TerrifiedMouse

So disinformation sites will be effectively free from competition on Facebook Canada … this will end well.

Maybe it depends on at what speed you are going.

Crumple zones exist in cars because it’s better that the car absorbs (and deforms in the process) the kinetic energy of a crash than you the passenger inside.

What people hated about Microsoft’s acquisition was that it will deprive its competitors IPs they used to have access to - eventually.

Sony’s acquisitions are less “egregious” as the companies they acquire usually generated few to no (valuable) IPs for their competitors - there are exceptions of course. That’s why most all of their acquisitions fly under the radar.

> How many competitors died on the vine because Figma was able to offer a free tier subsidised with low interest rate VC money?

Is it any different from wealthy established multinationals offering a free tier subsidized by steady profits from established (sometimes even monopolistic) product lines killing all startup offerings?

FU money or not, Twitter has bills and interest (nearly a billion a year the last I heard) to pay. High spending advertisers redrawing from Twitter hurts. Several hundred million dollars is still several hundred million dollars even if you are a billionaire.

> My gut instinct is the amount of applications that do a lot of processing but only on a small amount of data are in the minority. The opposite seems a lot more common.

I doubt that. The easily way to find out is to disable the L3 cache on your CPU. If your theory is right, the performance drop should be minimal on most applications.

Note: Even with the L3 cache disabled there is still the L1 and L2 caches but those are pretty small.

> Good if you're NVidia, bad if you're OpenAI

Not necessarily good for Nvidia. If the new algorithm is branch heavy, don’t parallelize well, … etc. and operate better on CPUs rather than GPUs, it will be Intel, AMD, and ARM that enjoy the windfall.

Frankly, we may be barking up the wrong tree with LLMs. Sure they deliver novel and very marketable results, hence the insane funding, but I can’t help but feel it’s really just a parlor trick and there is a yet undiscovered algorithm that can actually deliver the AGI that we seek - AGI that reliable and precise like fictional AIs.

Next time put the “Summary by ChatGPT” at the top so we can decide for ourselves if we want to waste our time reading it.

Also this is such a low effort post … feeding text into an algorithm and pasting the results.

> It is sad to me that so many young people are voluntarily choosing not to have children.

I think many people feel they are incapable of taking care of offspring. Better not to bring into this world children you cannot care properly for.

> What is instinct physically?

Does it matter? As long as it conceptually exist that’s all that matters.

LLMs don’t seek any goal. It’s advanced autocomplete.

You can’t give it a bunch of facts and a goal then expect it to figure out how to achieve said goal. It can give you an answer if it already has it (or something similar) in its training set - in the latter case, it’s like a student who didn’t study for the exam and tries to guess the right answer with “heuristics”.

> A LLM also can't do multi-step reasoning, yet here we are.

Where’s “here”?

> If a NN is trained to do something, it can be equally considered as "wanting" to do that thing within the autonomy it is afforded, as much as any human.

Human wants are driven by instinct though - i.e. our preferences; if you like women, you like women, if you don’t, you don’t.

Our “output” is in service to those wants.

Current AI doesn’t have instinct / preprogrammed goals - except for goal-driven AIs but the hyped up LLMs aren’t such AIs. Their output isn’t motivated by any goal - a LLM can’t deliberately lie to you to get you to do something; it lies because it doesn’t differentiate between what’s true and what’s false.

> feels a bit more quiet than it used to for me.

The site as a whole feels a bit less active - i.e. not as active as it used to be.

> Nowadays if you share or reproduce anything controversial, is as if you are endorsing such content. LLM's outputs are user generated content for what is worth it, both from inferece and from training. That line of thinking that the host would be responsible for everything it says, even if the users force it to, is ludicrous to me but it seems like how the world nowadays has become.

If it applies to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, ... etc. it will apply to AI chatbots.

Facebook didn't write those posts that radicalize, promote hatred, and ignite conflict, but if it publishes them and promote them to users, the FBI will want them to take it down.

> They have been designed and trained to solve natural language processing tasks

They aren’t really designed to do anything actually. LLMs are models of human languages - it’s literally in the name, Large Language Model .

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-...

I’m sorry but I don’t trust something that uses a random number generator as part of its output generation.

> AGI is a potential successor species

Only if we let it be.

Oh who am I kidding. Someone either out of blind idealism, pure hubris, unfettered greed, or some combination of the aforementioned will probably go as far as technology allows them and create machines with a survival instinct that will compete with humans for resources effectively creating an enemy where there was once none.

Useful idiots will anthropomorphize machines, demand rights for them, … etc. and make attempts to eliminate them - so we can get back on top of the food chain - that much harder.

But maybe I’m just off my rocker. I’m tired.

Edit: The only people working at the cutting edge of AI now are for-profit companies who would screw over society if it made them a couple more bucks. It’s hard not to be pessimistic that any advancement would not be used to screw the common man over.

