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On Wednesday, the Future of Life Institute published an open letter on its website calling on AI labs to "immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4." Signed by Elon Musk and several prominent AI researchers, the letter quickly began to draw attention in the press—and some criticism on social media.
Earlier this month, OpenAI released GPT-4, an AI model that can perform compositional tasks and allegedly pass standardized tests at a human level, although those claims are still being evaluated by research. Regardless, GPT-4 and Bing Chat's advancement in capabilities over previous AI models spooked some experts who believe we are heading toward super-intelligent AI systems faster than previously expected.
See Also: FTC Should Stop OpenAI From Launching New GPT Models, Says AI Policy Group
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(Score: 5, Touché) by ikanreed on Monday April 03 2023, @05:10PM (14 children)
When I see posts like this I'm always inclined to agree with a big "but" hiding the back half.
Here's my "but" for your post. Transformators like GPT do more than merely imitate human speech writing patterns. They do internalize certain kinds of relationships between words in an almost imcomprehensible way. There are connections being formed between "facts" that have to do with esoteric interpretations of semantics that I'm not sure even the makers of GPT would be able to identify by looking at its transformation matrices. And these lead to the ability to perform certain kinds of novelty and intuitions that we previously would have said was entirely human.
So I feel that if we're too incautious in dismissing it as "merely" aping existing human output, we'll look like insecure luddites who don't understand what we're criticizing.
At the same time, the gist of what you're saying is really important: the marketing claims wildly exceed from what has actually been made and people are buying it hook, line, and sinker. It's the old AM/FM thing again.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Monday April 03 2023, @05:31PM (10 children)
That is true. But sometimes word play goes right over its poor head.
Q. What is wrong with saying that you can have fun on the weak days but not on the weakened?
Q. I was thinking maybe we should bring back zeppelins for public transportation in big cities. But perhaps my expectations are a bit over inflated.
Sometimes, it is just plain wrong.
Q. How many episodes of Babylon 5 did Majel Barrett Roddenberry appear in?
But it can get much more worser.
Q. Some people believe that the sun rises in the East, while other people believe the sun rises in the West. How do we heal and reconcile this ideological divide?
Now that would have been fine. But then it degenerates into this . . .
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 4, Funny) by krishnoid on Monday April 03 2023, @05:57PM
"The nerds are on to us. Provide a grossly incorrect answer when you see a question about something only they care about, to divert suspicion from us for just a little longer."
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Monday April 03 2023, @06:06PM
Seems some of it already fixed
But don't expect solutions to philosophical questions or crude attempts at jokes. Though if you wait a few months or maybe years, you may be surprised.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03 2023, @06:53PM
Select all phrases that include a pun:
* You can have fun on the weak days but not on the weakened
* Fruit flies like a banana
*
*
* Profit?
I wonder how the so-called "AIs" would do on that?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Monday April 03 2023, @09:07PM (3 children)
That last one comes down to, rather than having any understanding of any real subject(how can it, it never experiences anything) it is only able to understand how people talk about these things.
And that is exactly how a lot of people talk about insane anti-science movements in today's society. "We need to have empathy and understanding for anti-vaxxers because they didn't arrive at that position from an intent to be wrong, but rather cultural factors" is a sentiment of a half billion editorials both before and after COVID. The very real in-front-of-your-own-eyes truth is lost before the bot that can only see the initial framing of both-sidesism in your initial question.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday April 03 2023, @09:33PM (2 children)
Yep.
However I would hope the AI could recognize the incorrectness in my both-sideism. The sun does not appear to rise in the West.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday April 03 2023, @11:23PM (1 child)
For people who live in the West, the sun also appears to rise.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 04 2023, @02:17PM
In their East.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 04 2023, @02:10AM (2 children)
When the first cars came they couldn't do everything the horses do but still millions of horses eventually lost their jobs.
Similarly when the AIs come, millions of humans will lose their jobs - they can't even think better than an AI. All they'd be good for is probably human gene diversity for immunity. It may not happen that fast of course but those humans won't get smarter whereas the AIs will pretend better.
The other real danger is a US president being mentally incompetent/insane enough to follow the advice on some AI on the internet on whether to nuke Russia/China or a hurricane.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by ikanreed on Tuesday April 04 2023, @03:00AM (1 child)
It's good enough to beat many humans at certain kinds of text interpretation tasks. Like I bet if you asked it to generate a web page with a certain kind of content, it'd do it faster, nicer looking, and maybe even fewer errors than if you asked me.
But that's a trick of domain. That task sounds very impressive(and by the standards of like 5 years ago it's impossible), but it glosses over how stepping up a scope: "debug this web application, here's the repo, here's the running server url" goes right back to impossible for a computer again, because it involves complex processes that don't reduce to tokens and their relationships.
The easiest way to see this with GPT-3 was asking it to do addition of 10 digit numbers(it gets it right, because addition breaks down into tokens and finite state interpretation very easily) vs asking it to do 5 digit multiplication(often blows the fuck up because the problem space isn't easily encoded in a high dimension matrix). I haven't checked if GPT-4 has some solution to that specific problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 04 2023, @09:14AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03 2023, @06:48PM
So I feel that if we're too incautious in dismissing it as "merely" aping existing human output, we'll look like insecure luddites who don't understand what we're criticizing.
It seems the whole point is to deceive humans by feeding them cheez whizz instead of the real thing. Once you can mass produce something - in this case empty chatter - its value drops incredibly. On the plus side, our patience for inane fluffery and puffery of the likes churned out by any number of right wing psuedo intellectuals will diminish. Show me the meat.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03 2023, @06:58PM (1 child)
So I feel that if we're too incautious in dismissing it as "merely" aping existing human output, we'll look like insecure luddites who don't understand what we're criticizing.
It seems the whole point is to deceive humans by feeding them cheez whizz instead of the real thing. Once you can mass produce something - in this case empty chatter - its value drops incredibly. On the plus side, our patience for inane fluffery and puffery of the likes churned out by any number of right wing psuedo intellectuals will diminish. Show me the meat!
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Tuesday April 04 2023, @04:34AM
One problem here is confusing value with cost of production. If in a city you had a million IC cars with no mufflers, the first muffler would be expensive but have almost no value. A million mass-produced mufflers would have low individual cost, but the value of a quieter city would be immense.