Training for one trillion parameter model backed by Intel and US govt has begun
techradar.com
techradar.com
Edit: Ah, Mixture of Experts. I hadn't heard this one yet. Thanks!
Argonne installs final components of Aurora supercomputer (22 June 2023): https://www.anl.gov/article/argonne-installs-final-component...
Aurora Supercomputer Blade Installation Complete (22 June 2023): https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/aurora...
Intel® Data Center GPU Max Series, previously codename Ponte Vecchio (31 May 2023): https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...
If not, spending years to design and build a system for weather and nuke simulations and ending up doing something that's totally not made for these systems is kind of a mind bender.
I can imagine the conversations that led to this: "we need a government owned LLM" "okay what do we need" "lots of compute power" "well we have this new supercomputer just coming online" "not the right kind of compute" "come on, it's top-500!"
I'm honestly not sure, and hoping somebody comments here and provides more information as I'm genuinely interested.
1 - https://openai.com/research/scaling-kubernetes-to-7500-nodes
OpenAI says their biggest jobs run on MPI so maybe a supercomputer would be better?
Modern supercomputers are just a bunch of computers with a (very) high speed interconnect. As far as I’m aware, pretty much every multi node job on a supercomputer uses MPI to communicate, and there isn’t any sort of “unified memory” system.
It has been a few years since I worked on one of the big supercomputers though, so maybe you have better knowledge than me. I’d love more information.
Which makes me wonder. I'm not sure this applies here but say you train a model on classified information, is the model/weights then classified?
Anyway, to bring it to the next level, how big should it be? Maybe 10T? 100T?
I don't think we have enough training data to train models so big in a way to efficiently use all the params. We would need to generate training data, but then I don't know how effective it would be.
If they can generate data they should use that instead of piping it through a million-dollar lossy compressor.
User:
Are you an MoE model?
ChatGPT:
No, I am not based on a Mixture of Experts (MoE) model. My underlying architecture is based on the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) framework, specifically the GPT-4 version. This architecture is a large-scale transformer-based neural network, but it does not use the MoE approach.
In a GPT model like mine, the entire model works in a unified manner on each task, without dividing it among specialized sub-models or experts. The model is trained on a diverse range of data and tasks, enabling it to generate responses across a wide array of topics and questions. While this approach lacks the specialization that MoE models offer, it provides broad, general-purpose language understanding and generation capabilities.
If you ask it a question and it makes up a completely fabricated story, like for example the case files in that recent legal case [1], then saying it was “wrong” doesn’t really seem to capture it.
Calling it a hallucination is a great analogy, because the model made up a plausible sounding, but completely fabricated story. It saw things that were never real.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-chatgpt-c...
Due to current hardware limitations it is not feasible to have a 1T parameter model without MoE.
It's possible that it's just hallucinating here too, I don't have any proof that the responses are canned, but they appear that way to me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/zo9of4/comment/j0n...
It's interesting that other people don't seem to agree with the idea that it has some pre-programmed responses, I am curious as to what they think is going on here.
And OpenAI would not add such proprietary information there.
Improving AI will involve architectural changes. No human requires the amount of training data we are already giving the models. Improvements will make more efficient use of that data, and (no idea how - innovation required) allow them to generalize and reason from that data.
If you train a bigger model on more text, we have a lot of confidence that the next-word prediction task will improve. So algorithmic progress is not necessary, it's a very nice bonus, but we can sort of get more powerful models for free, because we can just get a bigger computer, which we can say with some confidence we're going to get, and just train a bigger model for longer, and we are very confident we are going to get a better result.
Well, humans are also trained differently. We interact with other humans in real time and get immediate feedback on their responses. We don't just learn by reading through reams of static information. We talk to people. We get into arguments. And so on.
Maybe the ideal way to train an AI is to have it interact with lots of humans, so it can try things on its own? The implication of that is maybe the best trained AI will be the center of some important web property, like, say, the Google search engine (I'm imagining something like Google search now, but more conversational -- it asks you if that was what you're looking for, and asks clarifying questions.) Whoever has the most users will have the best AI, which creates the best product, which attracts the most users... and so on.
I do agree that architectural improvements could be hugely significant too.
Kinda like alpha go zero but with "life".
How can you assert this ? Do you have any evidence?
In the latter case, the first humans (H. Habilis) had about 1/2 of H. Sapiens brain to work with, and a much smaller fraction of neocortex.
