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Gpt-4 has been released!. Looks like the cat is finally out of the bag. The CW implications of large language models are obvious and have been discussed here, so I figured I would drop a few fun facts.
Also, here's a peek at LessWrong freaking out.
The full technical report gives some fascinating information. Here are some highlights:
GPT-4 can pass a bar exam and score a 5 on several AP exams.
GPT-4 is 82% less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content and 40% more likely to produce factual responses than GPT-3.5 on our internal evaluations.
GPT-4 can accept images as inputs and generate captions, classifications, and analyses.
GPT-4 is capable of handling over 25,000 words of text, allowing for use cases like long form content creation, extended conversations, and document search and analysis.
Of all of these, passing the bar exam is the one that sticks out. We'll have to see how much it still hallucinates, but this is clearly a water mark, at least for the legal profession.
I'll go ahead and stake a perhaps dramatic but I believe warranted claim - the culture war is about to get ugly. Creating ads, propaganda, and bots to argue politics has never been easier. Whichever side moves first on scaling and implementing these language models to persuade humans to their camp will own the future.
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Sounds like stand-up comedian is still available.
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I suspect that the world's oldest profession may become the world's final profession as well.
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At the moment, paid, meaningful work is pretty much a white privilege. The Last Psychiatrist wrote about in '13.
Yeah, future where we're all going to be like blacks - hardly employable, grudingly tolerated pets of the powers that be is a quite likely one.
Ya think FDA will allow you to experiment with I dunno, brain interfaces or embedding AI systems into yourself so you could get off the dole?
Why, that'd be unsafe and irresponsible.
Maybe in countries that don't prosecute people for selling raw milk.
For a section of the white population; those who have the marketable skills that are in demand (see the current hand-wringing over the tech company lay-offs, and others writing reassuring articles that it's okay, it's just trimming the fat of all the hiring during the pandemic and the useless people, but real engineers are always in demand).
That Last Psychiatrist piece annoys me, probably because I'm from the section of society where people are welders, and it's a good, respectable trade:
No, dickhead, people who do hard manual labour don't decide that "welp, I'm 45, I'd prefer to laze about for the next thirty years so I'll pretend I can't work anymore". Mostly they keep working until they can't work, because their body really does wear out. And very few of them do nice, tidy, 9-5 hours. If somewhere in your house springs a leak, do you decide "Can't call a plumber, it's after 5 pm so they've clocked off!" No, you'll try ringing round and see if you can get a guy to call out sometime, anytime soon (because often they're very busy, being in demand for all kinds of jobs).
Do some people game the system? Yes, of course. Just like educated white guys who like to pretend they're the Hunter Thompson of mental health professionals and write their hot takes. I don't know any welders who retired at 45, I wonder if Mr Big Brain here even does know anyone who works with their hands? I know plenty of people who worked themselves into the ground, or had legitimate health reasons for retiring early. Man, I had no idea that living off social welfare was so easy, I could have done it when I was 45 and lived high on the hog! Allegedly!
I agree about the "never worked" cohort, but again - that's complicated. There are some people who never worked because they're incapable of holding down a job, because they're too weird or they have untreated mental problems (not even outright crazy, never diagnosed with a disorder as a kid and left to sink or swim through school and life) or some other reason. Again, yes of course there are people gaming the system with fake illnesses and scamming their way through life. Humans do that kind of thing.
Excellent advice - were it not for the snide bit earlier about the welders (and plumbers, presumably, and other tradespeople) who scammed the system by pretending they could no longer work the 9-5 job and decided to live off the public purse so they could laze about.
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Honestly we're approaching a future where the vast majority of people are nothing more than a deadweight drag on humanity. I wonder how long before we (humanity as a whole) decide to deprecate them, by which I mean discourage their reproduction until they slowly disappear. Perhaps modernity is already a preliminary strategy to do so, but if so at the moment it's most effective on the very people we want to reproduce more so tweaking is needed.
That decision has effectively been made. Populations capable of maintaining technological modernity aren't breeding.
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I don't think 'we, humanity as a whole, acting together' - like universalist, democratic humanism - works to 'deprecate the vast majority of humanity'. It'd have to be some small group doing that.
It's, arguably, good - some people clearly are more useful, or have better lives, or w/e than others, and whether you want 'the greatest good for the most' or just 'power', somehow replacing normal people with better people advances that cause. And it's very "natural", that's what evolution does, every time you want to marry an attractive girl instead of an ugly one, or someone of "good character" instead of poor character, you 'discouraging the reproduction of those with bad genes' in your own genes' reproductive interests. On the other hand, this may happen in the form of gene editing - and "normal people giving their children better lives with gene technology" and "prevent the useless people from reproducing" end up having the same observable long-term effects.
The problem is the winnowing down - as technological society progresses, the requirements to be the kind of person who is "more useful" or "has a better life" become more and more specialised and stratified. So the number of such people reduces down and down.
So now we're talking not "100 fewer peasants, 50 more factory workers", we're talking "tens of millions out of hundreds of millions" (if we even get that high) or "millions out of billions".
If only the 'useful, productive, creative' people should replace 'normal people', or those are the ones not a 'deadweight drag', then we are talking about the vast majority of humanity being deadweight that - what? should be euthanised? allowed to die of illness, hunger and other conditions of the developing world? Even within the developed world, how many people out of the entire population of the United States would you say are "the better people"? This is a general query, I'm not aiming it at either commenter above.
If I take some economic data for 2021, then the result seems to be - get rid of the whites and the blacks, leave the USA to the Asians alone, since by household earnings at the highest rate recorded here, they are plainly the "better people":
Let's see what that would look like, population-wise:
So reducing down the population to something over 20,000,000. But well worth it, because that leaves just the better people and not the deadweight!
No idea why you want to keep just Asians regardless of their skills, a high skill white/black is better than a low skill Asian. And we don't need to starve anyone. In fact we can deprecate them with kindness, at puberty (and later should they choose it) offer to hook them up to electrodes that stimulate the pleasure centres of their brain/simulate a massive open world they get to virtually rule over and leave them in bliss until they die of natural causes without leaving heirs (something like Nozick's experience machine).
In fact you can make this offer open to every single citizen and the people who refuse it will be enriched for better humans, just repeat this for a few generations and the dregs will have weeded themselves out.
Of course gene editing is also good and should be done alongside such a program.
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I'm personally not at all afraid it'll break society; that would be one of the better outcomes. Personally I'm much more disturbed it may bend it into something unrecognizable before it breaks, at least in my lifetime.
There are very few outcomes of AI that seem positive. A curse on all who went into this field.
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