[HN Gopher] OpenAI - transformer debugger release
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       OpenAI - transformer debugger release
        
       Author : nmca
       Score  : 333 points
       Date   : 2024-03-12 01:12 UTC (21 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | CityOfThrowaway wrote:
       | This is pretty cool. I find it intriguing that we're neural
       | surgery on LLMs!
        
       | seanieb wrote:
       | Can't help but think Elons lawsuit will trigger more releases by
       | OpenAI. His core arguments are BS, but raised legitimate
       | questions about their non-profit status and lack of non-profit
       | related activity.
        
         | gurgunday wrote:
         | Why do you think they are BS? You say it raised legitimate
         | questions about their non-profit status and lack of non-profit
         | related activity.
        
           | rvz wrote:
           | > Why do you think they are BS?
           | 
           |  _Because me and everyone else here really hates Elon Musk._
           | 
           | > You say it raised legitimate questions about their non-
           | profit status and lack of non-profit related activity.
           | 
           | As soon as OpenAI accepted that investment from Microsoft it
           | has only been used as a for-profit proxy to have their own
           | 'DeepMind' to bring down Google which they have tried for
           | years with Bing and the Scroogled campaigns.
           | 
           | OpenAI is now no better than Google DeepMind and both are as
           | closed and secretive and OpenAI ditched from their charter
           | and non-profit status and continues to make excuses for not
           | giving back their research.
        
             | marknutter wrote:
             | > Because me and everyone else here really hates Elon Musk.
             | 
             | Speak for yourself.
        
           | myko wrote:
           | I think some believe Elon's argument is BS because Elon
           | claims to be upset about OpenAI charging for their work.
           | However, internal communications/texts show he wanted to do
           | the same thing. So it seems like sour grapes that he isn't
           | the one in charge.
        
             | ramblerman wrote:
             | An argument isn't good or bad because of the motivations of
             | the person behind it.
             | 
             | I get Elon is not popular right now. But jeez this is
             | playground emotional level logic.
        
             | _diyar wrote:
             | I detailed my understanding of this case in a sibling-
             | comment to this one, but I think the fact that he wanted to
             | "do the same thing" (read: use the for-profit engine to
             | fund AI research) only makes his case stronger!
             | 
             | If I understand correctly, the OpenAI board asked Musk to
             | remove himself and sell his stake as his for-profit
             | pursuits conflicted with the mission of open, non-profit
             | research. But after he left, they started a for-profit
             | subsidiary and did exactly what they didn't want him doing.
             | I could see how a judge might side with him.
        
             | GreedClarifies wrote:
             | Let's be real. They think Elon's arguments are BS since he
             | bought Twitter and he destroyed their Leftie safe space.
             | 
             | They are also very upset with Elon's very public shift away
             | from the current Left.
             | 
             | It's Elon derangement syndrome.
        
         | nonethewiser wrote:
         | > His core arguments are BS, but raised legitimate questions
         | about their non-profit status and lack of non-profit related
         | activity.
         | 
         | These legitimate questions about their non-profit status ARE
         | his core arguments. His complaints are the same as the popular
         | notion on hackernews that OpenAI has failed to be open.
        
           | refulgentis wrote:
           | Erm, you get it, it's right in your comment: lawsuit about
           | non-profit, HN about open weights.
        
           | jhonof wrote:
           | They are part of his core argument, but not the entire
           | argument. The (imo) shakier part of the argument is that he
           | is entitled to damages even though he doesn't own shares in
           | the company. This is atypical, most of the time you lose that
           | right once you get rid of your shares. It seems like he is
           | arguing that he was misled and sold his shares because of
           | that, which will be hard to prove if true, and even if it is
           | true, isn't really illegal.
        
             | _diyar wrote:
             | I believe at the time it was reported that Musk and the
             | OpenAI board chose to part ways due to his for-profit AI
             | research (in Tesla) posing a conflict of interest to the
             | OpenAI mission.
             | 
             | Hence his argument boils down to "You made me sell my
             | shares because my 'closed' AI research conflicted with your
             | 'open' non-profit ideals. However, you have since stoped to
             | adhere to your mission statement, effectively seizing to
             | publish your research findings and pursuing for-profit
             | goals. As a consequence of this I have lost a bunch of
             | money."
             | 
             | And as nuts as Musk is, I kind of see his point here.
        
