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OpenAI Codex

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Re: OpenAI Codex

#41

Post by elefanten »

EamonnMR wrote: post #35
nradov wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The notion of a toy like a chatbot being "dangerous" is just so ludicrous. The OpenAI folks take themselves way too seriously. Their technology is cool and scientifically interesting, but in the end it's nothing more than a clever parlor trick.

Definitely dangerous from a legal perspective if AI Dungeon is any indication.

The general public basically races to test the most controversial content. As exhibited by several other high-profile chatbot launches.

> Tay responded to a question on "Did the Holocaust happen?" with "It was made up"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)

Re: OpenAI Codex

#42

Post by nradov »

throwaway128327 wrote: post #19

I don't understand what is going on, why are people even spending time on this? I think this and copilot and etc are solving a non problem of "we will remove the boring part of programming" by generating a bunch of code, so now it's even more boring to read it and check if it actually does what you want. In the same time zero of the developers I interviewed know how a linked list is laid out in memory, or what is the…

It seems like they're going in totally the wrong direction. If program content is predictable based on patterns (low entropy) then that's a sign that our programming languages are too low level. If we want to improve developer productivity then the solution is the same as it always has been: create higher level languages which abstract away all the repetitive patterns.

Re: OpenAI Codex

#43

Post by throwaway128327 »

parksy wrote: post #38
throwaway128327 wrote: post #19

I don't understand what is going on, why are people even spending time on this? I think this and copilot and etc are solving a non problem of "we will remove the boring part of programming" by generating a bunch of code, so now it's even more boring to read it and check if it actually does what you want. In the same time zero of the developers I interviewed know how a linked list is laid out in memory, or what is the…

This is just nascent technology leading toward something like this: "Computer, I want to play a game." "Okay, what will the game be?" "I want to be a starship captain, give me a cool space ship I can explore the galaxy with" "Okay... like this?" "Not quite, make the galaxy more realistic, with real stars and planets. Also make it 3d. I want to be the captain inside the ship." "How about now?" "Cool, and there should…

Oh! this will be so cool! do you really think it could lead in that direction? To me it seems more like a metaphysical cargo cult. I think I am too pessimistic, I should shake it off, nothing good comes out of being pessimistic (by definition).

Thanks for the inspiration!

Re: OpenAI Codex

#44

Post by keewee7 »

z77dj3kl wrote: post #8

I thought OpenAI was originally supposed to be some kind of for-the-good, non-profit institution studying AI and its safe use in particular with an effort to make it more accessible and available to all through more open collaboration. This is cool research, sure; but what happened to making models available for use by others instead of just through some opaque APIs? Maybe I'm just remembering wrong or conflating Ope…

OpenAI was founded in 2015. In 2015 Google was AI and AI was Google. There was legitimate concern that one American corporation was going to dominate AI. OpenAI was created to challenge that dominance and let "AI benefit all of humanity".

In the meantime China and Chinese companies have catched up. Turns out the fear that one company and one country dominating AI was overblown.

Maybe the OpenAI founders feel that the original goal has been fulfilled because AI is no longer dominated by the US and Google.

Re: OpenAI Codex

#45

Post by maxwells-daemon »

The "language models don't really understand anything" corner is getting smaller and smaller. In the last few months we've seen pretty definitive evidence that transformers can recombine concepts ([1], [2]) and do simple logical inference using contextual information ([3], "make the score font color visible"). I see no reason that this technology couldn't smoothly scale into human-level intelligence, yet lots of people seem to think it'll require a step change or is impossible.

That being said, robust systematic generalization is still a hard problem. But "achieve symbol grounding through tons of multimodal data" is looking more and more like the answer.

[1] https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/ [2] https://distill.pub/2021/multimodal-neurons/ [3] https://openai.com/blog/openai-codex/

Re: OpenAI Codex

#46

Post by dimal »

reducesuffering wrote: post #23
throwaway128327 wrote: post #19

I don't understand what is going on, why are people even spending time on this? I think this and copilot and etc are solving a non problem of "we will remove the boring part of programming" by generating a bunch of code, so now it's even more boring to read it and check if it actually does what you want. In the same time zero of the developers I interviewed know how a linked list is laid out in memory, or what is the…

Think bigger. Say I'm starting a startup: 1. "Setup Django, Nginx, and Postgres deployed on a Digital Ocean Ubuntu droplet." Done. 2. "Make a shopping page like $URL." Done. 3. "Fill it with data from X and connect with Stripe." Done. 4. ??? 5. Profit Seems like even a great dev will take 20x the time to do that if the model is able to correctly generate this, even with an error, customization, or two.

