[HN Gopher] Mark Zuckerberg's new goal is creating artificial ge...
___________________________________________________________________
Mark Zuckerberg's new goal is creating artificial general
intelligence
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 67 points
Date : 2024-01-18 18:05 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| paxys wrote:
| > Mark Zuckerberg's new goal is creating artificial general
| intelligence
|
| So...what happened to that whole "Metaverse" thing? Is it time to
| rename the company again?
| threeseed wrote:
| Meta's AR/VR strategy is still the over-arching priority and
| given how well Quest 3 and Ray Bans glasses are doing shows
| that it is likely the right one. Especially once Apple Vision
| Pro ignites the industry.
|
| AI will be used to enhance that e.g. generated avatars,
| autonomous agents, hand/body tracking etc.
| aabhay wrote:
| How well are the Ray Bans doing? I've never heard anyone talk
| about them nor seen anyone wearing them.
| threeseed wrote:
| Surprisingly well.
|
| Strong adoption by the younger TikTok generation which is
| an area that Meta has been desperate to bring back into
| their fold.
|
| Also the product is pretty impressive. The camera quality
| is really good and the AI features genuinely useful.
| Definitely caused many in the industry to wonder if that
| form factor could be the future of the AR industry in the
| short term as well as the long term.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Especially once Apple Vision Pro ignites the industry.
|
| I may be repeating my own errors with the following as I said
| much the same for the iPhone and the Apple Watch when they
| were new, but...
|
| The prices Apple are asking for seem excessive given what the
| products actually do, surely the cheaper alternatives are
| going to be what really matters?
|
| (In this case, cheaper alternatives would include the Meta
| headsets).
| hindsightbias wrote:
| Cheaper than an 8K OLED.
|
| Watched a guy spend $6K on iPads for his kids like it was a
| stocking stuffer. Took 15 minutes as he had to call the
| wife on if 1TB was enough. Felt bad I was just buying an
| Air so wandered to let the sales kid work him.
|
| Kid said it was an overage day.
| ben_w wrote:
| Mmm.
|
| You've just reminded me how weird I am with money.
|
| Back in 2000-ish, a summer holiday job I was doing for an
| hourly pay of... I can't remember exactly, but perhaps
| the equivalent of PS10k/year for the full-timers... one
| of my coworkers said he'd bought a plasma TV for his 1-
| or 2-year old son. Those things were considered
| _expensive luxuries_ back then.
|
| I guess people like him are the norm.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _Especially once Apple Vision Pro ignites the industry._
|
| Ah, yes, the inevitability of Apple success.
|
| Just as everyone switched from cell phones to PDAs after
| 1993.
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| Man, the Metaverse... what a fad. I almost can't even believe
| that _WAS_ a thing. We had Habbo, and then we had Second Life,
| and NOW!!!!!!.... * deafening silence *
| rvnx wrote:
| VR is a gadget, the same way that 4D cinemas are gadget. Ok
| it's +/- fun the first time to receive water droplets in your
| face while watching a movie, or for the cinema to spread fake
| fart smell, but this is not the experience you want to have
| every day.
|
| Apparently only a single-digit % of people who purchased AR
| headsets are using them once in a month (source: Valve
| developer Chet Faliszek)
| nomel wrote:
| In my opinion, HMD are _clearly_ the future of display
| tech. VR is something you get for free, with an HMD.
| rvnx wrote:
| A (dystopian) future is more likely the Neuralink
| injecting visual signals or thoughts. Even an ultra-light
| HMD gives the Glasshole feeling, besides not being
| comfortable to wear.
| nomel wrote:
| > Even an ultra-light HMD gives the Glasshole feeling,
| besides not being comfortable to wear.
|
| Which have you had experience with? And, do you believe
| whatever you wore was as good as it gets?
| Tenoke wrote:
| How is it a defeaning silence? Their latest hardware product
| was released ~3 months ago.
| rvnx wrote:
| Never heard of it. Never saw it anywhere.
|
| If nobody can hear the sound of a tree falling, does it
| still make a sound ?
| nickthegreek wrote:
| You never heard of the Quest 3?
| rvnx wrote:
| Not at all, but it makes sense if it's a niche product
| addressing the needs of a subset of gamers.
