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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   40081 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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Was a bit surprised to see this hadn't been posted yet, but yesterday Yudkowsky wrote an op-ed in TIME magazine where he describes the kind of regime that he believes would be necessary to throttle AI progress:

https://archive.is/A1u57

Some choice excerpts:

Many researchers working on these systems think that we’re plunging toward a catastrophe, with more of them daring to say it in private than in public; but they think that they can’t unilaterally stop the forward plunge, that others will go on even if they personally quit their jobs. And so they all think they might as well keep going. This is a stupid state of affairs, and an undignified way for Earth to die, and the rest of humanity ought to step in at this point and help the industry solve its collective action problem.

The moratorium on new large training runs needs to be indefinite and worldwide. There can be no exceptions, including for governments or militaries. If the policy starts with the U.S., then China needs to see that the U.S. is not seeking an advantage but rather trying to prevent a horrifically dangerous technology which can have no true owner and which will kill everyone in the U.S. and in China and on Earth. If I had infinite freedom to write laws, I might carve out a single exception for AIs being trained solely to solve problems in biology and biotechnology, not trained on text from the internet, and not to the level where they start talking or planning; but if that was remotely complicating the issue I would immediately jettison that proposal and say to just shut it all down.

Shut down all the large GPU clusters (the large computer farms where the most powerful AIs are refined). Shut down all the large training runs. Put a ceiling on how much computing power anyone is allowed to use in training an AI system, and move it downward over the coming years to compensate for more efficient training algorithms. No exceptions for anyone, including governments and militaries. Make immediate multinational agreements to prevent the prohibited activities from moving elsewhere. Track all GPUs sold. If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.

if its presence in the CW thread needs justifying, well, it's published in a major magazine and the kinds of policy proposals set forth would certainly ignite heated political debate were they ever to be seriously considered.

"Yudkowsky airstrike threshold" has already become a minor meme on rat and AI twitter.

I see we're back to trying to outlaw mathematics. I encourage everyone to read this article by Stephen Wolfram describing how LLMs work before panicking. I cannot understand the degree to which LLMs have apparently broken some people's brains.

Any concept which can be expressed in words is now, in principle, understandable by a computer. I am confused by your confusion.

Maybe you and I have different definitions of "understand" but this seems clearly false to me.

ETA:

Perhaps better to say, I don't see what this statement has to do with LLMs.

Let me break it down:

  1. LLMs understand words and sentences (or at least the relationships between them).

  2. If a concept can be expressed in words, then what that concept means is encoded by how the words that express that concept relate to the words that express any other concept.

  3. Therefore, as an LLMs capability to relate words and sentences to each other approaches or exceeds human level, the LLMs understanding of concepts approaches or exceeds human level.

This is a very high-level explanation, but I think it captures the core intuition.

I must ask, what is the most powerful LLM you have personally interacted with? Default ChatGPT feels like talking to a 6-year-old after using Bing and GPT-4.

All that is trivially shown false by how LLMs persistently fail at the most basic mathematical problems as soon as solving those would require understanding instead of just stringing words together. They are very efficient bullshit generators but to claim they "understand" anything is a massive exaggeration.

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