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Interview with gwern

dwarkeshpatel.com

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Re: Interview with gwern

#81

Post by sourcepluck »

jnsaff2 wrote: post #59
resiros wrote: post #12

>Wait if you’re doing $900-1000/month and you’re sustaining yourself on that, that must mean you’re sustaining yourself on less than $12,000 a year. What is your lifestyle like at $12K?" >I live in the middle of nowhere. I don't travel much, or eat out, or have health insurance, or anything like that. I cook my own food. I use a free gym. There was this time when the floor of my bedroom began collapsing. It was so ol…

> Dwarkesh Patel > How do you sustain yourself while writing full time? > Gwern > Patreon and savings. I have a Patreon which does around $900-$1000/month, and then I cover the rest with my savings. I got lucky with having some early Bitcoins and made enough to write for a long time, but not forever. So I try to spend as little as possible to make it last. Then Dwarkesh just gets stuck on this $1k/month thing when Gw…

Thanks for providing that context, which obviously completely changes the story. How that got left out by others is a mystery to me.

Re: Interview with gwern

#82

Post by notahacker »

satvikpendem wrote: post #31
whiplash451 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone probably said the exact same thing when the first cars appeared. Where is the data showing that more jobs get destroyed than created by technological disruption?

> Someone probably said the exact same thing when the first cars appeared. Without saying anything regarding the arguments for or against AI, I will address this one sentence. This quote is an example of an appeal to hypocrisy in history fallacy, a form of the tu quoque fallacy. Just because someone criticizes X and you compare it to something else (Y) from another time does not mean that the criticism of X is false.…

In this case, there isn't much substance to engage with . The original argument made in passing in an interview covering a range of subjects is essentially [answering your question which presupposes that AI takes over all jobs] I think it'll be bottom up because [in my opinion] being a visionary CEO is the hardest thing to automate

The fact that similar, often more detailed assertions of the imminent disappearance of work has been a consistent trope since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (as acknowledged in literally the next question in the interview, complete with an interestingly wrong example) and we've actually ended up with more jobs seems far more like a relevant counterargument than ad hominem tu quoque...

Re: Interview with gwern

#83

Post by mapt »

keiferski wrote: post #56

By writing, you are voting on the future of the Shoggoth using one of the few currencies it acknowledges: tokens it has to predict. If you aren't writing, you are abdicating the future or your role in it. If you think it's enough to just be a good citizen, to vote for your favorite politician, to pick up litter and recycle, the future doesn't care about you. These AI predictions never, ever seem to factor in how actu…

With AI you need to think, long and hard, about the concept (borrowed from cryptography), "Today, the state of the art in is the worst it will ever be".

Humanity is pinning its future on the thought that we will hit intractable information-theoretic limitations which provide some sort of diminishing returns on performance before a hard takeoff, but the idea that the currently demonstrated methods are high up on some sigmoid curve does not seem at this point credible. AI models are dramatically higher performance this year than last year, and were dramatically better last year than the year before, and will probably continue to get better for the next few years.

That's sufficient to dramatically change a lot of social & economic processes, for better and for worse.

Re: Interview with gwern

#84

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

This will come across as vituperative and I guess it is a bit but I've interacted with Gwern on this forum and the interaction that has stuck to me is in this thread, where Gwern mistakes a^nb^n as a regular (but not context-free) language (and calls my comment "not even wrong"):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559620

Again I'm sorry for the negativity, but already at the time Gwern was held up by a certain, large, section of the community as an important influencer in AI. For me that's just a great example of how basically the vast majority of AI influencers (who vie for influence on social media, rather than research) are basically clueless about AI and CS and only have second-hand knowledge, which I guess they're good at organising and popularising, but not more than that. It's easy to be a cheer leader for the mainstream view on AI. The hard part is finding, and following, unique directions.

With apologies again for the negative slant of the comment.

Re: Interview with gwern

#85

Post by mynegation »

demaga wrote: post #78

> I love the example of Isaac Newton looking at the rates of progress in Newton's time and going, “Wow, there's something strange here. Stuff is being invented now. We're making progress. How is that possible?” And then coming up with the answer, “Well, progress is possible now because civilization gets destroyed every couple of thousand years, and all we're doing is we're rediscovering the old stuff.” The link in th…

That works in reverse too. While I am in awe of what humanity already achieved - when I read fictional timelines of fictional worlds (Middle-Earth or Westeros/Essos) I am wondering how getting frozen in medieval like time is even possible. Like, what are they _doing_?

