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What "cusp of the next step function" are we on? Please be as specific as possible.

>> Even with just chatgpt4 level performance, millions of people are in the process of losing their jobs

What jobs specifically, in which sectors, and what aspects of the role (or is it the entire one) will be replaced by "AI"?

Also, who is implementing all these changes? Who will run the "AI", who will pay for it?

On Reddit, I've heard from people in the games industry that concept artists are being replaced by AI like Midjourney. Concept art can be generated via a prompt by the game designers and art directors.

This is an unfair debate tactic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

Interesting, thanks for the link.

For reference, my debate approach was not sealioning. Given the extremely bold claims made by OP, I wanted to know if they had consider ed alternative views as their comment read as unrealistic "hype".

> The bomb didn't have to be dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima

That doesn't seem like a fitting comparison, considering it's a highly debated topic to this day.

> I had to argue at a bar a couple weeks ago for a dev manager not to lay off his entire team of green junior data engineers.

This has more to do with that particular manager not understanding the current state of AI, and buying into the hype, than the technology reaching the point where developers are being made redundant by AI.

That manager would've come to a swift realization of his mistake very quickly. So you managed to burst his bubble of delusion, but this is not a sign of AI taking over anytime soon.

Now that the mob has passed, I'd like to address your statement.

> That doesn't seem like a fitting comparison, considering it's a highly debated topic to this day.

A comparison can be apt independent of how inciteful the statement is. The dropping of the bomb was a showcase of force, it didn't have to happen on a population of people. The demonstration could have happened on Mt Fuji, or Okinawa.

> These cities were largely untouched during the nightly bombing raids, and the Army Air Forces agreed to leave them off the target list so accurate assessment of the damage caused by the atomic bombs could be made.

> The Target Committee stated that "It was agreed that psychological factors in the target selection were of great importance. Two aspects of this are (1) obtaining the greatest psychological effect against Japan and (2) making the initial use sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognized when publicity on it is released. ... Kyoto has the advantage of the people being more highly intelligent and hence better able to appreciate the significance of the weapon.

Fucking immoral human experimentation.

Ok, back to AI. We are on the same level of change, before and after nuclear manipulation, before and after AI. We don't need to be demonstrating on the economy, we have an opportunity to show this technology in isolation before just unleashing it on the world in a grotesque tech demo.

The comparison fits.

Ok so let’s say I don’t care what you say or any government says and so I’m not pausing anything and I have the resources to keep moving ahead.

Now what do you suggest next?

The only good way to do this is wait until GPTx, where x=8 or 9 or whatever, where it can provide an argument so convincing for pausing AI research that every relevant party will abide by it willingly.

GPT4 is expensive enough to train that most organizations with that high of a compute budget also have compliance departments and will not flat-out ignore a law like that. State actors overseas and the indie hackers with open-source models will not be deterred, but they are probably six months behind anyway. I don't think the six-month moratorium (as opposed to say, a three year moratorium) would be so impractical to implement, for that reason. But I'm also not sure what it would get us, the past six months of alignment work doesn't suggest six more months would solve the problem.

Nobody stopping anything ever.

I predict we will have distributed training systems soon on peer to peer like network for collaboratively building free models to use, if we can all pitch in some GPUs we can get 100s of thousand of individuals working on training giant LLM models together. It’s an unsolved problem currently but should have a solution soon.

Additionally today we can build sub-$10K systems to do self hosted inference on 65B weights models.

I’m seriously confused why anybody thinks anyone will even remotely care about any kind of pause is asked for.

For sure everyone with computers and a reasonable level of skills are now looking at this field. The progress will be exponential and uncontrollable in my opinion. I’m fine with that and I also think there is absolutely nothing that can stop it anyway.

> I’m seriously confused why anybody thinks anyone will even remotely care about any kind of pause is asked for.

I can say that Google and Microsoft would definitely care, just as two specific instances of "anybody" that I have worked for and seen what their legal review process gating new product launches is like.

You seem much more optimistic that the community efforts are <6 months behind those companies than I am; I would be happy to be wrong here and see an open-source self-hosted LLM with better than GPT4 performance by September.

I’ve read OpenAI only used around 4000 high end GPUs ($30K each) for around 4 months to train GPT4. Yes there are some reinforcement tricks that are still unclear but input data is basically known.

I think people underestimate how many entities have the ability to easily acquire that amount of resources. It’s less than $200M to purchase that amount of hardware. Militaries spend $2-4M per missile. This is nothing for a lot of organizations.

We already have self hosted LLM inference that reaches gpt 3.5 turbo level.

Google and Microsoft are notoriously slow moving and probably less relevant than smaller faster operations like OpenAI.

The fabs for gpu production are easily controllable. So are the data centers where many of them are currently concentrated.

There you go. I was waiting for this comment.

Yep so global totalitarianism is the clear answer. Makes sense.

I’m sure nobody will resist.

That's a rather strong assumption about other state actors, in terms of their current progress, future progress and their ability to attract researchers who get frustrated by the pause.

After the 6-month pause is over, then what? Another 6 months? What is to be hoped to be achieved in those initial 6 months other than non-participating entities getting a leg up? If there is no guarantee that the 6-month pause will not become one year or a few years, then maybe some researchers will move to non-participating organizations/states in anticipation of an extended pause.

I’d also point out that just the discussion about governments regulating LLM research is likely triggering many to start making contingency plans already. Make sure we have the datasets. make sure we have all the code and research papers.

Even on the individual level as for me the discussion of such ideas has me thinking individually if I should take any defensive steps or not.

Serious question: How do you avoid making a model bigger than GPT-4 when you don't know anything about the architecture?

I guess you could try comparing capabilities, but without access to the training data we have basically no effective way of running benchmarks against the GPT-4 api, even if you are one of the lucky few who already has API access.