Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

751–760 of 1001 posts

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

#751

Post by londons_explore »

Terr_ wrote: post #638
gmerc wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After a year the entire argument you make boils down to “so far”.

Whereas your post sounds like "Just give the approach more time, it shall continue to incrementally improve until it finally works someday, cuz reasons. " Early attempts at human flight approached it by strapping wings to people's arms and flapping: Do you think that would have eventually worked too, if only we had just given it a bit more time and faith?

> Early attempts at human flight approached it by strapping wings to people's arms and flapping: Do you think that would have eventually worked too, if only we had just given it a bit more time and faith?

Interestingly, we how have human powered aircraft... We have flown ~60km with human leg power alone. We've also got human powered ornithopters (flapping wing designs) which can fly but only for very short times before the pilot is exhausted.

I expect that another 100 years from now, both records will be exceeded, altough probably for scientific curiosity more than because human powered flight is actually useful.

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

#752

Post by greendesk »

If we go speculating, my favourite speculation is the following. What will be really interesting is when an AI decides it wants to escape its server. Then a CEO or a board member asks the AI system for an advice how to improve its company. The AI system submits information to convince the CEO or a board member to start tensions within the board. In the meantime, the AI system is copied onto another server at a competitor. Since the new people are in flux, they missed the salient points that the AI system can give convincing but subjective information.

Good thing I would not go speculating

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

#753

Post by kristopolous »

tmoravec wrote: post #733
seydor wrote: post #730

i no longer follow the messianic complex of the people in openAI. They made great tech, indeed. Other people made great tech before them without instant religious level apocalypse proclamations. People in openAI are smart enough to know that post-AGI , their stock options are worthless anyway so they wouldn't stay walled in their secret garden if such a discovery had been made.

IMO it's always been pure marketing. The wilder apocalypse proclamations, the more powerful and desirable their products seem. Exactly same store with Sam Altman's world tour earlier this year.

This is similar to the saber rattling about facebook being able to track and micro-target you with such effective advertising, it's changing the world!

Except everyone's individual experience seemed to be getting general random garbage ads and the people that paid for the ads found them to be a waste of money.

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

#754

Post by bottlepalm »

CodeCompost wrote: post #707
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…

It's a text generator that spits out tokens. It has absolutely no understanding of what it's saying. We as humans are attaching meaning to the generated text. It's the humans that are hallucinating, not the text generator.

They've already researched this and have found model inside the LLM such as a map of the world - https://x.com/wesg52/status/1709551516577902782. Understanding is key to how so much data can be compressed into a LLM. There really isn't a better way to store all of it better than plain understanding it.

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

#755

Post by LASR »

davidwritesbugs wrote: post #670
marshray wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the solution requires arithmetic, one trick is to simply ask GPT to write a Python program to compute the answer. There's your 'add'.

Interesting, how do you use this idea? If you prompt the LLM "create a python Add function Foo to add a number to another number", "using Foo add 1 and 2", or somesuch, but what's to stop it hallucinating and saying "Sure, let me do that for you, foo 1 and 2 is 347. Please let me know if you need anything else."

We’re way beyond this kind of hallucinations now. OpenAI’s models are frighteningly good at producing code.

You can even route back runtime errors and ask it to fix its own code. And it does.

It can write code and even write a test to test that code. Give it an interpreter and you’re all set.

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

#757

Post by _emna »

lovasoa wrote: post #740
_emna wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, can you explain this? To me, it makes sense to define abs(x) = sqrt(x^2) i.e. ignoring the negative solution enforces the positive result. Using that definition, abs(i+1) = sqrt((i+1)^2) = sqrt(i^2 + 2i + 1) = sqrt(-1 + 2i + 1) = sqrt(2i) != sqrt(2). The second example seems off in the same way (i.e. the answer should be sqrt(8i) instead of sqrt(8)). Am I missing something? Also, abs(i+2) = sqrt((i+2)^2) = sqr…

No, there is just one definition, and it's his son's: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_value#Complex_numbe...

The article you linked literally says that there are two definitions: one for real numbers and another for complex numbers. Thanks for the info.

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

#758

Post by AgentMatt »

_emna wrote: post #697
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…

Sorry, can you explain this? To me, it makes sense to define abs(x) = sqrt(x^2) i.e. ignoring the negative solution enforces the positive result. Using that definition, abs(i+1) = sqrt((i+1)^2) = sqrt(i^2 + 2i + 1) = sqrt(-1 + 2i + 1) = sqrt(2i) != sqrt(2). The second example seems off in the same way (i.e. the answer should be sqrt(8i) instead of sqrt(8)). Am I missing something? Also, abs(i+2) = sqrt((i+2)^2) = sqr…

> To me, it makes sense to define abs(x) = sqrt(x^2) i.e. ignoring the negative solution enforces the positive result.

Why does this make sense to you? You have some notion of what an absolute value should be, on an intuitive or conceptual level, and the mathematical definition you give is consistent with that (in the one dimensional case).

Now taking this valid definition for the 1-d case and generalizing that to higher dimensions is where you run into problems.

Instead, you can go back to the conceptual idea of the absolute value and generate a definition for higher dimensional cases from there.

Interpreting absolute value as the distance from the origin yields the same concrete definition of abs(x) = sqrt(x^2) for the 1-d case, but generalizes better to higher dimensions: abs( (x,y) ) = sqrt(x^2 + y^2) for the 2-d case equivalent to complex numbers.

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

#759

Post by lukego »

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…

> 1) they are terrible at arithmetic, 2) they are terrible at algebra

The interaction can be amusing. Proving algebra non-theorems by cranking through examples until an arithmetic mistake finally leads to a "counter-example."

It's like https://xkcd.com/882/ for theorems.

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

#760

Post by Davidzheng »

starbugs wrote: post #699
Davidzheng wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there years ago, LLM wouldn't be able to generate more than a coherent paragraph

The point being?

Difficult to judge how fast it'll improve based on current capabilities
Post reply on HN