3 ms·
Let's look closer at the Ilya Sutskever vs Sam Altman tensions, and think of the product/profit as a cover. Ilya Sutskever is a True Believer in LLMs being AGI
by cratermoon 3y ago
Let's look closer at the Ilya Sutskever vs Sam Altman tensions, and think of the product/profit as a cover.
Ilya Sutskever is a True Believer in LLMs being AGI, in that respect aligned with Geoff Hinton, his academic advisor at University of Toronto. Hinton has said "So by training something to be really good at predicting the next word, you’re actually forcing it to understand. Yes, it’s ‘autocomplete’—but you didn’t think through what it means to have a really good autocomplete"[1].
Meanwhile, Altman has decided that LLMs aren't the way.[2]
So Altman was pushing to turn the LLM into a for-profit product, to get what value it has, while the Sutskever-aligned faction thinks it is AGI, and want to keep it not-for-profit.
There's also some difference about whether or not AGI poses an "existential risk" or if the risks of current efforts at AI are along the lines of
algorithmic bias, socioeconomic inequality, mis/disinformation, and techno-solutionism.
1. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/geoffrey-hinton-profile-ai https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/geoffrey-hinto...
2. https://www.thestreet.com/technology/openai-ceo-sam-altman-says-that-chatgpt-is-not-the-way-to-superintelligence https://www.thestreet.com/technology/openai-ceo-sam-altman-s...
- Chamix 3y agoYou are conflating Illya's belief in the transformer architecture (with tweaks/compute optimizations) being sufficient for AGI with that of LLMs being sufficient to express human-like intelligence. Multi-modality (and the swath of new training data it unlocks) is clearly a key component of creating AGI if we watch Sutskever's interviews from the past year.
- cratermoon 3y agoYes, I read "Attention Is All You Need", and I understand that the multi-head generative pre-trained model talks about "tokens" rather than language specifically. So in this case, I'm using "LLM" as shorthand for what OpenAI is doing with GPTs. I'll try to be more precise in the future. That still leaves disagreement between Altman and Sutskever over whether or not the current technology will lead to AGI or "superintelligence", with Altman clearly turning towards skepticism.
- Chamix 3y agoFair enough, shame "Large Tokenized Models" etc never entered the nomenclature.
- cratermoon 3y agoSome terms I've seen used for the technology: Big-Data Statistical Models Stochastic Parrots or parrot-tech plausible sentence generators glorified auto-complete cleverbot "a Blurry JPEG of the Web" <https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-...> and just plain ol' "machine learning"
- limpanz 3y agoDo you have a link to one of these talks?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]