what line would you agree on today @garrison ? At what point would you actually ‘update’?
So far, am seeing a lot of people contesting the ‘object’ and not a lot of people updating. Which is kinda my point. Concordance with the group consensus seems to have become a higher priority than rationalism on this forum.
Does your lack of reply mean you haven’t updated at all @Connor Leahy ?
Again, the question isn’t even who was right about what, it was 1) are people on this website capable of updating, and b) are the other people on this website capable of holding each other accountable to rationalist principles.
So far, not seeing a lot of evidence of either, but by all means, happy to be proven wrong!
There are many math and coding benchmarks where models from DeepSeek, Ali baba and tencent are now leading, and definitely leading what was SOTA a year ago. If you don’t want to take my word for it I can dig them up.
The fact that their models are on par with openAI and anthropic but it’s open source.
There are people from the safety community arguing for jail for folks who download open source models.
You can’t have it both ways. Either open source is risky and an acceleration and should be limited/punished, or there is no acceptable change to timelines from open source AI and hence it doesn’t need to be regulated.
Does that make sense?
ok so what criteria would you use to suggest that your statements/gwern’s statements were falisified?
What line can we agree on today, while it feels uncertainty, so that later we’re not still fighting over terminology and more working off the same ground truth?
Sorry for my tone. Yours reads as very defensive.
So you admit you were wrong?
How have you updated your views on China or what we should do as a result?
Do you disagree that entities in China are now pushing the state of the art in an open source way?
If you disagree, then sure, you don’t have to update. But I’d argue you aren’t paying attention.
If you agree, then how did you update?
If your point is that using ‘use vs them’ framing makes thing worse, that may or may not be correct, but from the perspective of existential risk the object level determination re China is irrelevant, vs what “they” represent. A repeated game where defection by anyone one of N players leads to ruin (from the doomer perspective) and where folks in China just represent one of a very large set.
Does that make sense?
are you saying they accept your frame? because it appears they do not.
exactly
ok I will moderate my tone. I was a competitive debator and irrationality makes me upset. I thought this was a safe space for high standards wrt logic, but I can modulate. Thank you for the feebback.
There is a narrow point—people were wrong about this narrow prediction—“the ccp is scared of AI”
The broader point is that I perceive, and could be wrong, there is epistemic rot if a community dedicated to rationalism is incapable of updating. The comments I’ve seen so far are by and large consistent with that intuition. Folks seem defensive, and more concerned about my interest/tone than the thing at hand...a lot of people made decisions based off (in retrospect) bad expectations about the world. Which is fine, it happens all the time. But the thing that matters isn’t the old predictions, it’s identifying them, understand why and where they came from, and then updating.
If we want to talk about the narrow thing of “is China ready to pause AI”,it obviously is not entirely knowable, but the bigger issue is the one I think more important, are we capable of updating, because we need to be able to do that to actually investigate the small thing, going forward.
“Various things”—ugh
ok how about this ONE.
“No...There is no appreciable risk from non-Western countries whatsover” - @Connor Leahy
and the response to ‘shut it down’ has always “what about China, or India, or the UAE, or Europe to which the response was...they want to pause bc XYZ
Well, you not have proof, not speculation, that they are not pausing. They don’t find your arguments pursuasive. What to do?!?
Which is why the original post was about updating. Something you don’t seem very interested doing. Which is irrational. So is this forum about rationality or about AI risk? I would think the later flows from the former, but I don’t see much evidence of the former.
Cope. Leadership in AI has been an explicit policy goal since “Made in China 2025”. The predictions were that “the CCP prioritizes stability”, and “the CCP prioritizes censorship” and “China is behind in AI”. Are you willing to admit that these are all demonstrably untrue as of today? Let’s start there.
Here’s an article from 2018(!) in the South China Morning Post.
“Artificial intelligence (AI) has come to occupy an important role in Beijing’s ‘Made in China 2025’ blueprint. China wants to become a global leader in the field by 2030 and now has an edge in terms of academic papers, patents and both cross-border and global AI funding.
The fact you were ignorant or dismissive of their strategy is independent of the fact they a) stated the goal publicly, and b) are now in the lead.
Exactly. @gwern was wrong. And yet...
The argument has historically been that existential risk from AI came from some combination of a) SOTA models, and b) open source.
China is now publishing SOTA open source models. Oh and they found a way to optimize around their lack of GPUs.
Are you sure you aren’t under the influence of cognitive dissonance/selective memory?
“My first thought is, it’s not clear why you care about this. This is your first post ever, and your profile has zero information about you. Do you consider yourself a Less Wrong rationalist? Are you counting on the rationality community to provide crucial clarity and leadership regarding AI and AI policy? ”
I tried posting in the past but was limited because of the karma wall, but thanks for questioning my motives.
I am a game theorist and researcher, and yes, I consider myself broadly aligned with rationalism, though with a strong preference for skeptical consequentialism than overconfident utilitarianism. Is there no place for consequentialists here?
“Are you counting on the rationality community to provide crucial clarity and leadership regarding AI and AI policy?”
The rationalist community is extremely influential in both AI development and AI policy. Do you disagree?
“My second thought is, if a big rethink is needed, it should also include the fact that in Trump 2.0, the US elected a revolutionary regime whose policies include AI accelerationism.”
This is a) irrelevant to the post (why didn’t we update re China) and b) naive and borderline defensive.
Not very rational of you.
If you couldn’t forecast the Republicans would be in favor of less regulation, I don’t know man, you probably shouldn’t be publicly forecasting. This is more a statement about the quality of your Bayes machine than the world.
“Maybe a Chinese startup briefly got ahead of its American rivals in the domain of reasoning LLMs; but most of the contenders are still within American borders, and US AI policy is now ostensibly in the hands of a crypto VC who is a long-time buddy of Elon’s.”
This is literally cope. Go on Twitter for 5 seconds and find people freaking out about Gwen. Have you heard of Manus? Again, this says more about your estimation engine than the world.
How are we felling about this prediction now?
maybe we can ask @gwern.
Gwern, at what point would you say you were ‘wrong’ and how would that make you ‘update’?