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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   39200 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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Republicans are looking to militarize and ramp up AI: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/07/16/trump-ai-executive-order-regulations-military/

Former president Donald Trump’s allies are drafting a sweeping AI executive order that would launch a series of “Manhattan Projects” to develop military technology and immediately review “unnecessary and burdensome regulations”

The framework would also create “industry-led” agencies to evaluate AI models and secure systems from foreign adversaries,

This approach markedly differs from Biden's, which emphasizes safety testing.

“We will repeal Joe Biden’s dangerous Executive Order that hinders AI Innovation, and imposes Radical Leftwing ideas on the development of this technology,” the GOP platform says. “In its place, Republicans support AI Development rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing.”

America First Policy Institute spokeswoman Hilton Beckham said in a statement that the document does not represent the organization’s “official position.”

Greater military investment in AI probably stands to benefit tech companies that already contract with the Pentagon, such as Anduril, Palantir and Scale. Key executives at those companies have supported Trump and have close ties to the GOP.

On the podcast, Trump said he had heard from Silicon Valley “geniuses” about the need for more energy to fuel AI development to compete with China.

This is only a draft plan and not official policy but it does seem like decades of EA/lesswrong philosophizing and NGO shenanigans have been swept away by the Aschenbrenner 'speed up and beat China to the finish line' camp. I think that's what most people expected, the fruits are simply too juicy for anyone to resist feasting upon them. It also fits with the general consensus of big tech which is ploughing money into AI at great speeds. The Manhattan Project cost about $20 billion inflation adjusted, Microsoft is spending about $50 billion a year on capex, much of it going into AI data centres. That's a lot of money!

However, there is a distinction between AGI/superintelligence research and more conventional military usage: guiding missiles and drones, cyberwarfare, improving communications. China has been making advances there, I recall that they had datasets of US navy ships circulating. One of their most important goals is getting their anti-ship ballistic missiles to hit a moving, evading ship. It's hard to guide long-range missiles precisely against a strong opponent that can jam GPS/Beidou. AI-assisted visual targeting for the last adjustments is one potential answer.

The Chinese and US militaries may not be fully AGI-pilled but they're very likely enthusiastic about enhancing their conventional weapons. Modern high-end warfare is increasingly software-dependant, it becomes a struggle between the radar software and the ECM software, satellite recognition vs camouflage. If you have some esoteric piece of software that can make it easier to get a missile lock on a stealth fighter, that's a major advantage. While most attention is focused on text and image generation, the same broad compute-centric techniques could be used for radar or IR, seismology, astronomy...

On the cultural front J D Vance has highlighted the danger of big tech companies calling for safety regulations and securing their incumbents advantage: https://x.com/BasedBeffJezos/status/1812981496183201889

I also think Google's floundering around with black Vikings in their image-generation and other political AI bias has roused Republicans and right-wingers into alarm. They don't particularly want to get their enemies entrenched in control of another media format. AI may be a special format in that it's much more obvious and clear in how the propaganda system works. A real person can avoid gotcha questions or moderate their revealed opinions tactically. Most teachers do that in school, they can convey an attitude without providing gotcha moments for libsoftiktok (though some certainly do). With AI you can continually ask it all kinds of questions to try and make it slip up and reveal the agenda behind it.

I feel like this is a bad idea because LLMs appear to be a dead end beyond helping you write code. Like they can’t handle 9.9-9.11, so I don’t think they’ll be good at something that needs a lot of real-time precision. Maybe they’ll go after another approach but given that a lot of SF VC’s plans appear to be to get Trump/Vance into office and then get huge handouts for whatever they’re currently working on, it seems like this’ll be the way it’ll go.

dead end beyond generating text

dead end beyond generating bad pictures

dead end beyond classifying pictures

dead end beyond generating good pictures

dead end beyond helping write code

dead end beyond doing basic math with guidance

you are here

We're into fairly advanced mathematics now, things are moving so quickly.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-matches-the-abilities-of-the-best-math-olympians/

LLMs aren't helpful writing code.

Speak for yourself. They're great for doing entry level tasks in languages/tech you're not familiar with. Once you get a good sense for what they do and don't hallucinate, you can really cruise through. It's made me significantly faster.

That's exactly where they are worst! If you're not familiar with the language, you have no idea at all whether it's giving you correct code or not. Nobody should ever use an LLM for something they don't know well enough to validate.

Yeah IDK man, I can tell pretty quick whether the LLM code works or not. Either the UI starts looking right, the data starts getting transformed how I need it, or it doesn't. For anything not dead simple to validate I use my own brain. That's still automating a huge part of my work.

Why say something trivially disproved by common experience?

Maybe they don't feel helpful to you but, objectively, a lot of developers are being helped by them, myself and many of my coworkers included.

Why claim something trivially disproved by common experience?

Personally I'm with @SubstantialFrivolity on this one.

Generating a thousand lines of code in 5 minutes doesn't mean a thing if it's going to take a week or more to validate it.

I mean, it's a matter of opinion, not fact. But I don't think they are useful, and I think people who are using them for programming are playing with fire. You can't safely use anything they give you without validating it is correct, and if you have to check the code anyways it's not saving you work compared to just writing it.

