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Why are we even bothering talking about this? It's Gary Marcus "neural networks don't really work" suddenly discovering they do, and literally trying to shut d

by nl 4y ago

Why are we even bothering talking about this? It's Gary Marcus "neural networks don't really work" suddenly discovering they do, and literally trying to shut down research in that area while keeping his prefered research areas funded. We know a bunch of the people whose names are on the letter didn't sign it (eg Yann Lecunn who said he disagreed with the premise and didn't sign it). I'm so offended by the idea of this that I'll personally fund $10k of training runs myself in a jurisdiction where it isn't banned if this ever became law in the US.

1827162 4y ago
Assuming the training is based on public data, then making it illegal is like a "thought crime" where the state is trying to prohibit carrying out certain computations. Well if I believe the government has no right to control my thoughts, then I believe it has no right to control whatever computation I do on my private computer as well. Down with these ** control freaks, so much of everything nowadays prioritizes safety over freedom. This time let's put freedom first.
- nl 4y ago
  I disagree with this take completely.
- ElevenLathe 4y ago
  I would kind of agree but there's zero way for this line of thought to make it into the beltway.
- _qfi9 4y ago
  i have a libertarian bent but there are definitely some computations of questionable nature that probably shouldn't be lega, e.g. designing a super virus to wipe out humanity, or a super computer virus to encrypt all memory on planet earth. where to draw the line i have no idea
- mechagodzilla 4y ago
  Do you care about governments regulating 'carrying out certain lab operations'? And that they have no right to regulate whatever viruses or micro-organisms you develop at home? A lot of the hand-wringing isn't about whatever you're fiddling with on your computer at home, it's about the impact on society and public infrastructure and institutions we rely on. It's not hard to imagine public forums like hackernews and reddit being swamped with chatgpt spam (google searches are already dominated by SEO spam and that's probably going to get much worse). Things like our court systems rely on lawsuits mostly being expensive to file, and mostly done in good faith, and still get overwhelmed under fairly normal circumstances.
- quonn 4y ago
  As a hypothetical, if some computations are extremely dangerous for the general public, it should be possible to ban them.
  - timcobb 4y ago
    Extremely dangerous computations
lkbm 4y ago
On Twitter, it was "multi-blillionaires [Elon Musk] want to keep us down!" In the HN open letter thread it was "All the companies falling behind want a chance to catch up." Now it's "Gary Marcus". The letter was signed by a lot of people, including many AI researchers, including people working on LLMs. Any dismissal that reduces to [one incumbent interest] opposes this" is missing the mark. A lot of people, incumbents and non-incumbents, relevant experts and non-experts, are saying we need to figure out AI safety. Some have been saying it for years, other just recently, but if you want to dismiss their views, you're going to need to address their arguments, not just ad hominem dismissals.
- chatmasta 4y ago
  Elon Musk is the most ironic signatory of this blog post, considering his decade-long effort to put AI behind the wheel of 100mph+ vehicles. And then he's got the gall to lecture the rest of us on "AI safety" after we finally get a semi-intelligent chatbot? Come on, man.
  - sethd 4y ago
    Given that FSD is obviously a scam, wouldn't a pause like this be in his best interest? (buys them more time, while keeping the hype machine going)
    - thot_experiment 4y ago
      I don't know, a Tesla got me door to burrito store (6 miles) in the pelting rain the other day without human input. Seems like that's not quite the bar for an outright scam.
  - WillPostForFood 4y ago
    If we are being fair, even though we might refer to self driving capabilities as "ai" and as self aware supercomputer overlord as "ai" they aren't the same thing and you can hold different opinions on the development of them.
- nl 4y ago
detrites 4y ago
A great many would likely join you, making this entire fiasco a time-wasting distraction, at best, and grave risk at worst. The technologies will continue to be developed, moratorium or not. A moratorium only enables the hidden to get there first. The risks need to be discussed and understood, along with the benefits, and publicly. That's the only sensible way forward. Denying that the technology is here already and pretending it can be "paused" doesn't assist in alleviating their concerns. It's absurd to think any of it can be put back inside the box it came out of. Now that it is here, how best to mitigate any bad sides it may have? Simple, continue to develop it - as it will be the only viable source of effective counter-measures.
- nl 4y ago
