16 ms·
Please ignore the deluge of complete nonsense about Q*
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago"Please ignore all the speculation... and now for my speculation."
- seydor 3y agoit s like he s prompt injecting an LLM .... oh wait
- michael_nielsen 3y agoLeCun at least knows a lot about AI. Most of the Q* stuff is coming from people who know almost nothing.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y agoBut his guesses match the consensus, so it doesn't add to the stuff he's criticizing.
- michael_nielsen 3y agoFair enough. I suppose the useful bit is that lots of ignorant people have gone nuts ("OMG this is AGI!") without any details. That's just hype. But, yes, to your point, there is also some substantive and interesting speculation from more knowledgeable people.
- Cacti 3y ago[flagged]
- samrus 3y agoIt sounds like you prefer something that's more sensational simply because it's more sensational
- wkat4242 3y agoSeems to be a common theme with stuff starting with Q...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- klyrs 3y agoQuiet, you. There's nothing wromg with quiche.
- blharr 3y agoThis is just speculation, but I wonder if the naming behind both Q related things is why they became so popular. I could not imagine the same amount of searches and guesswork had they called it "P*" instead. It seems like Q inherently has some mystery to it. Maybe in that is the least commonly used letter and it rarely is used separately from "Qu"
- imjonse 3y agoI've run ollama on my macbook, watched a couple videos on prompt engineering, tried out stable diffusion on my phone. I am even working on a startup that is basically a shiny website plus an OpenAI API wrapper on the backend. What do you mean I am not qualified to speculate on what Q* from OpenAI is and how it is transformational for society!!?? /s
- _hi_again_dang 3y ago[flagged]
- WendyTheWillow 3y agoThen stop visiting the site.
- tbalsam 3y agospringer_what_look.gif
- tbalsam 3y agoHonestly, he has some really good takes mixed with....really bad ones. I ended up unfollowing him as the curmudgeony approach combined with some of the far out stuff was just a bit too much for me. Doesn't really improve discourse in the field.
- qualifiedai 3y agoYann has been a refreshing source of reason and common sense with regards to AI safety, regulation and open-source. I wish we had more people like him and less AI doomer cultists.
- hackinthebochs 3y agoPeople like his takes because he gives an authoritative gloss to what they already believe. But his points are usually lacking in argument or rigor. Anyone that essentially expects the public to trust them when it comes to the outcome of AI/AGI should be view with suspicion.
- junofan 3y agoI mean I don’t think predicting the future is something that typically involves rigor. The outcome is pretty clear: whatever makes a ton of money. Probably a trusted friend in your pocket that sometimes helps you buy stuff. The most negative predictions are silly because they don’t involve making a ton of money for anybody.
- makeitdouble 3y agoThe point about money is important, but we should also keep in mind most outcomes will make a ton of money for someone somewhere. Hell, there's wars killing tens of thousands of people going on right now, and a ton of money is changing hands making a juicy business for whole industries.
- ethanbond 3y agoYour theory for predicting the future is “people don’t lose money?”
- qualifiedai 3y agoOn the contrary, he gives good arguments about why open is safer and closed is more dangerous whereas other side gives, imho, convoluted arguments and asks for them to be proven wrong (as opposed to trying to prove themselves right).
- uoaei 3y agoIt's hard to call anything that comes from LeCun "news": any time you hear of a phenomenon in the ML/AI space, you know pretty much exactly the sentiment he's going to express. His entire brand is "doomers are wrong, you can trust me, I am AI daddy".
- renewiltord 3y agoDoomers thought GPT-2 was too dangerous to release. I guess one can be Dalio successful by calling doom at every instant like Dalio.
- uoaei 3y agoAnd one can be unfalsifiably successful by using mass media to proclaim safety at every instant. The irony is that if things do fail these kinds of pronouncements can no longer be made using tools like Twitter, etc. on which influencers like LeCun build their brands, since their existence and utility depends on the stability of society.
- PopePompus 3y agoYes, the Anti-doomers will be right many times, and wrong at most once.
- wkat4242 3y agoThe point is moot anyway. If someone can build it someone will. Laws and impending Doom or not. It's probably going to be better if it's us than Russia or China.
