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I'm going to shamelessly steal @Scimitar's post from the Friday Fun thread because I think we need to talk about LLMs in a CW context:
A few months ago OpenAI dropped their API price, from $0.06/1000 tokens for their best model, to $0.02/1000 tokens. This week, the company released their ChatGPT API which uses their "gpt-3.5-turbo" model, apparently the best one yet, for the price of $0.002/1000 tokens. Yes, an order of magnitude cheaper. I don't quite understand the pricing, and OpenAI themselves say: "Because
gpt-3.5-turboperforms at a similar capability totext-davinci-003but at 10% the price per token, we recommendgpt-3.5-turbofor most use cases." In less than a year, the OpenAI models have not only improved, but become 30 times cheaper. What does this mean?https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/11fn0td/the_implications_of_chatgpts_api_cost/
...or about $0.13 per hour. Yes technically it overlooks the fact that OpenAI charge for both input and output tokens, but this is still cheap and the line is trending downwards.
Full time minimum wage is ~$20k/year. GPT-3.5-turbo is 100x cheaper and vastly outperforms the average minimum wage worker at certain tasks. I dunno, this just feels crazy. And no, I wont apologize for AI posting. It is simply the most interesting thing happening right now.
I strongly agree with @Scimitar, this is the most interesting thing happening right now. If you haven't been following AI/LLM progress the last month, it has been blazingly fast. I've spent a lot of time in AI doomer circles so I have had a layer of cynicism around people talking about the Singularity, but I'll be damned if I'm not started to feel a bit uncomfortable that they may have been right.
The CW implications seem endless - low skill jobs will be automated, but which tribe first? Will HR admins who spend all day writing two emails be the first to go? Fast food cashiers who are already on their way out through self ordering consoles?
Which jobs will be the last to go? The last-mile problem seems pretty bad for legal and medical professionals (i.e. if an LLM makes up an answer it could be very bad) but theoretically we could use them to generate copy or ideas then go through a final check by a professional.
Outside of employment, what will this do to human relations? I've already seen some (admittedly highly autistic) people online saying that talking to ChatGPT is more satisfying than talking to humans. Will the NEET apocalypse turn into overdrive? Will the next generation even interact with other humans, or will people become individualized entirely and surround themselves with digital avatars?
Perhaps I'm being a bit too optimistic on the acceleration, but I can't help but feel that we are truly on the cusp of a massive realignment of technology and society. What are your thoughts on AI?
I've spent only a little time with ChatGPT and I've stated earlier that it is prone to unforced errors. But one of the bigger problems that I found is that it is prone to believing common falsehoods or myths. Go ask about the wage gap between men and women, which is just a bunch of statistical trickery but still a something that many people believe and consequently encoded into GPT.
Case in point during the week a bunch of Hacker News commentators took personal offence by a guy making the case that computer code should be written for computers if you want any kind of performance out of it. It is common opinion that code should only be written for other humans and writing it for computers is almost always a waste of time. It is the most prevalent attitude within my chosen profession and after 20 years I know that attitude of not writing code for machines is wasting performance. Guess what gets encoded into something that you cant reason with even less that a person that is convinced of superiority of his opinion? I've tried the output of GitHubs CoPilot, it does so many things wrong because the input to the models are wrong and incorrect code is so common. The ancient computer programmer adage Garbage In Garbage Out still holds true, and AI doesn't change that.
LLMs cannot improve from self-play. Once we get that, I don't know what will happen, might be direct-to-singularity, might not, but that issue shouldn't be a problem anymore.
ChatGPT won't write trash Python when it's had a million years of experience with performance tests.
The problem we are looking here isn't doing selfplay for optimal code. The problem is to write something into a random adversarial environment. AI dominates Chess and Go with clear rules and perfect information that has trained through self play, but for Poker the results aren't as clear cut. All of that because of randomness and hidden information. So putting code into a distributed system within an organization full of internal corporate politics where a manager somewhere wants to sabotage and also there are external advesaries that want to mess with your system. Sure it can write optimal code for your computer through selfplay but actually delivering something to an enterprise setting that is a different ballgame, it is Chess vs Poker.
And even with perfect formal rules AI can still be tricked https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/11/new-go-playing-trick-defeats-world-class-go-ai-but-loses-to-human-amateurs/
"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."
--Rich Cook
I don't think that has changed...
I'm just saying that inasmuch as LLMs are weak specifically at targeting objective metrics like performance, self-play should improve it. I'm not saying self-play is the panacea that'll give us AI, just that it will fill a hole in the existing methods.
I don't think that we are disagreeing at all here I'm just pointing out that having a target for self-play is going to be difficult. Because there are multiple dimensions to the problem of "not writing trash code" as it depends on whether or not it needs a theory of mind of actual people. Needing a theory of mind precludes self-play, that is always going to require input data.
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