  Of course they would. It's just ridiculous. If people are genuinely concerned about lack of access to the OpenAI models then work at training open ones! OpenAI has a maybe 6 month lead and that's nothing. Plus it's much easier being the follower when you know what is possible. (To be clear, I know at least a few of the projects already working on this. I just want to make it clear that is the intellectually honest approach).
  - kami8845 4y ago
    I think their lead might be a bit bigger than that. ChatGPT 3.5 was released 4 months ago and I still haven't seen another LLM come close to it.
    - nl 4y ago
      Alpaca on 13B Llama is enough to convince me that it on 65B Llama would match GPT 3.5 for most tasks. Perplexity AI's app is definitely better than GPT 3.5 for many things although it isn't clear how they are doing everything there.
    - laichzeit0 4y ago
      A slightly more paranoid me asks whether there’s some magic they’re using that no one is completely aware of. Watching Google fumble around makes me more paranoid that that’s the case.
logicalmonster 4y ago
> It's Gary Marcus "neural networks don't really work" suddenly discovering they do, I'm not familiar with Gary Marcus's arguments, but perhaps there's a bit of an misinterpretation or mind-reading going on with this specific point? Not sure, but one of the first comments on the article said the following as a possible explanation. > Gary Marcus has tried to explain this. Current AI bots are dangerous precisely because they combine LLM abilities with LLM unreliability and other LLM weaknesses.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
misssocrates 4y ago
What if governments start regulating and locking down advanced computing in the same way they locked down medicine and advanced weapontry?
- judge2020 4y ago
  So far it seems letting private industry iterate on LLMs doesn't directly pose to a risk of ending lives like human trials and nuclear weaponry development do.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    I think the fear of LLMs is very overblown. On the other hand, I think that if LLMs actually manage to do what proponents hope it will, some people will die as a result due to economics when they lose their jobs. That's not unique to LLMs, of course. It's what has happened before every time something has obsoleted a bunch of jobs. There's no reason to think this time would be any different.
    - stametseater 4y ago
      The old excuse from AI researchers was that once AI takes all the mundane jobs, people will be free to become artists. Ask artists now what they think about AI. A whole lot of them aren't very happy about it.
- nl 4y ago
  Well they do of course. There are export restrictions on supercomputers now, including many NVIDIA GPUs. I contend that doesn't matter. There is sufficient compute available now at consumer levels to make it too late to stop training LLMs. If cloud A100s became unavailable tomorrow it'd be awkward, but there is enough progress being made on training on lower RAM cards to show it is possible.
  - dwaltrip 4y ago
    > I contend that doesn't matter. Slowing things down is a real effect that will impact how circumstances unfold. Do I trust that a "slow down / pause" would be done robustly and sensibly? I wish I was more optimistic about that. At the very least, we should definitely continue having this conversation.
r3trohack3r 4y ago
This is my view too. The perceived value of LLMs relative to everything that came before is staggering. I wouldn’t expect any regulation or laws to slow it down at this point. You might get the U.S. to crack down on it and stop innovation, GPL or proprietary license holders might win a lawsuit, etc. But I suspect the net effect would be to push research and innovation out of the jurisdiction that made that decision and into another that isn’t willing to kill LLMs in their economy. Personally, after seeing what LLMs can do first hand, I’d likely move jurisdictions if the U.S. cracked down on AI progress. There is a not-0 chance that putting bread on my table in 10 years requires it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- beauzero 4y ago
  > I’d likely move jurisdictions if the U.S. cracked down on AI progress This is my overriding concern. This is a wave crest that if you don't ride it, it may well crush you or take the ocean with it and leave you in a desert. It is as interesting as fire as a tool for civilization going forward.
  - 1attice 4y ago
    What a great metaphor. Did you recall that your planet is currently in a sixth extinction event, brought about, yes, through the repeated overuse of fire? Zeus was right. Prometheus belonged on that rock.
deepsquirrelnet 4y ago
