This is a tiny corner of the internet (Timnit Gebru and friends) and probably not worth engaging with, since they consider themselves diametrically opposed to techies/rationalists/etc and will not engage with them in good faith. They are also probably a single-digit number of people, albeit a group really good at getting under techies' skin.
Re: blameless postmortems, i think the primary reason for blamelessness is because if you have blameful postmortems, they will rapidly transform (at least in perception) into punishments, and consequently will not often occur except when management is really cheesed off at someone. This was how the postmortem system ended up at Amazon while i was there.
Blameful postmortems also result in workers who are very motivated to hide issues they have caused, which is obviously unproductive.
Reasonable points, all! I agree that the conflation of legality and morality has warped the discourse around this; in particular the idea of Stable Diffusion and such regurgitating copyrighted imagery strikes me as a red herring, since the ability to do this is as old as the photocopier and legally quite well-understood.
It actually does seem to me, then, that style copying is a bigger problem than straightforward regurgitation, since new images in a style are the thing that you would ordinarily need to go to an artist for; but the biggest problem of all i...
Interestingly i believe this is a limitation that one of the newest (as yet unreleased) diffusion models has overcome, called DeepFloyd; a number of examples have been teased already, such as the following Corgi sitting in a sushi doghouse:
https://twitter.com/EMostaque/status/1615884867304054785?t=jmvO8rvQOD1YJ56JxiWQKQ&s=19
As such the quoted paragraphs surprised me as an instance of a straightforwardly falsifiable claim in the documents.
I think that your son is incorrectly analogizing heroin/other opiate cravings to be similar to "desire for sugar" or "desire to use X social media app" or whatever. These are not comparable. People do not get checked into sugar rehab clinics (which they subsequently break out of); they do not burn down each one of their social connections to get to use an hour of TikTok or whatever; they do not break their own arms in order to get to go to the ER which then pumps them full of Twitter likes. They do routinely do these things, and worse, to...
I actually think you can get an acceptable picture of whether something is priced in by reading stock analysts on the topic, since one useful thing you can get from them is a holistic perspective of what is on/off the radar of finance types, and what they perceive as important.
Having done this for various stocks, i actually do not think LLM-based advances are on anyone's radar and i do not believe they are priced in meaningfully.
I don't think i ever heard about tesla doing LLM stuff, which seems like the most relevant paradigm for TAI purposes. Can you elaborate?
One possible options play is puts on shutterstock, since as of about 2 weeks ago midjourney got up to a level where you can for a pittance replicate the most common and popular stock image varieties at an extremely high level of quality. (E.g. girl holding a credit card and smiling).
I think the most likely way this shakes out is adobe integrates image generation with figma and its other products, leaving "buying a stock image" as an increasingly niche and limited option for people who want an image to decorate a thing where they aren't all that particular about what the image is.
Primary question to me is on what time scale the SSTK business model dissolves in, since these changes take time.
Having a Ph.D. confers relatively few benefits outside of academia. The writing style and skills taught in academia are very very different from that of industry, and the opportunity cost of pursuing a Ph.D. vs going into software engineering (or something similarly renumerative) is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I would suggest that if you don't know exactly what you want to do with your life, you would be well-suited to doing something that earns you a bunch of money. This money can later be used to finance grander ambitions when you have figu...
My response comes in two parts.
First part! Even if, by chance, we successfully detect and turn off the first AGI (say, Deepmind's), that just means we're "safe" until Facebook releases its new AGI. Without an alignment solution, this is a game we play more or less forever until either (A) we figure out alignment, (B) we die, or (C) we collectively, every nation, shutter all AI development forever. (C) seems deeply unlikely given the world's demonstrated capabilities around collective action.
Second part:
I like Bitcoin as a proof-of-concept...
"If you think this is a simplistic or distorted version of what EY is saying, you are not paying attention. If you think that EY is merely saying that an AGI can kill a big fraction of humans in accident and so on but there will be survivors, you are not paying attention."
Not sure why this functions as a rebuttal to anything i'm saying.
You ask elsewhere for commenters to sit down and think for 5 minutes about why an agi might fail. This seems beside the point, since averting human exctinction doesn't require averting one possible attack from an agi. It involves averting every single one of them, because if even one succeeds everyone dies.
In this it's similar to human security-- "why might a hacker fail" is not an interesting question to system designers, because the hacker gets as many attempts as he wants. For what attempts might look like, i think other posts have provided some reas...
I'm not sure whether the unspoken context of this comment is "We tried to hire Terry Tao and he declined, citing lack of interest in AI alignment" vs "we assume, based on not having been contacted by Terry Tao, that he is not interested in AI alignment."
If the latter: the implicit assumption seems to be that if Terry Tao would find AI alignment to be an interesting project, we should strongly expect him to both know about it and have approached MIRI regarding it, neither which seems particularly likely given the low public profile of both AI alignment in general and MIRI in particular.
If the former: bummer.
From a rando outsider's perspective, MIRI has not made any public indication that they are funding-constrained, particularly given that their donation page says explicitly that:
We’re not running a formal fundraiser this year but are participating in end-of-year matching events, including Giving Tuesday.
