Uhh this first happening in 2023 was the exact prediction Gary Marcus made last year: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/artificial-intelligence-language
Not sure whether this instance is a capability or alignment issue though. Is the LLM just too unreliable, as Gary Marcus is saying? Or is it perfectly capable, and just misaligned?
I don't see why communicating with an AI through a BCI is necessarily better than through a keyboard+screen. Just because a BCI is more ergonomic and the AI might feel more like "a part of you", it won't magically be better aligned.
In fact the BCI option seems way scarier to me. An AI that can read my thoughts at any time and stimulate random neurons in my brain at will? No, thanks. This scenario just feels like you are handing it the "breaking out of the box" option on a silver platter.
Why is this being downvoted?
From what I am seeing people here are focusing way too much on having a precisely calibrated P(doom) value.
It seems that even if P(doom) is 1% the doom scenario should be taken very seriously and alignment research pursued to the furthest extent possible.
The probability that after much careful calibration and research you would come up with a P(doom) value less than 1% seems very unlikely to me. So why invest time into refining your estimate?
There was a recent post estimating that GTP-3 is equivalent to about 175 bees. There is also a comment there asserting that a human is about 140k bees.
I would be very interested if someone could explain where this huge discrepancy comes from. (One estimate is equating synapses with parameters, while this one is based on FLOPS. But there shouldn't be such a huge difference.)
Indeed (as other commenters also pointed out) the ability to sexually reproduce seems to be much more prevalent than I originally thought when writing the above comment. (I thought that eukaryotes only capable of asexual reproduction were relatively common, but it seems that there may only be a very few special cases like that.)
I still disagree with you dismissing the importance of mitochondria though. (I don't think the OP is saying that mitochondria alone are sufficient for larger genomes, but the argument for why they are at least necessary is convincing to me.)
I disagree with English (in principle at least) being inadequate for software specification.
For any commercial software, the specification basically is just "make profit for this company". The rest is implementation detail.
(Obviously this is an absurd example, but it illustrates how you can express abstractions in English that you can't in C++.)
I don't think the comparison of giving a LLM instructions and expecting correct code to be output is fair. You are vastly overestimating the competence of human programmers: when was the last time you wrote perfectly correct code on the very first try?
Giving the LLM the ability to run its code and modify it until it thinks its right would be a much fairer comparison. And if, as you say, writing unit tests is easy for a LLM, wouldn't that just make this trial-and-error loop trivial? You can just bang the LLM against the problem until the unit tests pass.
(And this process obviously won't produce bug-free code, but humans don't do that in the first place either.)
Not all eukaryotes employ sexual reproduction. Also prokaryotes do have some mechanisms for DNA exchange as well, so copying errors are not their only chance for evolution either.
But I do agree that it's probably no coincidence that the most complex life forms are sexually reproducing eukaryotes.
I barely registered the difference between small talk and big talk
I am still confused about what "small talk" is after reading this post.
Sure, talking about the weather is definitely small talk. But if I want to get to know somebody, weather talk can't possibly last for more than 30 seconds. After that, both parties have demonstrated the necessary conversational skills to move on to more interesting topics. And the "getting to know each other" phase is really just a spectrum between surface level stuff and your deepest personal secrets, so I don't really see where you would draw the line between small and deep talk.
One situation I struggle with on the other hand is when I would rather avoid talking to a person at all, and so I want to maintain the shallowest possible level of small talk. (Ideally I could tell them that "sorry, I would rather just not talk to you right now", but that's not really socially accepted.)
Any info on how this happened? This seems like a fairly serious supply chain attack. I have heard of incidents with individual malicious packages on npm or PyPI, but not one where multiple high profile packages in a software repository were infected in a coordinated manner.