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It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

theatlantic.com

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Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#531

Post by paulryanrogers »

wildermuthn wrote: post #516
jcgrillo wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then human invention will give way What? Would you mind explaining this?

It’s analogous to the automobile. People do still walk, bike, and ride horses, but the vast majority of productive land transportation is done by automobile. Same thing with electronic communication vs. written correspondence. New tech largely supplants old tech. In this case, the old tech is human ingenuity and inventiveness. I don’t think this is a controversial take. Many people take issue with the premise that ar…

Arguably cars have so many externalities they will bankrupt the earth of cheap energy sources. Walking is at least hundreds of millions of years old, and will endure after the last car stops.

Likewise (silicon based) AGI may be so costly that it exists only for a few years before it's unsustainable no matter the demand for it. Much like Bitcoin, at least in its original incarnation.

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#533

Post by richardw »

jcgrillo wrote: post #496
richardw wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any points that aren’t about the people you disagree with? Argue the facts. What are the limits that prevent progress on the dimension of replicating human intelligence?

> Do you have any points that aren’t about the people you disagree with? Yes... > Argue the facts. What? > What are the limits that prevent progress on the dimension of replicating human intelligence? I don't work in that field, but as a layman I'd wager the lack of clear technical understanding of what animal intelligence actually is , let alone how it works is the biggest limitation.

> What

Half of the language in your comment was fact free and incendiary. Delusion, prattle, deep needs of some role. That’s all firmly in the realm of ad hominem, so I was asking if you had anything substantial.

> I'd wager the lack of clear technical understanding of what animal intelligence actually is

I made the same points long time ago so can’t be too critical of that. I’ve changed my mind and here’s why. That’s not any kind of universal limit. It’s a state, and we can change states. We currently don’t understand intelligence but there’s no barrier I’m aware of that prevents progress. In addition, we’ve discovered types of intelligence (LLM’s, AlphaGo Zero etc) that don’t depend on our ability to understand ourselves. So our inability to understand intelligence isn’t a limit that prevents progress. New algorithms and architectures will be tested, in an ongoing fashion, because the perceived advantages and benefits are so great. It’s not like the universe had a map for intelligence before we arrived, it emerged from randomness.

I’m less sure that it’s a good idea, but that’s a different discussion. Put me in the camp of “this is going to be absolutely massive and I wish people took it more seriously.”

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#534

Post by muddi900 »

Dalewyn wrote: post #7
bediger4000 wrote: post #3

This seems like a more general problem with journalistic practices. Journalists don't want to inject their own judgements into articles, which is admirable, and makes sense. So they quote people exactly. Quoting exactly means that bad actors can inject falsehoods into articles. I don't have any suggestions on how to solve this. Everything I can think of has immediate large flaws.

A journalist's job is to journal something, exactly like how NTFS keeps a journal of what happens. A journalist doing anything other than journaling is not a journalist. So people getting quoted verbatim is perfectly fine. If the quoted turns out to be a liar, that's just part of the journal.

So they should report anything anyone says?

Because selecting whom to report is editorializing by your standards. It creates a bias and gives importance aome over others.

Woke Derangement Syndrome has taken the best of us.

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#535

Post by bad_user »

cdchn wrote: post #435
bad_user wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 12 year old that doesn't interact with the world. Many believe that AGI will happen in robots, and not in online services, simply because interacting with the environment might be a prerequisite for developing consciousness. You mentioned boredom, which is interesting, as boredom may also be a trait of intelligence. An interesting question is if it will want to live at all. Humans have all these pleasure sensors an…

>simply because interacting with the environment might be a prerequisite for developing consciousness. We can't even define what consciousness is yet, let alone whats required to develop it.

We may not be able to fully define Consciousness, but we can observe it in humans and develop falsifiable hypotheses, of which there are several.

