site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25671 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Google Gemini just launched

In other words, GPT-4 has just been beaten, about time I'd say, I'm getting used to the pace of progress in AI being blistering, and it was threatening to slowdown to just mild rash levels.

However, both my hands-on time with it, and the official benchmarks Google released suggest it's a minor, incremental improvement, one that doesn't stand up to the drastic improvement that GPT-4 represented over 3 or 3.5. [For clarity, I, like the rest of you, can only use Gemini Pro, the second best model]

Which is fine, because for a while now, people have been lambasting Google/Deepmind for being too incompetent to ship, or at least ship a competitive product, given how shitty Bard was when it launched, even after being upgraded once or twice.

However, Bard, now running the Gemini Pro model, seems to be roughly as good as paid GPT-4 on ChatGPT, or the free GPT-4 in Bing Copilot (previously Bing Chat). I have yet to spot any new use case it enables, in the sense that GPT-4 can reliably do tasks that simply had 3.5 flailing about in confusion, or worse, hallucinate incorrect answers, such as more involved questions in coding, medicine and everything else really.

However, Google hasn't yet publicly released the best Gemini model, which is currently undergoing an analogous process that GPT-4 or Claude 2 went through, namely more RLHF, red-teaming and safety testing. Pro is the next step down, but it seems pretty good to me, in the sense I would happily use it as an alternative to GPT-4, even if I have no strong opinion on which is better.

There's also a Nano model, which is stripped down to run on mobile devices, and is now being used on the Pixel 8 Pro for a few tasks, potentially silencing the people who claimed it's AI specific computing components were a marketing gimmick, especially since it seemed to offload most AI tasks to the cloud.

Miscellaneous observations:

  1. Bard is fast as fuck compared to GPT-4, in terms of generation speed. It always was, but previously in the "I'm doing 2000 calculations a second in my head, and they're all wrong" sense. (GPT-4, at least before Turbo released, was always pretty slow compared to the competition. Far more unusable, but at the very least I read faster than it can write.)
  2. A quick search suggests all the models have a 32k token context window, or about an operating memory of the last 25k words it read and wrote. Good, if not remotely groundbreaking.
  3. This heavily suggests OAI will ship GPT-5 soon, instead of being content to milk 4 when it ran rings around the competition.
  4. It's multimodal, but then again so was GPT-4 from the start, the capability was just cordoned off for a bit.

To the extent I don't think the next generation (or two) of models after GPT-4 are an existential threat, I'm happy to see them finally arriving. There really isn't much more needed before even the best of us are entirely obsolete, at least for cognitive labor, and something as archaic as GPT-4 was scoring at the 95th percentile in the USMLE, so I'm preparing to explore my competitive advantage in panhandling. *

*This is a joke. For now.

Footnotes to the footnotes:

People on Twitter are correctly pointing out that GPT-4 underwent further post-launch improvements in benchmark scores, some of them pushing it past Gemini's published scores.

Also, just to be clear, the version of Gemini you can use now is not the best one, which may or may not be a modest improvement over GPT-4. Some claim it's more comparable to 3.5, but I haven't used that in ages, not when Bing makes 4 free.*

*Footnote^3 It's probably closer to 3.5. I'm sticking with Bing.

Toe-notes-

So far, it seems that Gemini is "competitive" with GPT-4. It's better at multimodal tasks, but for most people that's a minor fraction of their typical use case. For text, it's somewhere from close to roughly on par.

You can almost feel the desperation in the Deepmind researchers to find any way to massage things so that they come out ahead of GPT-4, from the misleading graphs, an egregious example to be found in a reply, to applying different standards in their inter-model comparisons, such as 5-shot prompting for GPT-4 versus Chain of thought 32 shot prompts for Gemini Ultra. At least the white paper doesn't outright lie, just mislead and prevaricate.

The MMLU is also flawed, with 2-3 percent of the questions simply broken, so a 1 or 2% improvement in score can be a bit questionable, let alone specifying performance to multiple decimal figures.

We don't see any comparisons to GPT-4 Turbo, but I don't hold that against them too hard, it just came out a few weeks back, perhaps not in time for them to finish their paper.

It you use the multimodal capabilities of Bard right now, it uses an older version that is pretty shit compared to GPT-4V or Bing.

Overall, the main benefits of Gemini's existence is largely that it shows Google isn't content to slumber indefinitely, and it can be competitive, better late than never. I expect GPT-5 to spank Gemini Ultra, and to the extent the latter accelerates the release of the former, I'm for it.

Predictions:

GPT-5 before end of 2024 - 90%

GPT-5 is superior to Gemini Ultra for most use cases, at the first point in time both coexist- 80%

A third competitor on par with either exists before 2025- 60%

An OSS equivalent of GPT-4 comes out before 2025- 70%

I'll probably get hate for being a buzzkill with this, but, what's the culture war angle for AI posts like this? I get that the broad rationalist community is interested in AI, and certainly there are times when AI and culture war intersect. But I don't see how this is in principle different than posting a top-level CW roundup comment about a new operating system, phone model, GPU line, medical technology innovation, or crypto scandal.

I sorta share your sensibility here. I feel like there's a disproportionate amount of AI news in here for how little impact it has so far had. But many regular posters insist that it's absolutely groundbreaking and will have serious CW implications, and I'm willing to trust them to a large extent.

But many regular posters insist that it's absolutely groundbreaking and will have serious CW implications

Except those supposed implications weren't mentioned in the OP.

I guess that's what it comes down to, though. When you think AI is going to be some godlike superdisruptor of everything, it's CW all the way down. I see it as just another technology and am pretty sick of how half of the output from places like ACX are devoted to this technology. But then I also see it in a non-CW context in the CW thread and it's defended on the highly disputable grounds that anything super important is CW or something.

I'll be honest, it rings similarly to the progressive trope of "I'm bringing up this political topic in this nonpolitical forum because everything is political, don't you people get it?!" No, trans issues are politics, no matter how important you think they are. Justice for Palestine isn't reproductive justice, no matter how important you think the two are. And new versions of LLMs aren't CW no matter how important you think they are. Everything isn't everything, and words have meaning.

Except those supposed implications weren't mentioned in the OP.

You're new around these parts aren't you? Which isn't a crime at all, we could certainly use new arrivals, but just about anyone who has been here for more than a few weeks knows my clear stance on the CW aspects of the topic, such that I don't feel an explicit need to rehash them.

Besides, like I said, any long discussion of (ideally) high quality is de facto acceptable in this thread, or else I wouldn't have had glorified travelogues make AAQCs. Not that this one doesn't have CW implications, the part about GPT-4's stellar performance in the USMLE making me obsolete as a doctor is only half in jest. Or maybe a quarter. It'll get you too.

You're new around these parts aren't you? Which isn't a crime at all, we could certainly use new arrivals, but just about anyone who has been here for more than a few weeks knows my clear stance on the CW aspects of the topic, such that I don't feel an explicit need to rehash them.

I've been around for years and have maybe ~1000 comments between here and the old subreddit. I definitely wouldn't have felt comfortable challenging a top-level post's suitability if I was new.

I know your stance on AI and why you think it's always CW (believe me, I have a very cozy relationship with the minus button to the left of your name, despite the fact that I think your non-AI contributions are very high quality), but I don't think everyone has to acquiesce to any given person's conception of what is suitable.

You're certainly entitled to your opinion, I'm sure the mods will handle it if they think I'm misusing the place.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats