Seems like that's begging the question at best, motivated reasoning at worst.
13,013 karma · joined December 14, 2010
Was my comment incorrect? You admit it's both possible to work around it, people are actually doing that, and the comment does indeed give themselves a little pat on the back for working hard to unsuccessfully solve a problem with the product they themselves choose to make and market? So what's the reactionary part?
Yes it's true people have figured out how to disable the safeguard, but we all agree the important thing as we try to sell millions more of these is that we tried, right?
lol, see, it's unfalsifiable. No true abstraction ceiling.
Is it, or is it only the parts you hear about/pay attention to?
> People spent over a hundred years arguing whether a continuum approximation of a particle system would behave oddly. In the mean time, other folks went ahead and completely revolutionized the world of computational fluid dynamics (with multi-billion $$$ impact on society) by just doing better numerics (Kahn-style numerical analysis).
Yes, maybe famous solving famous conjectures is just trivia and trophy collecting and the real value is the intuition and techniques you develop along the way to solving them which you can then bring to bear on things like CFD.
It sounds more like you're turning a vibes based theory into a tautology.
Hofstadter struggling with math for the first time in graduate school isn't a unique story, nor is his self introspection about this event a good basis for an apparently unfalsifiable theory about human cognition.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you point, but I don't know how widely this would be held as true. Are you defining "math" as _only_ what can be proven under some particular formal system?
Producing human understandable proofs is possibly a job best for humans today, but the author appears to agree with you that this is probably fleeting (and argues that even if you disagree, it should probably be treated as if it is fleeting when planning for the future):
> Right now AI systems arguably underperform us at theory-building, asking questions, exposition, … so we could prioritize and reward those skills. I think this is unwise: compare the speed at which the academy adapts to the speed at which model capabilities improve. We need to consider the endgame. If the models remain incapable in some domain, we can adjust later.
Which is fine, great even (I do the same thing!), but in trying different things outside your day job, it seems like you do understand why people working on different things than you might be "reporting all these negative AI experiences"?
It's not a general argument, they made specific claims, but vague posted (and implying everyone else must be crazy) to the point that the conversation is derailed by a bunch of people trying to figure out what they meant.
> it still wouldn't invalidate the core thesis of LLMs providing business value.
lol, no, "providing business value" is not what was claimed:
>> What are people here doing exactly that they are not riding the gravy train and even reporting all these negative AI experiences?
The code their Astra+Fable setup, automatically generated from requests customers leave in voicemails, is apparently so good they never correct it. If the stories being woven are true, the SLA is literally just a middleman's 100k cut.
At the very least there might be some particulars here that aren't universally applicable.
Meanwhile they've apparently played with LLM porting of Postgres (or Postgres features?) and "would not put it in production"[2], so we can also guess the kind and scope of features being discussed here.
That's different (sometimes) when, for example, you're found guilty of criminal negligence leading to someone being injured.
Prosecutors don't have to demonstrate that you intended for someone to get hurt for that, your mens rea is that you should have perceived the danger of what you were doing but didn't.
edit: reading your other comments in this thread, maybe I missed your point, in which case, whoosh.
Huh? The endangerment finding was in 2009. The problem is that we have a very litigious set of polluters and then we elected Trump who stacked the supreme court, and then we elected Trump again, this time with a bunch of insane people with him who had specific plans to bring on the end of this country via the unitary executive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_greenhouse_gases...
lol, yes, this sort of thing is what many people who voted for Trump were saying, and things are going great for them.
> They prove a millenium result, but it doesn't count because they are bad people.
OpenAI has only themselves to blame for this, and they know it. They could have handled this so much better. I'd bet there's more meeting time right now going into how to unveil future math results than on meeting about the actual math research.
The biggest problem is, IMO, drivebys uninterested in actual results, just getting a check mark, and the equivalent of dropping a 200k line PR on people and expecting them to be interested and do the work for you. These are things many on HN are familiar with and know how to do better :)
Maybe it's worth double checking that you know how these fields benefit everyone else? Proving the blowup of the Navier Stokes equations in 3D isn't going to make your gas cheaper or make harvesting food easier or make drones easier to protect against. Maybe consider the deeper effects at work?
Funny, you were telling me two days ago that on the contrary, "it’s genuinely impossible to know how much of Buckmaster’s Codex data is in OpenAI’s training set":
Things like the nytimes interview are with Buckmaster, who works at NYU, not Alpöge. I saw a couple of tweets from him over the last week. Any chance of clarifying what makes you think he's "clearly pushing the case"?