- benatkin 3y agoThat's a reductive argument, and won't work with me. What we have is tantamount to an arms race, and trying to suppress another country's development of tech that could be used against them is a thing. We have already restricted access to our microchips to China specifically and Russia through broad sanctions. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/17/business/economy/ai-chips-china-restrictions.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/17/business/economy/ai-chips... Russia isn't poised for the current crop of AI tech anyway.
- s-xyz 3y agoI should maybe dig a bit deeper into what he is saying, but every-time I get excited about some development I get discouraged by his views. Perhaps they are realistic, but I prefer to dream sometimes.
- andy_xor_andrew 3y agoI took an AI course in college back around 2015. Just a bit before AlphaGo. One project was to implement a simple Q-learning action/value system to play simple games, like Pacman. The crypto-bros-turned-AGI-experts on twitter are spouting the most uninformed, misguided garbage about this whole thing, it's quite amazing to watch. And I'm not saying that I am smart or an expert about Q* because I took an introductory college course. I'm saying that even I, someone who knows basically nothing beyond the introductory concept can identity that these people have no clue what they are talking about, and yet the have this incredible talent of speaking in such an authoritative and faux-intelligent tone. It's amazing. My favorites are the tweets that sound like this: "So, now we know that [insert something totally wrong]. Well, what if extend that further, by [another totally wrong conclusion]. Here's an explanation of how this all works. A thread, 1/N" followed by a full thread, images included, of drivel.
- nothrowaways 3y agoExactly, a VC hype.
- munificent 3y ago> these people have no clue what they are talking about, and yet the have this incredible talent of speaking in such an authoritative and faux-intelligent tone. I miss the good old days with those idiots were mostly stuck to the honeypot that is/was cryptocurrencies.
- kibwen 3y ago> The crypto-bros-turned-AGI-experts on twitter are spouting the most uninformed, misguided garbage about this whole thing, it's quite amazing to watch. After the LK-99 debacle where Twitter "confirmed" its superconductivity and breathless sheisters heralded the dawn of a new age, my new policy is "inverse Twitter": if Twitter thinks something is a big deal, then it's more than than 50% likely that it's unsubstantiated horsepucky. The signal:noise ratio on Twitter has always been uselessly low, but the post-crypto scene has plumbed heretofore unfathomable depths.
- 3y ago
- kypro 3y agoI'm confused. I thought people were worried about the danger of some AI breakthrough? If researchers at OpenAI have developed an LLM more advanced than GPT4 which can also plan is that not potentially a worrying breakthrough?
- laserbeam 3y agoIt's just rumours. Everything I've read about that breakthrough sounds about as thoroughly backed in reality as a generic conspiracy theory. There may be a breakthrough, there may not, but nothing on the topic is convincing or worth reading.
- jordanpg 3y agoRumors that were reported on by a reputable news agency: https://www.reuters.com/technology/sam-altmans-ouster-openai-was-precipitated-by-letter-board-about-ai-breakthrough-2023-11-22/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/sam-altmans-ouster-openai...
- mianos 3y agoThey clarify their own article as unsubstantiated by seconds sources: > Reuters could not independently verify the capabilities of Q* claimed by the researchers. True, they are a reputable news agency, but the parent is also correct, it's not highly credible.
- kypro 3y agoI think you're missing my point. LeCun is saying, "ignore the deluge of complete nonsense" while also saying something to the effect of, "they've probably just created an AI model which can plan". I agree that the reporting on Q* has mostly been nonsense, and I suspect those articles were published just for the clicks, but at the same time this tweet makes zero sense because an AI model which can plan is somewhat concerning so perhaps those articles were on to something?
- martythemaniak 3y agoQ* is the new "GPT-4 has a hundred trillion parameters". https://thealgorithmicbridge.substack.com/p/gpt-4-a-viral-case-of-ai-misinformation https://thealgorithmicbridge.substack.com/p/gpt-4-a-viral-ca...
- riazrizvi 3y agoWhat are the more popular themes of the complete nonsense about Q*? Anyone know? I deleted my twitter account.
- _hi_again_dang 3y ago[flagged]
- wkat4242 3y agoWow I work in AI (implementation) and I have zero idea what he's talking about lol
- layer8 3y agoI love that reply: LeCun: “[Note: I've been advocating for deep learning architecture capable of planning since 2016].” Reply: “My understanding is Schmidhuber already solved that 10 years ago. Just no-one knows it yet.”