> I'm so offended by the idea of this that I'll personally fund $10k of training runs myself in a jurisdiction where it isn't banned if this ever became law in the US. And this is exactly the risk. These things will just go other places while the US trips over its salty billionaires trying to create political red tape to allow their own businesses to catch up. Surely Elon has no reservations about putting premature self driving cars on the road. Or are we just going to pretend that the last decade of his business failures have nothing to do with this hypocrisy? At least GPT hasn’t killed anyone yet. An open letter full of forged signatures and conflicts of interest aren’t convincing enough for the repercussions of the government stepping in. More than anything, this just reeks of playing on peoples fear of change. New things are scary, but in my opinion, this kind of drastic measure starts with broad interest panels that first evaluate and detail the risks. Ooo scary doesn’t cut it.
- yreg 4y ago
  >last decade of his business failures What world are you living in if you think Tesla and SpaceX have been in the past 10 years business failures?
  - xhkkffbf 4y ago
    When people don't like Musk for whatever reason but usually it's political alignment, they just make up things. I see people continue to claim that Twitter is failing, even though it's been working fine every time I log into. With Tesla, they'll just ignore the thousands of happy customers and focus on the bad stories like the occasional exploding car. It's quite sad to see normally reliable technical people go off the rails on these issues.
- ben_w 4y ago
  > At least GPT hasn’t killed anyone yet. Hard to tell, given that… (0) newspapers apparently rename things for clicks: https://www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/430098/belgian-man-commits-suicide-following-exchanges-with-chatgpt https://www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/430098/belgian-man-com... (1) him being a hypocrite tells you a mistake has been made, not which of the contradictory positions is wrong. My resolution is: GPT isn't the only AI, and Musk is pretty open about wanting to put FSD AI into those androids of his, so if the Optimus AI was as good as Musk sells it as being, it would absolutely be covered by this. (2) how do you even compare the fatality rates here? GPT doesn't move, and stationary Teslas aren't very dangerous, so miles-per-death seems a poor choice. User-hours per death? Perhaps, but I don't know how many user-hours either of them have had yet. And then (3), while I don't really trust self-promotional statistics, those are the only ones I have for Tesla, which says that switching it on increased the distance between accidents: https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport Better sources appreciated, if anyone has them! :) (4) finally, as this isn't just about GPT but all AI: how much of the change in the USA's suicide rate since the release of Facebook can be attributed to the content recommendation AI that Facebook uses? What share of culpability do they and Twitter bare for the Myanmar genocide thanks to imperfections in the automation of abuse detection and removal? Did the search AI of Google and YouTube promote conspiracies, and if so how much blame do they get for the deaths proximally caused by anti-vaccination? And in reverse, over-zealous AI have seen fraud where it did not exist, and people have committed suicide as a result: https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/23/22399721/uk-post-office-software-bug-criminal-convictions-overturned https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/23/22399721/uk-post-office-s...
sailingparrot 4y ago
> It's Gary Marcus "neural networks don't really work" suddenly discovering they do, and literally trying to shut down research in that area while keeping his prefered research areas funded Gary Marcus has been aware that neural nets work for a while now, but he is only in the spotlight for his contrarian take, if he stops having a contrarian take he disappears, because it's not like he is producing any research worth of discussion otherwise. So you can expect him to stay contrarian forever. What might have been a genuine take initially is now his job, that's how he makes money, and it's so associated with him that it's probably his identity as well.
- Analemma_ 4y ago
  This is a depressing pattern that I've seen get repeated over and over: it's easy to become Twitter-famous by just shitting out a steady stream of contrarian "me against the world, I'm the rogue dissident nobody wants to talk about!" takes, and once you start doing this, you have no choice but to keep it up forever (even when the takes are just wrong) because it has become your identity. It has destroyed so many interesting and intelligent people, and by itself is reason enough to never use Twitter.
  - nullc 4y ago
    Adopting a contrarian brand because it brings you attention when you'd otherwise be a nobody is by far not limited to twitter. It's a mainstay of traditional journalism. If anything twitter disincentivizes the practice because it has commoditized cynicism: It's harder to build a brand by being the well known naysayer of X when someone can source whatever negative view they want by simply typing it into a search box. Commoditization will be complete once the media starts quoting GPT4 for reliably opposing views.
