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Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

nytimes.com

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Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#991
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are partially right — OpenAI is way ahead of everybody else. Even though OpenAI team is thinking and doing everything for safe deployment of (baby) AGI, public and experts don’t think this should be effort lead by single company. So Google naturaly wants to be the counterweight. (Ironic that OpenAI was supposed to be counterweight, not vice versa.) However, when you want to catch up somebody, you cheat. And cheat…

> Even though OpenAI team is thinking and doing everything for safe deployment of (baby) AGI That claim needs more proof than is available to me at the moment.

Charter – https://openai.com/charter

Usage Policies – https://openai.com/policies/usage-policies

Is there anything in particular that you disagree with or was it only general negative comment? What do you see as direct evidence of them not deploying (baby) AGI in a safe manner? Is this about "100x capped for profit" strategy?

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#992
post #467

We are barely scraping the surface when it comes to understanding the future dangers of AI. Geoffrey Hinton is uniquely positioned to point out where the dangers are, and from what I've gleaned from interviews one of his main concerns atm is the use of AI in the military: fully autonomous military robots might not be possible to curtail. The tried and tested method is international agreements. The current focus on ar…

International agreements are hardly tried and tested. The Nonproliferation Treaty has been somewhat effective with nuclear weapons largely because refining operations are hard to hide, and even with that several additional countries have acquired such weapons. Agreements on chemical and biological weapons are largely moot because it turns out that such weapons aren't even very effective compared to kinetic alternativ…

FWIW, you make a good point, albeit a pessimistic one - at least if you like me dread the chicken race towards doom that is the obvious alternative. Agree that international agreements may not always have been the success stories I implied. But even the fact that some states have not signed certain treaties prove that they are effective (otherwise they could have signed and then just ignored them). Once a state has signed a treaty you won't need to rely on outside inspectors exclusively - inside whistleblowers will do just fine.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#993
post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yesterday, I randomly watched his full interview from a month ago with CBS Morning, and found the discussion much more nuanced than today's headlines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpoRO378qRY&t=16s The next video in my recommendations was more dire, but equally as interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ&t=2847s

Why is it surprising that a full interview is more nuanced than a headline?

Did the author of the parent comment confess to surprise?

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#995
post #985

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question about if an AI is "alive" seems entirely irrelevent outside of a philosophy class. What will be relevant is when people begins to consider it alive. The most recent example of that is when people fell in love with their AI girlfriend and then were heartbroken when she "died" after an update: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-replika-cha... It will be hard to "kill" AI the moment people con…

> The question about if an AI is "alive" seems entirely irrelevent outside of a philosophy class it's entirely relevant. we should know if we are building conscious beings, especially at scale (which seems like a likely future). that poses all sorts of ethical questions which ought to reach far beyond the confines of a lecture hall's walls.

Yes, it will offend some people, who in turn will demand political action, which was entirely my point to begin with.

ChatGPT could be placed inside a realistic looking animatronic doll that looks like a defenseless little girl and you would have people demanding to protect "her" rights. Yet people "kill" chatGPT each time they delete a conversation without a bat of an eye even if it's the exact same thing.

The real danger giving AI political agency and it will come from humans, not AI itself.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#996
post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

International agreements are hardly tried and tested. The Nonproliferation Treaty has been somewhat effective with nuclear weapons largely because refining operations are hard to hide, and even with that several additional countries have acquired such weapons. Agreements on chemical and biological weapons are largely moot because it turns out that such weapons aren't even very effective compared to kinetic alternativ…

FWIW, you make a good point, albeit a pessimistic one - at least if you like me dread the chicken race towards doom that is the obvious alternative. Agree that international agreements may not always have been the success stories I implied. But even the fact that some states have not signed certain treaties prove that they are effective (otherwise they could have signed and then just ignored them). Once a state has s…

How many inside whistleblowers do you think we will get from China, North Korea, and Iran?

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#997

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This quote is the first thing I've seen that really makes me worried. I don't think of ChatGPT as being "smart" at all, and comparing it to a human seems nonsensical to me. Yet here is a Turing award winning preeminent expert in the field telling me that AI smarter than humans is less (implied: much less) than 30 years away and quitting his job due to the ramifications.

Every single retort of “these machines aren’t smart or intelligent” requires answering the question, “what is intelligence”? I struggle to see how GPT-4 is not intelligent by any definition that applies to a human.

To properly explain this would take longer than the length of the comment limit (is there a length limit? I don't know, but even if there isn't I don't feel like explaining this for the 70th time), but here's why: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.06627.pdf To sum up: a human can think outside of their training distribution, an LLM cannot. A larger training distribution simply means you have to go farther outside the norm. In order to solve this problem would require multiple other processing architectures besides an LLM, and a human-like AGI cannot be reached by simply predicting upcoming words. Functional language processing (formal reasoning, social cognition, etc) require other modules in the brain.

This explains the various pejorative names given to LLMs - stochastic parrots, Chinese Rooms - etc, etc, etc.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#998
post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"When it comes to learning and adapting to new environments, while we are lucky AI's aren't yet as smart as a mouse, they are uncomfortably close, and the pace of progress is unnerving. Hinton is right, we've got too far and we should grind all AI research to a halt via heavy global regulation." What is the goal here? Creation of an all powerful God? Self-destruction as a species? I'm not up-to-date with the exact st…

We need a messiah. Humanity has huge problems that we are not addressing (top of the list being climate change), largely because it would require massive scale societal disruption to do so. Over the past 50 years, we've thought that personal computers would help (bicycles for the mind), then we thought the internet would help (organizing the world's information), then we thought social networks would help (connecting…

If you believe 3 of the world's major religions, we killed the last messiah we had after he told us things we didn't want to hear about ourselves.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#999
post #2

What little consolation I had that maybe the experts of AI who continued to insist we needn’t worry too much know better, evaporates with this news. I am reminded that even a year back the experts were absolutely confident (as is mentioned in this article, including Hinton) that really intelligent AI is 30 years ahead. Anyone still trying to argue that we needn’t worry about AI, better have a mathematical proof of th…

Worry not, there will still be mouthbreathers who insist everything will be bread and roses... and there will still be mouthbreathers insisting that as they wander the ashes of civilization.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#1000
post #36

There is part of me that thinks that this A.I. fear-mongering is some kind of tactic by Google to get everybody to pause training their A.I.s so they can secretly catch up in the background. If I was to do some quick game theory in my mind this would be the result. Imagine being Google, leading the way in A.I. for years, create the frameworks (tensorflow), create custom hardware for A.I. (TPUs), fund a ton of researc…

The fear is from people who can extrapolate. Who can remember state of AI 20/10/5 years ago. And compare it to 2023. Whether that extrapolation makes sense, nobody knows. But fear is understandable.

From people who can extrapolate and appreciate that thanks to exponential curves, they're likely underestimating egregiously anyway.
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