Take a look at this paper: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/mtgn7

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#536

Post by refulgentis »

12_throw_away wrote: post #465
Filligree wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(D) includes me, and does sound fun. Got any references?

> Got any references? This is a good question, and I worry you won't get a response. Here is a pattern I've observed very frequently in the LLM space, with much more frequency than random chance would suggest: Bob: "Oh, of course it didn't work for you, you just need to use an ANA (amazing new acronym) model" Alice: "Oh, that's great, where can I see how ANA works? How do I use it?" ** Bob has left the chat **

I'm sorry but if you're calling RL "ANA (amazing new acronym)" you're out of your depth on this one.

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#537

Post by hanspeter »

lolinder wrote: post #427
gojomo wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're projecting a short-term cash-out mentality here. Altman's actions are even more consistent with total confidence & dedication to a vision where OpenAI is the 1st and faraway leader in the production of the most valuable 'technology' ever. Plus, a desire to retain more personal control over that outcome – & not just conventional wealth! – than was typical with prior breakthroughs.

> you're projecting a short-term cash-out mentality I'm a software engineer comfortably drawing a decent-but-not-FAANG paycheck at an established company with every intention of taking the slow-and-steady path to retirement. I'm not projecting, I promise. > to a vision where OpenAI is the 1st and faraway leader in the production of the most valuable 'technology' ever Except that OpenAI isn't a faraway leader. Their b…

Even if you were right in his intentions, can you outline the scenario where Sam is able to make an exit?

I don't see how it could happen at current valuation. Who would want to pay $150 bil. for an OpenAI, where Sam is no longer part of it?

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#538

Post by barrell »

peteforde wrote: post #518
rocho wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To you maybe. But if Claude or any other competitor with similar features and performance keeps a lower price, most users will migrate there.

You could be right, but I suspect that you're underestimating the degree to which GPT has become the Kleenex of the LLM space in the consumer zeitgeist. Based on all of the behaviour psychology books I've read, Claude would have to introduce a model that is 10x better and 10x cheaper - or something so radically different that it registers as an entirely new thing - for it to hit the radar outside of the tech world. I…

I don’t think people outside of tech hearing about OpenAI more than Claude is really indicative of much. Ask those same people how much they use an LLM and it’s often rare-to-never.

Also, in what way has OpenAI become the Kleenex of the LLM space? Anthropic, Google, Facebook have no gpts, nobody “gpts” something, nobody uses that companies “gpt”.

I would say perhaps OpenAI has become the Napster, MySpace, or Facebook of the LLM space. Time will tell how long they keep that title

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#539

Post by jerpint »

KPGv2 wrote: post #477
jerpint wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video data is still very much untapped and likely to unlock a step function worth of data. Current image-language models are trained mostly on {image, caption} pairs with a bit of extra fine tuning

Do you think it matters that there's orders of magnitude less video (and audio) data than text data?

I’m not sure I agree, text is full of compressed information but lacks all of the visual cues we all use to navigate and understand our world. Video data also has temporal components which text is really bad at.

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#540

Post by wkat4242 »

changing1999 wrote: post #493
wkat4242 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, you can be economical. You don't need a GPT-4 quality model for everything. Some things are just low value where a 3.5 model would do just fine. I never use the $20 plan but I access everything via API and i spend a couple of dollars per month. Although lately I have a home server that can do llama 3.1 8b uncensored and that actually works amazingly well.

I use Llama 3.1 8B Instruct 128k at home and that pretty much covers all my LLM needs. Don't see a reason to pay for GPT-4.

Yeah it's good, right?? Amazingly good. The first-gen small models were a bit iffy but Llama 3.1 is so good The only thing I see is that it hallucinates a lot when you ask it for knowledge. Which makes sense because 8B is just not a lot to keep detailed information around. But the ability to recite training knowledge is really a misuse of LLMs and only a peculiar side-effect. I combine it with google searches (though OpenWebUI and SearXNG) and it works amazingly well then.
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