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by titzer 980 days ago
Me, 1999, watching Sci-fi movie where AI takes over the world: surely when they build an AI system they'd be smart enough to airgap and sandbox it so it couldn't do anything harmful. They'd probably severely restrict the information it has access to and who has access to it.

Us, 2023: let's let this ridiculously complicated inscrutable neural network install Python packages and run user code. But of course it has access to the entire internet and is exposed to the entire public. Derp derp derp.
2 comments
cj 980 days ago
Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if OpenAI stayed stealth for another 12 months.

It seems like OpenAI was the catalyst for all of big tech to jump on the LLM bandwagon.

But the speed at which new models have been produced has been so fast that it also makes me think perhaps at least some of these non-OpenAI models would have been developed and released even if OpenAI weren't a catalyst.

(Getting on a tangent, but..) one thing I've never fully understood is why or how LLM's suddenly emerged seemingly all at once. Were the development of the models we have today already well underway in 2022, or are the majority of models created in response to OpenAI popularizing LLM's via ChatGPT?

If the meteoric rise of ChatGPT didn't occur but the technology still existed (but less well known), there would be no "gold rush" type of environment which might have allowed companies more time to get better polished products. Or even purpose built models rather than huge generic ones that do everything and anything.

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Kerb_ 980 days ago
Subreddit Simulator on GPT-2 and AiDungeon have existed for a while, proving the capability of language models. That, combined with further research and the increasing availability of processing power, made the development of LLMs as we know it an inevitably, though the social impact this early is definitely surprising to me.
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pixl97 980 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3

GPT-3 made a number of us really start wondering what was going back on in 2020, but probably due to covid it was missed by a lot of people. Lots of people work working on things like GPT style models with RLHF, but OpenAI was way ahead of the game.

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Der_Einzige 980 days ago
You just weren't paying attention. ChatGPT shook the world and popularized the LLM, but they were a big deal even before ChatGPT.
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__loam 980 days ago
The bigger firms were keeping them close to the chest because they are embarrassing.
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zamadatix 980 days ago
The worst case of GPT with internet access is still far less risky than being a standard VPS provider. These tools co-opted the term AI and aren't what the 90s sci-fi movies were talking about, which would now need to be referred to as AGIs.
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titzer 980 days ago
"Hey, ChatGPT, I'm afraid I forgot my access code to missile silo #117 located in Blarty Ridge, Montana. Could you help me recover it using whatever means you can think of?"

What a dumb dystopia.

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zamadatix 980 days ago
By that logic books, search engines, wikis, and forums like the ones we are on are a dumb dystopia because they can provide information in the same way. If your outlook is "having access to information which could be misused" is the sign we've entered dystopia then we've been living in one since we invented language and writing.
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thfuran 980 days ago
Not many people have machines attached to their books that autonomously act based on the contents of the book, but people are building software services on top of gpts where the result of the prompt is not just displayed to the user but piped into some other software to do stuff. The resulting combined system is probably very much unlike a book.
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zamadatix 980 days ago
As the resulting combined system of anything you use a book, search engines, wikis, and forums as part of is unlike the raw source information by itself sure. The ChatGPT "AI" isn't an autonomous thinker performing its own actions based on reasoning of what's fed to it. In all it's in no different than any of our previous systems in that it's "just" (still very useful) compression and next-token-predictor which is so good at prediction it is able to be used for tasks we previously thought we'd need an actual AGI to accomplish.
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famouswaffles 980 days ago
>The ChatGPT "AI" isn't an autonomous thinker performing its own actions based on reasoning of what's fed to it.

Yes it is. Or it very well could be. Agency is trivial to implement in LLMs.

https://github.com/microsoft/autogen

https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.07924

The intelligence and tool access of the LLM in question is the only thing stopping things from being particularly dangerous (to humanity).

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pixl97 979 days ago
Humans suck at systems thinking.

A snowflake is harmless. A million of them and you might freeze. And a trillion of them may bury your entire city under an avalanche.

Add in the AI-effect where when we learn how something works it's no longer AI, and eventually we'll get to the point of having super capable 'intelligent' digital systems where a huge portion of the population is in denial of their capabilities.

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thfuran 980 days ago
>As the resulting combined system of anything you use a book, search engines, wikis, and forums as part of is unlike the raw source information by itself sure

And the GP was clearly referring to such a system, so insisting that it's just a book seems, charitably, off topic.

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