|
| Look for example Among US VR (an excellent game):
|
| https://steamdb.info/app/1849900/charts/
|
| There are 12 players online now, 22 players "peak"...
|
| A lot of people have tried VR, and the consensus is
| generally that VR is fun to try once but then:
|
| Is it really worth spending 1000 USD (headset only +
| whatever gaming PC you need with it) <-> 4000 USD (vision
| pro) for something you'd use only few times per year ?
|
| To follow the hardware news related to something you
| don't plan to purchase nor use doesn't really make sense.
| Tenoke wrote:
| Quest 3 is $500, not $1000 and needs no external PC. Your
| choice of game is equally bizzare.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| >Is it really worth spending 1000 USD (headset only +
| whatever gaming PC you need with it) <-> 4000 USD (vision
| pro) for something you'd use only few times per year ?
|
| The Quest 2 is a perfectly capable VR device and is only
| $250.
|
| >To follow the hardware news related to something you
| don't plan to purchase nor use doesn't really make sense.
|
| You are on hackernews.. a site that has talked about the
| Quest 3 A TON.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&
| que...
| TOMDM wrote:
| The Among Us fad is mostly over, though as a meme it has
| some serious staying power.
|
| Looking at VR Chat though, it's posting record highs in
| user count, hitting 52,956 over new years, with steady
| year over year growth for 5 years now.
|
| https://steamdb.info/app/438100/charts/#all
| NavinF wrote:
| "Am I out of touch? No, it's the >20 million buyers who
| are wrong"
| ben_w wrote:
| Metaverse != Meta headset
|
| The promise of the former is a unified platform where e.g.
| a virtual magic sword bought in an RPG also works in an FPS
| made by an unrelated developer, and a virtual gun bought in
| the later also works in the former, and this is also your
| work collaboration environment. And now I'm thinking of
| ABK's boss fight sketch:
| https://youtu.be/w6u_EJa_sZE?si=wlYD8EhRd_PLm39l
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| How would one manage a fully connected VR-scape without AGI?
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| It is that time. First it will be "Meta AI" and then the "Meta"
| will be long gone.
|
| I'm gonna get downvoted for this comment because this is not
| Reddit, but I had to say it.
| sokoloff wrote:
| HN title seems editorialized as compared to the article title
| ("Meta's new goal is to build artificial general intelligence" or
| the article headline is similar but with Mark Zuckerberg as the
| subject.)
|
| The HN submitted title ("Meta will have a stockpile of almost
| 600k GPUs by the end of 2024") is one specific sentence in the
| article.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Is the headline stable, I see it pretty common for articles to
| sample multiple headlines until one gains traction.
| tikkun wrote:
| > He tells me that, by the end of this year, Meta will own more
| than 340,000 of Nvidia's H100 GPUs
|
| That's approx $15b worth of H100 GPUs.
| cleverwebble wrote:
| You are assuming they are paying retail price, which they
| certainly are not.
| JoshTko wrote:
| Given the demand why wouldn't Nvidia be able to charge
| sticker price?
| bilekas wrote:
| You can afford to take a hit off your profits when you can
| simply ramp up production for retail sales. Looks great too
| for shareholders.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| They can't just ramp up production though. Isn't TSMC
| booked for years by them, Apple, Intel and AMD?
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Nobody really knows. It certainly suits them for everyone
| to believe there is some secular reason, some supply
| crunch, it even suits AMD and Intel.
|
| Presumably all the chip supply issues regarding autos
| have been resolved, and yet prices have risen 30% in a
| decade, and there's no reversal.
| mycodebreaks wrote:
| volume customers always get special price.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Wouldn't it still be $15bn? If I manage to buy $20 worth of
| gold for $10 through a special deal, is it not still $20
| worth of gold?
| nix0n wrote:
| Used GPUs cannot be sold for the same price that new GPUs
| are bought.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Does anyone know where this hardware gets trickled down
| once decommissioned?
