I’m curious what these “more effective words” are. This isn’t asked flippantly. Clearly there is a geopolitical dimension to the AI issue and Zvi lives in the U.S. Even as a rationalist, how should Zvi talk about the issue? China and the U.S. are hostile to each other and will each likely use AGI to (at the very least) disempower the other, so if you live in the U.S., first, you hope that AGI doesn’t arrive until alignment is solved, and second, you hope that the U.S. gets it first.
Andrew Burns
Karma: 172
10 AI dropped a model on Lmsys that is doing fairly well, briefly overtaking Claude Opus before slipping a bit. Just another reminder that, as we wring our hands about dodgy behavior by Open AI, apparently these Chinese firms are getting compute (despite our efforts to restrict this) and releasing powerful and competitive models.
Zvi is talking about those people who use libertarianism as a gloss for “getting what they want.” In other words, people who aren’t into liberty per se, but only into liberty to the extent it satisfies their preferences. There probably is, and if there isn’t, there should be, a word for people who invoke liberty this way. That way, when talking about the sort that, for instance, want children to be allowed to read the Bible in the classroom (because LIBERTY!) while simultaneously wanting to ban some book on trans-youth (because PARENTS RIGHTS), we can say: oh, yes, that (word) is at it again. I mean, hypocrite for sure, and perhaps gaslighter, but we need a better word. Well, if there is an existing word, please let me know. There are so many of these sorts out and about, they easily dwarf the population of libertarians.
Anyone paying attention to the mystery of the GPT-2 chatbot that has appeared on lmsys? People are saying it operates at levels comparable to or exceeding GPT-4. I’m writing because I think the appearance of mysterious unannounced chatbots for public use without provenance makes me update my p(doom) upward.
Possibilities:
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this is a OpenAI chatbot based on GPT-4, just like it says it is. It has undergone some more tuning and maybe has boosted reasoning because of methods described in one of the more recently published papers
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this is another big American AI company masquarading OpenAI
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this is a big Chinese AI company masquerading as OpenAI
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this is an anonymous person or group who is using some GPT-4 fine tune API to improve performance
Possibility 1 seems most likely. If that is the case, I guess it is alright, assuming it is purely based on GPT-4 and isn’t a new model. I suppose if they wanted to test on lmsys to gauge performance anonymously, they couldn’t slap 4.5 on it, but they also couldn’t ethically give it the name of another company’s model. Giving it an entirely new name would invite heavy suspicion. So calling it the name of an old model and monitoring how it does in battle seems like the most ethical compromise. Still, even labeling a model with a different name feels deceptive.
Possibility 2 would be extremely unethical and I don’t think it is the case. Also, the behavior of the model looks more like GPT-4 than another model. I expect lawsuits if this is the case.
Possibility 3 would be extremely unethical, but is possible. Maybe they trained a model on many GPT-4 responses and then did some other stuff. Stealing a model in this way would probably accelerate KYC legislation and yield outright bans on Chinese rental of compute. If this is the case, then there is no moat because we let our moat get stolen.
Possibility 4 is a something someone mentioned in Twitter. I don’t know whether it is viable.
In any case, releasing models in disguise onto the Internet lowers my expectations for companies to behave responsibly and transparently. It feels a bit like Amazon and their scheme to collect logistics data from competitors by calling itself a different name. In that case, like this, the facade was paper thin...the headquarters of the fake company was right next to Amazon, but it worked for a long while. Since I think 1 is the mostly likely, I believe OpenAI wants to make sure it soundly beats everyone else in the rankings before releasing an update with improvements. But didn’t they just release an update a few weeks ago? Hmm.
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The roundness of the earth is not a point upon which any political philosophy hinges, yet flat earthism is a thing. The roundness is not subjective, it isn’t controversial, and it does not advance anyone’s economic interest. So why do people engage in this sort of contrarianism? I speculate that the act of being a contrarian signals to others that you question authority. The bigger the consensus challenged, the more disdain for authority shown. One’s willingness to question authority is often used as a proxy for “independent thinking.” The thought is that someone who questions authority might be more likely to accept new evidence. But questioning authority is not the same as being an independent thinker, and so, when taken to its extreme, it leads to denying reality, because isn’t reality the ultimate authority?
Yes, yes. Probably not. And they already have a Sora clone called Vidu, for heaven’s sake.
