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Ronan Farrow on Hacker News. Now I’ve seen everything.
I’ve really appreciated how substantive and polite the discourse here is, overall!
https://theonion.com/anyone-else-have-those-weird-dreams-whe...
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Oh, I agree that's the correct answer. I just don't see the article actually ending up with that answer. I see it waffling. Basically, the article ends up saying that, well, we told you about all this dodgy stuff, but what he's doing is working.
God forbid an article presents all the evidence from all parties and asks you to reach a conclusion by yourself... Sorry for the snark. But I genuinely think the way they did this was perfect.
Evidently we disagree. I responded about that to another commenter downthread.
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> All they do is perform compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space and call it 'reasoning' If they discover the cure to cancer, I don't care how they did it. "I don't trust anyone who claims they're superhumanly intelligent" doesn't follow from "all they do is ".
Has generative AI made material progress on curing cancer? Has it produced any breakthroughs, at all?
- it’s the worst it’ll ever be - big leaps happened the fast few months bro
Etc.
Personally I think llm’s can be very powerful in a narrow-band. But the more substance a thing involves, the more a human is needed to be involved.
For those curious about how sama got to where he got and stayed on top for so long, I recommend you read the book: The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout. I am fairly confident when I say this -- sama is a sociopath. I don't know how anyone with solid intuition could even come to any other conclusion than the guy is deeply weird and off-putting. Some concepts from the book: > Core trait: The defining characteristic…
I was with you right up until the final paragraph, but this made me do a double take: > OpenAI is too important to trust sama with. ...wat? They made a chat bot. How can that possibly be so existentially important? The concept of "importance" (and its cousin "danger") has no place in the realistic assessment of what OpenAI has accomplished. They haven't built anything dangerous, there is no "AI safety" problem, and n…
I'm not even sure we're any closer to AGI than we were before LLMs. It's getting more funding and research, but none of the research seems very innovative. And now it's probably much more difficult to get funding for anything that's not a transformer model.
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> Human cognition is nothing like AI "cognition." I've wondered about this. Do we really know enough about what the human brain is doing to make a statement like this? I feel like if we did, we would be able to model it faithfully and OpenAI, etc. would not be doing what they're doing with LLMs. What if human cognition turns out to be the biological equivalent of a really well-tuned prediction machine, and LLMs are j…
Yes, we do. Humans share the statistical association ability that LLMs possess, but also conscious meaning and understanding. This is a difference in kind and means that we can generalize beyond the statistical pattern associations that we've extracted from data, so we don't require trillions of examples to develop knowledge. Theoretically a human could sit alone in a dark room, knowing nothing of mathematics and com…
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Hi Ronan appreciate you being here. what would help you and others continue to do journalism like this? (including commenting on HN?)
This is a vast and tricky question. The business model has basically fallen out from under journalism, and especially this kind of labor-intensive investigative reporting. The media landscape is increasingly dominated by moneyed individuals and companies essentially buying up the discourse. I would really suggest subscribing to and finding ways to amplify independent outlets and journalists, and encouraging others to…
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Your brain is performing "compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space" as you read this very sentence. You trained patterns on English syntax, structure, and semantics since you were a child and it is supporting you now with inference (or interpretation). And, for compute efficiency, you probably have evolution to thank.
people like to say this like they’re apples to apples but this comparison isn’t remotely how the brain actually works - and even if it did, the brain does it automatically without direction and at an infitesimal percentage of the power required. And we’re just talking about cognition - it completely ignores the automatic processes such as maintaining and regulating the body and it’s hormones, coordinating and maintai…
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They're mass media cynically produced to extract maximum profit from lowest common denominator audiences, so the idea that people working in such influential positions find them appealing enough to reference suggests they are members of that lowest common denominator audience. The people shaping the future have no taste.
There's a time and a place for everything, and rejecting popular media as "lowest common denominator" is the most uninspired form of cultural elitism. Is it cynical to want your to make a profit? Or for it to make enough profit to subsidize other projects? Is it cynical to make something accessible so more people who watch it are able to enjoy it? I agree that it's embarrassing and feels crass when movies both try to…
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Thank you for coming on HN and offering to answer questions.[a] This is a fantastic piece, very timely, evidently well-researched, and also well-written. Judging by the little that I know, it's accurate. Thank you for doing the work and sharing it with the world. OpenAI may be in a more tenuous competitive position than many people realize. Recent anecdotal evidence suggests the company has lost its lead in the AI ra…
It's worth noting Codex has 2x more stories than Claude https://hn.algolia.com/?query=codex
(i found your comment surprising based on my daily hn reading recollection - i mostly read top N daily and feel i only occassionally see codex stories).