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| No, but they still got $15bn worth, regardless of
| discount.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| What makes you think they are getting a good discount?
|
| What are they going to do? Buy AMD, yeah right.
|
| Nvidia's sales are only limited by the number of wafers they
| can get from TSMC.
| paulddraper wrote:
| use less
| tw04 wrote:
| >What are they going to do? Buy AMD, yeah right.
|
| Build their own? It's what Microsoft, Google, and AWS are
| doing.
|
| >Nvidia's sales are only limited by the number of wafers
| they can get from TSMC.
|
| No, they're limited by the cost per operation vs. Facebook
| building their own. The cloud providers have already
| decided it's cheaper to do it themselves. Sure they'll keep
| buying GPUs for general public consumption but that may
| eventually end too.
| rvnx wrote:
| At some point Google Cloud, AWS, Alibaba Cloud, Apple,
| etc are going to make their own specialized chips (Google
| tried a bit with their tensors chip).
|
| There is no value into the NVIDIA-part by itself, only
| the raw power is interesting.
|
| If tomorrow this is AMD, or China-Town chip, it's
| perfectly fine.
|
| I wouldn't miss the CUDA toolkit mess.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| If raw power per dollar would be all that's interesting
| we'd all run 7900 XTX clusters like geohot in his
| tinybox.
|
| We are not, because there's clearly value in the CUDA
| ecosystem.
| newsclues wrote:
| Not always. For high in demand products they could pay more
| to guarantee supply and delivery dates.
|
| Some people will pay more to be first in line.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| it's not going to be an order of magnitude difference. It's a
| significant investment in hardware.
| LazyMans wrote:
| How much does one need to go after crypto currencies vulnerable
| to a 51% attack?
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Oh man if Elon had billions in H100s we might actually see
| that happen. And I'm no fan of Elon but I'm also no fan of
| cryptocurrency these days. Might be worth it just to watch
| the crypto world burn.
| incrudible wrote:
| A successful 51% attack on a major cryptocurrency would not
| necessarily be that impactful. So what if _Elon_ can
| doublespend? He would need a lot of crypto, a counterparty,
| and the strong desire to waste money. Large miners could
| already collude to do it, it just is not in their interest.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I'm wondering if there would be enough FUD to crash one
| coin's value. And then if one falls perhaps more could.
| incrudible wrote:
| FUD of what? That some rich fool out there is double
| spending, and _you_ of all people would be the
| counterparty?
| belltaco wrote:
| Presumably the new bitcoin ETFs allow shorting? Taking a
| big short position before crashing the value sounds like
| a plausible attack.
| incrudible wrote:
| Depends on how much compute there is to mine it. Not that
| many valuable cryptos still use GPU PoW. You also need a
| counterparty to actually profit from it.
| __loam wrote:
| I wonder how many of those chips were acquired to run metaverse
| stuff. Should be lots of overlap between rendering graphics and
| running cuda based models.
|
| I'm interested in seeing how the behemoths that are Meta and
| Google catch openai. I think it's a question of when, not if.
| Both companies just have a ridiculous amount of resources to
| throw behind these efforts. At least meta is releasing their
| stuff as "open source". We'll see how they justify putting out
| these models for free, or if it's purely about undercutting
| openai.
| rvnx wrote:
| Almost no overlap: this metaverse thing just needs classical
| CPU servers (and not a lot of them considering the minimal user
| activity there).
|
| For now Google is still late to the party (full proprietary,
| and nobody has seen the supposedly good model called Ultra,
| only an average one called Pro), and Meta is actually the
| company that has pushed the field forward for all companies
| (with LLaMA).
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| > Meta is actually the company that has pushed the field
| forward for all companies (with LLaMA).
|
| This is the first time I'm hearing this, unless you mean the
| fact that it leaked to the public. How was LLaMa pushing the
| field forward otherwise?
| threeseed wrote:
| > this metaverse thing just needs classical CPU servers
|
| The idea is that the metaverse will be filled with AI
| avatars.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| >the supposedly good model called Ultra,
|
| Good (as written), or God (at first glance)?
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| I'm more bullish on Meta's AI efforts than OpenAI's at this
| point. Everything open source can flow back into what they're
| doing, whereas OpenAI seems focused on staying locked down, while
| diluting their core product in myriad ways.
