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Sooo, Big Yud appeared on Lex Fridman for 3 hours, a few scattered thoughts:
Jesus Christ his mannerisms are weird. His face scrunches up and he shows all his teeth whenever he seems to be thinking especially hard about anything, I didn't remember him being this way in the public talks he gave a decade ago, so this must either only be happening in conversations, or something changed. He wasn't like this on the bankless podcast he did a while ago. It also became clear to me that Eliezer cannot become the public face of AI safety, his entire image, from the fedora, to the cheap shirt, facial expressions and flabby small arms oozes "I'm a crank" energy, even if I mostly agree with his arguments.
Eliezer also appears to very sincerely believe that we're all completely screwed beyond any chance of repair and all of humanity will die within 5 or 10 years. GPT4 was a much bigger jump in performance from GPT3 than he expected, and in fact he thought that the GPT series would saturate to a level lower than GPT4's current performance, so he doesn't trust his own model of how Deep Learning capabilities will evolve. He sees GPT4 as the beginning of the final stretch: AGI and SAI are in sight and will be achieved soon... followed by everyone dying. (in an incredible twist of fate, him being right would make Kurzweil's 2029 prediction for AGI almost bang on)
He gets emotional about what to tell the children, about physicists wasting their lives working on string theory, and I can see real desperation in his voice when he talks about what he thinks is really needed to get out of this (global cooperation about banning all GPU farms and large LLM training runs indefinitely, on the level of even stricter nuclear treaties). Whatever you might say about him, he's either fully sincere about everything or has acting ability that stretches the imagination.
Lex is also a fucking moron throughout the whole conversation, he can barely even interact with Yud's thought experiments of imagining yourself being someone trapped in a box, trying to exert control over the world outside yourself, and he brings up essentially worthless viewpoints throughout the whole discussion. You can see Eliezer trying to diplomatically offer suggested discussion routes, but Lex just doesn't know enough about the topic to provide any intelligent pushback or guide the audience through the actual AI safety arguments.
Eliezer also makes an interesting observation/prediction about when we'll finally decide that AIs are real people worthy of moral considerations: that point is when we'll be able to pair midjourney-like photorealistic video generation of attractive young women with chatGPT-like outputs and voice synthesis. At that point he predicts that millions of men will insist that their waifus are actual real people. I'm inclined to believe him, and I think we're only about a year or at most two away from this actually being a reality. So: AGI in 12 months. Hang on to your chairs people, the rocket engines of humanity are starting up, and the destination is unknown.
Yud seemed to say LLMs could play chess and therefore could reason. However, the games I've see it play it has tried to make illegal moves which seems to indicate its just pattern matching and the pattern matching breaks down in some spots. of course maybe reasoning is just pattern matching and the LLMs aren't good at it yet or the LLM hasn't been trained on enough chess games. i guess chess players would also say chess is heavily about pattern matching but it also involves some kind of explicit reasoning to double check lines.
After your comment I tried myself to make chatGPT play chess against stockfish. Telling it to write 2 paragraphs of game analysis before trying to make the next move significantly improved the results. Telling it to output 5 good chess moves and explain the reasoning behind them before choosing the real move also improves results. So does rewriting the entire history of the game in each prompt. But even with all of this, it gets confused about the board state towards the midgame, it tries to capture pieces that aren't there, or move pieces that were already captured.
The two fundamental problems are the lack of long term memory (the point of making it write paragraphs of game analysis is to give it time to think), and the fact that it basically perpetually assumes that its past outputs are correct. Like, it will make a mistake in its explanation and mention that a queen was captured when in fact it wasn't, and thereafter it will assume that the queen was in fact captured in all future outputs. All the chess analysis it was trained on did not contain mistakes, so when it generates its own mistaken chess analysis it still assumes it didn't make mistakes and takes all its hallucinations as the truth.
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That's the funniest thing I've seen in a while.
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A human who learned chess almost entirely from ASCII, and then played games entirely in chess notation with no board, would also have trouble not making illegal moves.
(Without any tree search.)
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