- toxik 3y agoI saw LeCun give a keynote speech at ICML 2018, he did not mention planning but talked basically only about semi and self supervised learning.
- theGnuMe 3y agoThis is the cake lecture right? I think it gets mentioned at the end of that talk but he might not have said it then. He also has the part about predictive video (which way does the thing fall). From 2015. https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.05440 https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.05440
- sinuhe69 3y agoDo you have a link? I followed the work of Schmidhuber but didn’t know of that. Edit: I didn't realize you were sarcastic (－‸ლ)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ren_engineer 3y agoThe leak about Q* feels like an olive branch to let the former OpenAI board and Ilya save a bit of face, probably part of the terms for Sam coming back plus it distracts from all the drama and puts a positive spin on things. >"The board didn't handle things well, but they were right to be concerned because OpenAI did have some sort of research breakthrough" Not coincidence that this leaks after Sam comes back, rather than before when it could have made the board look more justified in their decision. This changes the story from incompetence to "it's a problem only OpenAI has because they are so far ahead and close to AGI". Masterful PR move to leak this and shift the narrative
- melagonster 3y agohope openAI prepared some physical mechanisms to make sure safety of human. p.s., maybe bomb us a good idea.
- iepathos 3y agoGood point about timing of the leak. IMO the whole fiasco still reeks of incompetence and no PR move can wash that clean.
- lacrimacida 3y agoIn my opinion, the fiasco is still a reliable warning sign and is drawing attention to OpenAi/Sama/Microsoft dynamics. It may keep on giving even if things appear to have stabilized now.
- eigenvalue 3y agoTo be fair, Altman separately alluded to a recent big discovery/breakthrough in a talk shortly before all the drama went down.
- wkat4242 3y agoCould it have been due to him breaking some kind of NDA? After all that would make sense then that they're so mysterious about it, after all they don't want to release more information.
- xg15 3y agoSo Q* is just A* for neural networks?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nsagent 3y agoI haven't heard any real details of what Q* is supposed to be; I assumed it's related to reinforcement learning. I guess it's possible the heuristic in A* was replaced with a neural network value function. I'm not sure how that could lead to a breakthrough in language models though.
- blharr 3y agoThe star in A* doesn't have anything to do with the algorithm itself. It just means optimal. Q star would mean optimal Q. If that is even what the star is referring to. There is still no way to know if the Q is the quality factor, query value, question, something else, or just a placeholder name that doesn't reference its structure at all
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- blharr 3y agoThere is virtually zero chance that this is what Q* is. Loosely connecting the fact that both are named with a letter and an asterisk is the only basis there is for thinking this.
- lostmsu 3y agoBeing a software engineer why else would you add a star to a known ML term?
- esafak 3y agoIt is probably A* search + Q-learning
- trhway 3y agoA conspiracy minded me may see all that saga of the last week as a marketing campaign to generate excitement for the GPT-5-now-with-30%-more-Q release. Ane even more conspiracy-minded take - from the Russian news naturally - is that it is the Great Battle for the future of humanity between "doomers" (Oh, no! the AI is going to kill us all, we need to stop all the work and control the GPUs like guns) and "Effective Altruists" (We can do all the evil today in order to achieve greater good tomorrow)
- IAmGraydon 3y ago>A conspiracy minded me may see all that saga of the last week as a marketing campaign to generate excitement for the GPT-5-now-with-30%-more-Q release. Close. It’s to generate hype for the upcoming $86 billion share sale.
- bryan0 3y ago> One of the main challenges to improve LLM reliability is to replace Auto-Regressive token prediction with planning. Anyone have a good source for learning more about this topic?
- the_gipsy 3y agoIt's just making a plan with auto-regressive token prediction, that's all.
- xcv123 3y agoI just found this list of papers. https://github.com/AGI-Edgerunners/LLM-Planning-Papers https://github.com/AGI-Edgerunners/LLM-Planning-Papers Here's one titled "Reasoning with Language Model is Planning with World Model" https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14992 https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14992
- ratg13 3y agoThis is the one you want https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.20050.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.20050.pdf It’s different from the link the other user posted. This one is specifically about the Q* process
- cgearhart 3y agoDoes anyone have any references to published works discussing the idea he’s pushing here that all the top labs are trying to replace next token prediction with planning? (Note: I’m not interested in using a token-prediction LLM to solve planning problems; I’m interested in work that tries to replace token sampling with action sampling by formulating the text completion problem as a planning domain.) Or is that not what he’s talking about…?
