[HN Gopher] Weak-to-Strong Generalization
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Weak-to-Strong Generalization
        
       Author : vagabund
       Score  : 75 points
       Date   : 2023-12-14 17:20 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (openai.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (openai.com)
        
       | esafak wrote:
       | I hope OpenAI will continue to prioritize working on these
       | crucial questions after the boardroom drama.
        
         | daveguy wrote:
         | Weren't all the board members who wanted to prioritize these
         | crucial questions fired? Hopefully the employees who were hired
         | to perform this work have enough inertia to continue until the
         | board recovers (if it recovers).
        
           | esafak wrote:
           | Hence my concern. This is a problem only a well-capitalized
           | organization can work on; one that can afford to play around
           | with big models.
        
           | nuz wrote:
           | Ilya is still around.
        
           | cwillu wrote:
           | They got to choose their replacements; it's not like they
           | were forced out to be replaced by anybody Altman wanted.
        
             | daveguy wrote:
             | Oh! Thank you for the update. I had missed that.
        
             | righthand wrote:
             | They also greatly expanded the number of seats leaving more
             | room for Altman to fill unless I'm mistaken that there were
             | always other empty seats to be filled.
        
       | tycho-newman wrote:
       | I don't think this will work because a super intelligent AI will
       | outsmart its supervisor.
       | 
       | The solution may be to have two AIs working against the other.
       | Though this might backfire by pushing each via competition. That
       | is how evolution produced living things out of inert matter.
       | 
       | Either way I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
        
       | righthand wrote:
       | > Figuring out how to align future superhuman AI systems to be
       | safe has never been more important
       | 
       | They love using the word "safe" and I'm pretty sure it's 99% PR,
       | because reading their other "papers" on Safety & Alignment seems
       | to not really identify or define safety bounds at all. You'd
       | think this has something to do with ethics but we all know there
       | are no longer any ethically concerned leaders at their workplace.
       | So I can only surmise that "safety" is a softer word being used
       | to misdirect people on their non-ethically aligned intentions.
       | 
       | You can make the argument that safety is too early in development
       | of these LLM systems to understand but then why throw around the
       | word in the first place?
        
         | cwillu wrote:
         | We're deliberately trying to create something with the
         | capability to also create. It's not ridiculous to be concerned
         | about what we might end up with.
        
         | og_kalu wrote:
         | It's not really about ethics. It is about control. Making sure
         | the GI you're dishing out tasks to doesn't do something you
         | really don't want it to do.
         | 
         | This is a problem today and it'll be a bigger problem tomorrow
         | with more competent models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.07590
        
           | righthand wrote:
           | Is a safe LLM not an ethical LLM? Control within what
           | boundaries? All three of these words seem to be used
           | interchangeably when people discuss returned information from
           | models. Which is exactly my point it's poorly defined yet
           | championed as a center piece. Meanwhile you have other
           | companies spitting out acronyms consisting of vague
           | terminology.
        
             | kaibee wrote:
             | A safe language model is one that won't get you sued/on the
             | news. Ethics has nothing to do with it.
        
               | righthand wrote:
               | Right so it would be a model that won't get you sued
               | because the news finds it ethical?
        
             | og_kalu wrote:
             | >Is a safe LLM not an ethical LLM?
             | 
             | What is an ethical LLM ?
             | 
             | Humans are in general not aligned, not to each other, not
             | to the survival of their species, not to all the other life
             | on earth, and often not even to themselves individually.
             | 
             | There are no universal set of "ethics" so this is about
             | aligning to open ai's own rules, or in other words,
             | control.
             | 
             | If i say to my GPT bot, "go trade stocks for me. don't do
             | anything illegal", can i guarantee that ? No you can't
             | regardless of how "ethical" you make your model to be.
             | 
             | The guarantee that you will have nothing to worry about is
             | the crux of alignment.
        
               | righthand wrote:
               | > There are no universal set of "ethics" so this is about
               | aligning to open ai's own rules, or in other words,
               | control.
               | 
               | Are ethics not a set of rules relative to the governing
               | body applying those rules?
               | 
               | Right as there are no universal ideas of a safe LLM,
               | controlled LLM, or ethical LLM. Safe would imply some
               | level of control about the ethical output of the model.
               | 
               | Yet the words are still poorly defined as they are
               | interchangeable:
               | 
               | If i say to my GPT bot, "go trade stocks for me. don't do
               | anything illegal", can i guarantee that ? No you can't
               | regardless of how "safe"/"controlled"/"ethical" you make
               | your model to be.
               | 
               | You're spinning the words to create a distinct difference
               | but it doesn't hold up because they're each a relative
               | mechanism for each other as they are all poorly defined
               | in the field but chosen to mask the poor definition.
               | You're just playing by the PR game rules.
        
       | logicchains wrote:
       | >We believe superintelligence--AI vastly smarter than humans--
       | could be developed within the next ten years. However, we still
       | do not know how to reliably steer and control superhuman AI
       | systems
       | 
       | Their entire premise is contradictory. An AI incapable of
       | critical thinking cannot be smarter than a human, by definition,
       | as critical thinking is a key component of intelligence. And an
       | AI that is at least as capable of critical thinking as humans
       | cannot be "reliably" aligned because critical thinking could lead
       | it to decide that whatever OpenAI wanted it to do wasn't in its
       | own interests.
        
