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Evolving OpenAI's Structure

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Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#731

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> Hobbies, hanging out with friends, reading, etc. That's basically it. > It will be like a simple retirement on a low income [...]. Yes, like retirement but without the old age. Right now I'm studying, so I do live on a very low income. But still, there are so many interesting things! For example, I'm trying to design a vacuum pump to 1mbar to be made of mostly 3d printed parts. Do vacuum pumps exist and can I buy t…

Introverted high IQ nerds are a tiny percentage of the world population. We exist in a tiny bubble here in Hacker News. I am thinking about society as a whole, how it will affect all types of people and cultures on this planet.

There is nothing "introverted high IQ nerd" about being creative. Think about everyone that is practicing music, artistry, crafts, rhetoric, cooking, languages, philosophy, writing, gardening, carpentry, and whatever you can think of. Most of them don't do it for money.

> [...] how it will affect all types of people and cultures on this planet.

Some will definitely feel without purpose. But I'd argue that just having a job so that you have a purpose is just a band-aid, not a real solution. I won't say that purposelessness isn't a problem, just that it would be great to actually address the issue.

Granted, I do hold a utopic view. I continue to be curious due to my religious belief, where I'm looking forward to life unconstrained by age. Regardless whether this will manifest, I think it is healthy to remain curious and continue learning. So on "how it will affect all types of people": I really do think that people without purpose need to engage in curiosity and creativity, for their own mental health.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#732
post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As recently as the Silicon Valley tv show, the joke was that every startup pitch claimed they were “making the world a better place”.

"I don't want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do." -Gavin Belson

Gavin is a perfect example of this, tho fictional. "Doing good" was a route to personal success and domination; Gavin under a Trump admin would have dropped the act, just as others have done.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#733

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When people that wealthy are that delusional... With few checks or balances from politics, media, or even social media... I don't think humanity as a whole is in for a great time.

They are roughly as delusional as everyone else. There is an image human bias to convince yourself that what benefits you is also best for everyone else. It’s just that their biases have much more capacity to cause damage as their wealth gives them so much power.

I disagree with this. I think there's probably a baseline "capacity for delusion" we all share, but the very wealthy are insulated from the negative repercussions of their actions in a way everyday folks are not. They also hold so much power by virtue of their wealth that they end up surrounded by sycophants, creating the conditions for a level of self-belief that is deeply delusional, and that only the most narcissistic among the rest of us could ever dream of attaining.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So then it’s something exponentially more capable than the most capable human? > So one fundamental difference is that AGI would not need some absurdly massive data dump to become intelligent. The first 22 years of life for a “western professional adult” is literally dedicated to a giant bootstrapping info dump

Your quote is a non sequitur to your question. The reason you want to avoid massive data dumps is because there are guaranteed to be errors and flaws. See things like Alpha Go vs Alpha Go Zero. The former was trained on the entirety of human knowledge, the latter was trained entirely on itself. The zero training version not only ended up dramatically outperforming the 'expert' version, but reached higher levels of co…

Think beyond software and current models

The moment after human birth the human agent starts a massive information gathering process - that no other system really expects much output from in a coherent way - for 5-10 years. Aka “data dump” some of that data is good, and some of it is bad. This in turn leads to biases, it leads to poor thinking models; everything that you described, is also applicable to every intelligent system - including humans. So again you presupposing that there’s some kind of perfect information benchmark that couldn’t exist.

When that system comes out of the birth canal it already has embedded in it millions of years of encoded expectations predictability systems and functional capabilities that are going to grow independent of what the environment does (but will be certainly shaped in its interactions by the environment).

So no matter what, you have a structured system of interaction that must be loaded with previously encoded data (experience, transfer learning etc) with and it doesn’t matter what type of intelligent system you’re talking about there are foundational assumptions at the physical interaction layer that encode all previous times steps of evolution.

Said an easier way: a lobster, because of the encoded DNA that created it, will never have the same capabilities as a human, because it is structured to process information completely differently and their actuators don’t have the same type and level of granularity as human actuators.

Now assume that you are a lobster compared to a theoretical AGI in sensor-effector combination. Most likely it would be structured entirely differently than you are as a biological thing - but the mere design itself carries with it an encoding of structural information of all previous systems that made it possible.

So by your definition you’re describing something that has never been seen in any system and includes a lot of assumptions about how alternative intelligent systems could work - which is fair because I asked your opinion.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Introverted high IQ nerds are a tiny percentage of the world population. We exist in a tiny bubble here in Hacker News. I am thinking about society as a whole, how it will affect all types of people and cultures on this planet.

There is nothing "introverted high IQ nerd" about being creative. Think about everyone that is practicing music, artistry, crafts, rhetoric, cooking, languages, philosophy, writing, gardening, carpentry, and whatever you can think of. Most of them don't do it for money. > [...] how it will affect all types of people and cultures on this planet. Some will definitely feel without purpose. But I'd argue that just having…

Yes a few of us will enjoy the peaceful life of contemplation like Aristotle, but not everyone is genetically wired that way.

Introverts are only 25% - 40% of the population, and most people are not intellectually or artistically gifted (whether introvert or not), but they still want to contribute and feel valued by society.