- loveparade 3y agoIf you do search for Reinforcement Learning based decoding in language models (or neural machine translation) you'll find hundreds of papers. It's a super common research topic that has been around forever, way before LLMs were a "thing". Just follow the reference from there. Nothing new here, really. But doing it on the scale of something like GPT-4 is only something OAI can do, and I don't doubt that there's some breakthrough there. But IMO it's likely that the breakthrough isn't algorithmic, but a result of scale, like most of the other OAI breakthroughs.
- __loam 3y ago> But doing it on the scale of something like GPT-4 is only something OAI can do It's shocking to me that people think Google and Meta don't have the scale to operate at this level.
- loveparade 3y agoThey have the scale in terms of hardware, but they likely don't have the infrastructure to experiment efficiently on this scale on LLMs specifically. OpenAI has been building LLM-specific infrastructure for years. Why do you think Google Bard sucks so much? It's not because there's some special magic secret that only OAI knows. It's because you need a huge amount of purpose-built infrastructure and trial-and-error iteration from experiments each of which take months. You can't easily catch up to that in a few months. Even if you throw 10x more staff at it, you are not going to make progress faster. The only way you could catch up faster is by having orders of magnitude more hardware. But due the global shortage on hardware right now, nobody has that, not even Google.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- kristopolous 3y agoThere's so much attention on this field right now (something like ~100 papers hitting arxiv a day). Is the possibility of being blind-sided by a "next generation" technique really plausible? Isn't it more plausible that someone is just piecing together a couple key public papers in a novel way?
- born-jre 3y agoLooks like he is not saying it cz he has inside knowledge, instead he is just saying his usual I-JEPA line. About which, the best way to convince people is to give them something they can evaluate/get their hands dirty. I-JEPA for now still looks hand wavy / incomplete.
- pedrovhb 3y agoAh! Is Q* a play on the A* pathfinding algorithm, but with a Q presumably for the Query vector of attention mechanisms? Clever, and actually does reveal something about the project.
- dmix 3y agoThis question has been discussed to death in multiple other threads, just search Q* on hn.
- blharr 3y agoIf you are basing off the names, it could just as well be a play on the perfect market price in economics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterisk#:~:text=In%20economics%2C%20the%20use%20of,in%20a%20perfect%20market%20situation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterisk#:~:text=In%20econom...).
- tasty_freeze 3y agoOne thing that makes no sense about Sam Altman hiding the Q* progress from the board is that Ilya Sutskever was part of the board too. As he is the technical lead and Altman isn't technical at all, how would it be a secret from Sutskever? NB: I know nothing about these people and don't track it, but my consistency check failed on this claim based on the flood of news over the past week.
- wkat4242 3y agoExcellent point. I hadn't thought of that.
- ugh123 3y agoMaybe it wasn't secret, and Ilya wanted to bring it to the board but Sam fought him.
- next_xibalba 3y agoWhere did the myth of Sam "not being technical at all" come from? Patrick Collison seemed satisfied with Sam's tech chops [1]. If that isn't enough of a vouch, god help the rest of us. [1] https://www.quora.com/Is-Sam-Altman-highly-technical-Has-he-contributed-to-the-code-base-of-Loopt https://www.quora.com/Is-Sam-Altman-highly-technical-Has-he-...
- oska 3y agoI had a look at the Collison response and it read strongly like "mate puts in a good word when asked to" for me. An impression that was reinforced by the 'like' that Sam put on the answer. Also, I wouldn't call it a myth. I would call it 'questions around his technical knowledge'. The best way to answer those questions would be for direct evidence of his technical ability to be shown, not references from mates (just as any interview for a tech position requires direct evidence).
- tasty_freeze 3y agoI agree, I could have stated myself more clearly. Sutskever is a world-class domain expert in AI. Altman surely is intelligent and has some technical skills, but isn't the doing the groundbreaking technical work at OpenAi. My point was that it seems highly unlikely that Altman was canned for knowing technical secrets from the board (about Q* specifically) that Sutskever didn't know even better.
