First, let me say that what broke me from the herd at lesswrong was specifically the calls for AI pauses. That somehow ‘rationalists’ are so certain advanced AI will kill everyone in the future (pDoom = 100%!) that they need to commit any violent act needed to stop AI from being developed.
The flaw here is that there’s 8 billion people alive right now, and we don’t actually know what the future is. There are ways better AI could help the people living now, possibly saving their lives, and essentially eliezer yudkowsky is saying “fuck em”. This could only be worth it if you actually somehow knew trillions of people were going to exist, had a low future discount rate, and so on. This seems deeply flawed, and seems to be one of the points here.
But I do think advanced AI is possible. And while it may not be a mainstream take yet, it seems like the problems current AI can’t solve, like robotics, continuous learning, module reuse - the things needed to reach a general level of capabilities and for AI to do many but not all human jobs - are near future. I can link deepmind papers with all of these, published in 2022 or 2023.
And if AI can be general and control robots, and since making robots is a task human technicians and other workers can do, this does mean a form of Singularity is possible. Maybe not the breathless utopia by Ray Kurzweil but a fuckton of robots.
So I was wondering what the people here generally think. There are “boomer” forums I know of where they also generally deny AI is possible anytime soon, claim GPT-n is a stochastic parrot, and make fun of tech bros as being hypesters who collect 300k to edit javascript and drive Teslas*.
I also have noticed that the whole rationalist schtick of “what is your probability” seems like asking for “joint probabilities”, aka smoke a joint and give a probability.
Here’s my questions:
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Before 2030, do you consider it more likely than not that current AI techniques will scale to human level in at least 25% of the domains that humans can do, to average human level.
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Do you consider it likely, before 2040, those domains will include robotics
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If AI systems can control robotics, do you believe a form of Singularity will happen. This means hard exponential growth of the number of robots, scaling past all industry on earth today by at least 1 order of magnitude, and off planet mining soon to follow. It does not necessarily mean anything else.
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Do you think that mass transition where most human jobs we have now will become replaced by AI systems before 2040 will happen
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Is AI system design an issue. I hate to say “alignment”, because I think that’s hopeless wankery by non software engineers, but given these will be robotic controlling advanced decision-making systems, will it require lots of methodical engineering by skilled engineers, with serious negative consequences when the work is sloppy?
*“epistemic status”: I uh do work for a tech company, my job title is machine learning engineer, my girlfriend is much younger than me and sometimes fucks other dudes, and we have 2 Teslas…
it’s the S in TESCREAL, if that doesn’t answer your question you have some more deprogramming to do (and we are not your exit counselors)
Consider a flying saucer cult. Clearly a cult, great leader, mothership coming to pick everyone up, things will be great.
…What if telescopes show a large object decelerating into the solar system, the flaw from the matter annihilation engine clearly visible. You can go pay $20 a month and rent a telescope and see the flare.
The cult uh points out their “sequences” of writings by the Great Leader and some stuff is lining up with the imminent arrival of this interstellar vehicle.
My point is that lesswrong knew about GPT-3 years before the mainstream found it, many OpenAI employees post there etc. If the imminent arrival of AI is fake - like the hyped idea of bitcoin going to infinity or replacing real currency, or NFTs - that would be one thing. But I mean, pay $20 a month and man this tool seems to be smart, what could it do if it could learn from it’s mistakes and had the vision module deployed…
Oh and I guess the other plot twist in this analogy : the Great Leader is saying the incoming alien vehicle will kill everyone, tearing up his own Sequences of rants, and that’s actually not a totally unreasonable outcome if you could see an alien spacecraft approaching earth.
And he’s saying to do stupid stuff like nuke each other so the aliens will go away and other unhinged rants, and his followers are eating it up.
you’ve changed my mind, we should introduce Eliezer to seminal work of J. Posadas
We just nuke the datacenters, then aliens will come down and hand us the aligned symbolic AGI, which in turn will teach us communism, water birth and communication with porpoises? WTF I love TREACLESP now!
