I don’t think this by itself should scare you very much. Why does it scare you? When there’s a surprising capability, we have to update up up on “woah, AI is more impressive than I thought”, and also up on “oh, that task is not as hard as I thought”. It turns out that sounding natural in written text without close reading, isn’t that hard. GPT-3 is going to tell you very little that’s true and useful and that it didn’t basically read somewhere(s). It can make new puns and similar, but that should not be surprising given word2vec (which is a decade old), and it can remix stuff by shallow association (to little benefit AFAIK). If someone wants to show that it’s doing something that’s more impressive than that, I’m interested, but you have to show that it’s not “getting it directly from the dataset”, which isn’t a perfectly clear test but I think is the right sort of question. (Examples of things that don’t get their impressiveness, if they have any, “directly from the dataset”: successful RL agents; automated theorem provers.) In other words, I think “scaling laws” are probably somewhat silly (or at least, the (possibly very straw) version that I’m imagining some people think). Algorithms that we know so far all seem to hit outer limits. It’s not like AlphaZero is effectively infinitely good at Chess or Go; it got really good really fast, and then hit an asymptote. (Though this is weak evidence, because it could also have hit some sort of actual upper limit, though that seems implausible.) GPT will get as far as you can get by squeezing more shallow patterns out of text, and then basically stop, is my retro- / pre-diction.
GPT-3 by itself shouldn’t scare you very much, I think, but as part of a pattern I think it’s scary.
“GPT-3 by itself shouldn’t scare you very much, I think, but as part of a pattern I think it’s scary.”
Exactly. Combining it with other parts, like an agent and something else, like an AI researcher whose name I can’t recall said in YouTube interview that I watched (titled something like “GPT-3 is the fire alarm for AGI” (reasons: GPT-2 was kinda dumb and just scalling the model turned into something drastically better, plus the combination aspect that I mentioned).
“Why is it crappy to be alive now? If you want a nice life, now’s fairly okay, esp. compared to most of history. If you’re worried about the future, best to be in the time that most matters, which is now, so you can do the most good. It does suck that there’s all that wasted potential though.”
Well isn’t it easy to tell?? Life is certainly more comfortable now, and mine certainly has been, but there’s a) the immense gloom of knowing the current situation, I don’t think any other human in history thought he or his fellow humans might come to face s-risk scenarios (except maybe those fooled by promises of Hell in religions, but I never saw any theist seriously stressed over it)
b) the possibility of being caught in a treacherous turn ending in s-risk scenario, making you paranoid 24⁄7 and considering… Well, bad things. That vastly outweighs any comfort advantage. Specially when your personal timelines are as short as mine.
And about helping… Again, sorry for being extremely depressing, but it’s just how it is: I don’t see any hope, don’t see any way out, specially because of, again, my short timelines, say 5-10 years. I’m with Eliezer that only a miracle can save us at this point. I started praying to a benevolent creator that might be listening, started hoping for aliens to save us, started hoping for the existence of Illuminati to save us, etc. such is my despair.
I don’t think this by itself should scare you very much. Why does it scare you? When there’s a surprising capability, we have to update up up on “woah, AI is more impressive than I thought”, and also up on “oh, that task is not as hard as I thought”. It turns out that sounding natural in written text without close reading, isn’t that hard. GPT-3 is going to tell you very little that’s true and useful and that it didn’t basically read somewhere(s). It can make new puns and similar, but that should not be surprising given word2vec (which is a decade old), and it can remix stuff by shallow association (to little benefit AFAIK). If someone wants to show that it’s doing something that’s more impressive than that, I’m interested, but you have to show that it’s not “getting it directly from the dataset”, which isn’t a perfectly clear test but I think is the right sort of question. (Examples of things that don’t get their impressiveness, if they have any, “directly from the dataset”: successful RL agents; automated theorem provers.) In other words, I think “scaling laws” are probably somewhat silly (or at least, the (possibly very straw) version that I’m imagining some people think). Algorithms that we know so far all seem to hit outer limits. It’s not like AlphaZero is effectively infinitely good at Chess or Go; it got really good really fast, and then hit an asymptote. (Though this is weak evidence, because it could also have hit some sort of actual upper limit, though that seems implausible.) GPT will get as far as you can get by squeezing more shallow patterns out of text, and then basically stop, is my retro- / pre-diction.
GPT-3 by itself shouldn’t scare you very much, I think, but as part of a pattern I think it’s scary.
“GPT-3 by itself shouldn’t scare you very much, I think, but as part of a pattern I think it’s scary.”
Exactly. Combining it with other parts, like an agent and something else, like an AI researcher whose name I can’t recall said in YouTube interview that I watched (titled something like “GPT-3 is the fire alarm for AGI” (reasons: GPT-2 was kinda dumb and just scalling the model turned into something drastically better, plus the combination aspect that I mentioned).
“Why is it crappy to be alive now? If you want a nice life, now’s fairly okay, esp. compared to most of history. If you’re worried about the future, best to be in the time that most matters, which is now, so you can do the most good. It does suck that there’s all that wasted potential though.”
Well isn’t it easy to tell?? Life is certainly more comfortable now, and mine certainly has been, but there’s a) the immense gloom of knowing the current situation, I don’t think any other human in history thought he or his fellow humans might come to face s-risk scenarios (except maybe those fooled by promises of Hell in religions, but I never saw any theist seriously stressed over it)
b) the possibility of being caught in a treacherous turn ending in s-risk scenario, making you paranoid 24⁄7 and considering… Well, bad things. That vastly outweighs any comfort advantage. Specially when your personal timelines are as short as mine.
And about helping… Again, sorry for being extremely depressing, but it’s just how it is: I don’t see any hope, don’t see any way out, specially because of, again, my short timelines, say 5-10 years. I’m with Eliezer that only a miracle can save us at this point. I started praying to a benevolent creator that might be listening, started hoping for aliens to save us, started hoping for the existence of Illuminati to save us, etc. such is my despair.