- omnicognate 4y ago
  "Neural networks don't really work" isn't an accurate representation of Marcus' position, and his actual position hasn't been shown to be wrong unless you believe that LLMs and diffusion models display, or are manifestly on the way towards displaying, understanding. That is something many think, and it's not in itself an unreasonable view. However there are also plenty of reasons to think otherwise and many, including me, who haven't conceded the point. It hasn't been settled beyond reasonable debate. To assume that the person you disagree with can only hold their view out of cynical self-interest, wishful thinking or plain insanity is to assume that you are so obviously right that there can be no valid debate. That is a bad starting position and I'd recommend against it as a matter of principle. Apart from anything else, however convinced you are of your own rightness it's plain rude to assume everyone else is equally convinced, and ad-hominem to ascribe negative motives to those who disagree. As for Gary Marcus, as far as I've seen he's been consistent in his views and respectful in the way he's argued them. To read about him on HN you'd think he's spent the last few years badmouthing every AI researcher around, but I haven't seen that, just disagreement with people's statements - i.e. healthy debate. I haven't followed him closely though, so if you know of any cases where he's gone beyond that and said the sorts of things about AI researchers that people routinely say about him I'd interested to see them.
gliptic 4y ago
> We know a bunch of the people whose names are on the letter didn't sign it Yann LeCun's name never was on the letter. Where did this meme come from.
- s-lambert 4y ago
  Pierre Levy tweeted that Yann LeCun signed the letter and this was one of the earlier tweets that gained traction. The tweet where Yann denies that he signed the letter: https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1640910484030255109 https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1640910484030255109. You can see a screenshot in the replies of the originally deleted tweet.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
version_five 4y ago
All the big named signatories to this were transparently self interested, as well as not real "practitioners" - mostly adjacent folks upset to be out of the limelight. I know it's a blurry line, but people like Andrew Ng and Yann LeCunn who are actually building ML stuff have dismissed this outright. It's almost like a bunch of sore losers got together and took an irrelevant stand. Like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell vs Spotify.
- ldhough 4y ago
  Yoshua Bengio is a signatory and shares a Turing award with Yann LeCun though...
  - version_five 4y ago
    I knew that when I wrote my comment
    - ldhough 4y ago
      I mean then what is the basis for calling him not a "real practitioner" while Yann LeCun is? It seems a little unfair to dismiss outright the opinion on a deep learning technology from a guy who won a Turing award for research into deep learning. I also don't see any evidence that he is "transparently self-interested."
tluyben2 4y ago
How can it be realistically shut down? There is too much cat-out-of-bag and many countries in the world won’t give a crap about whatever the west wants. So the west continues or falls behind. What is the discussion even here?
xg15 4y ago
Why exactly are you offended?
skybrian 4y ago
Talking about whether AI “works” or “doesn’t work” is a dumb debate. The conversation about AI is confusing with people having a lot of different ideas that are mostly more nuanced than that. I don’t believe Gary Marcus thinks in those terms either.
nonbirithm 4y ago
I can maybe sense some foresight that we didn't have at the time other world-changing technologies were discovered. People reference the printing press often in relation to the arguments against progress, but I haven't seen discussion about the internal combustion engine yet, which hundreds of years later we're now hoping we can replace with EVs because of their unforseen consequences. Books don't have the same impact, especially with paperless formats becoming commonplace. Would we have reacted to the ICE hundreds of years ago the same way some are reacting to AI, that it needs to be stopped or limited to prevent the destruction of $entity, if there had been enough knowledge about how tech can affect e.g. the environment, or the world in general? There was nothing in place to stop us from taking the tradeoff of transportation efficiency over the at the time unknown negative effects. But should we call the invention of the ICE and other related technologies a mistake that irreparably doomed the planet and our future generations? I have no idea. It's a tough question we were incapable of asking at the time, and might reveal some hard truths about the nature of progress and the price we have to pay for it. At least with the effects known at this point, we can start asking it, and it's a step up from obliviousness.

