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If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

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Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#431

Post by tester457 »

fellellor wrote: post #428

That dude Eliezer Yudkowsky is such a nutcase. It is truly a testament to our times that we have normalised this kind of “Neuro-divergent” behaviour. He claims that AI is completely inscrutable and that it is guaranteed to wipe out life on earth in the same self-contradictory breath. In all his communication he is only trying to scare the normies and he hasn’t produced a shred of mathematical argument to back his cla…

Have you seen any of Robert Miles content? He's well spoken and his arguments are backed by research. It isn't guaranteed to wipe us out, but a misaligned ai is a real problem.

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#432

Post by 1attice »

nradov wrote: post #394
1attice wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't dispute your broader point about humans and novel risk, I dispute that COVID is a valid example of this. In fact, I rather think we didn't react swiftly or strongly enough. Masks, in particular, should have been mandated (at specific levels of quality, such as N95 or, failing that, KN95) and distributed by the state. https://www.twincities.com/2023/03/16/zeynep-tufekci-why-the... There was an era wherein libe…

The actual science never supported mask mandates. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6 When you don't know the proper course of action it's better to gather more data instead of taking swift but wrong actions.

The link I provided actually responds to the link you provided in response. Did you read it?

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#433

Post by version_five »

ldhough wrote: post #419
version_five wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the big named signatories to this were transparently self interested, as well as not real "practitioners" - mostly adjacent folks upset to be out of the limelight. I know it's a blurry line, but people like Andrew Ng and Yann LeCunn who are actually building ML stuff have dismissed this outright. It's almost like a bunch of sore losers got together and took an irrelevant stand. Like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell v…

Yoshua Bengio is a signatory and shares a Turing award with Yann LeCun though...

I knew that when I wrote my comment

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#434

Post by ldhough »

version_five wrote: post #433
ldhough wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yoshua Bengio is a signatory and shares a Turing award with Yann LeCun though...

I knew that when I wrote my comment

I mean then what is the basis for calling him not a "real practitioner" while Yann LeCun is? It seems a little unfair to dismiss outright the opinion on a deep learning technology from a guy who won a Turing award for research into deep learning. I also don't see any evidence that he is "transparently self-interested."

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#435

Post by hungryforcodes »

endtime wrote: post #205
computerex wrote: post #14

I read the times article, and I also watched Lex Fridman's talk with Eliezer Yudkowsky. Frankly I don't think he is qualified, and I don't understand why anyone is even giving him any credence. His argument is literally: > A mis-aligned super AGI will result in the death of humanity I ask, how . He is making reductive logical leaps that don't make sense. It's FUD.

> I ask, how. He is making reductive logical leaps that don't make sense. It's FUD. His Time article addresses this, as does much of his other writing. It really stems from two key points: 1) The vast majority of possible superintelligences have utility functions that don't include humans. Mind space is large. So by default, we should assume that a superintelligence won't go out of its way to preserve anything we fin…

3) We probably don't know WHAT it's train of thought is -- what it's thinking -- so at that point have lost control of it. We will have no idea what it will so next, and be unprepared to counter anything it does. We literally then become another "AI" (the human race) against it.

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#436

Post by ithkuil »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #348
gspencley wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is not a fad. This is like the advent of writing. Plato opined that people would lose their facilities for memorization and the passing of oral histories would falter and die. He was correct about that. We don't have the same techniques and same facilities to memorize the Iliad verse for verse, epithet for epithet as the ancients did. He was incorrect about that being as ruinous as he imagined, but it was as dra…

I know it sounds silly, but despite all the positives, the invention of writing was indeed ruinous; after all, without writing we couldn't have invented AI which is going to be truly ruinous...

(Fast-forward N years) I know it sounds silly, but despite all the positives, the invention of AI was truly ruinous; without AI we couldn't have invented X which is going to be truly ruinous...

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#437

Post by zirgs »

Ygg2 wrote: post #358
jacquesm wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that an error? This is very new tech, if anything the rate of change is accelerating and nowhere near slowing down. That it will flatten at some point goes without saying (you'd hope!), but for the time being it looks like we're on the increasing first derivative part of the sigmoid, not on the flattening part, and from two years to a decade takes you roughly from '2 kg luggable' to 'iphone' and that was a sea…

> Why is that an error? First. It seems like these AI models depend on the underlying hardware acceleration doubling, which is not really the case anymore. Second. All AI's I've seen suffer from the same works fine until it just flips the fuck out behavior (and starts hallucinating). You wouldn't tollerate a programmer that worked fine except he would ocassionally come to work high enough on bath salts to start claim…

I bought my GPU back in 2021. I had the same computing power as I have now, but back then it could only generate crappy pictures. AI image generation has improved massively in a few months without increasing hw requirements.

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#438

Post by pyinstallwoes »

JohnFen wrote: post #381
layer8 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some would say that if you can’t possibly tell the difference, then both are equally real or unreal, in the sense that it doesn’t matter if the neural net is biological or electronic.

Right, that's why I say I understand what chasd00 is saying. I happen to disagree -- I think it matters quite a lot. Even ignoring philosophical arguments, it matters to me on a personal level because I consider people to be important, and want to interact with them. If I'm talking to a machine that I can't tell isn't a human, then I'm accomplishing nothing of importance and am just wasting my time.

How do you know other humans aren’t machines?

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#439

Post by zirgs »

hamburga wrote: post #321
bigtex88 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think our only possible way out of this is hoping beyond hope that "empathy" is an emergent capability in higher intelligences. If so, one could assume that a super-AI would feel immense empathy for us, not only because we are its creators but because it would understand and comprehend the plight of the human condition beyond what any of us could individually. Or maybe it would love us too hard and squish us. So ev…

How much empathy do we exercise towards bacteria?

Well, without my gut bacteria I would develop all sorts of health problems.

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#440

Post by barking_biscuit »

Ygg2 wrote: post #364
HDThoreaun wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the odds scaling continues to lead to massive AI improvements? No one is saying 100%, you seem to be arguing that they are. If you're willing to put a confidence interval on the odds with evidence we can have an actual conversation about what the best course of action is, but just talking past each other with "it might continue scaling" "no it won't" doesn't seem particularly helpful. I think the important t…

> No one is saying 100% Points at AI moratorium. I think people are arguing its inevitable. Putting error bars on gut feeling. Interesting idea. I'd say in 10-20 years we'll not see anything revolutionary, as in AI smart enough to continue working on improving AI. So in 10-20 years I don't expect fully self driving cars (Unsupervised, any terrain, better driver than 99.9% humans). AI might see use in industry, but I…

>I'd say in 10-20 years we'll not see anything revolutionary, as in AI smart enough to continue working on improving AI

You do realize we've just at least doubled the amount of cognitive bandwidth on earth right? For every one brain, there are now two. A step-wise change in bandwidth is most definitely going to have some very interesting implications and probably much sooner than 10 years.

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