> very least show clear signs of creativity

Do you know how that “creativity” is achieved? It’s done with a random number generator. Instead of having the LLM pick the absolute most likely next token, they have it select from a set of most likely next tokens - size of the set depends on “temperature”.

Set temperature to 0, and the LLM will talk in circles and not really say anything interesting. Set it too high and it will output nonsense.

The whole design of LLMs don’t seem very well thought out. Things are done a certain way not because it makes sense but because it seems to produce “impressive” results.

This is going to sound like heresy but I never understood what is the big deal with Ghibli’s films. They have good production values … and that’s about it really. I never really connect with the stories - they aren’t bad stories but they never really made much of an impact on me.

> but thinking it's an existential risk is still premature

Even ignoring what the technology can do, it feels me with dread that we basically have IMHO some of the worst possible people leading the charge - people who are greedy, slimy, and ruthless; who only care about money. Such a bad timeline we are in.

To quote Reddit user jstadig,

> The thing that most worries me about technology is not the technology itself but the greed of those who run it.

Someone slimy with limitless ambition like Altman seems to be the worst person to be in charge of things like this.

Nah. Microsoft still exist and is thriving. Altman is the new Bill Gates except he is better at retaining ~~cul~~ employees. Many at HN love him for those qualities.

Frankly I think they can allow this without hurting their business. I mean “allowing other stores” was the default before online stores - i.e. vast majority of games used to be sold by retailers that aren’t Sony.

How does Sony/Nintendo/Sega make money back in the day? Royalty fees. Every copy of a game sold on their platform, they get 10-20%. If you refuse then you don’t publish at all - all consoles have lockout mechanisms; NES/SNES has a lockout chip you can only get from Nintendo, modern consoles require all executables to be digitally signed or they won’t run and guess who has the keys, …

Apple would be hurt by allowing alt stores though since they don’t charge royalties. But if forced to open up iOS to alt stores, I think they will start charging royalties like consoles do.

I think it yo-yos because eventually they cut the cost of hardware over its life cycle. On average I think consoles are sold at break even.

For example, and I'm not saying such flaws exist, GPT4 output is bias in some way, encourages radicalization (see Twitter's, YouTube's, and Facebook's news feed algorithm), create self-esteem issues in children (see Instagram), ... etc.

If you worked for old OpenAI, you would be free to talk about it - since old OpenAI didn't give a crap about profit.

Altman's OpenAI? He will want you to "go to him first".

The OpenAI of the past, that dabbled in random AI stuff (remember their DotA 2 bot?), is gone.

OpenAI is now just a vehicle to commercialize their LLM - and everything is subservient to that goal. Discover a major flaw in GPT4? You shut your mouth. Doesn’t matter if society at large suffers for it.

Altman's/Microsoft’s takeover of the former non-profit is now complete.

Edit: Let this be a lesson to us all. Just because something claims to be non-profit doesn't mean it will always remain that way. With enough political maneuvering and money, a megacorp can takeover almost any organization. Non-profit status and whatever the organization's charter says is temporary.

Frankly, I would go so far as to say he is the wrong man for the job of running the for-profit arm of a nonprofit.

He seems to be a guy who wants to be the next Zuckerberg. He wants fame and power, and would step on anyone and anything that gets in his way.

His agreessive commercialization of OpenAI gets in the way of the organization’s original mission. He believes he should get to tell the board what to do, not the other way around.

OpenAI would be better off with a more “tame” CEO who would just do what he/she can to make some dough without running afoul of the organization’s charter, accepting that his/her role and desires are secondary to organization’s.

If they lack money they could always scale back operations.

Also running the for-profit arm the way Altman did isn’t the only way.

A more reasonable CEO would do what he/she can to make money without running afoul of the charter. Yes, it will be less profit - and sometimes no profit at all - but that’s the way it should be in a non-profit organization.

OpenAI used to be an organization that dabbled with various AI technologies. Anyone remember their DOTA2 bot? Before Altman turned it into all about commercializing their LLM - going so far as to try to lobby congress to create laws, in the name of safety of course, to hobble any upstart competition.

The for-profit arm was always meant to be subservient to the non-profit arm - the latter practically owns the former.

The important thing for the non-profit arm is the mission, its own existence is secondary.

> What this really shows us is that this "for-profit wrapper around a non-profit" shenanigans was doomed to fail in the first place.

I disagree. The for-profit arm was always meant to be subservient to the non-profit arm - the latter practically owns the former.

A proper CEO would just try to make money without running afoul of the non-profit’s goals.

Yes that would mean earning less or even not at all. But it was clearly stated to investors that profit isn’t a priority.

This is something you don’t get. What happens to the for-profit arm of OpenAI is not her problem, her loyalty lies with the non-profit arm’s charter (and not even the organization itself).

She is doing her job to uphold the mission of the organization.