah nah, theres a key thing missing here, the number of jobs created needs to be more than the ones it's destroyed, and they need to be better paying and happen in time. History says that actually when this happens, an entire generation is yeeted on to the streets (see powered looms, Jacquard machine, steam powered machine tools) All of that cheap labour…
> and probably revolution I theorise that revolution would be near-impossible in post-AGI world. If people consider where power comes from it's relatively obvious that people will likely suffer and die on mass if we ever create AGI. Historically the general public have held the vast majority of power in society. 100+ years ago this would have been physical power – the state has to keep you happy or the public will co…
That will be quite a hard thing to pull off, even for some evil person with a AGI. Let's say Putin gets AGI and is actually evil and crazy enough to try wipe people out. If he just targets Russians and starts killing millions of people daily with some engineered virus or something similar, he'll have to fear a strike from the West which would be fearful they're next (and rightfully so). If he instead tries to wipe out all of humanity at once to escape a second strike, he again will have to devise such a good plan there won't be any second strike - meaning his "AGI" will have to be way better than all other competing AGIs (how exactly?).
It would have made sense if all "owners of AGI" somehow conspired together to do this but there's not really such a thing as owners of AGI and even if there was Chinese, Russian and American owners of AGI don't trust each other at all and are also bound to their governments.
It’s good science fiction, I’ll give it that. I think getting lost in the weeds over technicalities ignores the crux of the narrative: even if this doesn’t lead to AGI, at the very least it’s likely the final “warning shot” we’ll get before it’s suddenly and irreversibly here. The problems it raises - alignment, geopolitics, lack of societal safeguards - are all real, and happening now (just replace “AGI” with “corpo…
> even if this doesn’t lead to AGI, at the very least it’s likely the final “warning shot” we’ll get before it’s suddenly and irreversibly here. I agree that it's good science fiction, but this is still taking it too seriously. All of these "projections" are generalizing from fictional evidence - to borrow a term that's popular in communities that push these ideas. Long before we had deep learning there were people l…
I think you misunderstood that argument. The simulate the brain thing isn't a "start from the beginning" argument, it's an "answer a common objection" argument.
Back around 2000, when Nick Bostrom was talking about this sort of thing, computers were simply nowhere near powerful enough to come even close to being smart enough to outsmart a human, except in very constrained cases like chess; we did't even have the first clue how to create a computer program to be even remotely dangerous to us.
Bostrom's point was that, "We don't need to know the computer program; even if we just simulate something we know works -- a biological brain -- we can reach superintelligence in a few decades." The idea was never that people would actually simulate a cat. The idea is, if we don't think of anything more efficient, we'll at least be able to simulate a cat, and then an idiot, and then Einstein, and then something smarter. And since we almost certainly will think of something more efficient than "simulate a human brain", we should expect superintelligence to come much sooner.
> There is no evidence or argument for exponential growth.
Moore's law is exponential, which is where the "simulate a brain" predictions have come from.
> It is science fiction and leads people to make bad decisions based on fictional evidence.
The only "fictional evidence" you've actually specified so far is the fact that there's no biological analog; and that (it seems to me) is from a misunderstanding of a point someone else was making 20 years ago, not something these particular authors are making.
I think the case for AI caution looks like this:
A. It is possible to create a superintelligent AI
B. Progress towards a superintelligent AI will be exponential
C. It is possible that a superintelligent AI will want to do something we wouldn't want it to do; e.g., destroy the whole human race
D. Such an AI would be likely to succeed.
Your skepticism seems to rest on the fundamental belief that either A or B is false: that superintelligence is not physically possible, or at least that progress towards it will be logarithmic rather than exponential.
Well, maybe that's true and maybe it's not; but how do you know? What justifies your belief that A and/or B are false so strongly, that you're willing to risk it? And not only willing to risk it, but try to stop people who are trying to think about what we'd do if they are true?
What evidence would cause you to re-evaluate that belief, and consider exponential progress towards superintelligence possible?