If that doesn't satisfy you, let's say I was speaking about some sort of human ancestor before that, which would have been about as dumb as chimps, unless you require proof of their dumbness as well.
All the new knowledge they got they figured out from the environment.
If a bunch of AIs started discussing with each other, and learning from each other, without validation, things can go wrong very easily.
I bet a lot of people thought that strapping a pair of feahterry wing was all that's needed to fly. This "knowledge" could've passed from one person to another through discussion. But it only took one (or more) person to actually try it in the real world to learn that, no, that doesn't work like that.
AI communities (as in communities of AIs talking to each other) might be one filled with the most outrageous "conspiracy theories", that may sound plausible but have no substance.
But once we are partially trained, training more requires a lot less.
Let's Fermi estimate that.
A 4k video stream is about 50 megabits/second. Let's say that humans have the equivalent of two of those going during waking hours, one for vision and one for everything else. Humans are awake for 18 hours/day, and we'll say a human's training is 'complete' at 25.
Multiply that together, and you end up with 1.8e17 bytes, or 180 petabytes of data.
There's plenty of reason to think that we don't learn effectively from all of this data (there's lots of redundancy, for example), but at the grossest orders of magnitude you seem to be right that at least in theory we have access to a tremendous amount of data.
I couldn't agree more. Fermi estimates are underused.
> Multiply that together, and you end up with 1.8e17 bytes, or 180 petabytes of data.
And for comparison, GPT-4 is estimated by Bill Dally (NVIDIA) at around 10^12 or 10^13 tokens [1]. Let's assume about 1 word per token and 5 characters per word. Furthermore, US-ASCII tokens requires one byte per character in UTF-8. So, that gives about 50 terabyte [Edited after comment below].
As a side note, I would guess that GPT-4 knows more "things" if you would be able to count them all up. For example, it knows more languages, more facts about cities, more facts about persons. However, people know way more inside their specialization.
Thanks, I was looking for that estimate but could not quickly find it. (Although are you sure about that 'petabyte' figure? I see 1e13 * 5 = 50e13 = 50 TB?)
I love these sorts of bulk comparisons, since they let us start to reason about how much humans learn from "each bit of experience" versus LLMs. On one hand humans process a lot of sensory information (most of it by discarding, mind), but on the other humans do a lot of 'active learning' whereby experience is directly related to actions. LLMs don't have the latter, since they're trained on passive feeds of tokens.
Uncompressed rates are easy to calculate if wanting to adjust your approximation:
24-bit, 4K UHD @ 60 fps: 24 × 3840 × 2160 × 60 = 11.9 Gbit/s.
Pretty unconvinced by this argument, it mostly hinges on the video stream size.
Regardless, yours still came out to be an order of magnitude higher than what GPT was trained on. So I guess the original argument makes some sense.
This is the basis for 'common sense' and I’m pretty sure everything else needs that as the foundation.
Go watch a child learning and you'll see a hell of a lot of this going on. They want to play with the same thing over and over and over again. They want to watch the same movie over and over and over again. Or the same song over and over and over and over and over again.
You cannot compare what the human eyes/brain/body does with analog facilities to its digital “equivalent” and then “math it” from there.
Also why trying to replicate the human brain with digital logic (current AI approach) is so insanely expensive.
The net energy cost of training and maintaining humans vs. training and maintaining (updating and augmenting) AI models.
The human body is incredibly efficient but there’s always a larger ramp-up cost.
10 kilobits per second would only get you some awful telephone quality audio. Even super low res video would be orders of magnitude more than that.
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/qzbgx
> Large language models show intriguing emergent behaviors, yet they receive around 4-5 orders of magnitude more language data than human children.
Humans get a lot more input that just language is the point. We get to see language out in the physical world. They have the (really quite difficult) task of inferring all the the real world and its connections, common sense, laws of physics, while locked in a box reading wikipedia.
How capable do you think a child would be if you kept them in a dark box and just spoke to them through the keyhole? (not recommending this experiment)
Why would LMM's be more like the biplanes analogy, and less like the CPU analogy?
The "problem" with larger neural networks is that they can store more information, so they can substitute understanding with memorization. Something similar happens with human students, who can stuff lots of raw information into short-term-memory, but to fit it into the much more precious long-term-memory you have to "understand" the topic, not just memorize it. In neural networks we call that memorization a failure to generalize. Just like a human, a network that just memorizes doesn't do well if you ask it about anything slightly different than the training data.
