5 ms·
It's hard to read Gwern's accompanying article without seeing this for what it is, which is a kind of mania. I'm sure he means well and is genuine in his aspir
by rocmcd 2mo ago
It's hard to read Gwern's accompanying article without seeing this for what it is, which is a kind of mania.
I'm sure he means well and is genuine in his aspirations, but what's outlined for GA is framing LLM's as quasi-gods, which they absolutely are not. I wish him the best, and look forward to being proven wrong.
- drcode 2mo agoAn LLM just solved 10 top tier math problems this week. It seems very likely that in 6 months they will solve 100 top tier math problems, maybe 1 millenium math problem, maybe 10 top tier physics problems, etc. It's only going to get crazier.
- amazingamazing 2mo agoSuppose LLM solved all math problems. So what? It’s not like diplomacy and war will end. Are humanity’s problems really constrained on our intellectual ability? If anything most evidence points to cultural failing and all AI will do is enable unprecedented oppression due to said skills at intellectual tasks. As you read this some poor person is starving. Humanity already possesses the ability to identify said person and send them aid. How is AI going to help here? The ultimate fallacy is that all technological progress will benefit mankind. That will be true until it is not.
- drcode 2mo agoI have no idea if diplomacy and/or war will end, I just hope we humans get to hang around a few more years
- ChadNauseam 2mo agoIt's an interesting time when the bar has moved to "It’s not like diplomacy and war will end". But that is on the table. Nuclear weapons caused the end of wars as we know them. Great powers no longer directly attack each other. And AI is much more powerful than nuclear weapons, with an equal capacity for damage and a much greater capacity for good. By the way, I donate monthly to GiveWell and the shrimp welfare project. Do you donate monthly to starving people? Most people don't, and the reason is simple: at the end of the day, most people just don't care that much about helping a starving person far away. They also don't care much about things like that, animals in factory farms, or earthquakes that kill hundreds of thousands. But ideally, we could find a way to empower people such that the minority who do care can make a big difference.
- cure_42 2mo agoYikes
- thin_carapace 2mo agothis comment will be killed, i find it an apt response to the idea that enabling those who believe themselves to be good is more important than reducing wanton suffering
- ChadNauseam 2mo ago> enabling those who believe themselves to be good is more important than reducing wanton suffering I'm genuinely not sure if you're referring to my comment or the one I responded to haha
- thin_carapace 2mo agoi read your article you posted here. in that article you state that you support live and let live. most people who support live and let live either havent been raped by life yet, or have chosen to double down post-rape. the latter is respectable, still im not currently interested in a discussion involving the influence of such a perspective. out of good faith i highlight that i responded to: > ideally, we could find a way to empower people such that the minority who do care can make a big difference is it a coincidence, that in your ideal world, you would be empowered, because you care, as evidenced by your testimony of things you do that make you think you care? in my ideal world, wanton suffering would be minimized, regardless as to the path it took to get there; requiring 1 specific path involving people who think they are good, demarcates our ideals.
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- Cthulhu_ 2mo agoHow is AI "more powerful than nuclear weapons" etc when they're two completely different things? Please explain to me how AI can glass the planet via mutually assured destruction.
- jacquesm 2mo agoAll technological progress will benefit an increasingly smaller (and wealthier) slice of mankind.
- jaggederest 2mo ago> Suppose LLM solved all math problems. So what? It’s not like diplomacy and war will end. These are two vastly different statements, and the the war and diplomacy end is almost trivial by comparison, it would absolutely be solved before we solve all math in even the most steelmanned version.
- Barrin92 2mo ago>An LLM just solved 10 top tier math problems this week and 30 years ago a computer beat Gary Kasparov, if you'd listened to Hans Moravec you wouldn't be surprised that the first thing that gets automated is intellectual domain expertise. Things are going to get crazy when it can figure out how to walk into a random house a and brew a cup of coffee, not do math
- tomjakubowski 2mo agoWhen we've done both we will have fully automated Erdős.
- neonnoodle 2mo agoregular LLM use makes people sound like they’re on meth so we must be getting close!
- z0r 2mo agohttps://dsimanek.vialattea.net/twain.htm https://dsimanek.vialattea.net/twain.htm
- edot 2mo agoMath is verifiable. LLMs will continue to make strides in such search spaces where all they need to do is try->verify->repeat. You can't train an LLM on how to end the war in Iran or Ukraine, nor how to solve hunger, nor climate change, etc. Real issues. And LLMs still suck at art and writing.
- MichaelDickens 2mo agoThree years ago, people were saying "LLMs just generate plausible-sounding text, they don't understand the notion of truth so they can't do verifiable work like math proofs."
- bigyabai 2mo ago> they don't understand the notion of truth so they can't do verifiable work like math proofs. Nobody that understands automated proof checking was claiming that.
- jdub 2mo agoYou understand that those are different kinds of "truth", right?
- edot 2mo agoRight, which was true at the time. So hundreds of billions of dollars have been poured into making LLMs better at these tasks via pretraining, RL, RLHF, post training, etc. again all with something verifiable in the loop. In order to improve the thing in the loop, the loop itself needs to be verifiable. There have only been a few thousand wars, and they’re all different and all different in the world in which they occurred. The dimensionality is absurd, which is not a problem for LLMs if there’s enough data, but in this case there isn’t.
