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Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

newyorker.com

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Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#601

Post by calf »

fgfarben wrote: post #542
stonyrubbish wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human cognition is nothing like AI "cognition." It really bothers me that people think AI is doing the same thing the human mind does. AI is more like a parrot which is trained to give a correct-looking response to any question. The parrot doesn't think, doesn't know what its doing etc, it just does it because it gets a treat every time a "good" answer is prompted. This is why it can't do things like know how many pa…

I love reading posts like this. When you were a child, learning math or grammar, do you not remember bouncing off the walls of incorrect answers, eventually landing on a trajectory down the corridor of the right answer? Or were you always instantly zero-shotting everything? In my experience, this is exactly how language models solve hard new problems, and largely how I solve them too. Propose a new idea, see if it wo…

The mistake in these types of arguments is that natural, classical-artificial, and/or neural-net-artificial learning methods all employ some kind of counterexample/counterfactual reasoning, but their underlying methods could well be fundamentally different. Thus these arguments are invalid, until computer science advances enough to explain what the differences and similarities actually are.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#603

Post by [deleted] »

fwipsy wrote: post #505
root_axis wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, every engineer in the bay area has a way of framing the business they work for as a benign force for good... Until they find themselves working somewhere else, then suddenly they have a lot to say about the unacceptable things going on there. From the outside, I find Anthropic's hyperbolic marketing to be an indication that they are basically the same as every other bay area tech startup - more or less nice fol…

My model is that Anthropic was founded by OpenAI engineers who self-selected for safety-consciousness. However, it's still subject to the same problem: power corrupts. I think they are better than OpenAI but they are definitely sliding.

[deleted]

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#604

Post by calf »

gambiting wrote: post #538
staticman2 wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious: did you give Gemini the entire text of Neuromancer or did you expect it to use search results for chapters 1 to 14? I would have just fed it the text of chapters 1 to 14 from a non drm copy.

I just asked like I said, give me plot summary until chapter 14, don't spoil the rest of the book. And of course when I told it what it just did it was like oh I'm sorry, here's a summary without the spoilers for the ending. So clearly it could do it without additional context.

I wouldn't expect any LLM to be able to respect such a request. Do they even have direct access to published works to use as reference material?

Also, last time I played 20 questions with ChatGPT, it needed 97 turns and tons of my active hinting to get the answer.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#605

Post by locust101 »

It’s hard to know what’s the new information here. Altman’s history has been reported on exhaustively.

Few people have left openai over the year - safety abandonments, non profit status change, deception etc. but there is too much money involved. Here lies the actual rub. A lot of people involved and named in the article are reprehensible, kushners, saudis, Emiratis, PayPal mafia, vc folks with god complexes. But as long as they have the money, we have to dance to their tune.

We really really need a way for our society to be more equitable and hold these people responsible.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#606

Post by rapnie »

root_axis wrote: post #352
solenoid0937 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whether the company that branded itself as the ethical AI lab actually is one FWIW I have two(!!) close friends working for Anthropic, one for nearly two years and one for about 4 months. Both of them tell me that this is not just marketing, that the company actually is ethical and safety conscious everywhere, and that this was the most surprising part about joining Anthropic for them. They insist the culture is ac…

Yeah, every engineer in the bay area has a way of framing the business they work for as a benign force for good... Until they find themselves working somewhere else, then suddenly they have a lot to say about the unacceptable things going on there. From the outside, I find Anthropic's hyperbolic marketing to be an indication that they are basically the same as every other bay area tech startup - more or less nice fol…

Indeed. The bad behavior is emergent, where most individual intentions are good. Good story, bad outcome.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#607

Post by gambiting »

calf wrote: post #604
gambiting wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just asked like I said, give me plot summary until chapter 14, don't spoil the rest of the book. And of course when I told it what it just did it was like oh I'm sorry, here's a summary without the spoilers for the ending. So clearly it could do it without additional context.

I wouldn't expect any LLM to be able to respect such a request. Do they even have direct access to published works to use as reference material? Also, last time I played 20 questions with ChatGPT, it needed 97 turns and tons of my active hinting to get the answer.

>>Do they even have direct access to published works to use as reference material?

I mean, clearly, given that it did answer my question eventually. Also wasn't it a whole thing that these models got trained on entire book libraries(without necessarily paying for that).

>>I wouldn't expect any LLM to be able to respect such a request

Why though? They seem to know everything about everything, why not this specifically. You can ask it to tell you the plot of pretty much any book/film/game made in the last 100 years and it will tell you. Maybe asking about specific chapters was too much, but Neuromancer exists in free copies all over the internet and it's been discussed to death, if it was a book that came out last year then ok, fair enough, but LLMs had 40 years of discussions about Neuromancer to train on.

But besides, regardless of everything else - if I say "don't spoil the rest of the book" and your response includes "in the last chapter character X dies" then you just failed at basic comprehension? Whether an LLM has any knowledge of the book or not, whether that is even true or not, that should be an unacceptable outcome.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#608

Post by chii »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #567
chii wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> underlying threat posted by AI to society, the economy and human freedom persists I would deny that AI poses any such threat. There are actors who would use the tool in ways that threaten as you described, but that is a threat from said actor, not AI - unless you're claiming that an AGI would be capable of such independent actions. AI is similar in transformative power to how the internet was a transformative power…

> I would deny that AI poses any such threat. There are actors who would use the tool in ways that threaten as you described, but that is a threat from said actor, not AI Of course, it is popular to deny it. People constantly tell themselves "it is people, not tech". They make valid, yet banal and inconsequential statement. This distinction has no bearing on reality.

So you're saying that if people hadn't invented weapons, there would be no violence?

The claim that AI is itself dangerous has no merit.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#610

Post by flux3125 »

calebm wrote: post #456
neonate wrote: post #86

https://archive.ph/hOYMn

[flagged]

Interesting. If you look at the sources it cited, there are a few links about "Sacred Songs and Solos" (likely from related/side content on the page), my guess is it didn't read the main article and instead anchored on those and hallucinated
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