Which more or less sounds like "we don't need any more money but if you want to give us some that's cool"
It might be worth doing some goal-factoring on why you want the PhD in the first place.
If you just want to advance human knowledge, one plausible option is to get a fancy tech job, save up enough money to fund the project you're interested in, then commission someone to do the project. Feasibility naturally depends on the specifics of the project.
PhDs can involve dealing with a lot of financial insecurity and oftentimes personal hardship to get through (with six years of opportunity cost and no guarantee of getting funding for your research interests at the end), so it's probably worth verifying that a PhD is actually your best option for whatever your personal goals are.
> Give Terrence Tao 500 000$ to work on AI alignement six months a year, letting him free to research crazy Navier-Stokes/Halting problem links the rest of his time... If money really isn't a problem, this kind of thing should be easy to do.
Literally that idea has been proposed multiple times before that I know of, and probably many more times many years ago before I was around.
What was the response? (I mean, obviously it was "not interested", otherwise it would've happened by now, but why?)
I think you're totally right that to the extent that the stock market is a zero-sum game retail traders will lose almost every time, since the big players on the other end will always have more information and power to leverage that information than retail.
I think a lot of the relevance of this comment depends on your view of stock-market-as-casino vs stock-market-as-generator-of-wealth-at-several-steps-removed. I take the view that it's mostly the latter; widget maker IPOs, accepts money from big institutional IPO investor and buys capital with it i...
I'd like to see the intuition expanded upon here:
And yet when I write that, I start asking myself “but what is a dollar if not an investment that is only worth what someone else is willing to trade for it” and then “wait, what if a stock is a better investment than a dollar” and then “no no no no no investing on top of investing is like double risk”
Is it double risk? We're going from a situation where we're talking to a widget producer and saying "yes I would like to exchange a dollar for a widget" to a situation where we're saying "I would lik...
This is an interesting argument! I certainly acknowledge that if you can become non-obese via purely dietary means, that is best.
I wonder whether your analogy holds in the circumstance where dietary means have been attempted and failed, as often happens judging by the truly staggering number of posts online on this very topic-- whether becoming non-obese via medication constitutes a short-term win outweighed by long-term detriments, and whether the effects of the pills turn out to be more harmful than the original obesity it was meant to treat.
But it's not totally clear to me that you have attempted to make an affirmative case for this being true, as opposed to suggesting it as a pure hypothetical.
Oh, Wellbutrin (bupropion) is totally a thing you can use for weight loss, and is even found in Contrave (one of the drugs I listed) for that reason. Lesser effect, though, since its weight loss effects are additive with naltrexone.
Berberine is one I hadn't heard of before; unfortunately I can't find any articles discussing its use in weight loss.
I suppose that's reasonable, though i will point out that this is a fully-general argument against taking any drugs long-term at all.
Oh, I'm guessing based on purely correlational studies, with all the uncertainty and fuzziness that implies. Added a disclaimer to the relevant section to this effect, since it's worth calling out.
That said, I'd be shocked if the whole effect was due to confounders, since there are so many negative conditions comorbid with obesity, along with the existence of some animal studies also pointing in the direction of improved lifespan with caloric restriction.
Unfortunately, we don't have the ability to run controlled studies over a human lifespan, so we ...
Yup! It's branded as "Topamax", but I've heard that some users refer to it as "Stupamax" because of the brain fog effect. It doesn't sound awesome.
Also, it sounded like it increases probability of getting a kidney stone by a lot, though I'd need to track down the reference. All told, feels like one of the worse options out there.
As far as I understand it, "combination" drugs don't really do anything together that each component doesn't do alone. For example, bupropion causes weight loss if you take it alone; it just causes more when you pair it with naltrexone, which also causes weight loss.
Also, good point about highlighting the uncertainty; I've added a disclaimer to that effect at the beginning of the section.
Can you give any examples of that happening, where a drug reduces lifespan but not by causing any specific fatal effect?
All fair points! That said, I think extended lifespan is a very reasonable thing to expect, since IIRC from longevity research that caloric restriction extends lifespan (from animal studies); this seems like a very natural extrapolation from that.
I'd be concerned that our instincts toward vengeance in particular would result in extremely poor outcomes if you give humans near-unlimited power (which is mostly granted by being put in charge of an otherwise-sovereign AGI); one potential example is the AGI-controller sending a murderer to an artificial, semi-eternal version of Hell as punishment for his crimes. I believe there's a Black Mirror episode exploring this. In a hypothetical AGI good outcome, this cannot occur.
The idea of a committee of ordinary humans, ems, and semi-aligned AI whi...
I'd definitely agree with this. Human institutions are very bad at making a lot of extremely crucial decisions; the Stanislav Petrov story, the Holocaust, and the prison system are all pretty good examples of cases where the institutions humans have created have (1) been invested with a ton of power, human and technological, and (2) made really terrible decisions with that power which either could have or did cause untold suffering.
Which I guess is mostly a longer way of saying +1.
It's a beautiful dream, but I dunno, man. Have you ever seen Timnit engage charitably and in-good-faith with anyone she's ever disagreed publicly with?
And absent such charity and good faith, what good could come of any interaction whatsoever?