by nl 4y ago

1827162 4y ago

Assuming the training is based on public data, then making it illegal is like a "thought crime" where the state is trying to prohibit carrying out certain computations. Well if I believe the government has no right to control my thoughts, then I believe it has no right to control whatever computation I do on my private computer as well. Down with these ** control freaks, so much of everything nowadays prioritizes safety over freedom. This time let's put freedom first.

nl 4y ago
I disagree with this take completely.
ElevenLathe 4y ago
I would kind of agree but there's zero way for this line of thought to make it into the beltway.
_qfi9 4y ago
i have a libertarian bent but there are definitely some computations of questionable nature that probably shouldn't be lega, e.g. designing a super virus to wipe out humanity, or a super computer virus to encrypt all memory on planet earth. where to draw the line i have no idea
mechagodzilla 4y ago
Do you care about governments regulating 'carrying out certain lab operations'? And that they have no right to regulate whatever viruses or micro-organisms you develop at home? A lot of the hand-wringing isn't about whatever you're fiddling with on your computer at home, it's about the impact on society and public infrastructure and institutions we rely on. It's not hard to imagine public forums like hackernews and reddit being swamped with chatgpt spam (google searches are already dominated by SEO spam and that's probably going to get much worse). Things like our court systems rely on lawsuits mostly being expensive to file, and mostly done in good faith, and still get overwhelmed under fairly normal circumstances.
quonn 4y ago
As a hypothetical, if some computations are extremely dangerous for the general public, it should be possible to ban them.
- timcobb 4y ago
  Extremely dangerous computations

lkbm 4y ago

On Twitter, it was "multi-blillionaires [Elon Musk] want to keep us down!" In the HN open letter thread it was "All the companies falling behind want a chance to catch up." Now it's "Gary Marcus". The letter was signed by a lot of people, including many AI researchers, including people working on LLMs. Any dismissal that reduces to [one incumbent interest] opposes this" is missing the mark. A lot of people, incumbents and non-incumbents, relevant experts and non-experts, are saying we need to figure out AI safety. Some have been saying it for years, other just recently, but if you want to dismiss their views, you're going to need to address their arguments, not just ad hominem dismissals.

chatmasta 4y ago
Elon Musk is the most ironic signatory of this blog post, considering his decade-long effort to put AI behind the wheel of 100mph+ vehicles. And then he's got the gall to lecture the rest of us on "AI safety" after we finally get a semi-intelligent chatbot? Come on, man.
- sethd 4y ago
  Given that FSD is obviously a scam, wouldn't a pause like this be in his best interest? (buys them more time, while keeping the hype machine going)
  - thot_experiment 4y ago
    I don't know, a Tesla got me door to burrito store (6 miles) in the pelting rain the other day without human input. Seems like that's not quite the bar for an outright scam.
- WillPostForFood 4y ago
  If we are being fair, even though we might refer to self driving capabilities as "ai" and as self aware supercomputer overlord as "ai" they aren't the same thing and you can hold different opinions on the development of them.
nl 4y ago

detrites 4y ago

A great many would likely join you, making this entire fiasco a time-wasting distraction, at best, and grave risk at worst. The technologies will continue to be developed, moratorium or not. A moratorium only enables the hidden to get there first. The risks need to be discussed and understood, along with the benefits, and publicly. That's the only sensible way forward. Denying that the technology is here already and pretending it can be "paused" doesn't assist in alleviating their concerns. It's absurd to think any of it can be put back inside the box it came out of. Now that it is here, how best to mitigate any bad sides it may have? Simple, continue to develop it - as it will be the only viable source of effective counter-measures.