Of course it's a balance act, because a network that's too small doesn't have space to store enough "understanding" and world model. A lot of the original premise of OpenAI was to figure out if LLMs keep getting better if you make them bigger, and so far that has worked. But there is bound to be a ceiling on this, where making the model bigger starts making it dumber.
But people did try! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Besson_H-5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplane_(aeronautics)#Quadr...
First, yes, bigger appears to be better so far. We haven't yet found the plateau. No, bigger won't solve the well known problems, but it's absolutely clear that each time we build a bigger model it is qualitatively better.
Second, it's not clear that this work is trying to build AGI, which I assume you are referring to when you say "the solution." Of all the use case for language models, building one off all the worlds scientific data like they are doing in this project is probably the most exciting to me. If all it can do is dig up relevant work for a given topic in the entire body of scientific literature, it will be revolutionary for science.
It does seem like bigger models give better responses when given benchmarks. It might plateau or overfit the data at some point, but I'm not sure we've reached it yet.
Learning in third person from the past data can only take AI so far. It needs to act and learn in the present, in first person, to be truly smart. No architectural change is needed, but the model needs to be placed in a real environment to get feedback signals.
You need more data to utilize more parameters, but folks at the forefront are confident that they are not going to run out of data any time soon.
If you mean “solution to AGI” maybe. But perhaps in-context scratchpads and agent loops will be sufficient to get this architecture to human-level performance, with enough data/parameters. (Sutskever and Hinton have both expressed credulity that the current architectures might get us there.)
All that said, it’s also possible that new architectures will be needed at some point, I’m just pushing back on your claim that we already hit the cliff.
One example is the Google books project made digital quite a few texts, but I’ve never heard if Google considers these fair game to train on for Bard.
Most of the copyright discussions I’ve seen have been around images and code but not much about books.
Seems to become more relevant as things scale up as indicated by this article.
https://aicopyright.substack.com/p/the-books-used-to-train-l...
im still skeptical because new techniques are going to give an order of magnitude efficiency boost to transformer models, so 'just waiting' seems like the best approach for now. I dont think they will be able to just skip to the finish line by having the most money.
People keep saying we don’t have enough data. I think there is a lot more data than we realize, even ignoring things like NSA.
I couldn’t find the average message length, but I would guess it’s fairly short (with a fat tail of longer messages).
To make the math easy, let’s say the average length is ~10 tokens. I’d be surprised if that isn’t correct within a factor of 2 or so.
So we have 20 trillion tokens per year from text messages in the US alone. And this is high-quality conversational data.
The annual numbers were fairly constant in recent years (and then it drops off), so the past decade of US text messages is about 200 trillion tokens! That’s a metric fuck ton… Much larger than any dataset existing models have been trained on, I believe.
I would guess phone transcripts would be an order of magnitude larger at least. Talking is a lot easier than typing on a phone.
You could train an absolutely insane model with that amount of data… Damn.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/185879/number-of-text-me...
It's mind-blowing to me that with all of Google's data, Google isn't the far and away leader in this new space. I have to believe they're paralyzed by the fear of legal repercussions.
The training parameters will be the databases of info scooped up and integrated into profiles of every person and their entire digital footprint, queriable and responsive to direct questioning
Such a wholesome thing. I don't want to hear 2 years from now how China is evil for using "AI" when the government is attempting to weaponize AI, of course other governments will start doing it as well.
Already fine tuned and conversational
its like education is more important than needing a trillion parameter brainiac
(People who dismiss SotA models as "stochastic parrots" confuse me as much as people who think they're already superhuman; the Markov chains and RNNs I coded a few years back didn't come close to last year's LLMs).
That even smaller models can do well is both unsurprising (why would we expect our existing design efforts to already have the most efficient architecture?) and very surprising (how come we can get something so much less complex than our biological brains to do so much so well?)
As a US taxpayer and as a Libertarian, I approve of this project!
Microsoft?
In more recent history, Exxon has a checkered past when it comes to using force against sovereign citizens, often employing paramilitary organizations to guard oil fields [1] to more recently abusing international court systems to disbar and jail the lawyer which successfully secured judgements against them [2]
And at this very moment, right now, is the ongoing genocide in the Congo due to rare earth mineral mining [3]
Everything I link here is quite frankly the tip of the iceberg, not the end-all-be-all, but meant to provide a jumping off point should you want to research how often private capital and genocide go hand in hand.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusations_of_ExxonMobil_hu...