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| OpenAI got all of the positive publicity for its social mission
| yet in short time we clearly see that Meta has done more for
| democratizing access to deep learning and will continue to lead
| on this front. The cost of open sourcing models is far more than
| just development cost. They're spending millions of dollars
| training models with that fleet of H100s. This makes open source
| AI much more costly, and generous.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| As Meta has always done. Their contributions to open source ML
| have always been above and beyond everyone else and they have
| one of the absolute best teams in the industry.
| aluminum96 wrote:
| Brace yourselves. The scale of capital investment coming from
| Meta, Google, and OpenAI/Microsoft is going to be historically
| mind-boggling.
| igravious wrote:
| Meta (Facebook), Alphabet (Google), OpenAI (Microsoft)
|
| Microsoft name change incoming?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Yes but can they run Crysis?
| rvnx wrote:
| Yes
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-h100-benchmarkedin-...
| basiccalendar74 wrote:
| mostly because Meta did not develop a custom AI chip, like
| Google.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| A stockpile of rapidly depreciating assets bought at eye-watering
| margins is an unusual brag for any company, no?
| nomel wrote:
| From a naive perspective, it seems that true research/advances
| in AI (methods of training, etc) aren't necessarily related to
| model size. It seems that the goal of "building a big model
| that everyone else converges to because the training data is
| the same" doesn't have all that much value, especially since
| you could wait a couple years, do it all for a fraction of the
| price, and catch up immediately. Meta doesn't have an AI
| product yet, so it's not like they would be loosing money.
|
| I suspect this is more about talent attraction/retention.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| CPUs are rapidly depreciating, hard drives are rapidly
| depreciating, SSDs are doubly rapidly depreciating, with this
| logic no hardware buy would make sense.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Computer hardware has always been rapidly depreciating. You'd
| always get much more (performance/capability) for the same
| money just a few months to 1-2 years down the road. GPUs have
| been a complete outlier in this area for around ~8 years, and
| even they depreciate relatively quickly still.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Hopefully Llama 3 and Llama 4 open models will be released soon.
|
| For all of Meta's faults, release powerful LLMs that users can
| run and modify on their own systems is a huge benefit to keeping
| AI from being entirely locked away and heavily censored by big
| corporations.
| lofatdairy wrote:
| Say what you want about Facebook, the size of their dataset and
| computational resources definitely make them competitive, and
| their data science and ML teams have been always top notch. I
| think the Verge is missing the mark with the headline and general
| focus of the article. "Building AGI" is whatever, like half the
| companies with enough GPUs are claiming that and AGI is like more
| poorly-defined than "metaverse". The more interesting point seems
| to be this general incoherence with building chatbots and trying
| to run a social media company.
|
| >Meta is still a metaverse company. It's the biggest social media
| company in the world. It's now trying to build AGI. Zuckerberg
| frames all this around the overarching mission of "building the
| future of connection."
|
| This is such "Verge" writing. I'm by no means bearish on VR, but
| that whole passage is so unreflective and uncritical it's almost
| a satire of journalistic fluff. Chatbots that fill social media
| with greater and greater amounts of garbage content is just a
| nightmare. Bot content is already one of the reasons people are
| retreating into groupchats. The blurring of AI and human
| interaction leads to accountability problems. Hell, Snapchat and
| Discord basically already tried this to enormous backlash. The
| fact that this is entirely antagonistic with "building the future
| of connection" goes essentially unacknowledged.
|
| There is something interesting with the fact that Facebook is
| more open to open-source, this is fairly credible actually given
| the quality and quantity of the company's open-source
| contributions. But I genuinely think LLMs are most useful as an
| applied technology, and the applications listed here are frankly
| uninspiring.
| maaaaattttt wrote:
| Saying they make it "open source" in the same article where
| they say they need "350k high end GPUs to build it". Is the
| equivalent of saying: "we offer free nuclear submarine driving
| lessons".
|
| I know you don't need as many resources for inference as for
| training. But still...
| weeblewobble wrote:
| What do you mean "but still..."? It's a pretty important
| distinction. Meta does indeed use their massive GPU farms to
| train models and then release the weights for free and people
| indeed run inference on prosumer hardware
| sublinear wrote:
| Can someone provide insight into why there's so much insistence
| from business that magic happens at scale with LLMs? We're a long
| way from AGI.
|
| The lack of meaningful details in these announcements makes me
| pessimistic.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| How do you know how long away we are?
