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Evolving OpenAI's Structure

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Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#561

Post by cik »

voidspark wrote: post #553
CorpOverreach wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd really love to talk to someone that both really believes this to be true, and has a hands-on experience with building and using generative AI. The intersection of the two seems to be quite hard to find. At the state that we're in the AIs we're building are just really useful input/output devices that respond to a stimuli (e.g., a "prompt"). No stimuli, no output. This isn't a nuclear weapon. We're not going to ac…

> Progress of technology should not be artitrarily held back to protect automateable jobs though. We need to adapt. So you don't mind if your economic value drops to zero, with all human labour replaced by machines? Dependent on UBI, existing in a basic pod, eating rations of slop.

> So you don't mind if your economic value drops to zero, with all human labour replaced by machines?

This was the fear when the cotton gin was invented. It was the ear when cars were created. The same complaint happened with the introduction of electronic, automated, telephone switchboards.

Jobs change. Societies change. Unemployment worldwide, is near the lowest it has ever been. Work will change. Society will eventually move to a currency based on energy production, or something equally futuristic.

This doesn't mean that getting there will be without pain.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#562

Post by xpe »

timewizard wrote: post #479
xpe wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do you strain so hard to lionize this behavior? > lionize: give a lot of public attention and approval to (someone); treat as a celebrity: modern athletes are lionized. Where in my comment do I lionize Musk? Please calm down. Please try to be charitable and curious rather than accusatory towards me.

> Where in my comment do I lionize Musk? You attribute to personality what should be attributed to malice. You do this three times. > Please calm down I am perfectly calm. > Please try to be charitable and curious rather than accusatory towards me. In attempting to explain why my point of view has been misunderstood by you I also attempted to find a reason for it. I do not think my explanation makes you a bad person…

> In attempting to explain why my point of view has been misunderstood by you I also attempted to find a reason for it.

What have I misunderstood? Help me understand. What is the key point you want to make that you think I misunderstand?

>> (me) When he goes into "demon mode"

> When he decides to lie, cheat and steal? Why do you strain so hard to lionize this behavior?

I hope this is clear: I'm not defending Musk's actions. Above, I'm just using the phrase that Walter Isaacson uses: "demon mode". Have you read the book or watched an interview with Isaacson about it? The phrase is hardly flattering, and I certainly don't use it to lionize Musk. Is there some misunderstanding on this part?

>>>> (me) But to speak plainly, Musk is a complex figure, frequently problematic, and he often exacts a tool on the people around him. Part of this is attributable to his wealth, part to his particulars. When he goes into "demon mode", to use Walter Isaacson's phrase, you don't want to be in his way.

>> (me) Where in my comment do I lionize Musk?

> You attribute to personality what should be attributed to malice. You do this three times.

Please spell this out for me. Where are the three times I do this?

Also, let's step back. Is the core of this disagreement about trying to detect malice in Elon's head? Detecting malice is not easy. Malice may not even be present; many people rationalize actions in such a way so they feel like they are acting justly.

Even if we could detect "malice", wouldn't we want to assess what causes that malice? That's going to be tough to disentangle with him being on the Autism spectrum and also having various mental health struggles.

Along with most philosophers, I think free will (as traditionally understood) is an illusion. From my POV, attempting to blame Musk requires careful explanation. What do we mean? A short lapse of judgment? His willful actions? His intentions? His character? The overall condition of his brain? His upbringing? Which of these is Elon "in control of"? From the materialist POV, none.

From a social and legal POV, we usually draw lines somewhere. We don't want to defenestrate ethics or morality; we still have to find ways to live together. This requires careful thinking about justice: prevention, punishment, reintegration, etc. Overall, the focus shifts to policies that improve societal well-being. It doesn't help to pretend like people could have done otherwise given their situation. We _want_ people to behave better, so we should design systems to encourage that.

I dislike a huge part of what Musk has done, and I think more is likely to surface. Like we said earlier -- and I think we probably agree -- Musk is part of a system. Is he a cause or symptom? It depends on how you frame the problem.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#563

Post by voidspark »

cik wrote: post #561
voidspark wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Progress of technology should not be artitrarily held back to protect automateable jobs though. We need to adapt. So you don't mind if your economic value drops to zero, with all human labour replaced by machines? Dependent on UBI, existing in a basic pod, eating rations of slop.

> So you don't mind if your economic value drops to zero, with all human labour replaced by machines? This was the fear when the cotton gin was invented. It was the ear when cars were created. The same complaint happened with the introduction of electronic, automated, telephone switchboards. Jobs change. Societies change. Unemployment worldwide, is near the lowest it has ever been. Work will change. Society will even…

The goal for AGI/ASI is to create machines that can do any job much faster, better, and cheaper than humans. That's the ultimate end point of this progress.