If you don't have someone that understands the generated code, you'll be kinda screwed. Most of my work isn't writing a function to do X. It's reading and understanding all the surrounding code and architecture and then knowing that I need a function to do X. Writing the actual function isn't usually much of a challenge. I get the feeling that this tool will just encourage write-only code that ultimately no one understands. Will all of the generated code follow a consistent style? Will it know to use the framework you built or will it just reinvent everything it needs for each problem you give it? I already see tons of code that people copy and paste without really understanding it, and a lot of the time they're just adding complexity by solving non-problems. This just automates that process. I can see it being useful in certain narrow cases, but the potential for misuse is huge.

Re: OpenAI Codex

#47

Post by minimaxir »

nradov wrote: post #37
minimaxir wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But they are so scared of their chatbot saying a bad thing and the PR around that they've removed the possibility of doing anything useful with it. It's not unreasonable to have checks-and-balances on AI content, and there should be. However, in my testing of GPT-3's content filter when it was released (it could be improved now), it was very sensitive to the point that it had tons of false positives. Given that pas…

Why should there be checks and balances on AI content? What most people label as "AI" today is literally just fancy statistics. Should there be checks and balances on the use of linear regression analysis and other statistical techniques? Where do we draw the line?

> Should there be checks and balances on the use of linear regression analysis and other statistical techniques?

That rhetorical question actually argues against your point: even in academic contexts, statistics can be used (intentionally or otherwise) to argue incorrect/misleading points, which is why reputable institutions have peer reviews/boards as a level of validation for papers.

The point I was making was more on general content moderation in response to user-generated content, which is required for every service that does so for legal reasons at minimum, as they're the ones who will get blamed if something goes wrong.

Re: OpenAI Codex

#48

Post by dfraser992 »

Vermeulen wrote: post #16
option_greek wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really interesting demo. What makes the responses so laggy? Does the model take that long to generate text? You can also experiment with things like repeating the user question or adding pauses like "hmm let's see" to make it less noticeable at least some of the time. Too bad they asked you to pull it. What's the danger they are worried about? Annoying thing from their press releases is how seriously they ta…

It's laggy since it needs to do speech to text, gpt3 text response, then text to speech. Not sure what adds the most latency actually. They only allow gpt3 chatbots if the chatbot is designed to speak only about a specific subject, and literally never says anything bad/negative (and we have to keep logs to make sure this is the case). Which is insane. Their reasoning to me was literally a 'what if' the chatbot "advis…

But what if it wasn't clearly labeled? I did my MSc thesis on fake reviews and discussed the phenomena known as "covert marketing" a bit. e.g. a guy you're talking to in a bar at some point steers the conversation to the excellent beer he is drinking and heavily recommends it to you. Good enough actors will be very convincing. "Influencers" are a somewhat more ethical alternative that takes advantage of humans' lemming-like nature.

I mean, quite a lot of people truly believe Hilary Clinton is the mastermind behind a DNC run pedophile ring. Yes, she is a problem, but that theory is completely schizophrenic. A NPC masquerading as a real person who spouts positive talking points about Tucker Carlson's respect for Hungary is quite reasonable compared to that and it will suck some people in.

So all it takes is some right wing developers for a not-entirely-just-a-game like Second Life or Minecraft to introduce a bug that allows certain instances of NPC to be unlabeled... or a mod to a game that drives a NPC... and an equivalent to GPT-3 funded by the Kochs or the Mercers...

Very hypothetical, very hand waving. But it is possible. So I can see the PR and legal departments flat out stopping this idea.

Re: OpenAI Codex

#49

Post by qayxc »

motoxpro wrote: post #33
throwaway128327 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but does it really matter, if 20x is 1 week instead of 2 hours? are startups really that shallow?

1/20th of the time? That's kind of a big deal.

That depends: https://xkcd.com/1205/

A one-time setup is perfectly OK to take a few days, especially if afterwards you have a documented process that allows you to modify and improve the result.

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