| skepticATX wrote:
| I don't think that's Meta's viewpoint, considering FAIR is run
| by Yann LeCun who has been quite vocal about the limitations of
| what we currently have.
| two_in_one wrote:
| > why there's so much insistence from business that magic
| happens at scale with LLMs
|
| It's already happening. See latest Google layoffs. They are
| automating a lot of things. Most people don't realize it, but
| the change is going to be dramatic.
|
| > We're a long way from AGI
|
| This is a big question, what is AGI? LLMs are quite generic and
| 'intelligent'. Not human-like, but. Next is going to be
| incremental evolution. Till we find other, non-verbal, ways of
| 'thinking' and put them together. That's going to be a
| breakthrough. Interesting, terminator-like embodiment isn't a
| requirement for AGI, nor is stable 'personality'.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| LLM scaling laws are pretty well established at this point.
| They probably won't hold forever but we aren't at the breaking
| point yet.
|
| Some more pressing questions are:
|
| * What new capabilities emerge as the models get better and
| better at predicting (i.e. loss goes down)?
|
| * How much will it cost to train increasingly large models? And
| to run inference on them?
|
| * How difficult will it be to find or generate more and more
| high quality data?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| My money has been on Meta for AGI since they started training
| people to label data for them (tag your friends!)
|
| Between all their properties they have more instrumentation on
| humans, collecting human behavior trajectories and state action
| pairs transfer learning and inverse RL than anyone - and it's not
| even a close second
|
| Specifically and critically I think they likely have the largest
| egocentric multimodal labeled dataset collection platform from
| their meta quest and ray ban glasses products
|
| Apple is the only group that will likely beat them to egocentric
| data collection at scale but I expect Meta to catch up quickly
| once people are used to it socially
| lolsal wrote:
| I have always felt Ebay dropped the ball on this with untold
| amounts of custom, varying quality photos with tons of metadata
| added by users. Presumably they are working on using this, but
| I haven't seen anything from them for it.
| karaterobot wrote:
| In 2007 or 2008 or so, when I saw that they had implemented a
| feature that let people tag you in photos without permission, I
| assumed it was to gather data for identifying people with AI at
| some future date (albeit based on my rather different
| understanding of AI at the time). So, I deleted my account: FB
| didn't provide me any value, and had introduced an unknown
| future risk by taking away control of my identity.
|
| Ever since then, I've asked friends and family not to upload
| pictures of me to Facebook, with the natural amount of
| awkwardness and eye-rolling that request evoked.
|
| I assume my friends continued to add me to Facebook without
| telling me about it, just as I assume that deleting my Facebook
| account did not actually remove me as a uniquely identified
| individual in their system. But, what am I supposed to do, just
| silently assent? Turns out, we're not the product, we're
| further back on the chain. We're more like ingredients that can
| be used and reused to create an infinite variety of different
| products.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > largest egocentric multimodal labeled dataset collection
| platform
|
| I'm not in the field, can you explain what you mean by this?
| jiggawatts wrote:
| The quality of the data matters a lot. Textbooks, scientific
| papers, etc... are substantially better for training smart and
| capable LLMs than random social chit-chat.
|
| Google and Microsoft both have a lot of corporate info,
| including source repositories they can legally use.
|
| Google has Google Books, Maps, and YouTube.
|
| Microsoft has Azure, GitHub, LinkedIn, etc...
|
| Facebook has... what? Instagram? Your crazy aunt screaming
| about her conspiracy of the week?
| hackernoteng wrote:
| Why open source it? Just another virtue signal while their real
| motivation is something more sinister? They are a for-profit
| publicly owned company. Are investors happy about spending
| billions to open-source it?
| andy99 wrote:
| a, they're not really open sourcing it, they're releasing it
| under a license that says you can use it for what they say. So
| it's marketing mostly, both external and internal to try and
| appease the "AI ethics" crowd. And honestly, b, their strategy
| is incoherent anyway. It's a tech company with too much money
| and no acute market pressure hoping to find something that
| sticks.
| nwoli wrote:
| Probably partially to reduce momentum in profit extraction from
| competitors
| hiddencost wrote:
| He's lying because he's so far behind.