               | jhonof wrote:
               | That argument doesn't really hold a lot of water with me
               | to be honest. If I sell (forced or otherwise) my shares
               | in company because it isn't working on tech I agree with,
               | and then they pivot and start working on tech I agree
               | with and their shares pop, I am not entitled to sue them
               | for damages.
        
               | _diyar wrote:
               | In the scenario you described above, you would be
               | entitled to sue for damages if you sold shares in a
               | company under false pretenses because the other owners
               | deceived you.
               | 
               | Imagine being the part-owner of a bread focused bakery.
               | You tell the other owners that you think the business
               | should focus on pastries - even if everybody agrees that
               | bread products are more important - as pastries make more
               | money (that money can in turn be invested into the bread
               | business).
               | 
               | The other owners hard disagree and ask you to leave the
               | company, because a) that does not fit into their bread-
               | centric mission and b) you own a pastry-supplier in town
               | and would obviously be profiting from this move. So you
               | sell your shares and move on, no harm no foul.
               | 
               | But what if they then turn around and start producing
               | pastries, claiming it's only doing so to financially
               | support their bread business? What if they start entering
               | lucrative deals with other pastry-suppliers and
               | effectively stop making bread?
               | 
               | In this case I would argue that you would be entitled to
               | some portion of your foregone gains. You sold your stock
               | while being under the impression that the company would
               | never go into the direction which you deem is the *only
               | viable one*, only to find out that they did exactly what
               | you suggested after you left.
               | 
               | > ... because it isn't working on tech I agree with, ...
               | 
               | Please notice that this is not what happened. They all
               | agreed on the tech to be researched. The only
               | disagreement was the business model and company structure
               | required to fund the research.
        
           | John23832 wrote:
           | > These legitimate questions about their non-profit status
           | ARE his core arguments.
           | 
           | Except for the portion where he advocated for a capped-profit
           | arm which he would run under Tesla. You know that part that
           | is shown in the OpenAI emails. It seemed he was ok with it
           | when HE would stand to benefit.
           | 
           | You can't believe that Elon is "a great businessman" while
           | also believing that he is totally altruistic and ignores all
           | of the self serving impulses that have gotten him to where he
           | is.
        
             | revscat wrote:
             | GP is discussing legal arguments, not motivations.
        
               | John23832 wrote:
               | While I am not a lawyer, I think it's pretty apparent you
               | can't sue someone for damages for participating in an
               | action that you conspired to be a part of.
        
         | resource_waste wrote:
         | When I said this last year, people said
         | 
         | "BUT THEY ARE DEMOCRAITIZING IT"
         | 
         | Its good to see that I was always right, even last year. I just
         | didn't have a dad who owned an emerald mine.
        
           | simondotau wrote:
           | People seem to imagine that Errol Musk is dead and Elon got a
           | big inheritance from his daddy's estate. In fact Errol is
           | still very much alive, became bankrupt sometime in the 1990s,
           | and is now a deadbeat living off financial support from his
           | sons.
           | 
           | Was there ever an emerald mine? Maybe. Though nobody has been
           | able to find a scrap of evidence for it. Literally the only
           | "evidence" is Errol's own boasts, which is that he bought a
           | half-share of a Zambian mine for 100k ZAR ($50k USD). Hardly
           | the stuff generational empires are made of.
        
             | garyfirestorm wrote:
             | if you bought 50k USD worth of $AAPL in 1990, by
             | conservative estimates they will be worth 560 million USD
             | worth today. I'd argue, that's generational stuff right
             | there.
        
               | bitcurious wrote:
               | If you bought the winning lottery ticket, you'd be a
               | lottery winner.
        
               | zingelshuher wrote:
               | If grandmother had balls she would be a grandfather.
        
               | simondotau wrote:
               | Did Errol Musk buy 50k worth of $AAPL in 1990?
        
