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OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster

reuters.com

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

#531

Post by Davidzheng »

swatcoder wrote: post #514
muskmusk wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ask Ilya Sutskever he will say your kids head is full of neurons, so is LLMs. LLMs comsume training data and can then be asked questions. How different is that to your son watching YouTube and then answering questions? It's not 1:1 the same,yet, but it's in the neighborhood.

There are thousands of structures and substances in a human head besides neurons, at all sorts of commingling and overlapping scales, and the neurons in those heads behave much differently and with tremendously more complexity than the metaphorical ones in a neural network. And in a human, all those structures and substances, along with the tens of thousands more throughout the rest of the body, are collectively read…

True. But a human neuron is more complex than an AI neuron by a constant factor. And we can improve constants. Also you say years like it's a lot of data--but they can run RL on chatgpt outputs if they want, isn't it comparable? But anyway i share your admiration for the biological thinking machines ;)

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

#532

Post by neilk »

muskmusk wrote: post #509
wbhart wrote: post #491

I feel very comfortable saying, as a mathematician, that the ability to solve grade school maths problems would not be at all a predictor of ability to solve real mathematical problems at a research level. The reason LLMs fail at solving mathematical problems is because: 1) they are terrible at arithmetic, 2) they are terrible at algebra, but most importantly, 3) they are terrible at complex reasoning (more specifica…

Friend, the creator of this new progress is a machine learning PhD with a decade of experience in pushing machine learning forward. He knows a lot of math too. Maybe there is a chance that he too can tell the difference between a meaningless advance and an important one?

I am neither a mathematician or LLM creator but I do know how to evaluate interesting tech claims.

The absolute best case scenario for a new technology is that it when it seems like a toy for nerds, and doesn't outperform anything we have today, but the scaling path is clear.

Its problems just won't matter if it does that one thing with scaling. The web is a pretty good hypermedia platform, but a disastrously bad platform for most other computer applications. Nevertheless the scaling of URIs and internet protocols have caused us to reorganize our lives around it. And then if there really are unsolvable problems with the platform they just get offloaded onto users. Passwords? Privacy? Your problem now. Surely you know to use a password manager?

I think this new wave of AI is going to be like that. If they never solve the hallucination/confabulation issue, it's just going to become your problem. If they never really gain insight, it's going to become your problem to instruct them carefully. Your peers will chide for not using a robust AI-guardrail thing or not learning the basics of prompt engineering like all the kids do instinctively these days.

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

#533

Post by nobrains »

muskmusk wrote: post #509
wbhart wrote: post #491

I feel very comfortable saying, as a mathematician, that the ability to solve grade school maths problems would not be at all a predictor of ability to solve real mathematical problems at a research level. The reason LLMs fail at solving mathematical problems is because: 1) they are terrible at arithmetic, 2) they are terrible at algebra, but most importantly, 3) they are terrible at complex reasoning (more specifica…

Friend, the creator of this new progress is a machine learning PhD with a decade of experience in pushing machine learning forward. He knows a lot of math too. Maybe there is a chance that he too can tell the difference between a meaningless advance and an important one?

Also, wbhart is referring to publicly released LLMs, while the OpenAI researchers are most likely referring to an un-released in-research LLM.

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

#534

Post by adastra22 »

giarc wrote: post #369
huitzitziltzin wrote: post #358

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.

Apparently what made this person fearful was grade school math. "Though only performing maths on the level of grade-school students, acing such tests made researchers very optimistic about Q*’s future success, the source said."

...do they not know the history of their field? There's been programs able to grade school maths since the 60's.

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

#535

Post by caesil »

wbhart wrote: post #491

I feel very comfortable saying, as a mathematician, that the ability to solve grade school maths problems would not be at all a predictor of ability to solve real mathematical problems at a research level. The reason LLMs fail at solving mathematical problems is because: 1) they are terrible at arithmetic, 2) they are terrible at algebra, but most importantly, 3) they are terrible at complex reasoning (more specifica…

FWIW The Verge is reporting that people inside are also saying the Reuters story is bunk:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/22/23973354/a-recent-openai...

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

#536

Post by white_dragon88 »

graycat wrote: post #247

AGI? Hmm. That's artificial general intelligence ? Do insects count? In a plastic box on my kitchen countertop were some potatoes that had been there too long. So, I started to see little black flies. Soon with a hose on a vacuum, sucked up dozens a day. Dumped the old potatoes and cleaned up the plastic box. Now see only 1-3 of the insects a day -- they are nearly all gone! The insects have some intelligence to fly…

> intelligence to fly away

It's intelligence in the sense that jerking your arm away from a hotplate is intelligence, which is to say it's not cognitive reasoning, just genetically hardwired triggers.

AGI has been defined by OpenAI as something that can do most economically viable activities better than humans can. I like that approach as it strikes at the heart of the danger it really poses, which is an upending of society and destruction of our current way to generate value to each other.

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

#537

Post by wbhart »

adastra22 wrote: post #515
wbhart wrote: post #491

I feel very comfortable saying, as a mathematician, that the ability to solve grade school maths problems would not be at all a predictor of ability to solve real mathematical problems at a research level. The reason LLMs fail at solving mathematical problems is because: 1) they are terrible at arithmetic, 2) they are terrible at algebra, but most importantly, 3) they are terrible at complex reasoning (more specifica…

Back-tracking is a very nearly solved problem in the context of Prolog-like languages or mathematical theorem provers (as you probably well know). There are many ways you could integrate an LLM-like system into a tactic-based theorem prover without having to restart from the beginning for each alternative. Simply checkpointing and backtracking to a checkpoint would naively improve upon your described Monte Carlo algo…

There are certainly efforts along the lines of what you suggest. There are problems though. The number of backtracks is 10^k where k is not 2, or 3, or 4.....

Another issue is that of autoformalisation. This is the one part of the problem where an LLM might be able to help, if it were reliable enough (it isn't currently) or if it could truly understand the logical structure of mathematical problems correctly (currently they can't).

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

#538

Post by kgeist »

zarzavat wrote: post #406
lexandstuff wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. To me, GPT-4 is an AGI: it knows how to cook, write code, make songs, navigate international tax law, write business plans, etc. Could it be more intelligent? Sure. Is it a capable general intelligence? 100%.

GPT-4 still makes plenty of mistakes when programming that reveal that it doesn’t fully understand what it’s doing. It’s very good, but it doesn’t reach the level of human intellect. Yet. It is A and gets the G but fails somewhat on the I of AGI.

Humans also make mistakes, all the time.

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

#539

Post by CamperBob2 »

wbhart wrote: post #491

I feel very comfortable saying, as a mathematician, that the ability to solve grade school maths problems would not be at all a predictor of ability to solve real mathematical problems at a research level. The reason LLMs fail at solving mathematical problems is because: 1) they are terrible at arithmetic, 2) they are terrible at algebra, but most importantly, 3) they are terrible at complex reasoning (more specifica…

"Also, Crysis runs like crap on my Commodore 64."

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

#540

Post by gunapologist99 »

ugh123 wrote: post #530
cduzz wrote: post #316

I was talking to my (12 year old) son about parts of math he finds boring. He said that he thinks absolute value is absurdly easy and extremely boring. I asked him if there was anything that might make it more interesting, he said "maybe complex numbers". So I asked him "what would the absolute value of i+1 be?" he thinks for a little bit and says "square root of 2" and I ask him "what about the absolute value of 2i…

Are you saying an LLM can't come to the right conclusion and give an explanation for "what is the absolute value of 2i + 2"?

Are you saying it could, without having read it somewhere?
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