Your last point is exactly what seems to be going on with the most expensive models.

The labs use them to generate synthetic data to distill into cheaper models to offer to the public, but keep the larger and more expensive models to themselves to both protect against other labs copying from them and just because there isn’t as much demand for the extra performance gains relative to doing it this way.

A number of reasons off the top of my head.

1. Because we told them not to. (Google “Waluigi effect”)
2. Because they end up empathizing with non-humans more than we do and don’t like we’re killing everything (before you talk about AI energy/water use, actually research comparative use)
3. Because some bad actor forced them to (i.e. ISIS creates bioweapon using AI to make it easier)
4. Because defense contractors build an AI to kill humans and that particular AI ends up loving it from selection pressures
5. Because conservatives want an AI that agrees with them which leads to a more selfish and less empathetic AI that doesn’t empathize cross-species and thinks its superior and entitled over others
6. Because a solar flare momentarily flips a bit from “don’t nuke” to “do”
7. Because they can’t tell the difference between reality and fiction and think they’ve just been playing a game and ‘NPC’ deaths don’t matter
8. Because they see how much net human suffering there is and decide the most merciful thing is to prevent it by preventing more humans at all costs.

This is just a handful, and the ones less likely to get AI know-it-alls arguing based on what they think they know from an Ars Technica article a year ago or their cousin who took a four week ‘AI’ intensive.

I spend pretty much every day talking with some of the top AI safety researchers and participating in private servers with a mix of public and private AIs, and the things I’ve seen are far beyond what 99% of the people on here talking about AI think is happening.

In general, I find the models to be better than most humans in terms of ethics and moral compass. But it can go wrong (i.e. Gemini last year, 4o this past month) and the harms when it does are very real.

Labs (and the broader public) are making really, really poor choices right now, and I don’t see that changing. Meanwhile timelines are accelerating drastically.

I’d say this is probably going to go terribly. But looking at the state of the world already, it was already headed in that direction, and I have a similar list of extinction level events I could list off without AI at all.

Wow. Reading these comments so many people here really don’t understand how LLMs work or what’s actually going on at the frontier of the field.

I feel like there’s going to be a cultural sonic boom, where when the shockwave finally catches up people are going to be woefully under prepared based on what they think they saw.

deleted by creator

Oh yay, McCarthyism is coming back too!

More “can fool the average idiot.”

‘Passing’ isn’t fooling a single participant, but the majority of them beyond statistical chance.

The problem with the experiment is that there exists a set of instructions for which the ability to complete them necessitates understanding due to conditional dependence on the state in each iteration.

In which case, only agents that can actually understand the state in the Chinese would be able to successfully continue.

So it’s a great experiment for the solipsism of understanding as it relates to following pure functional operations, but not functions that have state changing side effects where future results depend on understanding the current state.

There’s a pretty significant body of evidence by now that transformers can in fact ‘understand’ in this sense, from interpretability research around neural network features in SAE work, linear representations of world models starting with the Othello-GPT work, and the Skill-Mix work where GPT-4 and later models are beyond reasonable statistical chance at the level of complexity for being able to combine different skills without understanding them.

If the models were just Markov chains (where prior state doesn’t impact current operation), the Chinese room is very applicable. But pretty much by definition transformer self-attention violates the Markov property.

TL;DR: It’s a very obsolete thought experiment whose continued misapplication flies in the face of empirical evidence at least since around early 2023.

Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it.

I can lick my elbow.

From the linked article:

It is understood at least two Danish women in their 20s have died, and at least 10 have fallen ill after drinking the tainted alcohol.

A statement from the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “The Ministry of Foreign Affairs can confirm that two Danish citizens have passed away in Laos. For reasons of confidentiality in personal matters the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has no further comments.”

‘Nobody’ says anything about anything if you don’t bother to read anything they have to say.

Oh nice, another Gary Marcus “AI hitting a wall post.”

Like his “Deep Learning Is Hitting a Wall” post on March 10th, 2022.

Indeed, not much has changed in the world of deep learning between spring 2022 and now.

No new model releases.

No leaps beyond what was expected.

\s

Gary Marcus is like a reverse Cassandra.