[2] https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/28/chevron-lawy...
[3] https://republic.com.ng/october-november-2023/congo-cobalt-g...
Pretty much all leading heads of IG Farben were in one way or another dinked (but not procecuted bc of political reasons) for their part in the Holocaust.
Then we have the Kiobel vs Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. case, where a number of petroleum companies ("allegedly") instigated the Nigarian government to crush protests.
It all depends on your definition of "trying to commit [atrocity]", to me personally, instigating and happily lending a hand are both morally deplorable. So in the context of this thread, I'd much rather have the instigater have that power than a helper. At least I have some say in what the government does... I hope?
Google, maybe, until they dropped the "don't be evil" catchphrase?
Many, maybe even most, governments could commit genocide and don't.
How many corporations that could commit genocide wouldn't? I don't know the answer to this, but I am less confident about the answer than I would prefer.
I don't think most corporations are inherently more evil than most governments, but I would choose a democratic government or consortium to shepherd AGI over any corporation, but also of course over any non-democratic government as well.
It may be hard to directly peg weapons manufacturers with genocide though Nazi-era chemical research absolutely played a role in the Holocaust.
For a more recent example, there are companies that play the role of mercenary armies. They have committed various atrocities, war crimes, and at least played a role in genocide.
Here's a list of corporations who profited from the holocaust in various ways.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_i...
They are not part of the international coûts mandaté at the moment so they are used to shield people behind them.
Here's a paper exploring this possibility
However, we have seen with other AI models that as soon as something useful is proved possible, we can expect rapid reductions in the amount of compute necessary to achieve the same.
It might take steps to try to prevent anyone building such a thing.
An AGI without consciousness may well act like it has consciousness for the same reason VHS tapes playing on a TV do a good job of reproducing human facial expressions. An AI like this would still act scared of such things, because some of us act scared of such things.
[0] it's not obvious to me that an AGI necessarily has to have consciousness
We simply don't know, just like we don't know what other species experience and can only guess at by observing their behavior and trying to map it back to what we know.
Once a digital intelligence is discovered, does it have rights? Can it be enslaved, controlled, or destroyed? If an AGI can't be granted similar rights as a human, why are corporations legally treated similarly to humans?
Even in that scenario, I'm not really sure what the distinction would end up being. At least in the US, our government and corporations are so tightly coupled at this point that we're really toeing the waters of Fascism.
If a corporation develops an AGI our government can have access to it whenever they deem necessary. And if a government wants to develop one they will almost certainly partner with corporations to do it. I'm sure the military and intelligence agencies have their own projects running, but they'd accelerate by partnering with and funding corporate projects and research.
Corporations also enable government actions by developing the tech and tools/weapons needed.
The company was only nationalised in 1858 and until then effectively colonised india until then
Government granted monopoly.
Just off the top of my head; holodomir, the Great Leap Forward, the holocaust, the Khmer Rouge are at least 10x the East India companies death toll. We should probably add in war casualties too - at a minimum WW1 and WW2. I think I could list off probably 10 more with about 5 more minutes of work.
People can be terrible. More direct power usually means more terrible.
Gov’ts usually have the most direct power.
East India company was an odd case because they were granted defacto delegated gov’t power over a region that was full of ‘others’.
Considering the factors involved, it’s amazing they weren’t worse. Like the French Congo [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Congo].
This is literally why economics is called "the dismal science". Slaveowners called economists that when the economists told them to stop doing slavery.
But the modern status quo is so massively skewed toward government that the benefits from mitigating the worst cases of competition are vastly eclipsed by the detriments of monopolistic centralization.
So we shouldn't cheer on private corporations that developers technology that could allow them to replace the government, that is really really scary if they actually succeeds in doing it.
The fact that governments used contrived symbolic rituals to get arbitrary subsets of arbitrary aggregations of people to express nominal approval of their behavior does nothing whatsoever to alter either the empirical nature or the ethical implicatoins of its monopoly.
> Corporations aren't democratic
Good -- this means that it's harder for them to appeal to vague symbolism to convince people that their actions are inherently legitimate, which in turn means that they are under greater scrutiny to justify their actions, each on its own merits.
> if a corporation gets powerful enough to overthrow the government and replace them you will be in much worse hands than if the current democratic government could remain in power.
