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Interview with gwern

dwarkeshpatel.com

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Re: Interview with gwern

#91

Post by michaelt »

dewey wrote: post #35

Interesting idea with the avatar, but I feel like just having a voice and some audio waves would be better than trying to create a talking avatar. Could just be my personal preference of not having a mental image of someone unknown I guess? Similar to reading a book after watching the movie adaptation.

It seemed weird to me too.

In my country, when TV series are interviewing anonymous people they use specific visual language - pixellated face, or facing away from the camera, or face clad in shadow.

Having an actor voice the words is normal. But having an actor showing the anonymous person's face is an... unusual choice.

Re: Interview with gwern

#93

Post by cle »

mapt wrote: post #83
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…

There's a good chance you're right, but I think there's also a chance that things could get worse at some point (with some hand-wavy definition of "a while").

Currently the state-of-the-art is propped up with speculative investments, if those speculations turn out to be wrong enough, or social/economic changes force the capital to get allocated somewhere else, then there could be a significant period of time where access to it goes away for most of us.

We can already see small examples of this from the major model providers. They launch a mind-blowing model, get great benchmarks and press, and then either throttle access or diminish quality to control costs / resources (like Claude Sonnet 3.5 pretty quickly shifted to short, terse responses). Access to SOTA is very resource-constrained and there are a lot of scenarios I can imagine where that could get worse, not better.

Even "Today, the state of the art in is the worst it will ever be" in cryptography isn't always true, like post-spectre/meltdown. You could argue that security improved but perf definitely did not.

Re: Interview with gwern

#94

Post by empiricus »

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…

Minor: if n is finite, then a^nb^n becomes regular?

Re: Interview with gwern

#95

Post by nocobot »

aubanel wrote: post #90
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".

is it really? this is the most common example for context free languages and something most first year CS students will be familiar with.

totally agree that you can be a great engineer and not be familiar with it, but seems weird for an expert in the field to confidently make wrong statements about this.

Re: Interview with gwern

#96

Post by tgaj »

sourcepluck wrote: post #79
nl wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh. He's living in a place where the floor collapsed and eats (good) ramen. If it's 12k or 20k I'm not sure it makes a meaningful difference to the narrative.

Eating (good) ramen is being used here as evidence that he's doing poorly, or something? I don't get it. Ramen is delicious, and can be very healthy. I hereby politely demand that you explain what exactly you are insinuating about the wonder that is ramen. A floor collapsing and not bothering to replace it sounds more serious, sure, but that can mean a lot of different things in different circumstances. Imagine, for…

I think the misunderstanding is caused by existing of two types of ramen - traditional, good quality is one, and another is instant - bad quality fast food.

Re: Interview with gwern

#97

Post by michaelt »

sourcepluck wrote: post #79
nl wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh. He's living in a place where the floor collapsed and eats (good) ramen. If it's 12k or 20k I'm not sure it makes a meaningful difference to the narrative.

Eating (good) ramen is being used here as evidence that he's doing poorly, or something? I don't get it. Ramen is delicious, and can be very healthy. I hereby politely demand that you explain what exactly you are insinuating about the wonder that is ramen. A floor collapsing and not bothering to replace it sounds more serious, sure, but that can mean a lot of different things in different circumstances. Imagine, for…

Living on ramen by choice? Sure, you do you.

But living on ramen + $12k/year + no healthcare + collapsing floor? That's sounding a lot like poverty to me.

Re: Interview with gwern

#98

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

empiricus wrote: post #94
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…

Minor: if n is finite, then a^nb^n becomes regular?

a^nb^n is regular, but it is also context free. I don't think there's a restriction on the n. Why do you say this?

Edit: sorry, I read "finite" as "infinite" :0 But n can be infinite and a^nb^n is still regular, and also context free. To be clear, the Chomskky Hierarchy of formal languages goes like this:

Finite ⊆ Regular ⊆ Context-Free ⊆ Context-Sensitive ⊆ Recursively Enumerable

That's because formal languages are identified with the automata that accept them and when an automaton accepts e.g. the Recursively Enumerable languages, then it also accepts the context-sensitive languages, and so on all the way down to the finite languages. One way to think of this is that an automaton is "powerful enough" to recognise the set of strings that make up a language.

Re: Interview with gwern

#99

Post by nahumfarchi »

empiricus wrote: post #94
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…

Minor: if n is finite, then a^nb^n becomes regular?

Yes, all finite languages are regular.

Specifically, you can construct a finite automata to represent it.

Re: Interview with gwern

#100

Post by fallingsquirrel »

mynegation wrote: post #85
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_?

They're probably doing the same thing humans on our earth were doing for centuries until ~1600. Surviving. Given how cruel nature is I think we're lucky to have the resources to do more than just survive, to build up all this crazy technology we don't strictly need to live, just for fun/profit.
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