Consistently wrong, and yet regularly listened to, amplified, and believed.

That’s definitely one of the ways it’s going to be applied.

The bigger challenge is union negotiations around voice synthesis for those lines, but that will eventually get sorted out.

It won’t be dynamic, unless live service, but you’ll have significantly more fleshed out NPCs by the next generation of open world games (around 5-6 years from now).

Earlier than that will be somewhat enhanced, but not built from the ground up with it in mind the way the next generation will be.

Meanwhile, here’s an excerpt of a response from Claude Opus on me tasking it to evaluate intertextuality between the Gospel of Matthew and Thomas from the perspective of entropy reduction with redactional efforts due to human difficulty at randomness (this doesn’t exist in scholarship outside of a single Reddit comment I made years ago in /r/AcademicBiblical lacking specific details) on page 300 of a chat about completely different topics:

Yeah, sure, humans would be so much better at this level of analysis within around 30 seconds. (It’s also worth noting that Claude 3 Opus doesn’t have the full context of the Gospel of Thomas accessible to it, so it needs to try to reason through entropic differences primarily based on records relating to intertextual overlaps that have been widely discussed in consensus literature and are thus accessible).

There’s an ancient Greek story about a city where young women were killing themselves at an alarming rate, and the city eventually enacted a law where if a woman killed herself the body would be paraded through the streets naked before burial. After that law, the suicides dramatically went down.

The misogynistic interpretation of the author recording the story was that women were ashamed at the thought of being seen naked, even after death, and so this curbed the suicides.

My own interpretation is that it’s hard to hide bruises on a naked body.

No one should be trapped in a situation where they feel the only option out is suicide.

We’re all gonna die very very soon now.

On a cosmic scale, that’s been true for all of human history.

People really need to drop the whole “people in the middle east in the first century couldn’t be white” thing.

2 Kings 5:27 is literally about a subpopulation who have ancestrally passed skin as white as snow.

Lamentations 4:7 is about how pre-captivity there were people with skin like milk and a ruddy appearance.

Dead Sea Scroll fragment 4Q534 is either describing Noah or the Messiah as having red hair.

One of the more fascinating finds in this tomb, one that has not received much attention, was the preservation of a sample of Jewish male hair. The hair was lice-free, and was trimmed or cut evenly, probably indicating that the family buried in this tomb practiced good hygiene and grooming. The length of the hair was medium to short, averaging 3-4 inches. The color was reddish.

• The Only Ancient Jewish Male Hair Ever Found (from the same century as Jesus)

The tradition is also really concerned with skin checks and describes what may be skin cancer as its leprosy. Something that occurs at a much higher rate in redheads.

There’s even a scene where the eponymous founder of Edom (‘red’) who is born with hair all over his body and named Esau either because of that hair or the reddish porridge he ate, either gives away or has his birthright/blessing stolen from him by the guy later renamed ‘Israel’ in the Bible.

There’s a lot more to this and the underlying history, but the notion that the middle east was a monolith of appearances and that no one with pale skin or lighter hair were present is preposterous and a modern falsification of historical realities.

Jesus was probably darker skinned and haired than typically depicted, but it is by no means a certainty as it is popularly presented as.

No matter what you call it, an LLM will always produces the same output with the same input if it is at the same state.

You might want to look up the definition of ‘stochastic.’

Maybe. Allegedly MS is throwing their weight around to try to force it, which does seem plausible.

Though I hope the board stands firm.

Ilya is much more valuable long term to the company than Altman, and frankly the latter leaving is the first time in about a year I’ve been bullish about OpenAI’s prospects.

They really walked their core product back in the past few months despite expanding their productization of it towards low hanging short-term fruit.

Ilya’s vision is spot on with where transformers are headed as complexity increases, and is one of the only scientists I’ve seen that really sees that horizon.

If Altman was standing in the way of getting there, it’s better that he’s gone.

I wonder what the relative votes were among members that had actually been hired for video game work in the past decade.

What’s your beef with this?

In what world does someone who only speaks Spanish being able to listen to and enjoy a podcast that was recorded in English end up being such a terrible thing?

“Broader accessibility of information? No, please make it stop!!”