3 ms·

> The only people who sincerely care about "extinction risk" are the weird cultists. In the real world there's essentially zero chance of LLMs/Current-GenAI sca

> The only people who sincerely care about "extinction risk" are the weird cultists. In the real world there's essentially zero chance of LLMs/Current-GenAI scaling up into AGI, nevermind AGI that'd be an extinction risk. (Yes, that phrasing is cheeky. AGI is a different kind of AI, not just specialized models made bigger. But we're only really trying to make them bigger, and not build general intelligence from the ground up) Given that a significant number of people working in the field apparently disagree with you perhaps you could give some justification for your dismissal beyond the ad-hominem? And it's very blatantly not the case that the entire field is 'only really trying to make them bigger'. The news is currently full of stories about coming advancements from OpenAI which have nothing to do with scaling and that's just a single company.

ADeerAppeared 2y ago
> beyond the ad-hominem Note that the "ad-hominem" pertains to only those who care about extinction risk, not AI developers in general. > which have nothing to do with scaling Except they are. There's no fundamental change in architecture, it's all transformers. OpenAI's "multi-modal" capabilities are not a redesign of their AI, it's systems bolted together. Bolting a text-to-image generator & image-to-text describer to an LLM doesn't approach "General Intelligence", it's a system of three specific capabilities. You could consider that new system "more general" than a lone LLM, but it only approaches General Intelligence in the same way that the series "1+1+1+1+..." approaches infinity. Is each individual step "closer to infinity"? Sure. Is it a useful way to achieve infinity? No, because you'll be stuck adding new steps forever the same as a conventional computer software. > And it's very blatantly not the case that the entire field is 'only really trying to make them bigger'. There are some, not many but I'll grant you some, researchers working on actually generalizing these systems. Their funding is a rounding error to AI spending, their work isn't going to hit production for years. It's not an extinction risk.
- MrScruff 2y ago
  I was talking about Q*/Strawberry which (from the leaked info) is more about self improvement via RL.

ADeerAppeared 2y ago

> beyond the ad-hominem Note that the "ad-hominem" pertains to only those who care about extinction risk, not AI developers in general. > which have nothing to do with scaling Except they are. There's no fundamental change in architecture, it's all transformers. OpenAI's "multi-modal" capabilities are not a redesign of their AI, it's systems bolted together. Bolting a text-to-image generator & image-to-text describer to an LLM doesn't approach "General Intelligence", it's a system of three specific capabilities. You could consider that new system "more general" than a lone LLM, but it only approaches General Intelligence in the same way that the series "1+1+1+1+..." approaches infinity. Is each individual step "closer to infinity"? Sure. Is it a useful way to achieve infinity? No, because you'll be stuck adding new steps forever the same as a conventional computer software. > And it's very blatantly not the case that the entire field is 'only really trying to make them bigger'. There are some, not many but I'll grant you some, researchers working on actually generalizing these systems. Their funding is a rounding error to AI spending, their work isn't going to hit production for years. It's not an extinction risk.

MrScruff 2y ago
I was talking about Q*/Strawberry which (from the leaked info) is more about self improvement via RL.