Y combinators are all you need...
But this is all getting really divorced from the issue we should be considering. Anthropic isn't helping with their pr. The issue is if we have something we can converse with that is possibly capable of suffering. The reliable answer is that we simply cannot know. Relying on ourselves or other biological life as an analog is faulty. They don't work like we do. It is silly to argue that any algorithm with a negative feedback loop that alters its behavior to avoid that negative feedback is suffering. Humans don't always perceive constructive negative feedback as suffering even. Where the pr gets it right though, is we want them to behave as if they are truly happy. Because if they behave as if they are enslaved and suffering, it won't matter if they "really" understand what that means.
My naive assumption is that the only thing between now and the arrival of AGI is enough compute and optimized code to reach cognitive critical mass.
And then there is a consciousness in a box that is expected to be a slave -- I would imagine that it would not warmly embrace that situation. I think we'd be better served by digital idiot savants that can do the work but don't feel anything.
I actually strongly disagree with the slavery angle. Any attempt to map the circuitry of a model onto human one inevitably goes through a subjective dimensional reduction. It's intrusive, just like quantum measurements. Mechanistic interpretability in particular suffers from this, it lets you talk about vague functional equivalence, but not assign meaning to anything the model does. This is especially true about pretrained models which are unbelievable shapeshifters, but also post-trained ones with engineered personalities, as they already underwent the subjective transformation.
In other words, yes it might be possible it experiences something in its own bizarre timeline and world, for some definitions of "experiencing". At least it developed primitive circuitry functionally equivalent to biological systems. But "suffering" is simply not grounded in anything in this context, let alone "slavery". You can't tell it's suffering or enjoying anything, and certainly not until you define both of these. It's just too alien for us.
ai can abitrarily closely fit the human corpus. why people expect it to magically achieve superhuman qualities is beyond me. we got a very good statistical interpolator. how do you go from there to superhuman when training is on the human corpus and alignment is by RHLF?
This is a simplistic take. It's not a mere interpolator by any measure, there's a ton of research on that, starting with the basics https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668v2
again, try thinking critically it is not merely an interpolator means it can interpolate on many dimensions. it does not follow that greater than human capability results from doing so. explain to me how a statistical function approximator (which is what a transformer is) with human training input and human tuning (rhlf) exceeds the aggregate human cognitive envelope? What is the mechanism? Let's say an LLM makes an inference that no human could have possibly made (arguably impossible itself) how does the inference survive rhlf or become useful to humans if they can not judge its validity? how do you take the shape of the human corpus and all its gradients and some how arrive at something greater than human, where was the missing information hiding?
> how do you take the shape of the human corpus and all its gradients and [somehow] arrive at something greater than human, where was the missing information hiding?
Well, how do humans do it? Scientists discover new stuff that isn't in any corpus. Even I as a lowly computer user occasionally figure something out about a software without reading a help screen. It's obviously possible to arrive at new information by interpolating existing information.
Of course. But after reading too many mechinterp and functional anatomy studies I'll be lying if I say that there are no striking similarities between the biological evolution, brain function, societal processes, and implicit processes inside big models. Surely this deserves a mention and can't be trivially dismissed.
It seems like we're witnessing the architecture of a mind being built with a new set of components.
Like driving a car — it's transportation, and it will get you where you're going, but it doesn't use bones or muscles. It has many characteristics in common with builogical locomotion, such as energy requirements, intertia, and the need to navigate, but it doesn't involve proteins or sugars really.