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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35347 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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He doesn't seem to have an intuitive understanding of what the everyman on the street is missing. That's probably why he never starts with a ground-up outline of the whole problem. Its hard to know what fundamental assumptions your audience is missing before you get to Q&A.

I finally found an argument (that I inferred myself from interactions with chatGPT, then later found Yann Lecun making a similar one) that convinced me that the entire class of auto-regressive LLMs like the GPT series are much less dangerous than I thought

I agree that we probably don't get doom from literally just stacking more layers. The concerning thing is that these seem like easier problems to solve than I would have expected getting computers to understand concepts would be. I still think we are at least one or two BIG breakthroughs from true AGI (the kind that makes humans obsolete). Those could come tomorrow, or they could come 10 years from now, or never.

I agree that we probably don't get doom from literally just stacking more layers. The concerning thing is that these seem like easier problems to solve than I would have expected getting computers to understand concepts would be. I still think we are at least one or two BIG breakthroughs from true AGI (the kind that makes humans obsolete). Those could come tomorrow, or they could come 10 years from now, or never.

This is the way I think about it, too. Despite popular fears, Deep Blue was never going to reach AGI no matter how much you refined its algorithm or how much computing power you gave it. Chess, like writing a five paragraph essay, was a test we used to measure the unobserved variable of intelligence, so people assumed that once a machine could play chess as well as humans (or research and write a five paragraph essay as well as humans), humans were presently donezo. But that unobserved variable is a tricky thing to define, and so, to engineer.

Every year offers a small chance that someone grasps the key insight that yields an AI capable of recursive self-improvement. But it's unpredictable when this insight will arrive. We don't know the shape of the thing we're fumbling for.

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