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

861–870 of 1001 posts

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

#861

Post by BenoitP »

sfjailbird wrote: post #816

I have a strong suspicion that this is a purposeful leak to hype up OpenAI's product. It wouldnt't be out of character for some of the people involved, and it's the kind of thing that rampant commercial (and valuation) focus can bring with it.

This, especially given the timing. The drama must have quite disturbed the momentum they had, and this piece of prototype-teasing has all to reassure their market. It projects new advancements of untold impact, stoking the greed. And of course it is not verifiable. The show must go on.

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

#862

Post by [deleted] »

swombat wrote: post #827
poulpy123 wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know for Q* of course, but all the tests I made with GPT4, and all what I've read and seen about it, show that it is unable to reason. It was trained with an unfathomable amount of data, so it can simulate reasoning very well, but it is unable to reason

Similarly, AlphaGo and Stockfish are only able to simulate reasoning their way through a game of Go or a game of Chess. That simulated reasoning is enough to annihilate any human player they're faced with. As Dijkstra famously said, "whether Machines Can Think... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim". Submarines don't swim, cars don't walk or gallop, cameras don't paint or draw... So wh…

[deleted]

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

#863

Post by smrtinsert »

muskmusk wrote: post #509
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…

Friend, the creator of this new progress is a machine learning PhD with a decade of experience in pushing machine learning forward. He knows a lot of math too. Maybe there is a chance that he too can tell the difference between a meaningless advance and an important one?

Ah finally the engineers approach to the news. I'm not sure why we have to have hot takes, instead of dissecting the news and trying to tease out the how.

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

#864

Post by Philpax »

willsmith72 wrote: post #25

I still don't really know how they're measuring AGI. They all seem very sure about it, does someone have a good definition? OpenAI just say "AI systems that are generally smarter than humans". That's not measurable. What will it look like when AGI is achieved?

DeepMind wrote a paper categorising AGI: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.02462.pdf

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

#865

Post by mewpmewp2 »

white_dragon88 wrote: post #517
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…

Your son is a goddamn genius.

I'm going to be this guy, but isn't it just Pythagoras theorem with a slight twist which is taught at 11 - 14 year old levels?

It only sounds complicated because of the words used like "complex", "imaginary", "real".

So if you studied Pythagoras at school and someone (a YouTube video) says you just have to do Pythagoras on the i multiplier and the other number, it would be fairly easy if you understand Pythagoras?

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

#866

Post by ethanbond »

panarky wrote: post #647
nostrademons wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I wonder, as a computer scientist: If you want to solve grade school math problems, why not use an 'add' instruction? It's been around since the 50s, runs a billion times faster than an LLM, every assembly-language programmer knows how to use it, every high-level language has a one-token equivalent, and doesn't hallucinate answers (other than integer overflow). We also know how to solve complex reasoning chains…

>> 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 > If you want to solve grade school math problems, why not use an 'add' instruction? Certainly the objective is not for the AI to do research-level mathematics. It's not really even to do grade-school math. The point is that grade-school math requires reasoning capabil…

This is so profoundly obvious you have to wonder the degree of motivated reasoning behind people’s attempt to cast this as “omg it can add… but so can my pocket calculator!”

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

#867

Post by kolinko »

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."

It writes a function and then you provide it to an interpreter which does the calculation output on which gpt proceeds to do the rest.

That’s how langchain works, chatgpt plugins and gpt function calling. It has proven to be pretty robust - that is, gpt4 realising when it needs to use a tool/write code for calculations when needed and then using the output.

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

#868

Post by ethanbond »

BenoitP wrote: post #861
sfjailbird wrote: post #816

I have a strong suspicion that this is a purposeful leak to hype up OpenAI's product. It wouldnt't be out of character for some of the people involved, and it's the kind of thing that rampant commercial (and valuation) focus can bring with it.

This, especially given the timing. The drama must have quite disturbed the momentum they had, and this piece of prototype-teasing has all to reassure their market. It projects new advancements of untold impact, stoking the greed. And of course it is not verifiable. The show must go on.

The teasing started before the drama

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

#869

Post by BenoitP »

passwordoops wrote: post #860
sfjailbird wrote: post #816

I have a strong suspicion that this is a purposeful leak to hype up OpenAI's product. It wouldnt't be out of character for some of the people involved, and it's the kind of thing that rampant commercial (and valuation) focus can bring with it.

These guys smell so much like Tesla it's not even funny. Very impressive core tech, and genuinely advancing knowledge. But the hype train is just so powerful that the insane (to put it mildly) claims are picked up without any sense of critical thinking by seemingly intelligent people. They're both essentially cults at this point

Agreed, but IMHO it is sort of justified for Tesla.

The size of its hype matches the size of the ICEs entrenchment in its moat. These have outsize influence on our economy, but climate change (and oil depletion) is quite inevitable. It takes irrational market cap to unseat that part of the economy being prisoner of its rent. And some allocators of capital have understood that.

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

#870

Post by Loughla »

J_cst wrote: post #652
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…

My son plays soccer

Mine fell out of bed this morning.
Post reply on HN