(Original title: The Continual Learning Overhang, but too many Overhang posts) TL;DR Continual learning could lead to emergent causal understanding or agency and we should probably study it now before it’s too late. Current LLMs are very impressive but suffer from a few key missing pieces (Sarah Constantin): * They...
TL;DR Could a superintelligence be motivated to preserve lower life forms because it fears an even greater superintelligence? This 'motivation' takes the form of something like timeless decision theory. This is a thought experiment about a superintelligent AI. No doubt the situation is more complicated than this, so I will...
Awesome ideas! These ideas are some of the things missing for LLMs to have economic impact. Companies expected them to just automate certain jobs, but that's an all or nothing solution that's never worked historically (until it eventually does, but we're not there yet).
One idea I thought of when reading Scott Aaronson's Reading Burden (https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8217), is that people with interesting opinions and with somewhat of a public presence, have a TON of reading to do, not just to keep up with current events, but to observe people's reactions and see the trend in ideas in response to events. Perhaps this can be improved with LLMs:
Give the model a collection of your writings... (read more)
I'll probably get disagree points, but wanted to share my reaction: I honestly don't mind the AI's output. I read it all and think it's just an elaboration of what you said. The only problem I noticed is it is too long.
Then again, I'm not an amazing writer, and my critical skills aren't so great for critiquing style. I will admit I rarely use assistance, because I have a tight set of points I want to include, and explaining them all to the AI is almost the same as writing the post itself.
Thanks for this post! I have always been annoyed when on Reddit or even here, the response to poverty always goes back to, "but poor people have cell phones!" It all comes down to freedom -- the amount of meaningfully distinct actions one person can take in the world to accomplish their goals. If there are few real alternatives, and one's best options all involve working until exhaustion, it is not true freedom.
I agree, the poverty restoring equilibrium is more complex than probably UBI -- maybe it's part of Moloch. I think the rents increasing by the UBI amount has something to do with demand inelasticity -- people will rent the same... (read more)
Not my worst prediction, given the latest news!
That's fair. Here are some things to consider:
1 - I think 2017 was not that long ago. My hunch is that the low level architecture of the network itself is not a bottleneck yet. I'd lean on more training procedures and algorithms. I'd throw RLHF and MoE as significant developments, and those are even more recent.
2 - I give maybe 30% chance of a stall, in the case little commercial disruption comes of LLMs. I think there will still be enough research going on at the major labs, and even universities at a smaller scale gives a decent chance at efficiency gains and stuff the big labs can incorporate. Then again, if we agree that they won't build the power plant, that is also my main way of stalling the timeline 10 years. The reason I only put 30% is I'm expecting multi modalities and Aschenbrenner's "unhobblings" to get the industry a couple more years of chances to find profit.
I think it is plausible but not obvious if this is the case, that large language models have a fundamental issue with reasoning. However, I don't think this greatly impacts timelines. Here is my thinking:
I think time lines are fundamentally driven by scale and compute. We have a lot of smart people working on the problem, and there are a lot of obvious ways to address these limitations. Of course, given how research works, most of these ideas won't work, but I am skeptical of the idea that such a counter-intuitive paradigm shift is needed that nobody has even conceived of it yet. A delay of a couple of years is possible, perhaps if the current tech stack proves remarkably profitable and the funding goes directly into the current paradigm. But as compute becomes bigger and cheaper, all the more easy it will be to rapidly try new ideas and architectures.
I think our best path forward to delaying timelines is to not build gigawatt scale data centers.
Is there a post in the Sequences about when it is justifiable to not pursue going down a rabbit hole? It's a fairly general question, but the specific context is a tale as old as time. My brother, who has been an atheist for decades, moved to Utah. After 10 years, he now asserts that he was wrong and his "rigorous pursuit" of verifying with logic and his own eyes, leads him to believe the Bible is literally true. I worry about his mental health so I don't want to debate him, but felt like I should give some kind of justification for why I'm not personally embarking on a bible study.... (read more)
I would pay to see this live at a bar or one of those county fair (we had a GLaDOS cover band once so it's not out of the question)
If we don't get a song like that, take comfort that GLaDoS's songs from the Portal soundtrack are basically the same idea as the Sydney reference. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVVZaZ8yO6o
(Original title: The Continual Learning Overhang, but too many Overhang posts)
TL;DR Continual learning could lead to emergent causal understanding or agency and we should probably study it now before it’s too late.
Current LLMs are very impressive but suffer from a few key missing pieces (Sarah Constantin):
TL;DR Could a superintelligence be motivated to preserve lower life forms because it fears an even greater superintelligence? This 'motivation' takes the form of something like timeless decision theory.
This is a thought experiment about a superintelligent AI. No doubt the situation is more complicated than this, so I will pose some concerns I have at the end. I wonder if this idea can be useful in any capacity, if this idea has not already been discussed.
An AI can have any value function that it aims to optimize. However, instrumental convergence can happen regardless of underlying values. Different nations have different values, but can work together because none of them have decisive... (read 682 more words →)
I think the state handling child rearing is the long term solution. The need for new people is a society wide problem and not ultimately one of personal responsibility. Of course people should still be free to do it on their own if they want. It'll be weird that not everyone will have traditional parents, but I think we can figure it out. Maybe a mandatory or highly incentivized big brother/ sister program would help make it more nurturing.