The economic value of human labour will drop to zero. That would be an existential threat to our civilization.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#564

Post by _heimdall »

ljouhet wrote: post #549
aeternum wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember however that their charter specifies: "If a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project" It does have some weasel words around value-aligned and safety-conscious which they can always argue but this could get interesting because they've basically agreed not to compete. A fairly insane thing to do in retros…

Who defines "value-aligned, safety-conscious project"? "Instead of our current complex non-competing structure—which made sense when it looked like there might be one dominant AGI effort but doesn’t in a world of many great AGI companies—we are moving to a normal competing structure where ..." is all it takes

Most likely the same people who define "all natural chicken" - the company that creates the term.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#565

Post by fastball »

caseyy wrote: post #222
jjani wrote: post #107

SamA is in a hurry because he's set to lose the race. We're at peak valuation and he needs to convert something now . If the entrenched giants (Google, Microsoft and Apple) catch up - and Google 100% has, if not surpassed - they have a thousand levers to pull and OpenAI is done for. Microsoft has realized this, hence why they're breaking up with them - Google and Anthropic have shown they don't need OpenAI. Galaxy ph…

It's doubtful if there even is a race anymore. The last significant AI advancement in the consumer LLM space was fluent human language synthesis around 2020, with its following assistant/chat interface. Since then, everything has been incremental — larger models, new ways to prompt them, cheaper ways to run them, more human feedback, and gaming evaluations. The wisest move in the chatbot business might be to wait and…

Seems like an arbitrary distinction.

I'd say Chain-of-Thought has massively improved LLM output. Is that "incremental"? Why is that more incremental than the move from GPT-2 to GPT-3? Sure you can say that this is when LLMs first passed some sort of Turing test, but fundamentally there was no technological difference from GPT-3 to GPT-4. In fact I would say the quality of GPT-4 unlocked thousands (millions?) more use-cases that were not very viable with the quality delivered by GPT-3. I don't see any reason for more use-cases to keep being unlocked by LLM improvements.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#566

Post by dr_dshiv »

Muromec wrote: post #451
lossolo wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AGI is already here Last time I checked, in an Anthropic paper, they asked the model to count something. They examined the logits and a graph showing how it arrived at the answer. Then they asked the model to explain its reasoning, and it gave a completely different explanation, because that was the most statistically probable response to the question. Does that seem like AGI to you?

That's exactly what I would expect from a lot of people. Post factum rationalization is a thing.

Exactly. A lot of these arguments end up dehumanizing people because our own intelligence doesn’t hit the definition

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#567

Post by thayne »

always_imposter wrote: post #128
voidspark wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their multimodal models are a rudimentary form of AGI. EDIT: There can be levels of AGI. Google DeepMind have proposed a framework that would classify ChatGPT as "Emerging AGI". https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.02462

AGI would mean something which doesn't need direction or guidance to do anything. Like us humans, we don't wait for somebody to give us a task and go do it as if that is our sole existence. We live with our thoughts, blank out, watch TV, read books etc. What we currently have and possibly in the next century as well will be nothing close to an actual AGI. I don't know if it is optimism or delusions of grandeur that d…

> I can guarantee for a fact, that work will still be there but will it be equitable? Available to everyone?

I don't think there has ever been a time in history when work has been equitable and available to everyone.

Of course, that isn't to say that AI can't make it worse then it is now.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#568

Post by _heimdall »

root_axis wrote: post #403
brookst wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people who can’t drive cars. Are they not general intelligence? I think we need to separate the thinking part of intelligence from tool usage. Not everyone can use every tool at a high level of expertise.

Generally speaking, anyone can learn to use any tool. This isn't true of generative AI systems which can only learn through specialized training with meticulously curated data sets.

People physically unable to use the tool can't learn to use it. This isn't necessarily my view, but one could make a pretty easy argument that the LLMs we have today can't drive a car only because they aren't physically able to control the car.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#569

Post by JumpCrisscross »

stego-tech wrote: post #525
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That world never existed It absolutely did. Steve Wozniak was real. Silicon Valley wasn't always a hive of liars and sycophants.

Sure it has. For every Woz, there was a Jobs; for every Linus, a Bill (Gates). For every starry-eyed engineer or developer who just wants to help people, there are business people who will pervert it into an empire and jettison them as soon as practical. For every TED, there’s a Davos; for every DEFCON, there’s a glut of vendor-specific conferences. We should champion the good people who did the good things and manag…

> For every Woz, there was a Jobs; for every Linus, a Bill (Gates)

Nobody said there were no bastards. Just that they didn’t have dominion. We let this happen, in part by being lazy and cynical.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#570

Post by JumpCrisscross »

tyg13 wrote: post #480
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> legions of apologists seem to forget that there is more to human cognition than being able to regurgitate facts, write grammatically-correct sentences, and solve logical puzzles To be fair, there is a section of the population whose useful intelligence can roughly be summed up as that or worse.

I think this takes an unnecessarily narrow view of what "intelligence" implies. It conflates "intelligence" with fact-retention and communicative ability. There are many other intelligent capabilities that most normally-abled human beings possess, such as: - Processing visual data and classifying objects within their field of vision. - Processing auditory data, identifying audio sources and filtering out noise. - Mai…

> It conflates "intelligence" with fact-retention and communicative ability

No, I’m using useful problem solving as my benchmark. There are useless forms of intelligence. And that’s fine. But some people have no useful intelligence and show no evidence of the useless kind. They don’t hit any of the bullets you list, there just isn’t that curiosity and drive and—I suspect—capacity to comprehend.

I don’t think it’s intrinsic. I’ve seen pets show more curiosity than some folk. But due to nature and nurture, they just aren’t intelligent to any material stretch.

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