             | n2d4 wrote:
             | The Zambian mine _is_ the emerald mine everyone is talking
             | about. From Walter Isaacson 's biography:
             | 
             |  _> [Errol and a Zambian busienessman] agreed on a price
             | [for Errol 's plane], and instead of taking a payment in
             | cash, Errol was given a portion of the emeralds produced at
             | three small mines that the entrepreneur owned in Zambia.
             | [...]_
             | 
             |  _> Errol, who never had an ownership stake in the mine,
             | expanded his trade by importing raw emeralds and having
             | them cut in Johannesburg.  "Many people came to me with
             | stolen parcels," he says. "On trips overseas I would sell
             | emeralds to jewelers. It was a cloak-and-dagger thing,
             | because none of it was legal." After producing profits of
             | roughly $210,000, his emerald business collapsed in the
             | 1980s when the Russians created an artificial emerald in
             | the lab. He lost all of his emerald earnings._
             | 
             | $210,000 in 1986 would be about $600,000 today.
        
               | simondotau wrote:
               | Yes, all entirely consistent with what I said. Errol has
               | told this story many times, including to Walter. But
               | that's all there is -- a story. Is it true? Doesn't seem
               | particularly consequential even if true. $600k is a lot
               | of money, but it's hardly unimaginable wealth.
        
         | brucethemoose2 wrote:
         | My concern is that Elon has shut the door with a sloppy
         | lawsuit.
         | 
         | If some other entity (Government agency? Another company?)
         | Comes around to pull this string, its going to set a bad
         | precedent.
        
         | furyofantares wrote:
         | > raised legitimate questions about their non-profit status and
         | lack of non-profit related activity
         | 
         | What is "non-profit related activity"? IANAL but the only
         | justification needed for non-profit designation is not being
         | for-profit.
         | 
         | And maybe their structure with a for-profit subsidiary is up
         | for debate because of this. But you don't get to be non-profit
         | by doing "good stuff" like open sourcing things. You get it by
         | investing all profits back into the business.
         | 
         | Evil Corp for Doing Evil could be a non-profit if it invested
         | all its profits back into the business.
        
           | LordDragonfang wrote:
           | > What is "non-profit related activity"? What is "non-profit
           | related activity"? IANAL but the only justification needed
           | for non-profit designation is not being for-profit.
           | 
           | Good thing you are NAL, because this is flat out wrong. "Non-
           | profit" is a term used to refer to specific tax-exempt
           | institutions under US tax law 501(c), and has nothing to do
           | with investing profits "back into the business" (otherwise,
           | you could have called Amazon or Uber "non-profits").
           | 
           | OpenAI[1] is specifically a 501(c)(3)[2] which explicitly
           | requires the organization's purpose be one of the following
           | "exempt" purposes:
           | 
           | >charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary,
           | testing for public safety, fostering national or
           | international amateur sports competition, and preventing
           | cruelty to children or animals. [3]
           | 
           | If it does not continue to fill one of those purposes, it can
           | lose its tax-exempt nonprofit status.
           | 
           | [1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/
           | 810...
           | 
           | [2] https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-
           | organiz...
           | 
           | [3] https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-
           | organiz...
        
             | furyofantares wrote:
             | > Good thing you are NAL
             | 
             | I'm offended. Presumably if I was AL I would have gotten it
             | right.
        
         | jeanlucas wrote:
         | Remember, open source is just on the beginning and for
         | recruiting purposes
        
       | xcodevn wrote:
       | I must say, understanding how transformers work is arguably the
       | most important research problem in history, assuming that AGI can
       | be achieved by just scaling up current LLM models on text, video,
       | audio, etc.
        
         | kindking wrote:
         | That is a very big assumption.
        
           | ImHereToVote wrote:
           | Which might turn out to be correct. Might be wrong also. We
           | have no priors to AGI developing. Only NGI, and we know
           | preciously little about how to achieve NGI too, except the
           | bedroom way.
        
             | joaogui1 wrote:
             | In vitro fertilization too!
        