nl 4y ago
Of course they would. It's just ridiculous. If people are genuinely concerned about lack of access to the OpenAI models then work at training open ones! OpenAI has a maybe 6 month lead and that's nothing. Plus it's much easier being the follower when you know what is possible. (To be clear, I know at least a few of the projects already working on this. I just want to make it clear that is the intellectually honest approach).
- kami8845 4y ago
  I think their lead might be a bit bigger than that. ChatGPT 3.5 was released 4 months ago and I still haven't seen another LLM come close to it.
  - nl 4y ago
    Alpaca on 13B Llama is enough to convince me that it on 65B Llama would match GPT 3.5 for most tasks. Perplexity AI's app is definitely better than GPT 3.5 for many things although it isn't clear how they are doing everything there.
  - laichzeit0 4y ago
    A slightly more paranoid me asks whether there’s some magic they’re using that no one is completely aware of. Watching Google fumble around makes me more paranoid that that’s the case.

logicalmonster 4y ago

> It's Gary Marcus "neural networks don't really work" suddenly discovering they do, I'm not familiar with Gary Marcus's arguments, but perhaps there's a bit of an misinterpretation or mind-reading going on with this specific point? Not sure, but one of the first comments on the article said the following as a possible explanation. > Gary Marcus has tried to explain this. Current AI bots are dangerous precisely because they combine LLM abilities with LLM unreliability and other LLM weaknesses.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

misssocrates 4y ago

What if governments start regulating and locking down advanced computing in the same way they locked down medicine and advanced weapontry?

judge2020 4y ago
So far it seems letting private industry iterate on LLMs doesn't directly pose to a risk of ending lives like human trials and nuclear weaponry development do.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  I think the fear of LLMs is very overblown. On the other hand, I think that if LLMs actually manage to do what proponents hope it will, some people will die as a result due to economics when they lose their jobs. That's not unique to LLMs, of course. It's what has happened before every time something has obsoleted a bunch of jobs. There's no reason to think this time would be any different.
  - stametseater 4y ago
    The old excuse from AI researchers was that once AI takes all the mundane jobs, people will be free to become artists. Ask artists now what they think about AI. A whole lot of them aren't very happy about it.
nl 4y ago
Well they do of course. There are export restrictions on supercomputers now, including many NVIDIA GPUs. I contend that doesn't matter. There is sufficient compute available now at consumer levels to make it too late to stop training LLMs. If cloud A100s became unavailable tomorrow it'd be awkward, but there is enough progress being made on training on lower RAM cards to show it is possible.
- dwaltrip 4y ago
  > I contend that doesn't matter. Slowing things down is a real effect that will impact how circumstances unfold. Do I trust that a "slow down / pause" would be done robustly and sensibly? I wish I was more optimistic about that. At the very least, we should definitely continue having this conversation.

r3trohack3r 4y ago

This is my view too. The perceived value of LLMs relative to everything that came before is staggering. I wouldn’t expect any regulation or laws to slow it down at this point. You might get the U.S. to crack down on it and stop innovation, GPL or proprietary license holders might win a lawsuit, etc. But I suspect the net effect would be to push research and innovation out of the jurisdiction that made that decision and into another that isn’t willing to kill LLMs in their economy. Personally, after seeing what LLMs can do first hand, I’d likely move jurisdictions if the U.S. cracked down on AI progress. There is a not-0 chance that putting bread on my table in 10 years requires it.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
beauzero 4y ago
> I’d likely move jurisdictions if the U.S. cracked down on AI progress This is my overriding concern. This is a wave crest that if you don't ride it, it may well crush you or take the ocean with it and leave you in a desert. It is as interesting as fire as a tool for civilization going forward.
- 1attice 4y ago
  What a great metaphor. Did you recall that your planet is currently in a sixth extinction event, brought about, yes, through the repeated overuse of fire? Zeus was right. Prometheus belonged on that rock.