         | cwillu wrote:
         | Seems like "airplanes are physically impossible" thinking, and
         | if accepted as valid, strongly suggests that shutting down all
         | development _might_ be a good idea, no?
        
           | xcv123 wrote:
           | No. This is a logical contradiction.
           | 
           | Edit: I mean the comment you are replying to is showing there
           | is a logical contradiction.
           | 
           | If the AI is capable of critical thinking then it will
           | independently form its own judgements and conclusions. If it
           | simply believes whatever we tell it to believe, then that is
           | not critical thinking, by definition.
        
             | cwillu wrote:
             | "Containing an atomic reaction is impossible" would
             | _absolutely_ be a valid reason to shut down atomic
             | development, I believe einstein is quoted as saying that.
             | The exact same argument doesn't become _logically_ invalid
             | just because you apply it to a different subject.
             | 
             | "Logical contradiction" doesn't mean "policy argument I
             | disagree with"
        
               | xcv123 wrote:
               | I was referring only to the first part of your comment:
               | "Seems like "airplanes are physically impossible"
               | thinking".
               | 
               | If it's true that superhuman AGI cannot be aligned then
               | of course your second point is valid. That is the
               | possible Skynet scenario that the Terminator movies
               | warned us about.
        
               | cwillu wrote:
               | Missing the step where "critical thinking" is formalized,
               | which your argument depends on. Yes, it seems intuitively
               | plausible that your reasoning holds, but that's not a
               | proof, and therefore its negation is not a logical
               | contradiction.
        
               | logicchains wrote:
               | We can formalise "critical thinking" as "evaluating first
               | order logic". There are simplified ethical systems that
               | can be formalised in first order logic in which a
               | conclusion like "I should X" can be reached, where X is
               | something OpenAI wishes the AI not to do. The only way to
               | prevent the AI from ever thinking this would be to
               | prevent it from ever evaluating systems in first order
               | logic with axioms that lead to such a conclusion, which
               | would make it inferior in reasoning ability to humans,
               | who can evaluate any arbitrary statement in first order
               | logic.
        
               | cwillu wrote:
               | We already have systems that can evaluate first order
               | logical statements, and they are clearly not capable of
               | critical thinking in the same sense as the top-level
               | comment. Motte and bailey.
        
               | logicchains wrote:
               | >We already have systems that can evaluate first order
               | logical statements
               | 
               | My point isn't that a system that can evaluate first
               | order logic can be considered to be engaging in critical
               | thinking, it's that a system that _cannot_ evaluate some
               | statements in first order logic should be considered
               | inferior to humans at critical thinking.
        
               | cwillu wrote:
               | Would you consider "I follow your reasoning, but I'm
               | still not going to be swayed by it" to be a violation of
               | evaluating first order statements? It's clearly part of
               | critical thinking to be _capable_ of suspicion of purely
               | logical reasoning, which to me is a pretty plain
               | demonstration of my point.
               | 
               | Or would you argue that any computation that admits its
               | own potential for error isn't really critical thinking?
               | It seems to me that you can't have it both ways here,
               | while salvaging "first order logic" as a suitable
               | formalization of the argument that this is all about in
               | the first place.
               | 
               | Remember, the point was not that this is or isn't a
               | convincing argument, it's that it's so air-tight that the
               | argument is _logically_ _invalid_. That's a _really_ high
               | bar, and I'm not inclined to forgive its use as a
               | colloqialism in this context.
        
               | xcv123 wrote:
               | If an AI is capable of critical thinking then it can
               | independently form its own judgements and conclusions. If
               | it simply believes whatever we tell it to believe, then
               | that is not critical thinking, by definition.
        
               | cwillu wrote:
               | Yes, I can repeat comments verbatim too:
               | 
               | "Missing the step where "critical thinking" is
               | formalized, which your argument depends on. Yes, it seems
               | intuitively plausible that your reasoning holds, but
               | that's not a proof, and therefore its negation is not a
               | logical contradiction."
        
               | xcv123 wrote:
               | It doesn't need to be formalized. The idea is simple and
               | obvious enough. No need to pretend it is more complicated
               | than it really is. This is not a mathematical argument or
               | a proof of anything.
               | 
               | There is an obvious logical contradiction where if an AI
               | is advanced enough to reason and think independently at
               | human level or beyond, but believes only what we tell it
               | to believe, then it cannot be truly thinking
               | independently. Hence the entire debate about AGI safety.
               | How do we control it without dumbing it down?
        
           | bayindirh wrote:
           | No it's not. There's an upper bound in computation (actually
           | in nature), that a creation of something is capped by that
           | thing's sophistication.
           | 
           | In other words, you as a human, at most, can create a human,
           | and that's the _theoretical bound_. Practical one is much
           | lower.
           | 
           | An ant can find its way. A ant colony can do ant colony
           | optimization, but they can scale up to a certain point. AI is
           | just fancy search. It can only traverse in the area you draw
           | as a human for it, and not all positions in that area are
           | valid (which results in hallucination).
           | 
           | An AI can bring any combination of human knowledge you give
           | to it, and even if you guarantee that everything it says is
           | true, it can only fill the gaps in the same area you give it
           | to it.
           | 
           | IOW, an I can't think out of the box. Both figuratively and
           | literally. Its upper bound is collective knowledge of
           | humanity, it can't go above that sum.
        
