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

FTC investigating ChatGPT over potential consumer harm

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 146 posts

Re: FTC investigating ChatGPT over potential consumer harm

#91

Post by [deleted] »

cjbprime wrote: post #88
somenameforme wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's quite a rationale justification for the ever 'shifting goalposts.' When humans describe some milestone in the future as finally being "real AI", they're not really just describing that milestone, but the many adjacent capabilities that they expect that milestone to entail. But we're quite clever, and like any old metric needing to be juked, we invariably find ways to achieve the milestone while sidestepping a…

Have you used GPT-4 significantly? I've had many experiences* of answers that, as far as I can tell, require strong reasoning skills and a world model. It is unreliable, as you say, but only demonstrating those skills a small fraction of the time would still be proof of their existence. *: (such as when GPT-4 describes what would be output by Python code that I write and feed it, if it was run, despite GPT-4 not havi…

[deleted]

Re: FTC investigating ChatGPT over potential consumer harm

#92

Post by steve_adams_86 »

zarzavat wrote: post #51
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn’t it closer in the same way that I’m closer to Japan than my dog who is sitting 1 meter to the east of me is? We are still both 10,000 km away

This technology (transformer language models) was invented about 6 years ago. For it to be far away means that at some point the exponential has to stop and we have an AI winter. That’s possible but doesn’t look likely at this point. It’s more likely that we will see superintelligence in our lifetime. And if the rate of progress does not slow it will be sooner rather than later. My current estimate is parity by 2030…

I don’t know much about AI but this:

> That’s possible but doesn’t look likely at this point.

Why doesn’t it seem likely?

We’ve been trying to do great things with AI for decades. We don’t seem to have an excellent grasp on why certain things work well or if the strategies we’re using can ultimately yield much better intelligence.

My impression is that we really don’t have a lot of control over progress and we could very likely hit walls and stall for many years without meaningful progress. What am I missing?

Re: FTC investigating ChatGPT over potential consumer harm

#93

Post by probably_wrong »

biofunsf wrote: post #16
andrewstuart wrote: post #7

Sam Altman himself sat in front of the top levels of government and freaked them out by telling them his company was putting in place the groundwork to possibly end humanity. A really strange thing to do, I remain puzzled as to why any CEO would stir up the government like this. Having panicked regulators with science fiction, I hope he's not surprised when they take action.

Maybe he's just a CEO doing the ethically responsible thing and not the purely self-serving thing for the sake of shareholders? (though as humans, the shareholders have some stake in humanity too)

I can't imagine a valid ethical justification for not releasing the model training details which they withheld. I'd speculate that they did it only to slow their competitors, but I don't have to because "the competitive landscape" was the reason given right there in their paper.

There is (IMHO) no good reason to let OpenAI argue simultaneously for "this technology is too dangerous to be replicated" and for "... but if you have a credit card then you can use it right now".

Re: FTC investigating ChatGPT over potential consumer harm

#94

Post by somenameforme »

cjbprime wrote: post #88
somenameforme wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's quite a rationale justification for the ever 'shifting goalposts.' When humans describe some milestone in the future as finally being "real AI", they're not really just describing that milestone, but the many adjacent capabilities that they expect that milestone to entail. But we're quite clever, and like any old metric needing to be juked, we invariably find ways to achieve the milestone while sidestepping a…

Have you used GPT-4 significantly? I've had many experiences* of answers that, as far as I can tell, require strong reasoning skills and a world model. It is unreliable, as you say, but only demonstrating those skills a small fraction of the time would still be proof of their existence. *: (such as when GPT-4 describes what would be output by Python code that I write and feed it, if it was run, despite GPT-4 not havi…

What makes you think there isn't a limited interpreter, or an expert system effectively akin to an interpreter working behind the scenes? I think this is a fairly easy concept to test. Give it 'code' that is trivial to understand, but in a [hopefully] novel syntax that might also fuzz up guess-the-next-word. I just gave ChatGPT a prompt of:

------

"I'm working with a new computer language. What would be the output of:

IsTrue is not true

If IsTrue is true then print IsTrue

If IsTrue is not true then print IsNotTrue"

------

It hemmed and hawed, and accurately describe what the program would do, which is basically just repeating back the last two lines to me. But refused to tell me what the output would be. When I demanded it tell me what the value of "IsTrue" would be, so I could figure out the output, I got:

"I apologize for the confusion, but as an AI language model, I don't have access to the specific values of variables in your code or the ability to execute code directly. In the given context, the value of IsTrue is not specified, so I cannot determine its exact value. It could be either true or a value that is not true, depending on how the variable is defined or assigned in your code."

I then gave it the exact same program in C#, and it unsurprisingly gave me not only a far more meaningful description of what the code does, but also the exact output - immediately.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk

Re: FTC investigating ChatGPT over potential consumer harm

#95

Post by I_am_tiberius »

ChatGPT is a privacy nightmare. When you disable "Chat history & training", this setting is stored client side in local storage. That means the setting gets lost when switching browser or deleting your browser cache.

