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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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I think you're being misled by a very specific failure mode of LLMs trained on tokenized input. The spelling and number of words is explicitly scrubbed from their input. Asking for word counts is like asking a blind person who reads and writes Braille about the shape of letters.

Good enough next-token prediction is, in principle, powerful enough to do anything you could ask someone to do using only a computer. I'm not claiming that this is a plausible route to super-powerful AI. But the "just" in "It just understands them as probabilistic sequences of tokens" seems totally unwarranted to me.

To be clear, I think LLMs can do a lot of really impressive things. I've used Github Copilot in my job and it was able to autocomplete some mostly correct code (variable/property names needed fixing) just from my writing a comment. It was pretty cool! But the leap from Copilot or GPT-4 or whatever to "We need international regulation on GPU production and monitoring for GPUs and to air strike countries that look like they have too many GPUs" is absurd.

Good enough next-token prediction is, in principle, powerful enough to do anything you could ask someone to do using only a computer.

I guess with the caveats "good enough" and "in principle" I am not sure I disagree but I am also not sure any LLM will be "good enough."

I still don't understand why you think the capabilities of current LLMs are an important factor in how scared we should be about AGI in the medium term. I also don't understand what threshold of capabilities you want to use where we could wait until we see it to coordinate a slowdown. The better these things get, the more demand there will be for their further development.

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