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OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster

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Re: OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster

#461

Put this on my tombstone after the robots kill me or whatever, but I think all “AI safety” concerns are a wild overreaction totally out of proportion to the actual capabilities of these models. I just haven’t seen anything in the past year which makes me remotely fearful about the future of humanity, including both our continued existence and our continued employment.

I will bet ANY amount of money that 30% of current jobs will be displaced with AI advances in the next twenty years.

Darn well I really was hoping my children and grandchildren could continue my wonderful data entry career but OCR ruined that, and now they can’t even do such meaningful jobs like read emails and schedule appointments, or do taxes like an accountant. What meaning will they have in life with all those ever so profound careers ruined!! /s

Re: OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster

#462
post #3

> warning of a powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity, > Given vast computing resources, the new model was able to solve certain mathematical problems, [..] Though only performing math on the level of grade-school students, acing such tests made researchers very optimistic about Q*’s future success, the source said. I somehow expected a bit more.

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Re: OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster

#463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is enough there to make me believe it's real. After all, a big objection to LLMs is they are just "fancy autocomplete" or "stochastic parrots". I don't agree, but LLMs famously are "bad at math", that is you can't really train them to do math unless they've seen previous calculations with similar numbers in their training sets. Training an AI system to truly do arbitrary mathematical logic (think "compl…

Mathematical logic doesn’t refer to ‘complex word problems with big numbers’. The reason that LLMs struggle (well, are hopeless currently) with mathematics problems is not because it involves arithmetic (although this is already enough of a struggle) but because it requires a conceptual understanding of the ideas rather than just being about manipulating language — a lot of the goings-on are hidden in the semantic wo…

That's an interesting observation. It seems that in theory, you could train it to do math if you encoded literally everything in syntax and started at the beginning, like Principia Mathematica 50 pages proving 1+1=2 type beginning, and then the rest of known mathematics encoded similarly, and used that as the training data, although the context window limitations might still stop it from doing anything useful, and it might not work.

Re: OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster

#465

Remember, about a month ago Sam posted a comment along the lines of "AI will be capable of superhuman persuasion well before it is superhuman at general intelligence, which may lead to very strange outcomes". The board was likely spooked by the recent breakthroughs (which were most likely achieved by combining transformers with another approach), and hit the panic button. Anything capable of "superhuman persuasion",…

But they didn’t hit the panic button. They said Sam lied to them about something and fired him.

Re: OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster

#466

You've got to hand it to OpenAI for their bleeding edge marketing strat: "WE'VE GOT AN AGI IN THIS CABINET RIGHT HERE AND WE DON'T WANT TO LET IT OUT BECAUSE IT'S SO POWERFUL, IT'S SO AI YOU HAVE NO IDEA, BEST YOU THROW MONEY AT US AND WE'LL KEEP EVERYONE SAFE BUT SORRY YOU"RE ALL REDUNDANT BECAUSE AGI, SORRY" You'd think that so soon after so many Crypto scams people would be just a wee bit less credulous.

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Re: OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster

#467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. The rational fear is that they will automate many lower middle class jobs and cause unemployment, not that Terminator was a documentary.

Wasn't this supposed to happen when PCs came out?

Occupations like computer (human form), typist, telephone switcher, all became completely eliminated when the PC came out. Jobs like travel agents are on permanent decline minus select scenarios where it is attached with luxury. Cashier went from a decent nonlaborious job to literal starvation gig because the importance of a human in the job became negligible. There are many more examples.

Some people managed to retrain and adapt, partially thanks to software becoming much more intuitive to use over the years. We don't know how big the knowledge gap will be when the next big wave of automation comes. If retraining is not feasible for those at risk of losing their careers, there better be welfare abundance or society will be in great turmoil. High unemployment & destitution is the single most fundamental factor of social upheavel throughout human history.

Re: OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster

#469

Remember, about a month ago Sam posted a comment along the lines of "AI will be capable of superhuman persuasion well before it is superhuman at general intelligence, which may lead to very strange outcomes". The board was likely spooked by the recent breakthroughs (which were most likely achieved by combining transformers with another approach), and hit the panic button. Anything capable of "superhuman persuasion",…

Except that there's a fairly large body of evidence that persuasion is of limited use in shifting political opinion. So the persuasion would need to be applied to something other than some sort of causative political-implication-laden argument.

Or, let's say, you don't need a lot of persuasion to guide an election. I mean we already have X, FB, and an army of bots.
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