Comment by aborsy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aborsy | Hacker News Reader

Aaronson works on quantum complexity theory. He has almost no papers on language or AI (classical one, the one that has produced LLMs in question). He is going to go to OpenAI soon for some sort of position (perhaps PR around quantum ML, that is nevertheless important for the company).

Chomsky has around half a million citations to his scientific work, mostly on language. The guy is amazing. At age 94, he is productive, sharp and very well spoken. I tend to take him more seriously on this.

One problem is that, experts in one domain opine about domains they have not worked on. Another problem is, some people apparently hold a view that, if you make a product that works and sells, nothing else matters. Everyone will rush to earn a living around it. They feel empowered to take any position. So Science doesn’t matter if it’s not aligned, products do. Aaronson didn’t publish a proper article addressing Chomsky’s arguments.

> Another problem is, some people apparently hold a view that, if you make a product that works and sells, nothing else matters. Everyone will rush to earn a living around it. They feel empowered to take any position.

This has been my biggest issue around tech recently, and the whole conversation on ChatGPT and the latest generation of AI stuff just makes it a lot more obvious. They rush to make it and sell it, and that's all that matters. Societal externalities be damned. There's a lot of people way too invested in making sure stuff doesn't get discussed, all around.

As far as I know, Scott Aaronson has been on leave from UT Austin to work on theoretical foundations of AI safety at OpenAI since June 2022: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6484

That sounds like a conflict of interest. I haven't read his article but would expect this to be noted at the top.

There is a note on Aaronson’s blog post:

"[Note for people who might be visiting this blog for the first time: I’m a CS professor at UT Austin, on leave for one year to work at OpenAI on the theoretical foundations of AI safety. I accepted OpenAI’s offer in part because I already held the views here, or something close to them; and given that I could see how large language models were poised to change the world for good and ill, I wanted to be part of the effort to help prevent their misuse. No one at OpenAI asked me to write this or saw it beforehand, and I don’t even know to what extent they agree with it.]"

And Chomsky is both a linguist and a cognitive scientist, and a philosopher as well. The people mentioned in Marcus's article, aren't they more single-field experts?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com