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Comment by bransonf | Hacker News Reader

My take is that OpenAI is all hype.

I’m not saying that they don’t do really cool things. But, they have a tendency to exaggerate the extent/significance of their work.

The ‘Solving a Rubiks Cube’ went viral with the premise that a robot figured out how to solve a Rubiks cube. It did not. It figured out the dexterity of solving a Rubiks cube... 20% of the time.

‘Too dangerous to share’ is just another statement meant to drive hype.

I feel it’s kind of irresponsible for them to represent AI in the way they are. I know so many people convinced that robots are going to take all of the jobs really soon, so ‘why should they try?’ Why shouldn’t we just give everyone money instead?

What the general public doesn’t get is that while it may happen, the timeline in which it happens is extremely exaggerated. And you have politicians like Yang feeding into this narrative.

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In hindsight, we shouldn't be surprised that a company founded by Elon Musk is driven mainly by hype. I really respect the man, but it's a consistent pattern in most of his work.

Andrew Ng did a good analogy: it is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars. It will happen sometimes in the future, but worrying about it now is very premature.

It's all hype until you realize you've been arguing politics with one of these, on Reddit.

If this software helps people realize that arguing politics on reddit isn't productive, then I'd say it's done us good.

The timeline is inherently unpredictable, significant innovations are sudden but adopted widely within months. We don't know when a set of jobs will be automated away, and we will have relatively little warning on a political timeline.

There are other arguments for basic income too, at the core UBI is to continue the debate about welfare and inflation, and asking if our current Quantitive Easing policies are not themselves pressuring the economy in unforeseen ways.

The biggest argument against UBI is that the government can require conditions with it, and you cannot easily find a new government. If you think this is unrealistic, look at selective service. You have to register or you can be barred from receiving federal financial aid or working in government positions, possibly for life. If the government makes recieving UBI contingent on two years of military or civilian service at age 18, what can be done?

I would be fine with UBI or any other form of welfare if I could personally opt out of it and not receive that welfare AND not pay any taxes for it.

It could just be as bad as Microsoft's AI that was racist

I very much disagree.

Is GPT-2 capable of creating fake news articles? No, but thats a fundamental misunderstanding of propaganda.

Propaganda is a matter of connecting ideas to feelings and creating an ecosystem that reinforces those connections.

For that reason, you need propaganda directors to create the “fake news” or whatever, but where GPT-2 can be very, frighteningly useful, is with bot swarms.

Just a sentence or two from GPT-2 can be convincing enough to be indistinguishable from a human. Have enough of them primed to direct the pro/con conversation online, and people will respond accordingly, making the “conversation” seem real when it’s actually been carefully crafted.

You can already get this today, but that requires armies of people posting on social media. When anybody with access to enough bots on enough social networks can harness this, you can warp any conversation, anywhere, at almost zero marginal cost.

This is something GPT-2 can do right now. Even the smaller models were good enough at producing indistinguishable text. Nobody is immune to propaganda.

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