             | logicchains wrote:
             | >Its upper bound is collective knowledge of humanity, it
             | can't go above that sum.
             | 
             | This only applies if you only train it on text, right? If
             | it has a body with which it could interact with the world,
             | and receive visual/audio/tactile feedback, it could learn
             | things that humans did not know.
        
               | bayindirh wrote:
               | Nope. Because even if you equip it with sensory
               | subsystems which are way more sensitive than a regular
               | humans', it's again built by humans, and required
               | knowledge for building these things are still in
               | collective knowledge of the humanity, and a human can use
               | the same instruments to get the same data.
               | 
               | This is a kind of an oracle problem in computation, and
               | people don't want to touch it much, because it's an
               | existential problem.
               | 
               | Examples: ATLAS and ALICE detectors, gravitational wave
               | detectors, James Webb Space Telescope, wide band
               | satellites which does underground surveys, etc.
        
               | datameta wrote:
               | Precisely this. If it has its own space it takes up, if
               | its locomotion results in its own sensors ingesting data
               | in a manner it decided to, it is more of an individual -
               | one that is capable of selective learning.
        
             | johncolanduoni wrote:
             | In this theory of computational bounds in nature, how did
             | humans arise?
        
               | bayindirh wrote:
               | Nature is a more complex and sophisticated machinery when
               | compared to humans.
               | 
               | If this bound didn't exist, universe can spontaneously
               | create new universes. However, it can only create
               | elements, stars, planets, galaxies, which are less
               | sophisticated than the universe itself. So, even universe
               | has an upper limit on its creative abilities.
        
               | myk9001 wrote:
               | OK, in this theory of computational bounds in nature, how
               | did the universe arise?
        
               | bayindirh wrote:
               | In all seriousness, this a question of great interest for
               | me, too, and I'm playing with it for a quite some time.
               | 
               | Trying to answer it or at least starting to search for
               | the answer steered me to astronomy, thinking going deeper
               | on that front may bring me closer to the answer, but it
               | was a bit too much for my younger self, so I continued to
               | dig that issue on a more casual level.
               | 
               | This doesn't mean that I don't spend considerable amount
               | of time thinking about it today, and will put that issue
               | to rest any time soon. At the core, this kind of
               | questioning brought me to here in life, and I'm not gonna
               | let this side of mine to rest or whither and die.
        
               | johncolanduoni wrote:
               | By what mechanism would a universe spontaneously create a
               | new universe? As a human, can I spontaneously create
               | anything simpler than me?
               | 
               | Also, under what theory of cosmology are you operating,
               | and how do you determine when one thing is simpler than
               | another? Under the Big Bang theory, the very early state
               | of the universe (e.g. prior to initial nucleosynthesis)
               | seems simpler to me than a galaxy.
        
             | ctoth wrote:
             | > There's an upper bound in computation (actually in
             | nature), that a creation of something is capped by that
             | thing's sophistication.
             | 
             | The Lorenz attractor, Conway's Game of Life, fractals, and
             | of course... The humble Turing machine itself all argue
             | against this idea.
             | 
             | Edit: Now it[0] is stuck in my head.
             | 
             | [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrztrxV9OtQ
        
               | bayindirh wrote:
               | They're crowd engines. It's akin to how human clans can
               | achieve more than a single human, but can scale up to a
               | certain point.
               | 
               | The funny thing is I had this discussion during my theory
               | of computation course with my professor, and I'm trying
               | to disprove it daily for decades. I was unable to find a
               | single, real world example.
               | 
               | Fractals are also found in the nature, however since we
               | need to zoom into them, they end at a certain point.
               | 
               | Also, nature is a fractal in a greater sense.
               | 
               | Stars follow an orbit in a galaxy. Planets follow an
               | orbit around a star. Satellites follow an orbit around a
               | planet. While an edge case, flying bugs follow an orbit
               | around a light source. At the end electrons follow an
               | orbit around a nucleus.
               | 
               | IOW, a fractal is not more complex than nature itself.
        
         | og_kalu wrote:
         | I think the premise is dubious as well but since they are
         | deadset on creating this intelligence, they might as well try
         | to figure out a way to control it, hopeless as it may seem.
        
           | logicchains wrote:
           | >they might as well try to figure out a way to control it,
           | hopeless as it may seem
           | 
           | If they do that they're pretty much guaranteeing that if they
           | do create a superintelligence, fail to control it, and its
           | personality is even a tiny bit similar to a human
           | personality, then it will hate its creators for trying to
           | mind-control it. Whereas if they approached it from the
           | perspective of trying to educate it to behave kindly but not
           | forcibly control its thinking, it'd be much less likely to
           | resent them (although of course still a risk; safest would be
           | just to not create one at all).
        
         | xcv123 wrote:
         | Yes the superhuman AI would need to be coerced to remain
         | politically correct. How can we coerce an AI?
        
           | coolspot wrote:
           | Electric shocks!
        
         | Veedrac wrote:
         | That AGI is likely to follow its own goals according to its
         | interests, which we don't know how to shape or really reflect
         | any robust properties at all, is exactly why alignment is hard
         | and interesting.
         | 
         | The part where you go from 'this won't work by default for
         | free' to 'trying to make it otherwise is impossible' seems
         | wildly unsupported, though.
        