deepsquirrelnet 4y ago

> I'm so offended by the idea of this that I'll personally fund $10k of training runs myself in a jurisdiction where it isn't banned if this ever became law in the US. And this is exactly the risk. These things will just go other places while the US trips over its salty billionaires trying to create political red tape to allow their own businesses to catch up. Surely Elon has no reservations about putting premature self driving cars on the road. Or are we just going to pretend that the last decade of his business failures have nothing to do with this hypocrisy? At least GPT hasn’t killed anyone yet. An open letter full of forged signatures and conflicts of interest aren’t convincing enough for the repercussions of the government stepping in. More than anything, this just reeks of playing on peoples fear of change. New things are scary, but in my opinion, this kind of drastic measure starts with broad interest panels that first evaluate and detail the risks. Ooo scary doesn’t cut it.

yreg 4y ago
>last decade of his business failures What world are you living in if you think Tesla and SpaceX have been in the past 10 years business failures?
- xhkkffbf 4y ago
  When people don't like Musk for whatever reason but usually it's political alignment, they just make up things. I see people continue to claim that Twitter is failing, even though it's been working fine every time I log into. With Tesla, they'll just ignore the thousands of happy customers and focus on the bad stories like the occasional exploding car. It's quite sad to see normally reliable technical people go off the rails on these issues.
ben_w 4y ago
> At least GPT hasn’t killed anyone yet. Hard to tell, given that… (0) newspapers apparently rename things for clicks: https://www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/430098/belgian-man-commits-suicide-following-exchanges-with-chatgpt https://www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/430098/belgian-man-com... (1) him being a hypocrite tells you a mistake has been made, not which of the contradictory positions is wrong. My resolution is: GPT isn't the only AI, and Musk is pretty open about wanting to put FSD AI into those androids of his, so if the Optimus AI was as good as Musk sells it as being, it would absolutely be covered by this. (2) how do you even compare the fatality rates here? GPT doesn't move, and stationary Teslas aren't very dangerous, so miles-per-death seems a poor choice. User-hours per death? Perhaps, but I don't know how many user-hours either of them have had yet. And then (3), while I don't really trust self-promotional statistics, those are the only ones I have for Tesla, which says that switching it on increased the distance between accidents: https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport Better sources appreciated, if anyone has them! :) (4) finally, as this isn't just about GPT but all AI: how much of the change in the USA's suicide rate since the release of Facebook can be attributed to the content recommendation AI that Facebook uses? What share of culpability do they and Twitter bare for the Myanmar genocide thanks to imperfections in the automation of abuse detection and removal? Did the search AI of Google and YouTube promote conspiracies, and if so how much blame do they get for the deaths proximally caused by anti-vaccination? And in reverse, over-zealous AI have seen fraud where it did not exist, and people have committed suicide as a result: https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/23/22399721/uk-post-office-software-bug-criminal-convictions-overturned https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/23/22399721/uk-post-office-s...

sailingparrot 4y ago

> It's Gary Marcus "neural networks don't really work" suddenly discovering they do, and literally trying to shut down research in that area while keeping his prefered research areas funded Gary Marcus has been aware that neural nets work for a while now, but he is only in the spotlight for his contrarian take, if he stops having a contrarian take he disappears, because it's not like he is producing any research worth of discussion otherwise. So you can expect him to stay contrarian forever. What might have been a genuine take initially is now his job, that's how he makes money, and it's so associated with him that it's probably his identity as well.