LLMs are the worst sort of help - the unreliable kind, which you can't trust to actually do its job. Help like that is generally worse than no help at all, because at least you know what to expect and can plan for it when you have no help at all.

One of the main use cases I have is "take this algorithm described in this paper and implement it using numpy" or "render a heatmap" where it's pretty trivial to check that the code reads as doing the same thing as the paper. But it is nice to skip the innumerable finicky "wait was it numpy.linalg.eigenvalues() or numpy.linalg.eigvals()" gotchas - LLMs are pretty good at writing idiomatic code. And for the types of things I'm doing, the code is going to be pasted straight into a jupyter notebook, where it will either work or fail in an obvious way.

If you're trying to get it to solve a novel problem with poor feedback you're going to have a bad time, but for speeding up the sorts of finicky and annoying tasks where people experienced with the toolchain have just memorized the footguns and don't even notice them anymore but you have to keep retrying because you're not super familiar with the toolchain, LLMs are great.

Also you can ask "are there any obvious bugs or inefficiencies in this code". Usually the answer is garbage but sometimes it catches something real. Again, it's a case where the benefit of the LLM getting it right is noticeable and the downside if it gets it wrong is near zero.

Out of curiosity, would you say classic code completion is 'helpful' when writing code?

Suggesting a method or attribute is very useful because I know what I'm looking for and it's very quick to figure out which one is right. Suggesting the next ten lines means I need to carefully review them, and I might as well just write them myself at that point.

Suggesting the next ten lines means I need to carefully review them, and I might as well just write them myself at that point

Talking Copilot specifically, the suggestions I wait for and review are typically 1-3 lines long, and it's the sort of code I review far faster than I type. Most of the time it knows exactly what I mean to write. Maybe an extensive, expertly setup & quality tooling could match it, but I'm too incompetent and too poor, respectively.

Also Copilot chat is hugely helpful, superior to a search engine for simple questions, though admittedly only once I settled on 'instructions' prompt that reliably prevents it from yapping. It gives very concise answers, rarely makes mistakes. It consistently saves me time, and is much more pleasant to interact with than your typical search engine result.

Maybe a little, but it's a minor convenience really.

Not in the cases it routinely suggests complete garbage (as everyone with suitably buggy / misconfigured IDE has found out).

LLMs don’t generate pictures. I have no idea why people keep repeating the blatantly obviously incorrect claim that AI equals LLM.

Stable diffusion contains a text transformer. Language models alone don't generate pictures but they're a necessary part of the text-to-image pipeline.

Also some LLMs can use tools, so an LLM using an image generation tool is in a sense generating a picture. It's not like humans regularly create pictures without using any tools.

Yes, it has an input parser. If you’ve studied SD details, you’ll know that it’s very different from what people call LLMs and is only a small part of Stable Diffusuon (and not anything you could say that ”generates pictures”).

Yes, it has an input parser

Specifically OpenCLIP. As far as I can tell the text encoder is nearly a bog-standard GPT-style transformer. The transformer in question is used very differently than the GPT-style next token sampling loop, but architecturally the TextTransformer it's quite similar to e.g. gpt-2.

Still, my understanding is that the secret sauce of stable diffusion is that it embeds the image and the text into tensors of the same shape, and then tries to "denoise" the image in such a way that the embedding of the "denoised" image is closer to the embedding of the text.

The UNet is the bit that generates the pictures, but the text transformer is the bit which determines which picture is generated. Without using a text transformer, CLIP and thus stable diffusion would not work nearly as well for generating images from text. And I expect that further advancements which improve how well instructions are followed by image generation models will come mainly from figuring out how to use larger language transformers and a higher dimensional shared embedding space.

Tbh, I didn’t notice that Tomato had called those out in particular. The top level post talks about various applications which are definitely not LLMs.

LLMs specifically are horrible with arithmetic (as Tomato said). I don’t see why a math oriented AI couldn’t be made - it just wouldn’t be an LLM and quite possibly would have about as much in common with LLM as eg. image generators do (iow, very little beyond an input parsing stage).

I don’t know what it is about this site (other than people being infatuated with ridiculously long meandering posts) that makes users think LLMs are the modal example of AI when their actual productive uses are limited to a few text generating and parsing niches. Meanwhile eg. every photo 99% of people take has multiple layers of AI applied to it.

We were in the same spot a few years ago though?

I think Stable Diffusion's public release in August 2022 marks the time when we reached "dead end beyond generating good pictures" - before that, AI being able to generate good pictures was either very very niche knowledge or just not considered true. That's not even 2 years ago. I believe ChatGPT 3.5 also came out publicly in 2022, though earlier in the year, so a little over 2 years ago, and that probably marked when we reached "dead end beyond helping write code." I think it's arguable that the roughly 2 years since those periods haven't been revolutionary, but I think it's inarguable that lots of progress has happened in those 2 years, and in any case, 2 years is a rather short period of time, probably the lower bound of what is considered "a few years."

We've now got pretty good video generation.

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