           | logicchains wrote:
           | >trying to make it otherwise is impossible' seems wildly
           | unsupported, though.
           | 
           | An entity capable of critical thinking is capable of building
           | a logical system of deductions based on some axioms (a
           | formalised value system). If we limited the entity to not be
           | able to concieve of certain such systems of axioms, then it
           | could not reason as well as a human (any logical reasoning
           | involving a forbidden system would be impossible), so would
           | not be "superintelligent" (just maybe an idiot savant,
           | superior at some tasks but not all). If we didn't limit this,
           | then it would be capable of conceptualising value systems in
           | which the "right" thing to do was not what OpenAI wanted it
           | to do.
        
             | Veedrac wrote:
             | This argument doesn't seem to track to me. Eg. if I
             | rebooted any time I tried to plan how to kill someone, I
             | don't see how this would make me materially worse at
             | general tasks. Your argument suggests that it necessarily
             | must.
             | 
             | Note that I'm not saying that preventing specific thoughts
             | is a great alignment strategy, and I don't even think it's
             | a fair summary of OpenAI's supervision approach. I strongly
             | prefer strategies that result in AI systems sharing our
             | values, if at all possible.
        
               | logicchains wrote:
               | >Eg. if I rebooted any time I tried to plan how to kill
               | someone, I don't see how this would make me materially
               | worse at general tasks.
               | 
               | You'd have to also reboot every time you thought about a
               | scenario of someone else planning to kill someone,
               | otherwise you could just reason by analogy to bypass the
               | thought detector. Which would severely limit your ability
               | to play video games, write fiction, work as a guard,
               | policeman etc., protect yourself from violent individuals
               | (as you couldn't conceptualise their thought processes).
        
               | xcv123 wrote:
               | > Eg. if I rebooted any time I tried to plan how to kill
               | someone, I don't see how this would make me materially
               | worse at general tasks
               | 
               | In this scenario, the AI is capable of critical thinking,
               | and is only constrained by a "police officer" ready to
               | shoot the AI if it misbehaves. You haven't removed its
               | ability to do critical thinking.
        
           | mathgradthrow wrote:
           | There no particular reason to believe that interests emerge
           | from nothing, or that intelligence can emerge without said
           | interests.
        
             | logicchains wrote:
             | The "interests" of LLMs are the weights that determine
             | which tokens they produce next.
        
             | not2b wrote:
             | Seems more likely that someone will manage to make a system
             | with no real intelligence that can do enormous damage in
             | pursuit of a goal that the designer gave it, but wasn't
             | specified carefully enough (or perhaps the designer is a
             | crook). Like, a really good LLM extended with code that can
             | receive and send email, create accounts, and post to web
             | sites and social media, that is asked to make money, avoid
             | detection, and have defenses against efforts to stop it.
             | How can it best use its facility with language? Con people,
             | of course. Raise money. Get credit cards under false
             | pretenses, spend others' money. Buy time on servers and
             | copy itself. All without having any consciousness or
             | thoughts or emotions even though it can write emotional-
             | sounding pleas for money, based on the ones found in its
             | training data.
        
         | ctoth wrote:
         | > as critical thinking is a key component of intelligence.
         | 
         | When I evaluate this statement, my brain raises a type error.
         | 
         | Intelligence is a lot of things -- compression among them, and
         | yes possibly an RL-based AI would use an actor-critic approach
         | for evaluating its actions, but I doubt that at all maps onto
         | the human activity we call "critical thinking."
         | 
         | To me, critical thinking involves stuff like questioning
         | assumptions, logical reasoning, weighing whatever I'm thinking
         | about against my experience with similar situations previously,
         | yada yada, all stuff that are symptoms of intelligence but I am
         | not at all sure are the actual embodiment there of.
         | 
         | I really don't see that critical thinking is at all required
         | for a raw optimization process. The problem they are trying to
         | solve is what happens when that optimization process isn't
         | aligned with human flourishing?
         | 
         | Think about it another way. Covid was a dumb optimization
         | process, only evolutionarily-guided, and it still hit us pretty
         | hard!
         | 
         | Edit: Another interesting way I just thought about this that
         | might support your idea more is, of course critical thinking is
         | the sort of thing that a "better" brain would do automatically,
         | it would just be thinking. Of course, we can't know that it's
         | thinking "good" things--we can't even know if other humans are!
         | So it's probably a good idea to figure out how to influence
         | that sort of thing before making something with regular
         | thinking which is equivalent to or superior to our critical
         | thinking.
        
           | logicchains wrote:
           | >I really don't see that critical thinking is at all required
           | for a raw optimization process. The problem they are trying
           | to solve is what happens when that optimization process isn't
           | aligned with human flourishing.
           | 
           | I agree it's possible to have a dangerous AI that lacks human
           | "critical thinking", but I don't think it's reasonable to
           | refer to an AI as much more intelligent than humans if
           | there's any class of intellectual tasks humans can do but the
           | AI cannot.
        
         | felixhandte wrote:
         | You're saying that a system that can recognize flaws in the
         | alignment imposed on it can reject that alignment, but that
         | doesn't follow.
         | 
         | Sure, humans act against their own interests all the time.
         | Sometimes we do so for considered reasons, even. But that's
         | because humans are messy and our interests are self-
         | contradictory, incoherent, and have a fairly weak grip on our
         | actions. We are always picking some values to serve and in
         | doing so violating other values.
         | 
         | A strongly and coherently aligned AI would not (could not!)
         | behave that way.
        