- cure_42 2mo agoThey still can't. But very smart humans constructed ways to use the monkeys with typewriters (with a statistical advantage) to find correct answers to problems where they already knew how to verify the answer.
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- ytoawwhra92 2mo agoHas an LLM ever intentionally made you laugh? Cry?
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- cindyllm 2mo ago[dead]
- jibal 2mo agoIncoherent question because LLMs don't have intentions.
- Cthulhu_ 2mo agoHave you? (I'm trolling, I'm not sure what you're asking or why)
- consp 2mo agoNot OP but it implies all efforts are not intentional but at best by chance. For instance, the state of freely available LLM chatbots still makes me cry by the amount of crap they spew out confidently, which is not intentional. (tiny bit of sarcasm, but only a tiny bit)
- Planktonne 2mo agoHow many maths problems does one have to solve before becoming god?
- an0malous 2mo agoIt really underscores how rationality is just another religion
- doctorpangloss 2mo agoNo, it has some of the nasty trappings of a religion, like keeping women separate until you need to exploit them, but none of the good moral or creative literary parts of religions.
- wavemode 2mo agoMeh. It does all sound rather grandiose, but in this startup economy I'm sure he can at least manage to get acquired. At least he's pursuing something more novel than yet another "sandboxes for agents".
- cure_42 2mo agoIn this startup economy? Where almost no one is getting acquired anymore and over fifty percent of global venture is locked up in dead weight and liquidity is at an all time low? Not sure how you can feel sure anyone can get acquired even if their company had a path to profitability, much less for ones that absolutely don't.
- wavemode 2mo agoPlenty of companies in (or adjacent to) the AI space are still getting acquired and/or finding VC funding, even as funding in other spaces is drying up.
- qingcharles 2mo agoThe end goal of AI is to create quasi-gods.
- koudelka 2mo agoThe term robot came from the Czech language in 1923. The word was coined by Czech author Karel Capek, first used in his play R.U.R. (translated as Rossum's Universal Robots).[7][8][9] The term comes from the Czech word robotník ('forced worker'), from robota 'forced labor, compulsory service, drudgery,' from robotiti 'to work, drudge', from an Old Czech source akin to Old Church Slavonic rabota (работа) 'servitude,' from rabu 'slave'.
- GolfPopper 2mo ago>The end goal of AI is to create quasi-gods. I think this is what is driving the hype, the mania, and what increasingly appears to be insanely high investment. It's not about the underlying technology, which is objectively impressive, even if we're not certain of the true cost or utility of it. It's about selling the dream of Olympian omnipotence to investors, implicitly promising that IPO stands for Install Planetary Overlord.[1] And who doesn't want to be on the right side of that? (That there is no 'right side' in such circumstances does not seen to occur to anyone involved in the decisionmaking.) 1. Not my coinage, but that of SF author Charlie Stross in The Jennifer Morgue
- petesergeant 2mo ago> is framing LLM's as quasi-gods, which they absolutely are not Always such certainty in these dismissals. And whenever you dig in, it always seems to be "well my super-human coding assistant made this dumb mistake!", along with a heavy dose of https://mastodon.social/@falseknees/116477394235883790 https://mastodon.social/@falseknees/116477394235883790 I don't think anyone who has spent any time around me would describe me as having anything but a pretty clear-eyed view of the current abilities of LLMs, I don't think anyone would seriously consider me to be in a period of mania or psychosis, and it also seems almost inevitable to me that we are a year or two away from LLM-cognition being substantially more competent in almost every regard from human cognition, and therefore in the foothills of the singularity. The extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof is that this will somehow all blow over, not that we're heading towards a singularity here.
- igorkraw 2mo agoHonest question: What _would_ convince you that we are not heading towards a singularity? Like, is this belief falsifiable? (Secondary question: what do you mean with singularity?) As an offering of me engaging in good faith, a controversial opinion of mine: I legit think arpanet going online and starting the networking all of humanity into a massive coupled complex system fits the definition of singularity of "the moment after which predicting what will happen becomes hard to impossible", although that of course heavily depends on your definitions of prediction and hard/impossible.
- petesergeant 2mo agoFor falsification, I would take a year in which we don’t see an absolute sea change in capability. The last twelve months were not that, in my opinion, nor were the twelve before it. Hell, I’d even throw in “a year in which capabilities obviously improve but at a cost consumers can’t afford”. “What LLMs can’t do, only humans can” feels like a God of the Gaps situation: people have to keep moving the goal posts because the more recent models keep unlocking more territory that was previously a “well they’ll never be able to do this!” holdout
- karel-3d 2mo agoI think t's not just a random mania; it seems to me more as a vision - that I am not buying, but it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable. LLM trained on you and fine-tuned on you. It does make sense in a way! It is not what I want from LLMs, I think... but it might work. Gwern obviously knows what he talks about. It doesn't seem like a Gas Town-like fever dream.