Large vested interests are already extremely adept at co-opting nominally "democratic" government and using the very monopoly you're trying to justify as a way of obtaining top-down power that they'd never be able to acquire on their own -- they have zero interest in overthrowing anything.
Regulatory capture is the principal mechanism of corruption in the modern world, and it's astonishing to me that people keep arguing for expanding the reach of the regulatory state in order to reduce the dominance of large corporations, when the actual effect is always to amplify it.
This isn’t a feature of humans, but basic system dynamics / economics / etc.
A group gets more power and leverage that power to gain more power. Inevitable. Coordinated action is the only way to prevent it. And coordinated action is government.
Stopping this accumulation of power takes very little, its undoing the accumulation of power that is costly.
I don't consider myself an anarchist, partly be cause the term has been repurposed so many times now that it doesn't have a clear meaning.
The belief in magical harmony is unrealistic regardless of the model that's supposed to create it, whether its anarchism or federalism.
Uh oh, what if he spent $50 buying muscle?
USA didn't exist pre-colonial times, it started as a colony. Do you mean the British Empire? That one did way worse, yeah, but USA isn't the British Empire.
Both governments and corporations kill people (look up annual tobacco deaths, for just one fun example).
Interestingly schizophrenic people almost universally smoke, and it's thought this is because it's a better treatment than the actual drugs we give them, though that's not proven.
No, that's quite backwards. Individual behavior is effectively the only thing that objectively exists, as "society" is just an emergent pattern of aggregated individual behavior. Individuals' choices are limited by their own particular capacities, and "society" factors into that only in the sense that the choices of other individuals in the same bounded context, in aggregate, can function as environmental constraints. So a more accurate statement is "every individual has full freedom of choice, but external constraints including the behavior of others may limit one's ability to fully execute the choices one has made".
Given that the act of smoking entails deliberately choosing to purchase a product, light it on fire, and actively inhale the fumes -- all behaviors which are necessarily the result of purposeful intention -- and given that within any social context one will find some people who smoke but a great many who do not, along with many who have chosen to quit (despite the external influences and incentives being largely constant), it seems impossible to attribute smoking to anything other than conscious individual choice.
I once asked family member why they smoke, and the response was "because I love it". I had, and could have, no retort to that -- if another person consciously chooses to make the risk/reward tradeoff in favor of short-term pleasure rather than longer-term health, then there's no further argument to be had, and the only demand that any other party could make is that they not be exposed to negative externalities resulting from that choice.
All that while fossil fuel companies receive 7000B$ of annual subsidies, and spend billions yearly to fuel disinformation.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/09/apple-a...
Why don't you ask the people who were slaving in United Fruit plantations how much corporations improved their lives? Or East India Company colony subjects?
Corporations benefit those who benefit from them, often at the expense of everyone else/extraction of the commons.
People elected to government often seem to seek power for powers sake and I have less faith that they'll not harm us.
Doing more to stem the growth in CO2 emissions would have reduced the magnitude of the change in the climate, and with it, the harmful effects of that change, but it would also have reduced the benefits that oil and gas have conferred upon the world, in raising incomes and reducing poverty worldwide.
In Germany, their actions actually caused increase in the use of coal and increased CO2 output.
So it’s possible for a rational environmentalist to acknowledge the benefits and drawbacks of nuclear and decide subsidizing nuclear is a poor investment vs other options. Since 2010 Germany reduced coal production by 82 TWh while also reducing Nuclear by 104 TWh. Oil -7 TWh and gas + 6TWh effectively canceled out for a net of -83 TWh from fossil fuels.
I know because I served as an officer in one of those wars on behalf of the United States (among other things that were also not beneficial to citizens). That had absolutely nothing to do with protecting US citizens directly.
It was chiefly about maintaining petro-dollar power and reinforcing the financial-corporate-govt collusion that maintains the current capitalist structures.
The structure of an organized body politic is not the problem.
The problem is that the body politic has been beaten into submission by those same corporate-government oligarchs to such an extent that most people just “go with the flow” because fighting it is exhausting and seemingly impossible.
Link here too for everyone:
The US does not care about "the petrodollar". Nor do we care about foreign oil. Nor do we have remotely the same economy we did in 1935.
In fact, war is not even profitable for our military industrial complex. They profit from the threat of war because that funds development of untested superweapons. Actual wars mean all that stuff actually has to work though, and there's a chance you'll get nationalized.
But if it was good for some MIC rich people, it still wouldn't matter, because they're outnumbered by all the other rich people it's bad for.