Also, when you disable "Chat history & training", plugins are not available to you as a paid user.

I believe Sam Altman doesn't care about his users' privacy at all. I lost trust in him completely, when he first mentioned that he doesn't understand why decentralized Finance might be useful to people. Some months later, when Silicon Valley bank was in the process of shutting down, he started crying. At the same time he supports Worldcoin.

Re: FTC investigating ChatGPT over potential consumer harm

#96

Post by gettodachoppa »

somenameforme wrote: post #61
andrewstuart wrote: post #7

Sam Altman himself sat in front of the top levels of government and freaked them out by telling them his company was putting in place the groundwork to possibly end humanity. A really strange thing to do, I remain puzzled as to why any CEO would stir up the government like this. Having panicked regulators with science fiction, I hope he's not surprised when they take action.

I think something that's increasingly clear is that OpenAI's only moat is time. Every other company, and even completely independent models, are rapidly catching up. And this is happening at the same time that OpenAI is already making claims that they're hitting diminishing returns on model size [1], as happens in literally every single neural net based field. If Sam's Gambit succeeded, OpenAI could have potentially…

>Every other company, and even completely independent models, are rapidly catching up.

I see the HN headlines like "new model approaches GPT4 in benchmarks!" but they turn out to suck when I try them. What can I use today that comes close to GPT4? Certainly not Bard.

I generally run 2 tests to gauge:

1. Write me a Python script that blah blah blah

2. Write me the lyrics to a song about blah blah blah

Only GPT4 has given me impressive results. For #2 the other models manage to rhyme (except most local models), but the rhymes on other models are really basic compared to GPT4's.

Re: FTC investigating ChatGPT over potential consumer harm

#97

Post by sensanaty »

andrewstuart wrote: post #7

Sam Altman himself sat in front of the top levels of government and freaked them out by telling them his company was putting in place the groundwork to possibly end humanity. A really strange thing to do, I remain puzzled as to why any CEO would stir up the government like this. Having panicked regulators with science fiction, I hope he's not surprised when they take action.

> I remain puzzled as to why any CEO would stir up the government like this

Because he sold his soul to the Devil (M$) and is now pursuing regulatory capture in order to build a "Open"AI-controlled moat where no competitors can survive.

Re: FTC investigating ChatGPT over potential consumer harm

#98

Post by blharr »

I_am_tiberius wrote: post #95

ChatGPT is a privacy nightmare. When you disable "Chat history & training", this setting is stored client side in local storage. That means the setting gets lost when switching browser or deleting your browser cache. Also, when you disable "Chat history & training", plugins are not available to you as a paid user. I believe Sam Altman doesn't care about his users' privacy at all. I lost trust in him completely, when…

The plug-ins part makes total sense to me. I would reason that plug-ins can save your chat history and use them for their own data, so if you want to keep your privacy totally, plug-ins would ve disabled as well.

Re: FTC investigating ChatGPT over potential consumer harm

#99

Post by throwawayadvsec »

andrewstuart wrote: post #7

Sam Altman himself sat in front of the top levels of government and freaked them out by telling them his company was putting in place the groundwork to possibly end humanity. A really strange thing to do, I remain puzzled as to why any CEO would stir up the government like this. Having panicked regulators with science fiction, I hope he's not surprised when they take action.

>A really strange thing to do, I remain puzzled as to why any CEO would stir up the government like this.

Because it's a very serious possibility(that the singularity could end humanity), and a significant part of the people who are serious about AI are extremely worried about alignment, for good reasons.

> I hope he's not surprised when they take action.

Surprised? Do you mean relieved?

Re: FTC investigating ChatGPT over potential consumer harm

#100

Post by throwawayadvsec »

mellosouls wrote: post #63
zarzavat wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This technology (transformer language models) was invented about 6 years ago. For it to be far away means that at some point the exponential has to stop and we have an AI winter. That’s possible but doesn’t look likely at this point. It’s more likely that we will see superintelligence in our lifetime. And if the rate of progress does not slow it will be sooner rather than later. My current estimate is parity by 2030…

For it to be far away means that at some point the exponential has to stop Not if we are on the wrong path, going in the wrong direction, which I think was at least partly the point of the comment to which you are responding. There is a school of thought that something fundamental is being missed by modern AI and the (amazing) success of GPT3+ ironically risks directing us further down that wrong path at an accelerat…

I'm pretty sure AGI will not be one model.

But a collection of models, with some kind of vector databases(or something more efficient than that), being orchestrated by one or multiple master models.

A large LLM that knows pretty much everything there is to know about the world, seems like a good building block for an AGI, no matter how the rest is built.

LLM's could be like the Broca's and Wernicke's area of an AGI brain. working in unison with dozens of other parts.

Post reply on HN