- lordfrito 3y agoI dunno all this talk about OpenAI lately really feels more and more like hype to me. What they've accomplished so far is really impressive. But until I see AGI for real I won't hold my breath. Just feels to me like some expert/wizard level PR is going on right now.
- zyang 3y agoIt feels more like spin to distract people from the insane board coup drama.
- liquidpele 3y agoThat’s just what the AGI wants you to think.
- ratg13 3y agoNobody respectable has said that AGI will be achieved in the next 5 or even 500 years.
- sschueller 3y agoSadly a large part of the public believes it will happen and is all in. To the average person chatGPT is literally magic.
- _heimdall 3y agoEliezer Yudkowsky should be respected in the field of AI. Agree or disagree with his level of concern over AI risk, he has made fairly accurate predictions so far. Last I heard, he was predicting that we could be as little as 10-15 years from the level of AI development that he considers to be an extinctions level risk. Again, there's plenty of different conclusions that can be made on the risk levels but that doesn't change his expectation on timing of development.
- yowlingcat 3y agoNo one should respect that blowhard. Please point me to the specifically accurate predictions he has made so far.
- agnosticmantis 3y agoLeCun is one of the rare voices of reason in the AI community, especially among the celebrities. He’s been consistently voicing realistic statements with regards to AGI (he doesn’t believe it’s a thing), AI safety and doomerism, limitations of LLMs, etc.
- jarpschop 3y agoA year ago he said that language models would never be able to explain why if you move a table, the bottle on top of it would not fall. He definitely had no idea what was coming with LLMs. And now he is arrogant enough to say "we all knew what capabilities LLMs would have". He has no intelectual humility or honesty at all. I at least admit openly that language models blew my mind. Lost respect for his opinions massively after seeing how he lied about the topic.
- blueblisters 3y agoCan you cite a reference for that quote? I can’t find it. He has definitely underestimated language model capabilities but he has been mostly right on the “language models can’t plan” stuff. He has been consistent and correct about his criticism about auto regressive model as well.
- agnosticmantis 3y agoHe’s said it’s easy to generate this kind of questions that trick LLMs because of the lack of physical grounding in models trained solely on text. And that’s true now as ever. I also heard him say that training multimodal models on text+image/video would mitigate the grounding issue, and that’s proven to be true too. So I’m not sure exactly what your objection is.
- stevenhuang 3y agoAs the other commenter mentions, lecun had a terrible track record when it came to LLMs. All his predictions at the time of what LLMs cannot do were proven wrong. His research at meta is in analytical methods of AI so I'm not surprised. LLMs were seen as anathema to him as he could not comprehend the capabilities that would come from simply scaling up a suitable architecture with compute and data. It's quite remarkable how confidently incorrect he was proven to be. Now he's going for round two on his takes with AI safety. Clearly he didn't learn his lesson.
- kdragon 3y agoPlot twist: this entire shit-show was orchestrated by chatgpt while inside OpenAI's basement.
- anticensor 3y agoYou mean at Microsoft's ground floor, because OpenAI does not host its own datacentres.
- wildermuthn 3y agoI didn’t realize Noam Brown was at OpenAI. He has done really exciting work, and if he’s pushing the envelope at OpenAI, that bodes well for AGI. His work with modeling an opponent’s beliefs/mind in self-play is on target.
- torginus 3y agoThank god that we have Yann Lecun. When it comes to AI, it's so refreshing to have a credible voice who calls out the hype, as well as pushes freedom and open source .
- andsmedeiros 3y agoI was quite ready to hear some Qt rant
- to11mtm 3y agoQ* honestly sounds like something in one of those threads on an imageboard.
- ml-anon 3y agoNever one to miss a spot of self promotion. Yann is basically the new Schmidthuber at this point: irrelevant old man shouts at clouds about how he totally had an idea before everyone else. Yann is a nobody at Meta (lol at calling FAIR a top lab at this point, it’s not even the top org in Meta for AI) and keeps trying to claim credit by association for Meta LLM success.
- throwaway63737 3y agoTo be fair I was at a one of his talks a few years ago and he was arguing exactly for the type of training he is mentioning in the tweet. The lecture in which he mentioned it is this one: https://memento.epfl.ch/event/campus-lecture-yann-lecun/ https://memento.epfl.ch/event/campus-lecture-yann-lecun/ Comparing with Schmidthuber is a bit strange too, he claims everybody is doing it.