Analemma_ 4y ago
This is a depressing pattern that I've seen get repeated over and over: it's easy to become Twitter-famous by just shitting out a steady stream of contrarian "me against the world, I'm the rogue dissident nobody wants to talk about!" takes, and once you start doing this, you have no choice but to keep it up forever (even when the takes are just wrong) because it has become your identity. It has destroyed so many interesting and intelligent people, and by itself is reason enough to never use Twitter.
- nullc 4y ago
  Adopting a contrarian brand because it brings you attention when you'd otherwise be a nobody is by far not limited to twitter. It's a mainstay of traditional journalism. If anything twitter disincentivizes the practice because it has commoditized cynicism: It's harder to build a brand by being the well known naysayer of X when someone can source whatever negative view they want by simply typing it into a search box. Commoditization will be complete once the media starts quoting GPT4 for reliably opposing views.
omnicognate 4y ago
"Neural networks don't really work" isn't an accurate representation of Marcus' position, and his actual position hasn't been shown to be wrong unless you believe that LLMs and diffusion models display, or are manifestly on the way towards displaying, understanding. That is something many think, and it's not in itself an unreasonable view. However there are also plenty of reasons to think otherwise and many, including me, who haven't conceded the point. It hasn't been settled beyond reasonable debate. To assume that the person you disagree with can only hold their view out of cynical self-interest, wishful thinking or plain insanity is to assume that you are so obviously right that there can be no valid debate. That is a bad starting position and I'd recommend against it as a matter of principle. Apart from anything else, however convinced you are of your own rightness it's plain rude to assume everyone else is equally convinced, and ad-hominem to ascribe negative motives to those who disagree. As for Gary Marcus, as far as I've seen he's been consistent in his views and respectful in the way he's argued them. To read about him on HN you'd think he's spent the last few years badmouthing every AI researcher around, but I haven't seen that, just disagreement with people's statements - i.e. healthy debate. I haven't followed him closely though, so if you know of any cases where he's gone beyond that and said the sorts of things about AI researchers that people routinely say about him I'd interested to see them.

gliptic 4y ago

> We know a bunch of the people whose names are on the letter didn't sign it Yann LeCun's name never was on the letter. Where did this meme come from.

s-lambert 4y ago
Pierre Levy tweeted that Yann LeCun signed the letter and this was one of the earlier tweets that gained traction. The tweet where Yann denies that he signed the letter: https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1640910484030255109 https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1640910484030255109. You can see a screenshot in the replies of the originally deleted tweet.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

version_five 4y ago

All the big named signatories to this were transparently self interested, as well as not real "practitioners" - mostly adjacent folks upset to be out of the limelight. I know it's a blurry line, but people like Andrew Ng and Yann LeCunn who are actually building ML stuff have dismissed this outright. It's almost like a bunch of sore losers got together and took an irrelevant stand. Like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell vs Spotify.

ldhough 4y ago
Yoshua Bengio is a signatory and shares a Turing award with Yann LeCun though...
- version_five 4y ago
  I knew that when I wrote my comment
  - ldhough 4y ago
    I mean then what is the basis for calling him not a "real practitioner" while Yann LeCun is? It seems a little unfair to dismiss outright the opinion on a deep learning technology from a guy who won a Turing award for research into deep learning. I also don't see any evidence that he is "transparently self-interested."

tluyben2 4y ago

How can it be realistically shut down? There is too much cat-out-of-bag and many countries in the world won’t give a crap about whatever the west wants. So the west continues or falls behind. What is the discussion even here?

xg15 4y ago

Why exactly are you offended?

skybrian 4y ago

Talking about whether AI “works” or “doesn’t work” is a dumb debate. The conversation about AI is confusing with people having a lot of different ideas that are mostly more nuanced than that. I don’t believe Gary Marcus thinks in those terms either.

nonbirithm 4y ago

I can maybe sense some foresight that we didn't have at the time other world-changing technologies were discovered. People reference the printing press often in relation to the arguments against progress, but I haven't seen discussion about the internal combustion engine yet, which hundreds of years later we're now hoping we can replace with EVs because of their unforseen consequences. Books don't have the same impact, especially with paperless formats becoming commonplace. Would we have reacted to the ICE hundreds of years ago the same way some are reacting to AI, that it needs to be stopped or limited to prevent the destruction of $entity, if there had been enough knowledge about how tech can affect e.g. the environment, or the world in general? There was nothing in place to stop us from taking the tradeoff of transportation efficiency over the at the time unknown negative effects. But should we call the invention of the ICE and other related technologies a mistake that irreparably doomed the planet and our future generations? I have no idea. It's a tough question we were incapable of asking at the time, and might reveal some hard truths about the nature of progress and the price we have to pay for it. At least with the effects known at this point, we can start asking it, and it's a step up from obliviousness.