Imagine if instead of developing them, we were like, “we need to stop here because we don’t understand EXACTLY how this works… and maybe for good measure we should bomb anyone who we think is continuing development, because it seems like transistors could be dangerous[1]”?
Claims that the software/networks are “unknown unknowns” which we have “no idea” about are patently false, inappropriate for a “rational” discourse, and basically just hyperbolic rhetoric. And to dismiss with a wave how draconian regulation (functionally/demonstrably impossible, re: cloning) of these software enigmas would need to be, while advocating bombardment of rouge datacenters?!?
Frankly I’m sad that it’s FUD that gets the likes here on LW— what with all it’s purported to be a bastion of.
I know for a fact there will be a lot of heads here who think this would have been FANTASTIC, since without transistors, we wouldn’t have created digital watches— which inevitably led to the creation of AI; the most likely outcome of which is inarguably ALL BIOLOGICAL LIFE ON EARTH DIES
No, it’s not, because we have a pretty good idea of how transistors work and in fact someone needed to directly anticipate how they might work in order to engineer them. The “unknown” part about the deep learning models is not the network layer or the software that uses the inscrutable matrices, it’s how the model is getting the answers that it does.
I think he’s referring to the understanding of the precise mechanics of how transistors worked, or why the particular first working prototypes functioned while all the others didn’t. Just from skimming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_transistor
That’s the current understanding for llms—people do know at a high level what an llm does and why it works, just like there were theories decades before working transistors on their function. But the details of why this system works but 50 other things tried didn’t is not known.
The transistor is a neat example.
Imagine if instead of developing them, we were like, “we need to stop here because we don’t understand EXACTLY how this works… and maybe for good measure we should bomb anyone who we think is continuing development, because it seems like transistors could be dangerous[1]”?
Claims that the software/networks are “unknown unknowns” which we have “no idea” about are patently false, inappropriate for a “rational” discourse, and basically just hyperbolic rhetoric. And to dismiss with a wave how draconian regulation (functionally/demonstrably impossible, re: cloning) of these software enigmas would need to be, while advocating bombardment of rouge datacenters?!?
Frankly I’m sad that it’s FUD that gets the likes here on LW— what with all it’s purported to be a bastion of.
I know for a fact there will be a lot of heads here who think this would have been FANTASTIC, since without transistors, we wouldn’t have created digital watches— which inevitably led to the creation of AI; the most likely outcome of which is inarguably ALL BIOLOGICAL LIFE ON EARTH DIES
No, it’s not, because we have a pretty good idea of how transistors work and in fact someone needed to directly anticipate how they might work in order to engineer them. The “unknown” part about the deep learning models is not the network layer or the software that uses the inscrutable matrices, it’s how the model is getting the answers that it does.
Yes, it is, because it took like five years to understand minority-carrier injection.
I think he’s referring to the understanding of the precise mechanics of how transistors worked, or why the particular first working prototypes functioned while all the others didn’t. Just from skimming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_transistor
That’s the current understanding for llms—people do know at a high level what an llm does and why it works, just like there were theories decades before working transistors on their function. But the details of why this system works but 50 other things tried didn’t is not known.