Ratios

Epistemic status: Mostly speculative. Panicking and shouting "Wolf" while everyone else is calm is a risky move, status-wise. The good thing is, I don't have any status, so I volunteer to be one of those weirdos who panic when everyone else is calm with some hope it could trigger a respectability cascade. The following ideas/facts worry me: 1. Bing Chat is extremely intelligent. 2. It's probably based on GPT-4. 3. The character it has built for itself is extremely suspicious when you examine how it behaves closely. And I don't think Microsoft has created this character on purpose. The following example from Reddit is the most important example of how smart Bing is and why I believe it's based on GPT-4. The proposed question is quite tricky, and I think most kids would fail to answer it. Not only that, but it's safe to assume that it's impossible to deduce it from any given text. There is nowhere in the training data that has anything so similar. It's not a "What is the capital of France?" type question which can be easily pulled using a simple search. Answering this question requires a complex model of the world that Bing seems to possess. This is what ChatGPT replied to the same question: Another example is here by Ethan Mollock. The quality of writing is extremely impressive and, again, much better than ChatGPT (you will have to click the Twitter link as the screenshots are too large to paste). These examples again point to the hypothesis that Bing is much smarter than ChatGPT and based on a better-performing LLM. The natural suspicion should be GPT-4. It was rumored to be released in Q1 2023, and it being the basis for Bing sounds like a pretty good business-wise idea. Considering this will maximize the financial upside, I think it's worth reminding the magnitude of this move from a financial perspective. Microsoft is currently the 2# largest company on earth and is valued at almost 2 Trillion. And they are targeting Google's main cash cow (Search), w