joe

You haven’t answered my questions, hence why I still have questions. I promise you that, even if it’s the last comment I make to you, I will answer your questions. They’re not the gotcha you apparently believe them to be and are essentially a waste of time to answer, but they appear super important so I will get to them.

First I want to understand your stance. All I’ve got now is that a blog said AI isn’t actually dangerous, and you concur. Why do you think this?

I know it has already been said, but even your tactics resemble anti-intellectualism. You don’t need to keep hammering the same questions; I will get to them. Calm down, there isn’t a prize at the end; there is no winner or loser. We’re just having a discussion. Breathe.

That link didn’t answer my question, so I have to ask more questions. Are you saying that AI will not (can not?) be a threat to humanity, ever? And is the rationale for that conclusion because you don’t think AI actually works?

I dont believe it requires sapience; that is what the marketers are saying. The AI boom (and many historic boom cycles) is predicated on marketing and sentiment, not facts and data. That is why they always pop; the facts dont back up the hype.

I think there is some confusion. I do not believe AGI implies sapience, nor does Google, and now it seems that you don’t either. So who is discussing sapience?

If this is working, where’s the company with runaway success creating unimagined leaps in productivity and technology?

Hypothetically speaking, what do you think this would look like?

Slow down, sir or ma’am. We’ll get to your questions, I promise.

What does “AI Doomerism” mean? I am not familiar with the term.

I answered your non sequitur as a show of good faith. Your turn: what precisely is the stance you’re arguing here?

I don’t understand the question. Yudkowsky’s book is on my reading list, but judging by the title, I assumed it to be more on the side of restricting AI research, which best aligns with what I think (but suspiciously you refuse to clarify) your stance is.

When I said “the experts” I meant all the people working on AI at these frontier AI companies. You know, the experts?

As far as I am aware, AGI does not imply sapience, consciousness, or whatever. You seem to believe it does. A high level Google search seems to suggest that I’m correct. Is there some reason you are lumping sapience with AGI?

I’m not sure if the rest of your comment presupposes this, so I’ll wait to comment on where I think you’re mistaken.

If you don’t like that comparison, I suggest you take a hard look at how you’ve approached this topic.

I will happily continue this discussion once I (and presumably you) understand what you’re actually arguing.

The point of the “its not going away” comment is because a shocking number of people think the solution to AI is to, I dunno, delete it.

As a technology, it is out in the world. It isn’t going away any more than electricity or the internet. So any solutions to the real problems with AI that are essentially “make it go away” are essentially nonsense. Might as well propose wishing it away with a genie.

“It’s not going away” is not equivalent to “there’s nothing we can do to solve the problems”; it just means that the solution has to be in a framework where it is implemented alongside AI.

Which country is doing the ordering?

I do not consider the CEOs as experts, no.

You’re not making coherent arguments; it really is like discussing vaccines with an antivaxxer. Maybe take a step back and explain to me what your stance actually is? Bonus points if you learn just a layman’s level understanding of the technology before you post your response.

Computer science is still science. You distrust the experts in the field based on what? Something you saw on social media? Certainly not your own expertise, that much is clear.

Don’t move the goalposts. No one is claiming that “AI” doesn’t have downsides. That’s different than your original claim that they didn’t do what they appear to do.

I don’t suppose you happen to be in a field threatened by AI? In my anecdotal experience, the people that desperately want to pretend AI is all a scam are actually worried about the opposite, and their job. (A real concern I’m in no way trying to minimize.)

That is where the evidence points. Now, I don’t want to oversell it: “where the evidence points” is wildly different than “exactly how it works”.

We have an emergent property that we don’t understand, but we can reliably increase the functionally and complexity of that emergent property as a function of training data and available compute. Does that mean that there isn’t some threshold where that stops working? No, there certainly could be a point where throwing more information and compute has no effect. We just don’t know. However, so far, there is no evidence such a barrier exists, and everyone is racing to find out.

That paper doesn’t seem to rule out AGI, only an single LLM model that can answer every arbitrarily difficult question on demand.

AGI does not necessarily mean one model acting alone, or being able to answer any question on demand. Humans are the same way: we often need time or collaboration to arrive at conclusions, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have “general intelligence”.

I meant no insult, truly. You just don’t have the minimum required knowledge to discuss this intelligently. There’s no shame in that; no one can know everything.

I can’t know the motives of anyone, but I can say it’s at least plausible that the people working on the frontier models want an excuse to slow down that doesn’t give an advantage to other countries and companies, and also doesn’t put them in the crosshairs of investors and board members.

You apparently still internalize LLMs as fancy Markov chains, which tells me that you don’t have a working grasp to discuss the topic, even at the laymen level we’re at.

These hacking events may be “PR Stunts”, but the “stunt” part would be leaving a known vulnerability as a path to the wider Internet instead of making it physically impossible to break out, not the hacking of other websites. No one credible is disputing that these models are capable of hacking.

Your opinion is borne from lack of knowledge about the topic you’re trying to discuss, similar to an anti-vaxxer attempting to discuss the dangers of mRNA vaccines.

Fix your lack of knowledge or don’t; that’s your call, but if you care about discussing this topic somewhat intelligently, you should probably put in some effort to understand it.

The groups doing frontier research with the appropriate funding are few enough that a global pause would be possible, and useful.

I agree that a ban would be impossible, and counterproductive even if it were possible.

Any pause will have to be a global treaty; the unfortunate reality is that we’re in an arms race now, and despite Sanders’ threats otherwise, I don’t think there is going to be much will to pause in the US while China keeps developing.

And to be clear, I think it would be every wise to pause development and, afterwards, keep the pace slow. We know how to make “AI” more capable, but we don’t know how to make it stay aligned with human goals. The technology is useful and isn’t going anywhere, but that doesn’t mean we have to develop it as quickly as possible without regard to the real dangers it brings with it.

They were being pretty vague, but it could be something like “25 characters after every comma used, put a vowel. 25 characters after that vowel, put a space. 25 characters after that space, put a period.” (Except much more complex than what I made up.) The point is to string together a text pattern that is so exact that it can’t be just a coincidence.

The “watermark” is the text, so when you copy the text, you’re also copying the watermark. It’s also why they say it might not be conclusive if the text output is manually edited, or the output is too short.

Not for nothing, I think these types of endeavors are going to have unintended consequences. Despite them flat out saying that the lack of a watermark doesn’t mean it wasn’t AI generated, I think it’s very plausible that the proliferation of watermarks will lend credibility to anything without a watermark.

I would love it if you’d point me at these mathematical proofs.