Posted by jalev 2 days ago
Chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36586540 - July 2023 (13 comments)
- fawning over how amazing these tools are
- believing everything OpenAI and Anthropic say about how powerful and dangerous their product is
- minimizing the amount of human effort and involvement in every "AI" achievement
Current AGI definitions are intentionally vague.
The amount of real help vs. confidence/manipulation the LLM or con artist provides varies in each situation and scenario and mix of people (and LLMs) involved. It's something to strive to be aware and analytical about.
There are numerous scientific discoveries that have been made because one human looked at all available data and turned off the assumptions other people in the field have been using for years, maybe hundreds of years. Once you delete the assumption and make a new one the answer is obvious any anyone from that point wonders how so many humans could have missed it for so much time.
This can occur readily with LLMs as it can with people. It's very likely we will see this a lot as the causal connection in the available data will connected differently in their minds.
Escaping from a local maximum can be very difficult as you have to climb uphill with a nearly infinite amount of freedom but no ability to see the horizon. Psychics, LLMs, or some guy name Bob walking in an providing a workable analogy for you to escape the local maxima and move closer to a global maxima are all the same. Moreso, if LLMs are AGI we should expect these "psychic" behaviors just as much as actual discovery because both continuums exist in the same problem space as human minds.
Everyone not in a particular field asking LLM about said field is rolling bad dice.
If you have it ask for involved legal documents to give to a lawyer like 100% of the time they find problems with it. And someone who isn't in law would have not known any better.
When you have it write complex code that is not easy/quick to test, especially things that are specifically NOT concretely defined, like net-code (because it's all on the trade-offs you want to accept for your particular game), it's going to just repeatedly create sync issues.
I've asked it to write-up a detailed explanation of the different types of turns in 4-panel dance games and it's just permanently wrong no matter what I say.
The more unique and lacking of training data that exactly represents the problem statement the more impossible the statistical machine will generate text that makes sense.
But that cannot be used to discredit the fact that these are incredibly powerful tools that can get out of control and cause great damage.
As of "great damage", I doubt it. They do not have self-preservation instinct (all "worrying" experiments are the attempts to initiate something resembling self-preservation from human initiative). The driving part is external - the query loop can always be turned off. So yes, a dangerous tool that can be exploited by humans (including governments, especially governments - which is why I am skeptical to government regulation proposals, particularly looking at what passes as governments in this era). But there are no inherent dangers from their own agency, as there is none.
OK, so they are intelligent. I'm glad we agree.
The problem with this word is people associate intelligence with the process they realize is occurring inside their head which is only a tiny fraction of what intelligence encompasses. Humans (without study) know very little about intelligence and they very gray boundaries it has.
The potential for great damage relies upon the lack of self-preservation instinct. That lack releases the so-called AI from an order under pain of death. Damage cannot be punished.
But better again that you do believe, and know that these are not harmless fun, but that there are dark and hidden and evil things in this world to stay away from.
We are used to articles, blogs that stayed relevant for years. It is hardly the case with AI, the speed of change is so high that an observation can become stale in a year. This makes it very important for articles to state that the ideas are based on the technology in year X, rather than generalising them as universal truths.
This is just false? Language emerged from biology, we've brute forced some version of that model. Knowing that this is a new kind of mind requires that we are able to differentiate these different kinds of minds in the first place.