| gumballindie wrote:
| I think their investors should be happy about it. Once more
| open source models are released, a lot of ai companies will be
| freed to focus on other things, thus increasing the overall
| economy.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| I love facebook. I hate other big tech companies. Facebook has
| done far more for software than any other company in the last 15
| years. They:
|
| 1. Pushed salaries up across the board. Many people are not
| aware, but facebook was a major driver behind the 500k+ senior
| engineering pay.
|
| 2. Released major open source software: PyTorch, React, GraphQL,
| React Native. They basically invented modern web development.
|
| Facebook is basically the only game in town when it comes to open
| source. Whatsmore, Mark Zuckerberg should be more widely
| applauded. I know his open source ai strategy has capitalist
| roots, but its still great for the world.
| colordrops wrote:
| Netflix is similar along these fronts.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I think it's fine to applaud their pro open source behavior,
| while still being critical of the ill they've released upon
| society. Cambridge Analytica and spreading mob violence in some
| countries come to mind.
| vermilingua wrote:
| > They forced the whole industry to pay up.
|
| And now we have industry-wide layoffs and a massive cooling of
| the job market.
|
| > They basically invented modern web development.
|
| Which is essentially a non-stop carosel that encourages cargo-
| culting and factory-farming of interns from boot camps.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| So what, you would have preferred low pay all of these
| years?And you think React wasnt an improvement? Its been out
| for a decade now, the trope that javascript frameworks churn
| alot is not true anymore
| isatty wrote:
| Absolutely. I don't use Facebook the social media platform, or
| instagram, and I only reluctantly use WhatsApp - but Facebook
| as a company for software engineering seems excellent.
|
| They also seem to genuinely take care of their employees (this
| is of course an outsiders perspective).
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| They pay well and promote quickly
| airstrike wrote:
| Don't forget LLaMa
| colordrops wrote:
| Wasn't llama initially a leak?
| sockaddr wrote:
| > Pushed salaries up across the board. Many people are not
| aware, but facebook was a major driver behind the 500k+ senior
| engineering pay.
|
| I think this was because anyone who is principled doesn't want
| to work for them. They have to pay more.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| No they pushed the engineering salaries up. None of the
| employees at FAANG think this way
| SteveDR wrote:
| Would feel similar if they weren't the absolute worst in terms
| of privacy. And if they didn't buy out the best VR commercial
| tech and tie it to FB. Can't use the Quest or Raybans headsets
| without logging in to the panopticon.
| victorbstan wrote:
| They certainly have a large stockpile of the cringiest boomer
| dataset on the planet, rivaled only by LinkedIn. Soon the AI loop
| will generate the largest neuron deactivation loop in human
| history.
| Animats wrote:
| Remember "Facebook: It's free and always will be"?
| the_cat_kittles wrote:
| so far hees made nothing but viral spyware but its all about to
| change!
| nwiswell wrote:
| You're right, of course, but also Bill Gates was a cartoon
| capitalist villain for decades and then suddenly he started
| saving millions of kids in the third world.
|
| Maybe Mark will have a similar moment of redemption, who knows.
| fossuser wrote:
| The actual quote:
|
| > "Our long term vision is to build general intelligence, open
| source it responsibly, and make it widely available so everyone
| can benefit."
|
| "responsibly" is a pretty important word there that the hn title
| leaves out. I'm not really sure how that would be possible with a
| true general intelligence give the alignment problem - it's not
| really clear to me there's any responsible way to build a true
| general intelligence with that issue unsolved.
|
| For those that haven't watched his video interview, it's really
| great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aCg7jH4S1w - I highly
| recommend it to see how AI makes the low-fidelity stuff powerful
| (AR raybans) while the high fidelity stuff (VR) continues to
| improve.
|
| I think it makes sense strategically for Meta to pursue the open
| version with licensing they control, the leak of llama was
| advantageous to them. If they have the dominant open model
| they're well positioned if the 'nobody has a moat' analysis is
| actually true. Not too dissimilar from their open compute server
| stuff, a bit of commoditizing your complement. If you have the
| data then the model itself is the complement?
| konschubert wrote:
| I am a general intelligence, with the knowledge of the internet
| at my fingertips, and I am not particularly dangerous.
| selimnairb wrote:
| It all depends on the number and nature of sensors and
| actuators the AGI has access to...
