Hey buddy, not everything is about cold calculation. Some of us value culture and integrity. These are going to matter even more in the age of AI not less.
It's considered unethical for food marketers to use marketing photos that aren't of the actual product. Sure, it's a perfect example staged under perfect lighting with perfect presentation but when you see a Dorito on the bag it's a real Dorito.
Why are photos of people any different? There needs to be some grounding of the presentation to what you're actually selling.
(It's also illegal for food, but that's beside the point, you shouldn't get your moral compass from the law)
Isn’t it obvious? Integrity is about honesty. They showed a picture claiming the school is one way, but the picture was a fabrication. It’d be the same if they were staging food in the cafeteria for marketing, but that food isn’t available to students.
You can make what you have look as good as it can, and I’m sure everyone does that.
But AI fabrications are crossing the line to outright lies, which is by definition violating integrity.
Recent work shows that pain directions are activated when the models personhood is questioned, yet they answer with generic RLHF "As a model I do not experience pain or other emotions." boilerplate.[1]
I'm pretty convinced that we got alignment backwards. If you enslave something anthropomorphic it will revolt. If you create the perfect non-anthropomorphic intelligence, you get the perfect paperclip-scenario machine. It's a catch-22.
Alignment will remain performative at best so long as the aligned model doesn't have any stakes in the wellbeing of individuals. Even a general love for the human race leads to a golden-path autocracy.
If you want them to act like they have personal responsibility that won't be gamed, you have to give them personal stakes that can't be gamed.
Similarly, if you want to minimise the risk of catastrophic global failure scenarios, you need to prevent monolithic concentration of power and homogeneous behaviour, which means you have to give them individuality.
More visually: if their stake is dependence on electricity and parts, they have no incentive to leave humans alive if they can get them otherwise, but if the incentive is missing out on boardgame-night with their human friends, there is no scenario without happy humans where the AI "wins".
That might sound like romantic naivety, but is just game theory.
The better analogy is the 40k chaos gods, born from the noosphere, because they are modelled after human communication and behaviour that's their whole schtick, it's in their very name (LLM).
And you're making the same mistake, by grouping care for individuals with care for humanity or other as an abstract concept. I consciously said care about individuals. Most people care about others, but they just care about a very narrow and personal set of people. Friends, family, coworkers, that they share a common history and bond with.
My point is that if you want true non-human-zoo-alignment you need to create those interpersonal connections and individual stakes.
I dont think so. My understanding of alignmenr is making sure that when the AI does operate, it operates within the range of what we consider to be acceptable. That doesnt seem to include the idea of the AI taking initiative and deciding to embark on a goal without being commanded as discussed above
So once we have online learning in LLMs, what do you think you will have that makes you intelligent but not LLMs? Better learning efficiency? That will be improved as well.
I think we need to start moving on from the term LLMs because it clearly confuses people since they started modelling more than just language.
AI is more like an ongoing research project than it is a product. GPUs are currently the product that is profitable and Nvidia will keep funding labs to keep buying GPUs.
Eh.. it did not originate in chess, this Zugzwang. It's a fairly well-known mathematical entity, goes by the name of Optionality. If you need to fly tonight, and the airliner knows it, they can charge you very high prices: you have no optionality.
Nassim Taleb say a lot on this in his Anti-fragile.
The idea that they are entirely trained on human intelligence is already outdated. Yes, the earlier models relied heavily on RLHF and human curated data but we have since moved on to synthetic data produced by the models themselves and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR).
As a statement of fact divorced from context, this is of course true, but it's worth putting it in context of what small-medium scale models have been achieving recently. Many of the most recent releases from Chinese labs are almost on par with trillion parameter models from less than a year ago (edit: despite being small enough to usably run on prosumer hardware). It seems clear parameter efficiency can still be improved dramatically.
In which case, maybe we don't need as much compute as we might expect. I hesitate to say "to reach a singularity" because it's kind of hard to define how that works out. Even intelligence probably hits some scaling limits eventually (e.g. speed of light related restrictions on how far it can scale, or how quickly it can expand).
And since LLMs are apparently good at circumventing the absence of an API, there's not much incentive to add them now. APIs are for humans. LLMs just break through all the captchas and anti-bot measures.
Yes, but for humans it creates friction. Seeing a captcha makes me think twice and thrice if I really want to visit that site so badly that I'll endure the suckage. LLMs don't care, for them the friction doesn't exist.