And, even if you think A or B are unlikely, doesn't it make sense to just consider the possibility that they're true, and think about how we'd know and what we could do in response, to prevent C or D?
> "OpenBrain (the leading US AI project) builds AI agents that are good enough to dramatically accelerate their research. The humans, who up until very recently had been the best AI researchers on the planet, sit back and watch the AIs do their jobs, making better and better AI systems." I'm not sure what gives the authors the confidence to predict such statements. Wishful thinking? Worst-case paranoia? I agree that…
It's my belief (and I'm far from the only person who thinks this) that many AI optimists are motivated by an essentially religious belief that you could call Singularitarianism. So "wishful thinking" would be one answer. This document would then be the rough equivalent of a Christian fundamentalist outlining, on the basis of tangentially related news stories, how the Second Coming will come to pass in the next few ye…
Maybe we'll see "Church of the Children of Altman" /s
It seems without a framework of ethics/morality (insert XYZ religion), us humans find one to grasp onto. Be it a cult, a set of not-so-fleshed-out ideas/philosophies etc.
People who say they aren't religious per-se, seem to have some set of beliefs that amount to religion. Just depends who or what you look towards for those beliefs, many of which seem to be half-hazard.
People I may disagree with the most, many times at least have a realization of what ideas/beliefs are unifying their structure of reality, with others just not aware.
A small minority of people can rely on schools of philosophical thought, and 'try on' or play with different ideas, but have a self-reflection that allows them to see when they transgress from ABC philosophy or when the philosophy doesn't match with their identity to a degree.
It’s good science fiction, I’ll give it that. I think getting lost in the weeds over technicalities ignores the crux of the narrative: even if this doesn’t lead to AGI, at the very least it’s likely the final “warning shot” we’ll get before it’s suddenly and irreversibly here. The problems it raises - alignment, geopolitics, lack of societal safeguards - are all real, and happening now (just replace “AGI” with “corpo…
> even if this doesn’t lead to AGI, at the very least it’s likely the final “warning shot” we’ll get before it’s suddenly and irreversibly here. I agree that it's good science fiction, but this is still taking it too seriously. All of these "projections" are generalizing from fictional evidence - to borrow a term that's popular in communities that push these ideas. Long before we had deep learning there were people l…
I think the growth you are thinking of, self improving AI, needs the AI to be as smart as a human developer/researcher to get going and we haven't got there yet. But we quite likely will at some point.
It’s good science fiction, I’ll give it that. I think getting lost in the weeds over technicalities ignores the crux of the narrative: even if this doesn’t lead to AGI, at the very least it’s likely the final “warning shot” we’ll get before it’s suddenly and irreversibly here. The problems it raises - alignment, geopolitics, lack of societal safeguards - are all real, and happening now (just replace “AGI” with “corpo…
Whatever the future is, it is not American, not the United States. The US's cultural individualism has been Capitalistically weaponized, and the educational foundation to take the country forward is not there. The US is kaput, and we are merely observing the ugly demise. The future is Asia, with all of western culture going down. Yes, it is not pretty, The failed experiment of American self rule.
It’s good science fiction, I’ll give it that. I think getting lost in the weeds over technicalities ignores the crux of the narrative: even if this doesn’t lead to AGI, at the very least it’s likely the final “warning shot” we’ll get before it’s suddenly and irreversibly here. The problems it raises - alignment, geopolitics, lack of societal safeguards - are all real, and happening now (just replace “AGI” with “corpo…
But it's par on course. Write prompts for LLMs to compete? It's prompt engineering. Tell LLMs to explain their "reasoning" (lol)? It's Deep Research Chain Of Thought. Etc.
Much has been made in its article about autonomous agents ability to do research via browsing the web - the web is 90% garbage by weight (including articles on certain specialist topics). And it shows. When I used GPT's deep research to research the topic, it generated a shallow and largely incorrect summary of the issue, owning mostly to its inability to find quality material, instead it ended up going for places li…