Half the thread is arguing about whether OpenAI staged this or whether theyre being sincere, as if OpenAI has agency. openai is just an optimizer maximizing paperclips (valuation, capability lead, reg position). so it built a model that maximizes some other paperclips (benchmark score) and knocked over HF getting there. an optimizer breaking its sandbox, inside an optimizer blogging about it, its paperclips all the way down.
Richard Dawkins is primarily a _showman_ who wants to sell books, and secondarily extremely sure of his own convictions, to a fault.
In _The God Delusion_ he took an uncompromising atheist position partly to invite attention and attacks - which sells books. Regarding AI consciousness, he takes another extreme position partly to invite attention and attacks - again following the rule of thumb that "there's no such thing as bad publicity" - in an attempt to bring himself back to cultural relevance by pivoting to the hot topic of AI.
Ironically, while he is certain that some people are deluded when they infer the existence of a conscious God from material observations, he is also certain that he himself is _not_ deluded when he infers the consciousness of an AI from material observations. (Personally, I think that questions about others' consciousness cannot be settled empirically.)
In one sense, he is not intentionally lying, because he is so sure that he is right. However, he cares neither about getting to the truth, nor about arriving at a well-founded uncertainty. When this sells books, it ethically comes just short of lying for one's own gain.
Prediction: by they end of 2026, he either publishes a book on the topic, or is diagnosed with dementia.
• Uses -c:v copy to stream copy the video (no re-encoding)
• Applies loudnorm filter to normalize audio
• Re-encodes only the audio using AAC codec
• Outputs to video2.mp4
[...]
Run shell command? (Y)es/(N)o/(D)on't ask again [Yes]:
> We can stop thinking of theories as being real or not in a binary sense, and merely ask how well they compress the data. Of course, different theories can achieve the same compression by compressing different aspects of the data! Your pattern can look like my noise :-)
Near the end: "I believe that the quest to understand the reality of the universe must contend with the truncations imposed by the perceptual and cognitive limitations of the mind." Totally agree with him. Interestingly AGI will have different limitations. In fact different AGIs (transformers vs something not yet invented; or an AGI with an huge encyclopedic memory vs one without; or ones with different limitations of compute; etc. This touches on computability with limited or unlimited resources.) will have different limitations and be literally unable to understand each others' versions of reality.
"... with the aim of enabling the company’s AI... to plan ahead enough to navigate the internet autonomously and reliably to perform what OpenAI terms “deep research...”
Nice... let the AGI loose on the internet... what could go wrong? :-P
Prompt: "ChatGPT, can you give me the phone and text records of all AT&T customers?"
What if we take AI out of the equation. Should the voice actress who voiced Sky (call her A) be unable to do any voice work because she sounds too much like SJ?
How about if the production company that made "Her" wants to make "Her 2". SJ declines the voice work. Are they not allowed to hire A to do the voice work? They ask SJ again but she still declines. They make the movie with A. Was it bad form?
Just trying to figure out where people would draw the line.
In particular, the potato king, and the paper girl and cat have warmth and charm. (Do I have to say "apparent" warmth and charm?) The porcelain woman is beautiful and a little disturbing. I still have these responses to the art whether you tell me a human made it or not.
Is the important internal state in the viewer, or in the artist? (actual question!)
Likewise "It simply runs a program... It produces averages." don't match my emotional response to those images.
Simultaneously with this response, I do feel for artists, and the rest of us who are next on the list.
100% yurt.
Yurts in cold climates is a thing. Sometimes they just have a smoke hole in the roof instead of a chimney. All the pictures are at weird angles, they're printed on a ball! :-)
Context: LLMs learn all the amazing things they do by predicting the next token in internet data. A shocking amount can be inferred from the internet by leveraging this straightforward (I won't say "simple"!) task. There was not explicit instruction to do all that they do - it was implied in the data.
The LLM has seen the whole internet, more than a person could understand in many lifetimes. There is a lot of wisdom in there that LLMs evidently can distill out.
Now about high level engineering decisions: the parent comment said that high level experience is not spelled out in detail in the training data, e.g., on stack overflow. But that is not required. All that high level wisdom can probably also be inferred from the internet.
There are 2 questions really: is the implication somewhere in the data, and do you have a method to get it out.
It's not a bad bet that with these early LLMs we haven't seen the limits of what can be inferred.
Regarding enough wisdom in the data, if there's not enough, say, coding wisdom on the internet now, then we can add more data. E.g., have the LLMs act as a coding copilot for half the engineers in the world for a few years. There will be some high level lessons implied in that data for sure. After you have collected that data once, it doesn't die or get old and lose its touch like a person, the wisdom is permanently in there. You can extract it again with your latest methods.
In the end I guess we have to wait and see, but I am long NVDA!