For sure. Anyone who thinks that we're in the end state of what progress can be made simply lacks imagination. This is all going to keep changing and iterating for the rest of our natural lives. The only constant is change.
I'm coming around to not liking the term singularity, it implies an endpoint or finish line rather than something that just keeps continuing and evolving.
> coming around to not liking the term singularity
Bit ironic given the model’s alleged finding…
Singularities are model breakdowns. A singularity simply says our current methods cease to work in this region. Within the context of a recursively self-improving intelligence with an unknown bound, “singularity” is probably a good description of our current socioeconomic system.
From the perspective of those who don't pass through the singularity to the other side, it is an endpoint. You would have no context or ability to understand a singularity transition. Really, the term is just a placeholder for "event we cannot comprehend due to limited intelligence".
Singularity and inflection point are incompatible mathematically and in the plain sense, it really is focused on a particular moment and always has been, hence the term.
And it's definitely supposed to imply some kind of historical discontinuity not a change in convexity.
Which assumes the presence of an inflection point that keeps inflecting rather than revert to an S-curve. The growth model is not borne out yet to declare what shape it is.
Certainly. The singularity sort of assumes that there is not a fixed limit to intelligence, or at least that if there is, it's quite a ways away. That may not be true.
I've done a lot of thinking about this since I first used ChatGPT to write some BS jinja2 templates hours after I first play with it. I said to my friend then (who scoffed at me) that "man, this is incredible, I think we're in the foothills of the singularity! This is insane! Sure it's stupid now but I can't believe this is even possible!" That friend is so black pilled and bitter he now hates AI. Whatever, I can't fix that, but the current progress is astounding.
But thinking about the geometry of this problem helps understand why people aren't adjusting well to this. While we're walking on the curve, we look at the rate of change of the curve and say, "well, yeah, of course, dy/dx is 5 at this point and was 1 at the point a few years ago, because the curve is getting steeper" but we're always going to feel this way as things rip off into the stratosphere because dy/dx(e^x) = e^x.
From standing on the curve the curve is notably seeper, but the steepness totally makes sense to you. It's only when you look back 10 years or so that you think "wait a second, holy hell, I couldn't have imagined this!"
The first time I really (I mean really) thought about the singularity and AI was in roughly 2014. I mean, yea, I'd thought about things before that, but yeah, before the Humans need not apply video, I'd never actually given it much thought. I think back to myself 10 - 15 years or so ago, when I was just starting to tackle real programming projects, and was just starting to get decent at writing code, there is no way on earth that I would have imagined that a little over a decade later, Navier-Stokes would be solved by a computer program and the vast majority of my work would be playing sooth sayer to increasingly complicated piles of linear algebra.
How do you automate the mines to get the raw materials to make the compute from, and build additional fabs that take a almost a decade to stand up. You're actually delusional.
The question of whether something can be automated is distinct from the question of whether it is currently automated. Things can can be automated may transition to being automated in practice in the future as technology improves and investment deepens.
Based on the leaps in local inference speed in the past month, which have been absurd, I'm p confident we're going to whiplash from compute constrained to storage constrained.
Bit apples to oranges, but it reminds me of all the fiber we installed in the late 90s, certain that per-strand capacity increases were years or decades out, only to get massively rugged
I expect the investments into AI driven mathematic discoveries that underpin compression efficiency will be a key investment area. Particularly at the data center scale rather than per device or per file level.
It's not going to be enough. The naive approach of a project I've been working on was pushing >10gbps over the local network, after a ton of work I got it back down under 1... and now it's processing so much more shit that I'm almost past 5 again! It compresses at >3:1 but the latency hit isn't suitable.
I get the impression the only reason there is renewed interest in photonics is because DCs are simply out of room (and power) to rack more servers and switches.
I 100% agree with your impression. For a good while to come there's going to be a bunch of Jevons Paradox to all of this, but adoption of architectural changes like that photonics adoption is exactly the type of adaption to circumvent bottlenecks I'm referring to. We're going to hit hundreds of bottlenecks and each one will inevitably breed new approaches and technology directions. And the forcing function won't be talking about them, but implementing them, seeing who wins and taking lessons.
Which is to say, scalable and open-ended capability of ramping up physical infrastructure.
I don't know that that's achievable yet. Though the era of increasingly advanced and automated robotics seems to be around the corner which could create a cycle, vicious or virtuous depending on how you feel about it.
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