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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37972 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.

I guess (1) is where I disagree. I think there's a substantial difference between understanding the meaning of a word and understanding that word's statistical relation to other words. LLM's understand the latter, but not the former.

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.

I've used Bing and it's still pretty easy to ask it questions that demonstrate it doesn't understand the semantic content of what it is being asked. Here's an interaction I had just now:

M: Write a fifteen word story

B: Sure! Here’s a fifteen-word story for you: “The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock.”

M: Write a fifteen word story

B: Sure! Here’s another fifteen-word story for you: “The baby’s cry was the only thing that could stop the apocalypse.”

M: Write a fifteen word story

B: Sure! Here’s another fifteen-word story for you: “The last thing I saw was my alarm clock flashing 12:07 before she pushed her long rotting nails through my chest.”

I asked it the same question three times and never once did it give me a story that actually had fifteen words in it. It clearly does not understand what "fifteen" means and how the presence of the word in the my sentence should constrain its answer.

Hmmm, you're right. GPT-4 does in fact have trouble writing 15-word stories.

Me: Write a story with exactly 15 words

GPT-4: Moonlit whispers, midnight rendezvous. Time halted, love bloomed. Hands entwined, destiny united. Eternal adventure commenced together.

Me: How many words does this story have?

GPT-4: This story has exactly 15 words.

Me: Count them

GPT-4: Here is the story with each word numbered:

1.Moonlit

2.whispers,

3.midnight

4.rendezvous.

5.Time

6.halted,

7.love

8.bloomed.

9.Hands

10.entwined,

11.destiny

12.united.

13.Eternal

14.adventure

15.commenced

The story indeed has 15 words.

Me: You forgot to number "together"

GPT-4: My apologies, I indeed missed the word "together." Here is the corrected numbering:

1.Moonlit

2.whispers,

3.midnight

4.rendezvous.

5.Time

6.halted,

7.love

8.bloomed.

9.Hands

10.entwined,

11.destiny

12.united.

13.Eternal

14.adventure

15.commenced

16.together

The story actually has 16 words. Thank you for pointing that out.

Me: Fix it to make it 15 words

GPT-4: Here's the revised story with exactly 15 words:

Moonlit whispers, midnight rendezvous. Time halted, love bloomed. Hands entwined, destiny united. Eternal adventure commenced.

On the other hand, I was able to get it to write a 68 word story on the first try.

Me: Write a story with exactly 68 words

GPT-4: Beneath the murky sky, a lonely robot wandered the abandoned city. For years, it searched for signs of life, collecting trinkets from the ruins. One day, the robot stumbled upon a withered book, its pages filled with tales of love and laughter. Entranced, it began to read. As the robot savored each word, it understood the beauty of human emotion and yearned to be more than just metal.

Trying this experiment with multiple 2-digit numbers X, it looks like GPT-4 outputs a story with X ± 2 words. I have updated slightly against GPT-4's capabilities (I expected it to get the exact answer most of the time), but I still hold to my original thesis. This is a quantitative error, not a qualitative error. The presence of the number in the input sentence does in fact constrain the output. Asking for a story with 68 words gives an output with more words than asking for a story with 49 words, but less words than asking for a story with 96 words. The model does have some concept of what these numbers are.

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