"he's gonna milk it to every drop" is such an odd take.
eliezer has long been concerned about AI and the risks it poses to humanity. and for just as long people have called him crazy and made hand-waving arguments for why we shouldn't be concerned.
now we're in the midst of an AI arms race and we don't have any good idea how this tech works. it progresses at a truly astonishing rate, where it's become sport to find instances of people saying "AI will never be capable of X" and showing them the latest AI doing X with ease.
i think his concern is real and justified. you might disagree, but i don't understand why think he's milking recent developments.
> It's become sport to find instances of people saying "AI will never be capable of X" and showing them the latest AI doing X with ease.
Interesting, I've not seen that many educated in technology make that claim that it will never, just that people are surprised that the folks leading this, Microsoft and Google, have a track record of turning their consumer facing products to advertised junk.
he's likely talking bout the internals. sure we know how to train them but nobody knows what the models learn exactly. how those billions of parameters shape the output on inference.
a few months ago, just this year some researchers discovered what might be the neuron that largely decides when to use an in gpt-2. yes 2. that's what he means.
Yeah, I wonder sometimes how many people gloss over what it would mean for an “ASI” to exist. We would - if successful - effectively be creating a supernatural being (at least, there wouldn’t be much of a distinction between it and one).
Sure, there’s hype, and FUD, and fatalism, etc. But, if you believe the creation of such a thing is within your lifetime then it would be difficult to find many higher priority issues to prepare for/help solve/vote on/etc.
In reality, we all likely still downplay the risk by assessing the limit on the downside as a relatively quick extinction of life on earth. There are many things one can imagine might be a lot worse than death.
GPT-4 is an unreasonably effective autocomplete. It's not telling you "where you're wrong". CMD-F in Notes.app tells mhe where I'm wrong in the same sense, as long as I've written the right answer down before.
The thing is, there's no evidence that the current path will lead to superintelligence.
It could be the case that despite feeding a trillion dollars in compute / data to a model, that we still need to hold it's hand to do anything useful.
He jumped the gun and he's really tarnished his reputation. How can anyone take him seriously after the insane rhetoric and hyperbole of this article?
> The thing is, there's no evidence that the current path will lead to superintelligence.
I don't understand how any person paying attention can think this. Just watching the jumps from GPT-2 in 2019 to GPT-4 today makes it clear as day we are rapidly drastically improving capabilities and there's no evidence we will hit a wall any time soon
That's besides the point. The argument still holds. We don't want to find ourselves with our foot on an exploding mine before we stop walking across the minefield. At that point it is too late.
How can you see the clear jumps in intelligence from GPT-2 to 3 to 4 and not only not believe that this leads to superintelligence, but see no evidence that this leads to superintelligence?
eliezer has long been concerned about AI and the risks it poses to humanity. and for just as long people have called him crazy and made hand-waving arguments for why we shouldn't be concerned.
now we're in the midst of an AI arms race and we don't have any good idea how this tech works. it progresses at a truly astonishing rate, where it's become sport to find instances of people saying "AI will never be capable of X" and showing them the latest AI doing X with ease.
i think his concern is real and justified. you might disagree, but i don't understand why think he's milking recent developments.