Look more carefully at what the cult leader is asking for. He was asking for money for his project before, now he’s tearing his hair out in despair because we haven’t spent enough money on his project, we’d better tell the aliens to give us another few months so we can spend more money on the cult project.
He has been very careful not to say that we should do anything bad to the aliens, just people who don’t agree with him about how we should talk to the aliens.
…What if telescopes show a large object decelerating into the solar system, the flaw from the matter annihilation engine clearly visible. You can go pay $20 a month and rent a telescope and see the flare.
if the only telescopes showing this object are the ones that must be rented from the cult and its offshoots, then it’s pretty obvious some bullshit is up, isn’t it? maybe the institution designed and optimized to trick your human brain into wholeheartedly believing things that don’t match with reality has succeeded, because it has poured a lot more time and money into tricking you than you could possibly know
My point is that lesswrong knew about GPT-3 years before the mainstream found it, many OpenAI employees post there etc. If the imminent arrival of AI is fake - like the hyped idea of bitcoin going to infinity or replacing real currency, or NFTs - that would be one thing. But I mean, pay $20 a month and man this tool seems to be smart, what could it do if it could learn from it’s mistakes and had the vision module deployed…
didn’t lesswrong bank on an entire different set of AI technology until very recently, and a lot of the tantrums we’re seeing from yud stem from his failure to predict or even understand LLMs?
I keep seeing this idea that all GPT needs to be true AI is more permanence and (this is wild to me) a robotic body with which to interact with the world. if that’s it, why not try it out? you’ve got a selection of vector databases that’d work for permanence, and a big variety of cheap robotics kits that speak g-code, which is such a simple language I’m very certain GPT can handle it. what happens when you try this experiment?
a final point I guess — there’s a lot of overlap here with the anti-cryptocurrency community. it sounds like we’re in agreement that cryptocurrency tech is a gigantic scam; that the idea of number going up into infinity is bunk. but something I’ve noticed is that folk with cryptocurrency jobs could not come to that realization, that when your paycheck relies on internalizing a set of ideas that contradict reality, most folk will choose the paycheck (at least for a while — cognitive dissonance is a hard comedown and a lot of folks exited the cryptocurrency space when the paycheck no longer masked the pain)
Just to be clear, you can build your own telescope now and see the incoming spacecraft.
Right now you can go task GPT-4 with solving a problem about equal to undergrad physics, let it use plugins, and it will generally get it done. It’s real.
Maybe this is the end of the improvements, just like maybe the aliens will not actually enter orbit around earth.
I keep seeing this idea that all GPT needs to be true AI is more permanence and (this is wild to me) a robotic body with which to interact with the world. if that’s it, why not try it out? you’ve got a selection of vector databases that’d work for permanence, and a big variety of cheap robotics kits that speak g-code, which is such a simple language I’m very certain GPT can handle it. what happens when you try this experiment?
??? I don’t believe GPT-n is ready for direct robotics control at a human level because it was never trained on it, and you need to use a modification on transformers for the architecture, see https://www.deepmind.com/blog/rt-2-new-model-translates-vision-and-language-into-action . And a bunch of people have tried your experiment with some results https://github.com/GT-RIPL/Awesome-LLM-Robotics .
In addition to tinker with LLMs you need to be GPU-rich, or have the funding of about 250-500m. My employer does but I’m a cog in the machine. https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-gemini-eats-the-world-gemini
What I think is the underlying technology that made GPT-4 possible can be made to drive robots to human level at some tasks, though if you note I think it may take to 2040 to be good, and that technology mostly just includes the idea of using lots of data, neural networks, and a mountain of GPUs.
Oh and RSI. That’s the wildcard. This is where you automate AI research, including developing models that can drive a robot, using current AI as a seed. If that works, well. And yes there are papers where it does work. .