We spend all this time debating: should greedy companies be in control, should government intervene, will intervention slow progress to the good stuff: cancer cures, longevity, etc. All of these arguments assume that WE (which I read as a gloss for the West) will have some say in the use of AGI. If the PRC gets it, and it is as powerful as predicted, these arguments become academic. And this is not because the Chinese are malevolent. It’s because, AGI would fall into the hands of the CCP via their civil-military fusion. This is a far more calculating group than those in Western governments. Here officials have to worry about getting through the next election. There, they can more comfortably wield AGI for their ends while worrying less about palatability of the means: observe how the population quietly endured a draconian lock-down and only meekly revolted when conditions began to deteriorate and containment looked futile.
I am not an accelerationist. But I am a get-it-before-them-ist. Whether the West (which I count as including Korea and Japan and Taiwan) can maintain our edge is an open question. A country that churns out PhDs and loves AI will not be easily thwarted.
So the usual refrain from Zvi and others is that the specter of China beating us to the punch with AGI is not real because limits on compute, etc. I think Zvi has tempered his position on this in light of Meta’s promise to release the weights of its 400B+ model. Now there is word that SenseTime just released a model that beats GPT-4 Turbo on various metrics. Of course, maybe Meta chooses not to release its big model, and maybe SenseTime is bluffing—I would point out though that Alibaba’s Qwen model seems to do pretty okay in the arena...anyway, my point is that I don’t think the “what if China” argument can be dismissed as quickly as some people on here seem to be ready to do.
Wait...your children are on the Mormon path? Oh boy.
As a non-parent, I have no idea how it is to be a parent. It must be exceptionally hard and require making difficult compromises. However, having realized that Mormonism is not the path to reason...aren’t you terrified that your children are headed toward a dead-end, believing irrational things and perpetuating those beliefs unto the next generation? How do you handle that? I would be looking for any signs that my kids wanted out...looking for them to send me an SOS so I would be justified in swooping in and telling them it’s all baloney and they don’t need to take any of it seriously. That would probably land me in family court and alienate me from my children, who, having grown up in the community and imbibed the teachings like mother’s milk, have become integrated into the hive mind, but the temptation to cry BS must be overwhelming, no?
Less than a year. They probably already have toy models with periodically or continuously updating weights.
Sure, the topics in this piece are dealt with superficially and the discussions are not especially thought-provoking; when compared to the amazing creative works that people on this site produce, it is low-mediocre. But Claude writes more coherently than a number of published authors and most of the general public.
He doesn’t mean politically conservative, he means that Google has traditionally been conservative when it comes to releasing new products...to the point where potentially lucrative products and services rot on the vine.
Good point, although I used Esperanto precisely because it is a language for which the OP’s approach is transparently difficult. The Greek word for light (in weight) is avaris...not heavy. So in Greek, one must say “This object is easy to lift because of the lowness of its weight,” but in English one can say “This object is light.” Seems arbitrary. I appreciate what the OP is trying to do, though.
Most of the time English has an antonym that does not involve a negative prefix or suffix.
It is not warm. ~= It is cool.
It is not new. ~= It is old.
But this is not the case in other languages. Consider Esperanto:
It is not warm. → Ĝi ne estas varmeta. ~= Ĝi estas malvarmeta.
It is not new. → Ĝi ne estas nova. ~= Ĝi estas malnova.
Because mal- is equivalent to un-, it is forbidden, and you have to resort to periphrasis:
Ĝi estas alia ol varmeta. (It is other than warm.)
Ĝi estas la malo de varmeta. (It is the opposite of warm.)...oh, wait, this contains mal- too.
People who eat seafood, but not the flesh of other terrestrial animals are pescatarian. Ethical (as opposed to environmental) pescatarians say fish and other marine life aren’t complex enough for fear or pain. Perhaps they call themselves vegetarians just to avoid having to explain pescatarianism.
I’m puzzled by your use of the word “intelligence.” Intelligence refers to a capacity to understand facts, acquire knowledge and process information. Humans are presently the only members of the set of intelligent self-regulating systems.
Whenever someone uses “they,” I get nervous.
This and other communities seek to transcend, or at least mitigate, human imperfections. Just because something is “human” doesn’t mean it contributes to human flourishing. Envy, rage, hate, and cruelty are human, after all.
Lex Luthor vibes.
A Chinese company released a new SORA competitor—Kling—and it is arguably superior to SORA publically available. Could be exfiltration or could be genuinely home grown. In any case, the moat is all gone.