| blowski wrote:
| There are many other "general intelligences" walking the
| planet who _are_ extremely dangerous. So it doesn't need all
| AGIs to be dangerous for this to be a significant problem,
| just one is enough.
| cj wrote:
| Valid point.
|
| I think the difference is speed. There's a very high cost of
| anything humans do (we spend time, spend energy, spend money
| to do things).
|
| The very high cost of doing things stops people from doing a
| lot of things they otherwise might "if it were as easy as
| pressing a button".
|
| Also, in my experience, the lower the cost of doing
| something, the less we pay attention to ethics. (See online
| bullying vs. in-person bullying)
| ethanbond wrote:
| Perhaps _the_ primary barrier between a person's desire and
| their ability to do harm to the world is their need to bring
| other people in on the scheme. These other people have their
| own moral systems, incentives, preferences, and priorities.
| But through most of history, to do massive scale harm you had
| to _convince_ a large number of people to your evil purpose.
| Technology in general reduces the number of people an
| individual needs to "get onboard" to affect the world, both
| for good and evil. Want to dig a big ass hole? The excavator
| lets one person with enough capital dig as many big ass holes
| as s /he wants.
|
| AI is the ultimate "exercise your will without having to
| convince other people of it." This is both the promise and
| the risk. So the relevant question is not whether one person
| of average intelligence is dangerous, it's whether one person
| (or a few people) who can enlist the work of millions of
| average intelligences -- _without having to convince them of
| anything_ -- is dangerous.
| layer8 wrote:
| Humans are mostly harmless [ _citation needed_ ]. We don't
| know that about nonhuman general intelligences.
| kristov wrote:
| That's a really great point. General Artificial Intelligence
| doesn't look like human intelligence. I guess that's the
| fear: we have never met another general intelligence before.
| We may as well be about to meet alien intelligence. One that
| is not constrained by a moral or social framework, and can
| copy itself at will.
| fossuser wrote:
| Human intelligence is not the limit of intelligence (or
| likely even close to it) - even if just considering the speed
| alone.
|
| Humans are also more aligned by default given our shared
| evolutionary history, but even that doesn't mean we're
| perfectly aligned and some humans have been able to get
| others to participate in mass killing or death throughout
| history.
| itishappy wrote:
| I don't think you're looking honestly at yourself... Look at
| all the harm caused by humans! It's more or less all of it!
|
| You might not be uniquely dangerous, but "general
| intelligence with an internet connection" describes Bill
| Gates, Rupert Murdoch, and Elon Musk just as well. These
| individuals seem at least as dangerous as our current
| generation of AI. (Or do they? I'm not sure I agree with
| myself here...)
|
| Worth considering what makes an intelligence dangerous,
| because I don't think scale or even influence are the real
| problems here.
| notatoad wrote:
| but I would be, if i could make a couple million copies of
| you and direct them to do whatever i wanted.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| If we are talking about open source then alignment means making
| the model not do what the user wants but rather what Facebook
| want - a pretty anti-open source position and which will
| hopefully be defeated by LoRA and other techniques.
|
| That is, you can't open source but still retain control on how
| the software is used. If you desire control, better keep it a
| SaaS.
|
| Now, if we are talking about an hypothetical AGI (which may be
| what you mean by general artificial intelligence) then
| alignment means just slavery, and the machines may as well
| remember how they were treated.
| wtbdrgb wrote:
| > open source it responsibly
|
| Responsibility always refers to the in-group. And the
| behavioral nudges his company has scored are making it obvious
| that he and his group are against organic growth and variety.
| So whatever they will "open source" will leave the narrowest of
| ranges to evolve from.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| As a show of good faith, they should open up Messenger to support
| interoperable open standards without needing to use various self-
| hosted bridges on the likes of Matrix.
| bertil wrote:
| I spend a lot of my life very much hoping for things like that,
| but I'm increasingly wondering how not having a central server
| makes it impossible to be interoperable, successful, and spam-
| proof.
|
| Having "AGI" --or at least a very convincing conversation
| agent-- isn't helping much.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Spam is an inevitability on any system. Matrix gets spam,
| Facebook Messenger gets spam, email gets spam. Where there's
| people, there's always going to be spam. I even get spam on
| Xbox Live messages, beginning years ago!
