This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
We are experimenting and learning and inventing. Every modern AI is a brand new prototype, mass released to the public only because of how interesting and useful they are despite their newness.
Nearly every new invention is massively overpriced compared to its long term potential unless the "invention" is a refinement of an old invention optimized specifically for its affordability. Cars used to be crazy expensive luxury goods, now they're expensive but affordable staples of modern life, much cheaper than trying to walk across the country on the Oregon Trail. The literal first refrigerator was vastly expensive as the inventor prototyped it out without a factory to stamp them out, now everyone has one. The first GPT-4 quality LLM was vastly more expensive to design than GPT-4 quality LLMs will be 10 years from now. We have no idea where AI intelligence will plateau, and we have no idea what cost it will asymptote towards over the next few decades as people discover more and more efficient methods and technologies. Current quality is merely a lower bound, and current costs are an upper bound, not the true long term potential, and probably not anywhere close.
The answer to every (non-safety) criticism of AI is that we're not there yet. But we're getting somewhere.
Compared to where we were ten years ago, it looks like AGI is achievable now. It seems before we didn't even have an architecture that you could spend infinite compute on that would ever arrive at an answer. But now it seems like we do! It's clear that you can get them to do reasoning-like things and it's mainly a matter of how much compute you can throw at it. So that's amazing.
But the question that remains, is will this architecture get to AGI within economic feasibility? It doesn't quite seem like the right architecture. They use much, much more power than humans do to solve the same problems, for example.
If we have to continually 10x the amount of inference compute we throw at a model to cut the error rate in half, we might exhaust the capacity of the Earth before we reach AGI.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link