He’s proposing using LLMs (which model human behaviour) to study humans so the distinction is pedantic. You don’t call it speadsheetology just because someone opened Excel.
173 karma · joined March 17, 2021
Let me tell you about a thing called JavaScript.
> A site that was never put on a server can never be taken off one.
If you post a link on HN and the content is embedded in the link itself then HN is the de facto server.
Anyone?
1. Send out thousands of letters expecting some to be returned. They may be returned due to deliverability issues, or they may be returned with a reply attached or (probably less commonly) scrawled on the pages of the letter itself. Replies to letters are of course common whether they're expressly requested or not.
2. Give each letter a unique number in your database so you can cross reference the letter to the recipient information (including but not limited to the address) you have stored in your system. The letter may be returned with something else (e.g. another letter) attached so it's important to keep that information correlated.
3. Scanning the original letter is a low cost way to maintain this correlation. When the letters are returned you scan them then send them through a program you have set up to update the system accordingly. The program uses some primitive OCR and probably a checksum to automatically recognize the codes in the original letters. I can imagine this being used to automatically mark bad addresses if a letter is returned without additional context, but its main purpose is probably to route the letter - and any attachments, like other letters - to the appropriate agent.
To support a workflow not unlike the one described above, it is requested that the unique number that identifies the letter be left unobscured. This way OCR can do its job, deliverability issues can be flagged with minimal human involvement, and replies to letters can be put in front of the right person without creating too much organizational overhead.
Look, it may well be something he believes, and he’s free to prognosticate (or market) however he likes, but I see absolutely nothing to support the number outside of his own opinion.
Besides, there’s no time limit on p(doom), so it’s completely unfalsifiable (“on a long enough timescale…”), and it’s about the destruction of humanity which means it’s unprovable as well. That, in my view, makes his 70% guess a sensational statement lacking scientific merit.
You clearly have some very specific models in mind. Even if the latest 4B and 8B models don’t move the needle on the “results you would champion” metric, this does not advance your argument that the state of the art hasn’t significantly progressed from 5 years ago.
> I would legitimately argue
I’ll bet you would!
> There’s a [arbitrary number] percent chance that [technology] will destroy or catastrophically harm humanity
Try these: social media, the Internet, the large hadron collider, Starlink, Neuralink, iPhones, iDrones, quantum computers, regular computers, the 2038 bug, the Y2K bug, electric cars, gasoline cars, the great firewall of China, the not so great firewalls of asbestos, mRNA technology, gain of function research, nuclear bombs, nuclear energy, paper clip manufacturers, scissors.
I’m not saying it’s true that these have a 70 percent chance of destroying or catastrophically harming humanity, but couldn’t you make the argument?
I don’t think that’s true.
> I will likely get downvoted, but there's something deep within his character that doesn't seem genuine or sit well with me
That’s actually an extremely popular opinion; see for example just about every recent article that’s been posted about him.
These are ballpark counts of cells in crow’s brain, a human’s brain, and a human body. The question is, is it the cells themselves doing the reasoning and planning, or are they just the machinery this disembodied process happens to be running on? I’d argue intelligence is a distributed phenomenon that our DNA is as much a party to as our brains.
Certainly the question of whether humans use DNA to reproduce or DNA uses humans is a matter of perspective.
Our brains however are highly modular (a “committee of idiots”) so who’s to say a portion, and even a significant one, doesn’t operate on similar principles?
That they’re not autonomously solving complex tasks is a bit of a straw man though, and with a bit of creativity we can easily imagine them being combined with models and modalities that do provide executive function and autonomy.
EDIT: To this feature’s credit, it’s not federated centrally, so a DDOS to nuke IP reputation would have its blast radius limited to the server(s) under attack.
The old "you're just not doing it right" chestnut, where have I heard that one before! Hey, by any chance have you noticed how many of those silly face masks made it (or didn't make it) to landfills?
> I stopped buying meat . . . Guess I'm just a stupid hippie.
You said it not me!
The converse (pushing green products) is also true so we have to consider whether the environmental impact is as big as is claimed, whether it's worth it even if it is (single issue reductivism is a dangerous way to craft policy), or whether banal financial and power incentives are the true moving force behind the lobbied solution.
Seed for the message above is 42 by the way.
(Just kidding!)
For the serious use cases you evidently have in mind, yes, it's folly to have it do double duty, but at the end of the day steganography is an obfuscation technique orthogonal to encryption, so the question of whether to use encryption or not is a nuanced one. Anyhow, I don't think it's fair to characterize this elaborate steganography tech as a poor-man's encryption — LLM tokens are expensive!
That being said, yes, some of my assumptions were incorrect, mainly regarding temperature. For practical reasons I was envisioning this being implemented with a third party LLM (i.e. OpenAI's,) but I didn't realize those could have their RNG seeded as well. There is the security/convenience tradeoff to consider, however, and simply setting the temperature to 0 is a lot easier to coordinate between sender and receiver than adding two arbitrary numbers for temperature and seed.
I misspoke, or at least left myself open to misinterpretation when I referred to the LLM's weights as a "secret key"; I didn't mean the weights themselves had to be kept under wraps, but rather I meant that either the weights had to be possessed by both parties (with the knowledge of which weights to use being the "secret") or they'd have to use a frozen version of a third party LLM, in which case the knowledge about which version to use would become the secret.
As for how I might take a first stab at this if I were to try implementing it myself, I might encode the message using a low base (let's say binary or ternary) and make the first most likely token a 0, the second a 1, and so on, and to offset the risk of producing pure nonsense I would perhaps skip tokens with too large a gulf between the probabilities for the 1st and 2nd most common tokens.
Then, having done all that, such steganography may be detectable using this very tool by encoding the difference between the LLM's prediction and ground truth, but searching for substrings with low entropy instead!
> unskilled, underpaid employees who don’t care
One of these things is not like the others. The models may not ask for a raise but they’ll no doubt go to work finding all sorts of other excuses to raise taxes.