In terms of work in mathematics, something I personally would not do based on ethical grounds would be to hear a rumor that some researchers are taking a certain approach and may be nearing a solution, use a model that was possibly contaminated with intimate knowledge about that approach (though later they investigated and think it wasn't), and then commit millions to tens of millions of dollars and untold amounts of hardware to try to beat them to it. If I had done this, I also wouldn't have pestered the researchers on a Sunday night to meet immediately so we could negotiate a nice way of presenting the actions I had decided to take.
Even if you don't think it was unethical, it was never going to be received well in the community that was especially going to care about this work, and who are very much peers to many of the people working on this solution, so it was at the least an enormous (and well-deserved) own-goal that their unveiling of their solution to NS went like this.
> Buckmaster rejected fame and $1M only because doing (3) would be wrong
I doubt Buckmaster would have accepted the offer to "write a paper presenting the Navier-Stokes result, acknowledging that an internal OpenAI model had resolved it" even if removing Alpöge from authorship wasn't a requirement. He clearly wanted nothing to do with OpenAI's actions here.
edit: I don't know if people think I'm disagreeing here, I'm certainly not, I'm just pointing out that playing the game of telephone with easily verifiable quotes is lazy and bad. For example, "end [your] career" was "ruin your career", and it was phrased as the much more "it would be a shame if something happened to you" like "Why would you ruin your career?" when Buckmaster said he would go public with this conversation: https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf
Really disagree on this, I think all states should be two party consent, personally.
> Why should it be illegal for me to remember exactly a conversation that I participated in, instead of only being allowed to have a vague recollection?
It's not illegal, it's just that the other person has to know that you're doing that and consent to it.
Giving them the chance to walk away or to tell a person and their Meta glasses to fuck off is important.
Let's check if an OpenAI employee agrees with you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49614154
Nope. Expensive, yes, impossible, no.
Moreover, you (and Sanders) aren't asking the more fundamental questions (and getting sloppy with your assumptions). - was Buckmaster's account set to prevent conversations from being trained on? This is easily answerable - Was user feedback ever activated on the account? I would bet this is logged, even if not tied to specific data - it's very easy to de-anonymize data in practice. In this case, there will be uncommon phrases used in material not published online until after the training material of their internal model was generated. Do any of these phrases appear in that material?
This is not sharing medical information. Companies publish postmortems relating to specific customers all the time with permission of those customers.
> You seem to think that it is some "gotcha" that OpenAI refuses to make a blanket denial
You're putting incorrect words into my mouth.
What I think is that this whole situation speaks to the character of OpenAI as a participant in the mathematics community, especially when they put no effort into getting to the bottom of this, and, of course, when the extent of them reaching out and collaborating with their peers involves rushed Sunday night video calls and apparent pressure on authorship and credit.
That's their choice, there doesn't appear to be anything illegal here, but they're going to continue to get called out on this kind of nonsense which can ruin the big moment they were clearly hoping to have. Bummer, but there are consequences.
Like first reply he literally says
> There is sorta one at some slight angles but basically no crease
And someone replied with a picture of it showing the crease.
It's probably fine and you don't notice it during use, but it's not some magic creaseless breakthrough.
Maybe glance back at your comment history and find you mostly are complaining about very developed world things and investigate why there might be a disconnect between these two aspects of you?
> If an AI can bring a few billion 3rd world people out of misery, I don't think I'm going to shed tears if that means you have to somehow "find meaning" outside of a high paying tech job.
Well, this is begging the question (how awful are people for worrying about the future when the future is going to be so great?), but you're also missing that there's more to humanity than surviving or not, and there always has been. There's no reason to reduce this to a dichotomy.
This is incorrect, and you invoke Russell's teapot incorrectly too.
It would only apply if the accusation rested solely on the fact that neither of us have evidence against the accusation.
But that's not the case. First, we know that there could be proof, it's just apparently burdensome and expensive to produce. At that point you're not in fallacy land anymore, you just need a way to balance the cost required of someone to prove the accusations against them false.
Second, we have an arguably plausible mechanism of action that OpenAI does not dispute is possible.
This isn't a legal dispute, so no one is going to force OpenAI to do anything here, but it's not unreasonable (and certainly not fallacious) to suggest that Buckmaster's suggestions are plausible enough it's up to OpenAI to stand behind their denial.
Always been what way? And how does that contrast to what Tao said (since it was apparently "a misstatement of mathematical history")?
> Also, your third paragraph is highly ironic.
You'll have to be more specific, since I engaged with my parent's argument, while they waved away Tao's quote by suggesting he was wrong because of exactly the kind of events that helped lead to the norms and mores working mathematicians have today.