> I'd argue that just having a job so that you have a purpose

It's not just about having a job. It's having an important or valuable role in society, feeling that your contributions actually matter to others - such as building or fixing things that others depend on, or providing for a family,

What would motivate a young boy to go through years of schooling, higher education, and so on, just to become a hobbyist, tinkering around on projects that no one else will ever use or really need? That may be acceptable for some niche personality types but not the majority.

Aspiring engineers or entrepreneurs are not merely motivated by having a job.

I am envisioning the AGI or ASI scenario which truly overtakes humans in all intellectual and physical capabilities, essentially making humans obsolete. That would smash the foundations and traditions of our civilization. It's an incredible gamble.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT can write a working Python script to generate the Json. It can call a library to do that.

But it cannot think on it's own! Billions of years of evolution couldn't bring human level 'AGI' to many many species, and we think a mere LLM company could do so. AGI isn't just a language model, there's tons of things baked into dna(the way brain functions, it's structure when it grows etc). It's not simply neuron interactions as well. The complexity is mind boggling

Humans and other primates are only a million years apart. Animals are quite intelligent.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your quote is a non sequitur to your question. The reason you want to avoid massive data dumps is because there are guaranteed to be errors and flaws. See things like Alpha Go vs Alpha Go Zero. The former was trained on the entirety of human knowledge, the latter was trained entirely on itself. The zero training version not only ended up dramatically outperforming the 'expert' version, but reached higher levels of co…

Think beyond software and current models The moment after human birth the human agent starts a massive information gathering process - that no other system really expects much output from in a coherent way - for 5-10 years. Aka “data dump” some of that data is good, and some of it is bad. This in turn leads to biases, it leads to poor thinking models; everything that you described, is also applicable to every intelli…

With due respect I do not think you're tackling the fundamental issue, which I do not think is particularly controversial: intelligence and knowledge are distinct things, with the latter created by the former. What we're aiming to do is to create an intelligent system, a system that can create fundamentally new knowledge, and not simply reproduce or remix it on demand.

The next time your in the wilds, it's quite amazing to consider that your ancestors - millennia past, would have looked at, more or less, these exact same wilds but with so much less knowledge. Yet nonetheless they would discover such knowledge - teaching themselves, and ourselves, to build rockets, put a man on the Moon, unlock the secrets of the atom, and so much more. All from zero.

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What your example and elaboration focus on is the nature of intelligence, and the difficulty in replicating it. And I agree. This is precisely we want to avoid making the problem infinitely more difficult, costly, and time consuming by dumping endless amounts of knowledge in the equation.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#738
post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure humans meet the definition here. If you took the average human from birth and gave them only 'the most primitive first principles', the chance that they would have novel insights into medicine is doubtful. I also disagree with your following statement: > Right now we're trying to essentially train on the entire corpus of human writing. That is a defacto acknowledgement that the absolute endgame for curre…

> you can teach an AI a novel language by feeding in a fairly small amount of words and grammar of example text into context. You didn't teach it, the model is still the same after you ran that. That is the same as a human following instructions without internalizing the knowledge, he forgets it afterward and didn't learn what he performed. If that was all humans did then there would be no point in school etc, but hu…

It depends what you count as learning - you told it something, and it then applied that new knowledge, and if you come back to that conversation in 10 years, it will still have that new knowledge and be able to use it.

Then when OpenAI does another training run it can also internalise that knowledge into the weights.

This is much like humans - we have short term memory (where it doesn't get into the internal model) and then things get baked into long term memory during sleep. AI's have context-level memory, and then that learning gets baked into the model during additional training.

Although whether or not it changed the weights IMO is not a prerequisite for whether something can learn something or not. I think we should be able to evaluate if something can learn by looking at it as a black-box, and we could make a black-box which would meet this definition if you spoke to a LLM and limited it to it's max context length each day, and then ran an overnight training run to incorporate learned knowledge into weights.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think beyond software and current models The moment after human birth the human agent starts a massive information gathering process - that no other system really expects much output from in a coherent way - for 5-10 years. Aka “data dump” some of that data is good, and some of it is bad. This in turn leads to biases, it leads to poor thinking models; everything that you described, is also applicable to every intelli…

With due respect I do not think you're tackling the fundamental issue, which I do not think is particularly controversial: intelligence and knowledge are distinct things, with the latter created by the former. What we're aiming to do is to create an intelligent system, a system that can create fundamentally new knowledge, and not simply reproduce or remix it on demand. The next time your in the wilds, it's quite amaz…

Intelligence and knowledge being different things is quite the claim - namely it sounds like you’re stuck in the Cartesian dualist world and having transitioned into statistical empiricism.

I’m curious what epistemological grounding you are basing your claim on

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With due respect I do not think you're tackling the fundamental issue, which I do not think is particularly controversial: intelligence and knowledge are distinct things, with the latter created by the former. What we're aiming to do is to create an intelligent system, a system that can create fundamentally new knowledge, and not simply reproduce or remix it on demand. The next time your in the wilds, it's quite amaz…

Intelligence and knowledge being different things is quite the claim - namely it sounds like you’re stuck in the Cartesian dualist world and having transitioned into statistical empiricism. I’m curious what epistemological grounding you are basing your claim on

I don't understand how you can equate the two and reconcile the past. The individuals who have pushed society forward in this domain or that scarcely, if ever, had any particular knowledge edge. Cases like Ramanujan [1] exemplify such to the point of absurdity.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan

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