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Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 23, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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This was skipped over in the main thread: Sam Altman said "We're not training GPT-5 right now, and won't be for some time... I think we're at the end of the era where it's going to be these, like, giant, giant models. We'll make them better in other ways."

Thoughts? Does this have any impact on your AI timelines?

From what I've read, Altman is simply de-emphasizing scale, due to options such as training on more tokens for similarly sized models, since deployment and inference costs would be lower over the longterm as compared to training a larger one on fewer tokens.

As for how that changes my timelines, we already live in a world where the damn AI is a better doctor than me and gets a B on quantum mechanics exams.

I was idly using GPT4 today and it just hit me full force that, holy fucking shit Jesus fuck me I'm having a full-blown conversation with an alien sapience, one smarter than the average person, and fully capable of understanding nuance and performing genuine intellectual labor.

That shook me, I realized that I'd been succumbing to complacency, when I'm already living the damn future. As a child or teen, I'd have wagered something like 2040 as the date when I could be having a chat with a human-level AI, and we're not even halfway through the 20s..

As such, even with Altman's statement, I doubt progress will stall, and even if it slows down, we're pretty much at the part that everyone once believed would take a ton of sweat, blood and erudite white papers. Not simply "stAck Moar layers!!!"

So my currently timelines are still 50% by 2028 and 90% by 2040, at most they've wobbled back six months.

Curious question -- can GPT-4 write a poem that doesn't rhyme? I was trying this with the free (3.5?) version, and while it will tell you what rhyming means, it absolutely refuses to write blank verse. (or even any non-whole number of quatrains.

3.5 couldn't write a rhyming one in Russian. We had to do an international women's day performance, and a few of us asked it to write a poem that wasn't full of cringeworthy complementarianism. Nope, he was worse than Jeremias Suomalainen.

Nope, he was worse than Jeremias Suomalainen.

As a Finn I'm obligated to ask who the hell is "Jeremias Suomalainen" and why is his first name so weird?

Seems like Martti Larni is one of these writers that are more popular in another country than in their own. Jeremias is the protagonist of Arvokkaat köyhät: Ja heidän kirjava seurakuntansa, if I got the Finnish name of the novel right.