It probably wouldn’t be hard for whoever had the most direct control of it to have it start pushing buttons population wide.
Napoleon's government alone murdered more people than all corporations combined have throughout all of history. And that's a revered historical figure that routinely gets fawning movies made about him, there are obviously worse examples. Mao's government murdered several times more than Napoleon did.
Don't get me wrong, corps have brought good as well, but saying one is necessarily better than the other is just betraying political leanings more than providing sound arguments.
OpenAI’s stated mission is AGI that can replace half the population in “economically valuable” work.
I get that with some creativity you can see that as a net benefit for humanity, but across at least a generation that’s going to be a rough & destabilizing transition.
There is one person out there who decides if you have a job and it's not anyone working on AI. It's the chairman of the Federal Reserve.
There's no perfect solution. I think so far we've done best with whatever's the most democratic (which is sometimes trade unions and sometimes capitalism), but even then, democracy itself is what sounds convincing rather than what is true — and the difference between them matters most when you've got an AI trained to respond with what people upvote the most, which is all of them from ChatGPT's RLHF to the Facebook/Twitter/etc. timelines to Google/Amazon/YouTube etc. search results…
[0] TW basically everything https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Rebellion_of_1857#Death...
It's not only this one, but all of your opinions are dependent on cases from the past that you've been trained on.
Maybe AGI takes over after it emerges as a solution to our inability to select competent candidates for political office.
I think it could be better until it won't. Like with dictators sometimes they "do good" but the issue is that at some point they will start doing more harm than good and they may not want to go away.
A succesful revolution against an AGI ruler may become impossible.
And I don't think we need sentience for AGI, so "want" may be the wrong term anyway. You could argue that the reward function is close enough ("do submarines swim?" etc.), but a human-made reward function is almost certainly going to be designed to be as close to aligned with our interests as we can manage.
If a company has it, US intelligence will have it, for sure.
If US govt has it, it might take a decade, or so, to leak out.
There are many private entities, although often not benevolent, most still have space for the benefit of doubt. OpenAI, DeepMind or Anthropic haven't done anything that compares to, say, MKUltra or lying about Iraqi WMDs to start decade long wars.
There is no line between government and corporations. These are all groups of people, and some people do bad things. The only way to prevent bad things is to do them in the open and have oversight, and that’s more likely to happen in the government than in private companies, maybe.
Absolutely not; there's no private company that's shot and bombed the life out of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in cold blood.
In my comment above, I also had in mind industrial and environmental damage, unintentional death by private interests, environmental accidents and disasters, and coverups, which we can’t even count but the WHO estimates is in the tens of millions per year globally, today.
The generation of people in their 30s and 40s running the country spent summers listening to Rush Limbaugh over lunch with grandpa, grew up to consume news and comment from message boards and later social media, entered adulthood in the middle of an endless cycle of warfare, and came into their own in this era of propaganda and information warfare. Mainline protestantism has been displaced by Pastor Bob and prosperity gospel. We're replacing the craven boomers with nihlists.
The underlying trope of most propagandistic media is always to discredit the most powerful entity in the room - the government. Why? The money people behind faux-grassroots media are almost always reactionaries who often build their empires on the government teat and don't appreciate the irony. Particularly true of extractive capitalists in the petroleum and materials industries. The US Government giveth, and is the only entity that can taketh. So "rule of law" for me, and "freedumb" for thee.
And there's no unsubscribe button
I think AI could be turned into a very effective persuasion weapon. I think the government that does it first will gain more power as a result.
Also, first question to the new model: "So... any way we could do this with fewer parameters?"
"Ok. Well, thinking about it, maybe that's not such a good idea safety-wise, I think you'll have to give back that access"
"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."
Except, that might really be how an AGI eventually goes rogue in the first place! But, no, I didn't know that. It is a fun fact indeed.
The largest US open model is Google’s Switch-C which is 1.6T and only because it is a Mixture of experts model, i.e. it is constituted of many small models working together.
It is the prisoner's dilemma: we end up with a super-advanced AI that will disrupt and make society worse because entities are competing where the metric of success is short-term monetary gain.
It's ridiculous. Humanity should give up this useless development of AI.
I do not think there is an enormous positive gain. Science progress in my opinion has gone too far in many respects and we should not be able to generate science so easily because we will not have the wisdom to use it. Although I love science, it's use is far too lackadaisical now -- see for example the climate crisis and efficient resource extraction of fossil fuels.