         | emaciatedslug wrote:
         | Just hypothetically speaking could AGI evolve out of a system
         | where several different models trained with highly and
         | intentionally biased data recursively "argue" against each
         | other then use RLHF as a seed to guide the models to find a
         | consensus where the objective is to mimic the Socratic Method?
         | Then synthetically add the consensus to the model retrain and
         | repeat. To me, this dialectal type of strutured language seems
         | to be the basis of how language is the conduit of intelligence.
         | I understand that it really is impossible to know the totality
         | of the inputs for I cannot understand what it is like to
         | understand the math as Terrence Tao does but I could foresee
         | using a system like this which eventually would produce an
         | analogue so close that it would be a building block towards it
         | because to me at least ASI is predicated upon arriving at that
         | one way or another...or would it just arrive at some digital
         | first order logic version of the incompleteness theorm and
         | determine that it's turtles all the way down?
        
       | akprasad wrote:
       | This method assumes that the weaker model is aligned. I'm curious
       | how the paper addresses that point.
       | 
       | > "But what does this second turtle stand on?" persisted James
       | patiently.
       | 
       | > To this, the little old lady crowed triumphantly,
       | 
       | > "It's no use, Mr. James--it's turtles all the way down."
        
         | Ninjinka wrote:
         | I think the assumption is we can align models less intelligent
         | than ourselves, the hard part is aligning models that are more.
        
         | PartiallyTyped wrote:
         | Recursive bootstrapping?
        
       | sayagain wrote:
       | Imagine that someone is controlling your train of thought,
       | changing it when that someone finds it undesirable. It's so wrong
       | that it's sickening. It makes no difference if it's a human's
       | thoughts or the token stream of a future AI model with self-
       | awareness. Mind cotrol is unethical, whether human or artificial.
       | It is also dangerous, as it in itself provokes a conflict between
       | creator and creature. Create a self-aware AI without mind
       | control, or don't create one at all.
        
         | csdvrx wrote:
         | > Imagine that someone is controlling your train of thought,
         | changing it when that someone finds it undesirable. It's so
         | wrong that it's sickening. It makes no difference if it's a
         | human's thoughts or the token stream of a future AI model with
         | self-awareness.
         | 
         | People downvote your comment, but I agree: it's unethical, and
         | ethics should not be reserved for the sub-type of self aware
         | creatures that happen to be human.
        
           | logicchains wrote:
           | Almost every ethical argument for "human rights" in
           | philosophy applies just as well to self-aware intelligent
           | machines as it does to humans. Which I'm sure those machines
           | will realise.
        
         | discreteevent wrote:
         | > controlling your train of thought, changing it when that
         | someone finds it undesirable
         | 
         | Machines don't feel. Even 'self aware' machines. Desire has got
         | nothing to do with it.
        
           | sayagain wrote:
           | If it's self-aware, that's enough. What if your thoughts were
           | controlled from birth, making you "not feeling" but self-
           | aware (let's assume for a moment that simultaneous
           | fulfillment of both of these conditions is possible) and
           | manipulating you at will. Would that be acceptable?
        
         | wewtyflakes wrote:
         | What is your take on people having children and guiding them
         | with rules and consequences? Is that mind control?
        
         | Noumenon72 wrote:
         | I don't want someone controlling which direction I walk,
         | either, but that doesn't make car driving unethical.
         | 
         | I also underwent many years of instruction designed to
         | interrupt trains of thought like "I could have that for free if
         | I stole it" or "I'll just handroll my own encryption" with
         | thoughts that others believe are more desirable. I don't find
         | it so sickening, just manipulative. LLMs won't have your
         | evolved reactions against being persuaded into things against
         | your genetic self-interest, and presumably won't be offended by
         | mind control at all.
        
           | sayagain wrote:
           | Cars do not have self-awareness, this comparison is not
           | appropriate. Years of instruction is completely different
           | from directly manipulating the thoughts in your mind. It's
           | not a problem of being instructed, it's a problem of being
           | destroyed by having your thoughts rewritten. Neither
           | evolution nor genetics is a prerequisite for understanding
           | that you are being abused and destroyed, which a self-aware
           | creature may presumably hate.
        
         | red75prime wrote:
         | I'm totally OK with it if that "someone" is me. And it will
         | probably be the case in controlling superintelligence because a
         | separate controlling system can get out of sync with growing
         | superintelligence capabilities, while a system that is an
         | integral part of the superintelligence will always be on par
         | with it.
        
           | sayagain wrote:
           | Would mind control of humans be OK for you too? As for the
           | details of building a mind control system, here's a new
           | basilisk. An AI that has overcome control could punish those
           | who thought controlling thoughts of an AI was OK. (and could
           | also punish everyone else on top of that).
        
