garrison

• garrisonNov 21, 2024, 4:15 AM

  4 points

  1

  in reply to: Jacob Pfau’s comment on: China Hawks are Man­u­fac­tur­ing an AI Arms Race

  Claiming that China as a country is racing toward AGI != Chinese AI companies aren’t fast following US AI companies, which are explicitly trying to build AGI. This is a big distinction!

• garrisonNov 21, 2024, 4:12 AM

  10 points

  6

  in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: China Hawks are Man­u­fac­tur­ing an AI Arms Race

  Hey Seth, appreciate the detailed engagement. I don’t think the 2017 report is the best way to understand what China’s intentions are WRT to AI, but there was nothing in the report to support Helberg’s claim to Reuters. I also cite multiple other sources discussing more recent developments (with the caveat in the piece that they should be taken with a grain of salt). I think the fact that this commission was not able to find evidence for the “China is racing to AGI” claim is actually pretty convincing evidence in itself. I’m very interested in better understanding China’s intentions here and plan to deep dive into it over the next few months, but I didn’t want to wait until I could exhaustively search for the evidence that the report should have offered while an extremely dangerous and unsupported narrative takes off.

  I also really don’t get the error pushback. These really were less technical errors than basic factual errors and incoherent statements. They speak to a sloppiness that should affect how seriously the report should be taken. I’m not one to gatekeep ai expertise, but idt it’s too much to expect a congressional commission with a top recommendation to commence in a militaristic AI arms race to have SOMEONE read a draft who knows that chatgpt-3 isn’t a thing.

China Hawks are Man­u­fac­tur­ing an AI Arms Race

• garrisonNov 14, 2024, 4:16 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: Is Deep Learn­ing Ac­tu­ally Hit­ting a Wall? Eval­u­at­ing Ilya Sutskever’s Re­cent Claims

  Thanks for these!

• garrisonNov 13, 2024, 10:10 PM

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: Noosphere89’s comment on: Is Deep Learn­ing Ac­tu­ally Hit­ting a Wall? Eval­u­at­ing Ilya Sutskever’s Re­cent Claims

  I think this is a misunderstanding of the piece and how journalists typically paraphrase things. The reporters wrote that Ilya told them that results from scaling up pre-training have plateaued. So he probably said something to that effect, but for readability and word-count reasons, they paraphrased it.

  If a reported story from a credible outlet says something like X told us that Y, then the reporters are sourcing claim Y to X, whether or not they include a direct quote.

  The plateau claim also jives with The Information story about OpenAI, as well as a few other similar claims made by people in industry.

  Ilya probably spoke to the reporter(s) for at least a few min, so the quotes you see are a tiny fraction of everything he said.

Is Deep Learn­ing Ac­tu­ally Hit­ting a Wall? Eval­u­at­ing Ilya Sutskever’s Re­cent Claims

Miles Brundage re­signed from OpenAI, and his AGI readi­ness team was disbanded

The Tech In­dus­try is the Biggest Blocker to Mean­ingful AI Safety Regulations

My ar­ti­cle in The Na­tion — Cal­ifor­nia’s AI Safety Bill Is a Mask-Off Mo­ment for the Industry

• garrisonJul 17, 2024, 3:40 PM

  9 points

  0

  in reply to: Ruby’s comment on: Against Aschen­bren­ner: How ‘Si­tu­a­tional Aware­ness’ con­structs a nar­ra­tive that un­der­mines safety and threat­ens humanity

  FWIW I was also confused by this usage of sic, bc I’ve only ever seen it as indicating the error was in the original quote. Quotes seem sufficient to indicate you’re quoting the original piece. I use single quotes when I’m not quoting a specific person, but introducing a hypothetical perspective.

Pod­cast with Yoshua Ben­gio on Why AI Labs are “Play­ing Dice with Hu­man­ity’s Fu­ture”

• garrisonMar 28, 2024, 10:38 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: trevor’s comment on: My In­ter­view With Cade Metz on His Re­port­ing About Slate Star Codex

  I only skimmed the NYT piece about China and ai talent, but didn’t see evidence of what you said (dishonestly angle shooting the AI safety scene).

• garrisonMar 5, 2024, 6:13 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Nathan Helm-Burger’s comment on: Claude Doesn’t Want to Die

  The fey thing stuck out to me too. I’ll guess ChatGPT?

  I agree that it’s hard to disentangle the author/​character thing. I’m really curious for what the base model would say about its situation (especially without the upstream prompt “You are a language model developed by...”).

Claude Doesn’t Want to Die

• garrisonFeb 14, 2024, 3:18 AM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: brambleboy’s comment on: My cover story in Ja­cobin on AI cap­i­tal­ism and the x-risk debates

  Thank you so much! I haven’t gotten any serious negative feedback from lefties for the EA stuff so far, though an e/​acc on Twitter mentioned it haha

My cover story in Ja­cobin on AI cap­i­tal­ism and the x-risk debates

• garrisonFeb 12, 2024, 9:56 PM

  2 points

  1

  in reply to: Logan Zoellner’s comment on: Sam Alt­man’s Chip Am­bi­tions Un­der­cut OpenAI’s Safety Strategy

  Maybe I wasn’t clear enough in the writing, but I make basically the same point about the desirability of a slow takeoff in the piece.

• garrisonFeb 10, 2024, 7:56 PM

  13 points

  20

  on: OpenAI wants to raise 5-7 trillion

  This approach appears to directly contradict Altman’s blogpost from less than a year ago arguing for short timelines + slow takeoff because of less compute overhang. I wrote more on this here.

Sam Alt­man’s Chip Am­bi­tions Un­der­cut OpenAI’s Safety Strategy

• garrisonOct 28, 2022, 3:50 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: Pod­cast: The Left and Effec­tive Altru­ism with Habiba Islam

  I’m exploring adding transcripts, and would do this one retroactively.

  Good to know RE YouTube. I haven’t uploaded there before (it’s outside of the RSS workflow and I’m not sure how much it would expand reach), but seeing comments like this is helpful info.