gabbagool

I know what you're saying, but OpenAI is an independent, profit driven company. They will make decisions that are in the best interests of the company, not the US. You really need something that is for the people (taxpayers), by the people (gov).

Edit: Nevermind, someone made this point already.

Well, I've never been to the Grand Canyon myself, but what you said perfectly aligns with my intuition.

Also, you touched on how even modern tech still falls short of the true experience. Just look at the history of motion picture since the early 1900s. We have added sound, color, bigger screens, faster refresh rates, more pixels, 3D (sort of), surround sound, spatial audio, IMAX, etc. Almost seems like video leaves a lot to be desired.

Or, ask yourself the following question:

If you read every single book there is about The Grand Canyon, and watched every single video and/or documentary about The Grand Canyon, do you believe that you have fully experienced The Grand Canyon? Or do you just have to be there to fully experience it.

I dunno. Substitute in whatever you want for "The Grand Canyon". Maybe climbing Mount Everest or walking on the Moon. The point is that maybe the human experience is more vast than what is written about it.

Probably too late for this, but I have argued before that language is a fundamentally lossy encoding of the human experience. We do our best to describe what we're seeing and experiencing using language, which is fantastically expressive, but it has its limits. I think we see glimpses of this when we find ourselves saying things such as, "it's impossible to put it into words" or we overload certain words when we mean very different things, such as, "I love my children" or "I love apple pie". Clearly the word "love" here has a certain magnitude that is not being expressed, yet it is understood by the listener somehow.

So, I do sort of buy into this idea that Einstein was simulating the world and running experiments on those simulations in ways that were beyond what you could encode in natural language. Will AI be capable of doing this, if it is bounded by training data that is composed almost entirely on language? One might argue that if AI is training on a lossy encoding/representation of the human experience, how will it be able to simulate anything beyond that experience? Unless it does so in a way that we manage to do when we image objects beyond 3D. But now I'm just rambling.

I agree with this whole heartedly. What's the point of even having copyright law at this point?

What's even crazier to think about is that to use the latest versions of these models for which you supplied training data, you have to pay hundreds of dollars a month. I would love to get a settlement check proportional to my model weights. Even if it's $0.10, at least everyone out there will get what they're owed.

My thought on this is that LLMs should be allowed to touch high stakes projects, but they shouldn't be left completely unsupervised.

Here me out.

Would you let AI manage your investments/retirement savings/etc. completely autonomously and unsupervised? Or would that make you a little nervous?

What if you had to undergo a X-Ray or a MRI. Would you ONLY want AI reading the images? Would you ONLY want a human radiologist reading the images? This is an interesting one because I would want both. In fact, I would find it questionable if AI wasn't given the opportunity to look at the images.

I'm genuinely curious why you think Apple software is terrible?

The first thing I thought when I read the abstract of the underlying paper was that this sounds like "model collapse" at the society level.

I don't feel super confident that we'll "soon" find ourselves in a world where there is no variance left in thought (would that be the net effect of total model/epistemic collapse?), though if you do accept that there could be any loss of variance due to AI, perhaps it's not unreasonable to consider how much and how quickly could this happen?

All this is by way of saying, I don't think it's wrong to ask these kinds of questions and think deeply about the consequences of societal shifts like this.

Just because someone lets the electrician (LinkedIn) into their home (browser) doesn't mean they can do whatever the hell they want that isn't expressly prohibited. If the electrician wants to rifle through my desk drawers, they should ask for permission, and I will politely tell them to leave.

To this day, I wonder if Google knew that they couldn't be the ones to unleash AI unto the world. They clearly had the wherewithal and expertise to do it (Vaswani et al, 2017), but were under so much antitrust pressure at the time that it seemed inconceivable that they could be the ones to introduce such a polarizing technology to the world. What kind of firestorm would have rained down on them if they were the first.

Or, you might think, if Google had the technology, and they knew how to turn it into a trillion-dollar product, it's beyond ridiculous to think they would just hand the win over to someone else.