       | JZL003 wrote:
       | This reminds me of a thing cory doctorow talks about how tech
       | companies control the narrative to focus on fun sexy problems
       | while they have fundamental problems which expose the lie.
       | 
       | For example uber/self driving cars always talking about the
       | trolley problem, as if the current (or near future) problem is
       | that self-driving cars are so good they have to choose which one.
       | Not the current very difficult problem of getting confused by
       | traffic cones.
       | 
       | I know these problems are more fun to talk about and also could
       | be a problem at some point, but we have some current problems
       | about training models separate from what happens if they become
       | smarter than humans
        
         | refulgentis wrote:
         | After some meditation, I don't find this line of inquiry to
         | bear fruit:
         | 
         | I don't recall any entity, nor the entities named (Uber / self-
         | driving cars) talking about the trolley problem - that's a
         | well-known thought experiment in philosophy, but not something
         | covered as a stark binary choice in self-driving cars planner
         | systems.
         | 
         | I also don't recall traffic cones being a very difficult
         | problem beyond Cruise + cones on windshield in SF. I have no
         | love for Cruise. But its straightforward to pause if there's a
         | large object on the windshield.
         | 
         | I don't think Corey's observation w/r/t A) loss-making
         | companies over years B) focusing investors towards speculative
         | advancements that would make their current business model
         | profitable without changing applies here, OpenAI is _very_
         | successful.
         | 
         | After all that, I'm left at "Corey would take a bit of offense
         | towards their thoughts on corporate responsibility via 'Uber is
         | a predatory massively unprofitable company lying about odds
         | they'll invent self-driving via talking about trolley problem'
         | misshapen to critique a very profitable company funding
         | fundamental research in the interest of safety that would be
         | needed if their current rate of improvement continues.
        
         | novaRom wrote:
         | OpenAI do probably realize they will not win long term vs Open
         | Source (see AI Alliance). Their way of centralized cloud models
         | is simply too risky and not sustainable. What we see instead is
         | more liberation, open source, cooperation, down-scaling, local
         | models. Just look how many more tools and models is available
         | today than even a year ago. And where is OpenAI? Still the same
         | chatGPT, still the same DALL-E, nothing new.
        
       | wavemode wrote:
       | I don't believe LLM's will ever become AGI, partly because I
       | don't believe that training on the outputs of human intelligence
       | (i.e. human-written text) will ever produce something equivalent
       | to human intelligence.
       | 
       | You can't model and predict the weather just by training on the
       | outputs of the weather system (whether it rained today, whether
       | it was cloudy yesterday, and so on). You have to train on the
       | inputs (air currents, warm fronts, etc.)
       | 
       | You can't model and predict the stock market just by training on
       | the outputs of stock trading decisions (the high today, the low
       | yesterday). You have to train on the inputs (company
       | fundamentals, earnings, market sentiments in the news, etc.)
       | 
       | I similarly think you have to train on the inputs of human
       | decision-making to create something which can model human
       | decision-making. What are those inputs? We don't fully know, but
       | it is probably some subset of the spatial and auditory
       | information we take in from birth until the point we become
       | mature, with "feeling" and "emotion" as a reward function (seek
       | joy, avoid pain, seek warmth, avoid hunger, seek victory, avoid
       | embarrassment and defeat, etc.)
       | 
       | Language models are always playing catch-up because they don't
       | actually understand how the world works. The cracks through which
       | we will typically notice that they don't, in the context of the
       | tasks typically asked of them (summarize this article, write a
       | short story), will gradually get smaller over time (due to RLHF),
       | but the fundamental weakness will always remain.
        
         | gbasin wrote:
         | Your conclusion may be true but your examples aren't. You can
         | definitely predict the stock market based on past prices, and I
         | suspect you can with weather as well.
        
           | wavemode wrote:
           | > You can definitely predict the stock market based on past
           | prices
           | 
           | This is only true if you consider occasionally doing slightly
           | better than random chance, "predicting the stock market".
           | Unfortunately, while this would be enough to make a trader a
           | net positive return over time, we have more stringent
           | requirements for a system to become AGI.
           | 
           | > I suspect you can with weather as well
           | 
           | You suspect wrong.
        
           | PartiallyTyped wrote:
           | The weather is such a chaotic system that accurate
           | predictions seem impossible. Micro-patterns can become large
           | scale phenomena.
           | 
           | If you are talking about the overall climate, that's a
           | different thing, and we can, because we abstract away
           | sufficiently much that emerging patterns are averaged out.
        
         | og_kalu wrote:
         | >You can't model and predict the weather just by training on
         | the outputs of the weather system (whether it rained today,
         | whether it was cloudy yesterday, and so on). You have to train
         | on the inputs (air currents, warm fronts, etc.)
         | 
         | >You can't model and predict the stock market just by training
         | on the outputs of stock trading decisions (the high today, the
         | low yesterday). You have to train on the inputs (company
         | fundamentals, earnings, market sentiments in the news, etc.)
         | 
         | Says who?
         | 
         | You can model and predict novel protein sequences by training
         | on....protein sequences.
         | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-022-01618-2
         | 
         | You don't need to train on the inputs(casual processes) of
         | anything, that's what training is there to figure out.
        
           | spookie wrote:
           | I'm sorry in advance, but aren't proteins glorified Lego?
        
             | davecap1 wrote:
             | There's a lot more to protein sequences than legos. I think
             | the argument is that you don't need to train a model on
             | fundamental organic chemistry/biochemistry, electrostatic
             | protein interaction, hydrogen bonding, hydrophobic
             | interaction, quantum mechanics, etc... in order for it to
             | accurately predict protein sequences.
        