Then we can imagine things like life-extending drugs, immunity from all disease (bad because it implies overpopulation), methods to generate oxygen (bad because it will mean we won't value the natural ecosystem as much), etc.
Smartphones, computer technology (human-isolating and community-destroying), etc. Pretty much all modern inventions are making life worse.
I see all of these negatives, and agree it is clear there is much that is bad in the world (there always has been) and much to be improved (ditto), including new problems created by science, technology, and human greed & selfishness. But I also see many positives and benefits, I see many problems that used to exist and don't anymore, and I see much evidence that we continue on average, to make progress. When I look to the past I do not wish I lived there.
Science have many times saved my friends and families' lives or enabled them to live more fully after an accident or sickness
Science made climate change possible but greed, raw capitalism, etc. put us on the path there. Science makes it possible to find a way out, slow or even reverse it eventually, and mitigate the worst results.
Populations are shrinking in developed countries despite people living longer.
Computers and the internet created and connected many new communities, too. The negative effects are again often the result of unbridled capitalism. Young people especially are fighting back against the negative effects and taking control, building technology to manage those hamrful effects.
etc…
I believe both that:
(a) it is not possible to stop humans acquiring and using knowledge, advancing science, developing technology, and evolving culturally and socially; and
(b) we shouldn't want to, even though it means we will create new problems and lose (or consign to a smaller "museum exhibit" role) some aspects of the culture and societies we have today, because on balance we will solve more and bigger problems than we create and build better and more interesting cultures and societies than those of the past.
It's not without existential risks, but those are overstated or analysed pseudoscientifically at best, by many of those (and certainly the loudest) who worry about them.
I think it was always the case. The wisdom actually comes from mistakes too, not from a priori speculations. Especially as all new solutions/technologies have been criticized and judged as dangerous, frivolous, unnecessary, morally wrong etc. Bikes, cars, street lights,social equality and so long.
By the way this is doomer rhetoric. Bashing scientific advancements as dangerous or useless by trying to attach vacuously scary ideas that are as speculative as they are outlandish.
1. Fossil fuel extraction -- we are killing our planet.
2. Plastic chemistry -- there are 5 trillion pieces of plastic in the ocean killing seabirds, turtles, fish (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0111913)
3. Concrete engineering -- building cities that move people away from a connection with nature
4. Veterinary medicine -- supporting global meat industry that is akin to torture on animals
5. Vehicle engineering -- capable of making vehicles that can kill MILLIONS of square meters of forest.
Our technology allows us to live comfortable lives but ONLY at the EXPENSE of millions of nonhuman animals (wild and domestic) that are KILLED every single day for our comforts. We dish out untold violence every second for our advancements.
There are scientific breakthroughs such as the proof of Fermat's theorem [1], for which I find it very hard to envision a way in which it will kill our planet.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiles%27s_proof_of_Fermat%27...
And being sincere, I don't care about 99% of human animals.
I cry for the deaths of my loved ones, and forget the rest. It is the only way to remain sane.
1. It will take away jobs from creatives
2. It will reduce the need for other human beings
3. It will be used by criminals for identity theft...
"In the 17th century nearly all Europe experienced revolts of the workpeople against the ribbonloom, a machine for weaving ribbons and trimmings, called in Germany Bandmühle, Schnurmühle, and Mühlenstuhl. These machines were invented in Germany. Abbé Lancellotti, in a work that appeared in Venice in 1636, but which was written in 1579, says as follows:
Anthony Müller of Danzig saw about 50 years ago in that town, a very ingenious machine, which weaves 4 to 6 pieces at once. But the Mayor being apprehensive that this invention might throw a large number of workmen on the streets, caused the inventor to be secretly strangled or drowned"
-- "Section 5: The Strife Between Workman and Machine", Das Kapital
> 3. Concrete engineering -- building cities that move people away from a connection with nature
This is 70s environmentalist thinking and it's terrible for the environment. Cities are good for it, because when you infill in cities you aren't touching the rest of the land.
America is unusually good about this. Most countries don't have our national park system.
"Humanity should give up this useless development of AI"
So balanced.
I do believe that AI has no merit, that people developing it are doing is a disservice, and that it should be completely destroyed. OF COURSE, there are some technologies that I think are completely bad, including chemical weapons. In fact, I believe AI to be on the level of chemical weapons essentially.
I disagree with their view on AI but also disagree with your criticism.