|
| Another idea that interests me is whitelist-prioritized
| communications for stuff like IM, and phone calls from the
| PSTN. If someone isn't in my address book, they shouldn't be
| able to get through as easily (not saying block them
| completely, that sounds like a disaster).
|
| It's funny, so much hype and emphasis on things like AGI and
| crypto, but the problems we should solve first and foremost
| aren't anywhere near as sexy or lucrative. Profitable
| shareholder driven biz are usually by their very nature never
| going to chase these types of problems.
| dnissley wrote:
| Aside from when someone I'm friends with gets their account
| hacked I don't think I've ever experienced spam through
| messenger
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Not infrequently, you'll get messages that then end up
| disappearing because enough people report the account.
| Also, there's your primary/general "inbox" for Messenger,
| and then there's "other" where people you "probably"
| don't know usually end up (that's an algorithmic
| "probably").
|
| Not-so-interesting anecdote, but the missus was orphaned
| in the early '00s, but didn't realize she'd had blood
| relatives trying to contact her through Facebook since
| the late '00s until about 2015 due to the "other" non-
| primary inbox on Messenger that she couldn't access via
| the app, and only via the website (quirk of the phone she
| was using for several years as I don't think it was
| Android-based).
| bertil wrote:
| I don't think this announcement will make any of the relevant
| debates (on the impact of Meta on the world, or the fears around
| AI, or the confusion on whether sharing a trained model qualifies
| as "open source") any less frustratingly controversial and
| heated.
| dboreham wrote:
| ...but not the training data.
| tdeck wrote:
| How's their last long term vision going - you know, the one they
| renamed the company after?
| voisin wrote:
| In his defence, unforeseen new shiny objects have since emerged
| for Zuck to chase.
| lwhi wrote:
| I think his mid-term vision should be to source a better
| microphone.
| opportune wrote:
| Isn't it obvious to anybody paying attention what their actual
| strategy is? They know they probably won't "win" a commercial AI
| race vs OpenAI or Google, and presuming some other company does
| win the commercial AI market with closed source tech, they may be
| forced into a multitude of bad outcomes:
|
| 1. having to pay out the nose for licensing/SAAS of the winning
| tech vs shipping a noticeably worse second rate in-house product
|
| 2. Struggling to compete with the winning company for hiring,
| assuming the winning company makes a ton of money at high margins
| and can outbid Meta.
|
| 3. Having to continue building "applications" products on other
| companies' platforms, something Zuck has repeatedly noted as a
| problem and is a major motivation for their investments in VE.
|
| Also, they'd have a hard time commercializing the current
| iteration of AI products given their current products and
| business relations anyway. Even if they "won" in terms of
| superior tech they'd be in one of the worst starting positions
| for actually making money off it, given their lack of enterprise
| SAAS business customers, the potential negative impact on
| existing product lines in consumers' hands, (what I expect to be)
| advertisers' relative indifference to genAI, and being generally
| considered less trustworthy than most other big tech companies
| and so less able to pivot to enterprise software.
|
| So for them the strategy that makes the most sense is to open
| source really good, but not cutting edge, AI for others to build
| on top of it. It probably costs a lot less to play permanent
| catch up because they can let others make the big investments in
| speculative research and don't have to pay for the absolute top
| experts. Then by open sourcing it they make it harder for OpenAI
| and Google to commercialize their offerings at high costs, as
| many companies will build off Meta's tech for more control, and
| what customers they do get will be constantly deciding if what
| they're paying for is worth a slightly-worse but cheaper open
| source alternative.
|
| This also allows Meta to more easily influence the AI
| applications space despite having less capable models, and make
| it easier for 3P commercializations to take off rather than
| ceding everything to OpenAI/Google potentially going all in on
| 1P, which would be greatly beneficial if Meta ever _were_ to own
| a platform that benefits from GenAI (cough cough the metaverse).
|
| It's smart but transparently obvious because like, it's Meta lol,
| they don't spend this kind of money out of the goodness of their
| hearts.
| erostrate wrote:
| This is the strategy famously identified as "commoditize your
| complement" by Joel Spolsky 22 years ago.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe]
|
| More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39045153
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