I am struggling to find anything in Zack’s post which is not just the old wine of the “just” fallacy [...] learned more about the power and generality of ‘next token prediction’ etc than you have what they were trying to debunk.
I wouldn’t have expected you to get anything out of this post!
Okay, if you project this post into a one-dimensional “AI is scary and mysterious” vs. “AI is not scary and not mysterious” culture war subspace, then I’m certainly writing in a style that mood-affiliates with the latter. The reason I’m doing that is because the picture of what deep learning is that I got from being a Less Wrong-er felt markedly different from the picture I’m getting from reading the standard textbooks, and I’m trying to supply that diff to people who (like me-as-of-eight-months-ago, and unlike Gwern) haven’t read the standard textbooks yet.
I think this is a situation where different readers need to hear different things. I’m sure there are grad students somewhere who already know the math and could stand to think more about what its power and generality imply about the future of humanity or lack thereof. I’m not particularly well-positioned to help them. But I also think there are a lot of people on this website who have a lot of practice pontificating about the future of humanity or lack thereof, who don’t know that Simon Prince and Christopher Bishop don’t think of themselves as writing about agents. I think that’s a problem! (One which I am well-positioned to help with.) If my attempt to remediate that particular problem ends up mood-affiliating with the wrong side of a one-dimensional culture war, maybe that’s because the one-dimensional culture war is crazy and we should stop doing it.
I don’t object to ironic exercises like “A Modest Proposal” or “On The Impossibility of Supersized Machines”, but it can certainly be difficult to write and ensure the message gets across, and I don’t think it does here.
I wouldn’t have expected you to get anything out of this post!
Okay, if you project this post into a one-dimensional “AI is scary and mysterious” vs. “AI is not scary and not mysterious” culture war subspace, then I’m certainly writing in a style that mood-affiliates with the latter. The reason I’m doing that is because the picture of what deep learning is that I got from being a Less Wrong-er felt markedly different from the picture I’m getting from reading the standard textbooks, and I’m trying to supply that diff to people who (like me-as-of-eight-months-ago, and unlike Gwern) haven’t read the standard textbooks yet.
I think this is a situation where different readers need to hear different things. I’m sure there are grad students somewhere who already know the math and could stand to think more about what its power and generality imply about the future of humanity or lack thereof. I’m not particularly well-positioned to help them. But I also think there are a lot of people on this website who have a lot of practice pontificating about the future of humanity or lack thereof, who don’t know that Simon Prince and Christopher Bishop don’t think of themselves as writing about agents. I think that’s a problem! (One which I am well-positioned to help with.) If my attempt to remediate that particular problem ends up mood-affiliating with the wrong side of a one-dimensional culture war, maybe that’s because the one-dimensional culture war is crazy and we should stop doing it.
I don’t object to ironic exercises like “A Modest Proposal” or “On The Impossibility of Supersized Machines”, but it can certainly be difficult to write and ensure the message gets across, and I don’t think it does here.