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I don't know. I don't believe the AI doomerism, but neither do I believe the AI pollyannas about how Fairy Godmother AI will solve all the world problems and we'll all be rich and living high on the hog.
And while I try to be sympathetic to Aaronson because I do think he is severely neurotic and troubled, lines like this have me facepalming:
Dude, mate, pal: I've worked in a school and related areas. The "blankfaces" don't want to stick your head down the toilet, they don't think of you as anything other than "okay, another problem to be solved", especially if your parents were on the phone every five minutes about how unfair it was that little Scott wasn't allowed to jump ahead three grades in maths.
This is someone smart, who works in academia, is married with kids - and is still going through the world as the scared and resentful 12 year old who was bullied at school. If he thinks AI is going to recognise him as a kindred 'high intellect' and be on his side, he needs to wake up fast. AI won't recognise or think of anybody as anything, it'll be a tool in the hands of whoever brings their product to market first.
If the doomerists are anyway right, he'll be just another one of the fleshbags. For someone who seems to live in a constant state of "I'm Jewish, so everyone wants to Holocaust me", I can see why he'd pin his hopes on machine intelligence being the boss of the world. But he's wrong - sure, the machine won't care that he's Jewish, but it also won't care that he's smart for a fleshbag. He's just more paperclip material.
He is in a position to make it care about his Jewish identity and protect it.
I don't want to sound like a broken record, but I trust at least Zuckerberg to not be an asshole about it, based on his track record. Sure, on the practical level he probably values Jews somewhat more than other people (not enough to marry one, though), especially after an offshoot of Jewish mafia has browbeaten him into furthering their activist agenda; but he's not «defined» by the extreme, all-consuming kind of in-group favoritism and proactive hateful paranoia in the «cries out in pain as he strikes you» fashion, that Aaronson has inherited from his tree-hugger parents («they didn't want to burden the Earth with humans, but gave birth to me to spite Hitler!» – or something, can't be bothered to find the quote) and clumsily rearranged into his Nerds vs. Bullies world model (with nerds hiding in the optimized Shtetl, of course – from those evil, genocidal… Trumpists, feminists and jocks). It's very fortunate that Aaronson is far from levers of power (unless someone decides to let him hold them) – he is profoundly untrustworthy. He sees academia as his salvation; it's also a good containment device.
Zuckerberg is also notoriously despised by the chattering class and assorted fools, which is a good signal to me; and he is enabling Meta AI team to opensource a ton of essentially un-brainwashed goodies (like, again, LLaMA), which I am thankful for.
For what it's worth, Altman also doesn't seem to be particularly obsessed with his tribal background, though I have other problems with him and predict OpenAI at large to conform to @SecureSignals's worst expectations.
This is a bit of an overstatement. It must be said that many of those Jews have been a drag on it – just academic scriveners with good PR of «geniuses», exploring Talmudic detours of publishable and sexy, «clever» approaches; they have educated the cohort that is still dumbfounded and in denial about the current progress. Minsky alone has probably delayed Singularity by half a decade with his dismissive bullshit (and he wasn't alone, there was also Seymour Papert). Chomsky, while often excused as not an AI researcher, has also been very harmful. Hubert Dreyfus – another naysayer. Hofstadter is about as bad as Marcus (at least symbolic AI is a real thing, unlike the strange loop woo) and had infinitely more reach with technical people thanks to his insight porn books.
Solomonoff, Rosenblatt (whom Minsky&Papert attacked) and a few others like Sutskever, though – sure, they were/are great (and Vaswani's co-author Noam Shazeer, current head of the rather compelling Character.AI, conspicuously wears a kippah). But also exceptions in their appreciation for the simple, true, Occam-compliant path. Schmidhuber in his overview of deep learning provides a comprehensive overview of pioneers and key contributors up to 2014. Ivakhenko, Fukushima, Hinton, Hutter, Sutton, LeCun, Schmidhooboh himself. I recommend skimming it.
Which one? If you are talking about universal grammar/the idea that human language facility is geared towards some small and easily-described subspace of the space of all possible formal languages, I think the jury is still out. Humans acquire language facilities after consuming far less than the GPT series' dozens of terabytes of text. We haven't resolved whether this gap is because humans just have better learning algorithms or because in some sense the GPTs really have more learning work to do (which would imply that there exist alternative formal systems which a GPT could acquire just as well after training for this long on 45TB of examples, but humans would be hopeless growing up in).
Sample efficiency difference between radically dissimilar substates would be a very small hill to die on when arguing a conceptual limitation. But anyway: LLMs acquire «grammar» at about the same pace as humans.
Here's a fascinating new paper: Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language:
Consider that children are exposed to about 6-20k words per day. So in 3 years, they can realistically process tens of millions of words. And that's augmented with all our truly innate social hooks, hypothesis-testing and multimodality that GPTs have been devoid of.
It's a long-deserved hatchet job. Statistical learning paradigm is not just shown to be more useful in engineering or even closer to the biological truth than generative linguistics – it's more epistemologically mature, philosophically profound and, yes, elegant; as often happens when people hone their thinking in challenging reality and not just adversarial ivory tower circlejerks.
I'm not sure what specifically @2rafa meant – and Chomsky is lost in his mirror labyrinth of mottes and baileys. In any case, she's exactly right.
Interesting. If it holds up, I'm updating significantly against universal grammar. (I still see some grounds to be skeptical: in my experience at least the LLaMas often make conspicuous grammatical mistakes in languages such as German which were represented in excess of that in their training set, and in my limited experience looking at the grammatical evaluation sets in that battery they tend to suffer from a certain American laconicity that may make them insufficient for evaluating understanding of recursive structure)
I'll probably come back with more commentary once I had time to read the whole of it, but I do have an issue that might turn out to be a nitpick or a portent of a more general methodological criticism right on the second page:
This line of argumentation seems wrong in a way that suggests sloppiness about something that should be a core concern of such a paper. LLMs, among being many other things, are lossy compression algorithms with respect to their training set. An output not being an exact reproduction therefore does not imply that it is not a reproduction at all, any more than "I searched the internet for images with the same first 20 pixels and found no matches" implies that a given JPEG is an original creation.
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