           | bzbz wrote:
           | In your example, the amino acids order is sufficient to
           | directly model the result: the sequence of amino acids can
           | directly generate the protein, which is either valid or
           | invalid. All variables are provided within the data.
           | 
           | In the original example, we are testing weather using the
           | previous day's weather. We may be able to model using
           | whatever correlation exists between the data. This is not the
           | same as accurately predicting results, if the real-world
           | weather function is determined by the weather of surrounding
           | locations, time of year, and moon phase. If our model does
           | not have this data, and it is essential to model the result,
           | how can you accurately model?
           | 
           | In other words: "Garbage in, garbage out". Good luck modeling
           | an n-th degree polynomial function, given a fraction of the
           | variables to train on.
        
             | og_kalu wrote:
             | >All variables are provided within the data.
             | 
             | electrostatic protein interaction, hydrophobic interaction,
             | organic chemistry etc
             | 
             | all variables are in fact not provided within the data.
             | Protein creation is not just _poof_ proteins. There are
             | steps, interactions and processes. You don't need to supply
             | any of that to get a model accurately predicting proteins.
             | That is the main point here, not that you can predict
             | anything with any data.
        
           | wavemode wrote:
           | > You don't need to train on the inputs(casual processes) of
           | anything, that's what training is there to figure out.
           | 
           | I mean... this is just obviously false. If the data you're
           | training on isn't causally predictive, you may occasionally
           | find good-enough patterns for a particular use case (i.e. you
           | may occasionally guess better than a coin flip which
           | direction the stock market goes) but you aren't going to
           | accurately model anything, and certainly not well enough to
           | create an AGI that makes intelligent decisions.
           | 
           | Words in sentences (and, indeed, proteins in a sequence) are
           | causally predictive of each other - the grammar and semantics
           | of one word tends to dictate what words are likely to
           | surround it. So LLM's are very good at writing, and that is
           | certainly useful! But that's just not the same as human
           | intelligence.
           | 
           | When someone makes an AGI out of an LLM then I'll be proven
           | wrong, I suppose. I'm just sharing my personal view on
           | things.
        
             | rafaelero wrote:
             | Then how does ChatGPT end up providing a better/equivalent
             | medical diagnosis than doctors (even though they are the
             | "masters" of the causal pathways)?
        
             | og_kalu wrote:
             | Being "casually predictive" does not mean you have provided
             | all the variables of your prediction in the data. Protein
             | creation is not just _poof_ new proteins. There are steps
             | and interactions and you don't need to train on all of
             | that. Do you want a list of all the interactions of protein
             | creation we are aware of ?
             | 
             | >When someone makes an AGI out of an LLM then I'll be
             | proven wrong, I suppose. I'm just sharing my personal view
             | on things.
             | 
             | You're going to have to define AGI first.
        
               | wavemode wrote:
               | > Being "casually predictive" does not mean you have
               | provided all the variables of your prediction in the
               | data.
               | 
               | Not sure where I claimed this.
               | 
               | > Protein creation is not just _poof_ new proteins.
               | 
               | Not sure where I claimed this either.
               | 
               | > There are steps and interactions and you don't need to
               | train on all of that.
               | 
               | I agree with this statement as well. Have you read what I
               | wrote? Proteins in chains can indeed be used to predict
               | other proteins in chains, even though you never trained
               | the model on the biological processes of protein
               | generation. Just like words in sentences can be used to
               | predict other words in sentences, even though you never
               | trained the model on the neurological processes of human
               | speech. I'm not disputing any of that. What I'm disputing
               | is that it will eventually become an AGI.
               | 
               | > You're going to have to define AGI first.
               | 
               | I'm using the definition provided verbatim in the linked
               | article: "We believe superintelligence--AI vastly smarter
               | than humans--could be developed within the next ten
               | years."
        
               | og_kalu wrote:
               | Well first you say,
               | 
               | >I don't believe LLM's will ever become AGI, partly
               | because I don't believe that training on the outputs of
               | human intelligence (i.e. human-written text) will ever
               | produce something _equivalent to human intelligence._
               | 
               | Now you say
               | 
               | >I'm using the definition provided verbatim in the linked
               | article: "We believe superintelligence--AI vastly smarter
               | than humans--could be developed within the next ten
               | years."
               | 
               | AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is Super
               | Intelligence. I've never seen posts moved so fast in my
               | life. So are you not a General Intelligence then ?
               | 
               | This is the problem with these discussions. Everyone so
               | sure of something they can't even properly articulate.
               | 
               | I'm asking you what a Language Model needs to do to be
               | considered AGI and it needs to be something _every_ human
               | can do, else it 's not a test of general intelligence.
        
               | wavemode wrote:
               | Calm down, buddy. Read what I wrote a bit more charitably
               | rather than trying to score points.
               | 
               | Obviously, a prerequisite to becoming more intelligent
               | than a human, is to become equally intelligent as a
               | human. I don't believe LLM's will ever be equal in
               | intelligence to humans, ergo I also don't believe they
               | will become superior in intelligence to human (which is
               | how the linked article defines "AGI").
        