Re: Interview with gwern

#86

Post by satvikpendem »

notahacker wrote: post #82
satvikpendem wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone probably said the exact same thing when the first cars appeared. Without saying anything regarding the arguments for or against AI, I will address this one sentence. This quote is an example of an appeal to hypocrisy in history fallacy, a form of the tu quoque fallacy. Just because someone criticizes X and you compare it to something else (Y) from another time does not mean that the criticism of X is false.…

In this case, there isn't much substance to engage with . The original argument made in passing in an interview covering a range of subjects is essentially [answering your question which presupposes that AI takes over all jobs] I think it'll be bottom up because [in my opinion] being a visionary CEO is the hardest thing to automate The fact that similar, often more detailed assertions of the imminent disappearance of…

Again, my comment is not about AI, it is about the faulty construction of the argument in the sentence I quoted. X and Y could be anything, that is not my point.

Re: Interview with gwern

#87

Post by luke-stanley »

dewey wrote: post #47
djmips wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about just listening to the interview then?

I'm aware of that possibility but I don't mind watching the other interviewer and I'm also not sure if there's something being shown (screenshots etc.) after the first few minutes I watched. I know it's probably a "me problem" ;)

It does make me wonder what easy way to do ML assisted shot / person detection and `blanking` is. I'm just gonna point out there is a nerd snipe danger here ;D

Although the avatar tool is probably not SOTA, I thought the 3D model was a really cool way to deal with interviewing Gwern, I am quite enjoying the current video.

Re: Interview with gwern

#88

Post by janetmissed »

bondarchuk wrote: post #29
resiros wrote: post #12

>Wait if you’re doing $900-1000/month and you’re sustaining yourself on that, that must mean you’re sustaining yourself on less than $12,000 a year. What is your lifestyle like at $12K?" >I live in the middle of nowhere. I don't travel much, or eat out, or have health insurance, or anything like that. I cook my own food. I use a free gym. There was this time when the floor of my bedroom began collapsing. It was so ol…

Many many people in the US live on that kind of money, it's not uncommon at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States "Among individuals living alone: 19.1% lived in poverty." Poverty line (max yearly income) for single households: $14,580

It does show how out of touch tech workers are that they are shocked someone is able to live off 1k a month. It sometimes feels like hn posters were born on college campuses and shielded from normal society until their twenties, after which they move to the Bay Area with the upmost confidence that they know everything there is to know about the world.

Especially if you are doing it voluntarily, 1k a month can provide you more then enough for a comfortable life in many part of the country. More so if you can avoid car ownership/insurance and health insurance (Which gwern seems to do).

Re: Interview with gwern

#89

Post by ml-anon »

Philpax wrote: post #37
automatic6131 wrote: post #33

I don't think this science fiction writer deserves the credit of someone who is studying and/or influencing the real world > You have one Steve Jobs-type at the helm, and then maybe a whole pyramid of AIs out there executing it and bringing him new proposals Very interesting in a short story (or a side quest in Cyberpunk 2077 - yeah that one). Not so much for a description of our future.

He has studied and influenced the real world. Here's Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, one of the leading AI companies, directly referencing him in an interview from this week: https://youtu.be/ugvHCXCOmm4?t=343

[flagged]

Re: Interview with gwern

#90

Post by aubanel »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #84

This will come across as vituperative and I guess it is a bit but I've interacted with Gwern on this forum and the interaction that has stuck to me is in this thread, where Gwern mistakes a^nb^n as a regular (but not context-free) language (and calls my comment "not even wrong"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559620 Again I'm sorry for the negativity, but already at the time Gwern was held up by a certain, l…

> For me that's just a great example of how basically the vast majority of AI influencers (who vie for influence on social media, rather than research) are basically clueless about AI and CS

This is a bit stark: there are many great knowledgeable engineers and scientists who would not get your point about a^nb^n. It's impossible to know 100% of of such a wide area as "AI and CS".

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