OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster • Hacker News Board

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

#941

Post by 93po » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 3:48 PM UTC

shrimpx wrote: post #651

jurgenaut23 wrote: post #606

This reminds me that, with our species, the real power always lies with those that tell the better story. Skynet and HAL 9000 had a more profound impact on those researchers than years of practice and study in the field. No surprise therefore that the storytelling of someone like Trump is practically indelibly imprinted into the mind of his supporters.

This reminds me of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where the protagonist realizes there is no "truth" and everything is rhetoric.

Everyone works 40+ hours a week for pieces of paper that intrinsically are worth nothing

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

#942

Post by wegfawefgawefg » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 3:49 PM UTC

qsort wrote: post #761

seanhunter wrote: post #735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a general result in machine learning known as "the bitter lesson"[1], which is that methods which come from specialist knowledge tend to be beaten by methods which rely on brute force computation in the long run because of Moore's law and the ability to scale things by distributed computing. So the reason people don't use the "add instruction"[2] for example is that over the last 70 years of attempting to bu…

As someone with a CS background myself, I don't think this is what GP was talking about. Let's forget for a moment that stuff has to run on an actual machine. If you had to represent a quadratic equation, would you rather write: (a) x^2 + 5x + 4 = 0 (b) the square of the variable plus five times the variable plus four equals zero When you are trying to solve problems with a level of sophistication beyond the toy stuf…

the ml method doesnt require you to know how to solve the problem at all, and could someday presumably develop novel solutions. not just high efficiency symbolic graph search.

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

#943

Post by dmix » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 3:50 PM UTC

nicce wrote: post #639

wraptile wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you perceive Altman as "slimy with limitless ambition"? I've always perceived him as being quite humble from his interviews and podcast appearances.

Actions speak behalf of speech. You see it from the all commercial deals, protecting company image more that eliminating threats, or even from this post, if it is true. Not telling about breaktrough in research if it would end the deal with Microsoft.

"Threats"

Which threats exactly did he ignore?

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

#944

Post by dmix » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 3:52 PM UTC

blazespin wrote: post #311

lucubratory wrote: post #126

Well, Emmett Shear lied to everyone if he knew about this. I understand why, he was probably thinking that without any ability to actually undo it the best that could be done would be to make sure that no one else knows about it so that it doesn't start an arms race, but we all know now. Given the Board's silence and inadequate explanations, they may have had the same reasoning. Mira evidently didn't have the same co…

Very unlikely Emmett lied. What would be the point.

If anyone involved was going to be alarmist it was him.

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

#945

Post by mewpmewp2 » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 3:55 PM UTC

culi wrote: post #934

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #877

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First YouTube video that hit for "absolute value of complex" numbers says within 30 seconds that you have to take the 2 numbers, square them and add them and the result is square root of that. I doubt he had to come up with that on his own.

The child clearly demonstrated a geometric, rather than formulaic, understanding of the problem

I imagine that was shown in the YouTube video visually? That it's a hypotenuse like he explained and this is how to calculate it. I'm just not seeing evidence that he came to the idea of it being like that on their own.

He basically reiterated the definition, and had to know the formula.

If the child would explain why should we even use or have complex numbers that would be impressive. As otherwise it just seems nothing more than hypotenuse calculation while using different, and "complex" or "impressive" sounding terms.

Why should you be interested in this in the first place?

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

#946

Post by dmix » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 3:58 PM UTC

GaryNumanVevo wrote: post #743

nabakin wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://youtu.be/PtAIh9KSnjo?t=3754

Man it's so sad to see how far Lex has fallen. From a graduate level guest lecturer at MIT to a glorified Joe Rogan

Nothing wrong with being a podcaster and getting tens of thousands of people excited by ideas and interviewing a great collection of people from an informed perspective (at a minimum more informed than the average podcaster/talking head).

Not everyone needs to be doing hard academic stuff. There's plenty of value in communication.

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

#947

Post by neilk » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 4:02 PM UTC

wbhart wrote: post #565

neilk wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am neither a mathematician or LLM creator but I do know how to evaluate interesting tech claims. The absolute best case scenario for a new technology is that it when it seems like a toy for nerds, and doesn't outperform anything we have today, but the scaling path is clear. Its problems just won't matter if it does that one thing with scaling. The web is a pretty good hypermedia platform, but a disastrously bad pla…

How on earth could you evaluate the scaling path with too little information. That's my point. You can't possibly know that a technology can solve a given kind of problem if it can only so far solve a completely different kind of problem which is largely unrelated! Saying that performance on grade-school problems is predictive of performance on complex reasoning tasks (including theorem proving) is like saying that a…

I didn’t say “certain success”, I said “interesting”

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

#948

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 4:14 PM UTC

xcv123 wrote: post #581

SantalBlush wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The statement you quoted also holds for humans. Of those who can solve grade school math problems, very, very few can solve mathematical problems at a research level.

You missed the point. Deep learning models are in the early stages of development. With recent advancements they can already outperform humans at many tasks that were considered to require AGI level machine intelligence just a few years ago.

[deleted]

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

#949

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 4:15 PM UTC

93po wrote: post #940

consumer451 wrote: post #836

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, there was supposed to be a liquidity event at a valuation of $86B, very soon. This event was no longer scheduled after Altman was removed.

Why have I not read this before it seems like the most obvious reason for all of this

I couldn't tell because that was pretty clear from day #1.

Here is an October 18 article about this:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-18/openai-is...

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

#950

Post by anvil-on-my-toe » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 4:34 PM UTC

Davidzheng wrote: post #548

anvil-on-my-toe wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recursive self-improvement.

Strange definition. Humans can't recursively self improve, at least not in the way I'm assuming you to mean. That's more like definition of the singularity

Well, humans aren't machines. Why would a definition of AGI need to apply to humans? On the other hand, as we gain the ability to edit our DNA, I think recursive self-improvement over generations is on the table for our species.

I guess it would be useful to have a definition of weak AGI, but after reading Bostrom's Superintelligence, I struggle to imagine an AGI without a singularity or intelligence explosion. It seems like wishful thinking.