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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34389 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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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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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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