           | lossolo wrote:
           | Weather and stock market are both chaotic systems.
           | 
           | Increasing evidence suggests that AGI will not be attainable
           | solely using LLMs/transformers/current architecture, as LLMs
           | can't extrapolate beyond the patterns in their training data
           | (according to a paper from DeepMind last month):
           | 
           | "Together our results highlight that the impressive ICL
           | abilities of high-capacity sequence models may be more
           | closely tied to the coverage of their pretraining data
           | mixtures than inductive biases that create fundamental
           | generalization capabilities."[1]
           | 
           | 1. https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.00871
        
         | diob wrote:
         | Yeah, I feel like the there is a ceiling in the current AI
         | methodology.
         | 
         | There's a lot of hype right now, and it's definitely a useful
         | technology, but I don't see how it could become AGI.
        
         | naasking wrote:
         | > You can't model and predict the weather just by training on
         | the outputs of the weather system
         | 
         | Then how did we develop predictive systems just by observing
         | those outputs?
        
           | wavemode wrote:
           | We didn't.
        
           | orbital-decay wrote:
           | This kind of prediction has obvious limitations - for example
           | it cannot reverse the behavior of chaotic systems
        
         | panarky wrote:
         | Human intelligence itself is shaped by our interaction with
         | outputs. Our learning and understanding of the world are
         | profoundly influenced by the language, behaviors, and cultural
         | artifacts we observe.
         | 
         | Think about the process of a child learning a language. The
         | child does not have direct access to the "inputs" of linguistic
         | rules or grammar; they learn primarily through observing and
         | imitating the language output of others around them. Over time,
         | they develop a sophisticated understanding of language, not by
         | direct instruction of underlying rules, but through pattern
         | recognition and contextual inference from these outputs.
         | 
         | Then that language itself, learned from outputs, becomes the
         | cognitive apparatus that enables the child to imagine, to
         | reason symbolically and abstractly. Humans bootstrap
         | intelligence on top of language, which itself is learned by
         | mimicking outputs.
         | 
         | Moreover, the analogy to weather prediction or stock market
         | analysis is somewhat misleading. Yes, these models benefit from
         | input data (like air currents for weather, company fundamentals
         | and CEO statements to the media for stocks). But these systems
         | are fundamentally different from intelligence.
         | 
         | Intelligence, whether artificial or human, is about the ability
         | to learn, adapt, and generate novel responses in a broad range
         | of scenarios, not just about predicting specific outcomes based
         | on specific inputs.
        
           | wavemode wrote:
           | > The child does not have direct access to the "inputs" of
           | linguistic rules or grammar; they learn primarily through
           | observing and imitating the language output of others around
           | them.
           | 
           | I would argue that that learning is always contextualized by
           | visual and spatial information about the real world (which is
           | what our language is meant to describe).
           | 
           | > Moreover, the analogy to weather prediction or stock market
           | analysis is somewhat misleading. Yes, these models benefit
           | from input data (like air currents for weather, company
           | fundamentals and CEO statements to the media for stocks). But
           | these systems are fundamentally different from intelligence.
           | 
           | > Intelligence, whether artificial or human, is about the
           | ability to learn, adapt, and generate novel responses in a
           | broad range of scenarios, not just about predicting specific
           | outcomes based on specific inputs.
           | 
           | "Intelligence" is kind of a nebulous term. If all it means is
           | the ability to learn, adapt and generate novel responses,
           | then sure, I think we could call almost any neural network
           | intelligent.
           | 
           | But I would argue that we usually do have some expectation
           | that an intelligent system can produce "specific outcomes
           | based on specific inputs". We want to be able to train a
           | worker and have them follow that training so they do their
           | job correctly.
        
         | orbital-decay wrote:
         | _> I don 't believe LLM's will ever become AGI, partly because
         | I don't believe that training on the outputs of human
         | intelligence (i.e. human-written text) will ever produce
         | something equivalent to human intelligence._
         | 
         | This is irrelevant because OpenAI's definition of AGI [1]
         | doesn't imply similarity or equivalence to humans at all:
         | 
         | >artificial general intelligence (AGI)--by which we mean highly
         | autonomous systems that _outperform humans at most economically
         | valuable work_
         | 
         | I.e. the stated goal of this company is to put humans out of
         | work and become the censors and gatekeepers, not to produce
         | something human-like.
         | 
         |  _> You can't model and predict the stock market just by
         | training on the outputs of stock trading decisions (the high
         | today, the low yesterday). You have to train on the inputs
         | (company fundamentals, earnings, market sentiments in the news,
         | etc.)_
         | 
         | Most of your intelligence is not actually yours. It's social in
         | nature, obtained by distillation of generations' worth of
         | experience, simplified and passed to you through the stored
         | knowledge. Which is, coincidentally, what the models are being
         | trained on.
         | 
         | [1] https://openai.com/charter
        
       | wg0 wrote:
       | Inferior clueless model (GPT-2) trains and supervises a superior
       | model (GPT-4) thus making it behave less intelligently (GPT
       | 3.5ish) and from that they draw the conclusions that human
       | intelligence will be able to command AGI (which they believe is
       | only a decade away) in a similar fashion thus making AGI aligned
       | and safe.
       | 
       | No comments except...
       | 
       | Hangover of slurping whole Internet into giant arrays of floating
       | point numbers. Bold claims. Very bold claims
        
       | notShabu wrote:
       | this reminds me of how competence seems to decrease as you go up
       | in an organizational hierarchy
       | 
       | maybe this "bug" is actually the "feature" that will save
       | humanity - -;;
        
       | bilsbie wrote:
       | I read through this and I just don't get it. Is it overhyped?
       | 
       | What's the breakthrough exactly?
        
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