             | furyofantares wrote:
             | We have a lot of priors - everything we've ever done has
             | not produced AGI.
             | 
             | Maybe scaling transformers is the best way forward. I'm
             | hopeful. But it's a big assumption that it will produce
             | AGI.
        
           | kromem wrote:
           | It really depends on the definition.
           | 
           | "Better than the _average_ human at _most_ profitable tasks "
           | is a much lower bar than most people on HN might think.
           | 
           | I have vendors who instead of filling out a web form which
           | remembers their inputs and eventually even fills everything
           | out for them instead print it out and fax it back in.
           | 
           | We're probably only about 2-3 years away from transformers
           | being self-optimizing enough in prompts and evaluations to
           | outpace the _average_ worker in most tasks in most roles. (It
           | won 't necessarily be that much cheaper after the multiple
           | passes and context windows required, and crucially probably
           | won't be better at _all_ tasks in most roles.)
           | 
           | If you define AGI as "better than _any_ human at profitable
           | tasks " or "better than average at _all_ tasks " then yes,
           | we're a long ways off and transformers alone probably won't
           | get us there.
        
             | shafyy wrote:
             | > _" Better than the average human at most profitable
             | tasks"_
             | 
             | This is not the definition of AGI. You can't just make up a
             | random definition to fit your argument, lol.
        
               | exe34 wrote:
               | No that's the economically dominating definition. The
               | philosophical one will happen much later or may never
               | happen, but human society may change beyond recognition
               | with the first one alone.
        
               | hnben wrote:
               | "The philosophical one" seems to get updated with every
               | new breakthrough. 20 years ago, GPT3 would have been
               | considered AGI (or "strong AI", as we called it back
               | then).
               | 
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intellig
               | enc...
        
               | exe34 wrote:
               | Dennett describes it as real magic. The magic that can be
               | performed is not considered real magic (it's merely a
               | trick of confidence), whereas real magic is that which
               | couldn't possibly be done.
        
               | falcor84 wrote:
               | I'm actually all in on people making up new definitions
               | for vague terms at the start of an argument as long as
               | they're explicit about it.
               | 
               | And I particularly like this one, which is much more
               | clearly measurable. If you feel AGI is taken, maybe we
               | should coin this one as APGI or something like that
        
               | worldsayshi wrote:
               | I don't think the main intention was to define AGI but to
               | zoom in on an interpretation of AGI that would provide
               | enough value to be revolutionary.
        
               | johnthewise wrote:
               | There is no single definition of AGI. Performing most
               | intellectual tasks human perform today is both general
               | and a form of intelligence, so I too agree with it.
        
               | ibejoeb wrote:
               | What is _the_ definition? The definition of AGI is one of
               | the central points of contention in the biggest industry
               | legal battle.
        
               | SilverBirch wrote:
               | It's only in contention because 1 of the sides has a
               | tonne of money, a hurt ego, and is willing to pay lawyers
               | to argue the sky is red in order to get revenge on his
               | former colleagues. I don't think anyone would seriously
               | claim OpenAI has achieved AGI today.
        
               | exe34 wrote:
               | No, what they have is several narrow ASIs.
        
               | belter wrote:
               | This is the correct way to approach the answer to when
               | and how to achieve AGI. Otherwise please present here
               | your Engineer Specification for defining AGI...
               | 
               | On a timeframe for achieving AGI:
               | https://youtu.be/cEg8cOx7UZk?t=1658
        
               | infecto wrote:
               | My understanding is that AGI has no formal definition as
               | it means different things to different people.
               | 
               | The poster here created his own definition, but what is
               | wrong with that? He set a very specific bar to achieve,
               | something that most "high-level" thinkers in the space
               | have not really done. Isn't the point of discourse to
               | bring your ideas to the table?
        
             | lm28469 wrote:
             | > "Better than the average human at most profitable tasks"
             | 
             | I think the HN crowd forgets that what really runs the
             | world are min wage workers running around and doing real
             | world things, not code monkeys and glorified type writers
             | filling excel sheets. So yes, replacing the bullshit jobs
             | we invented to keep people busy will be relatively easy,
             | that's if you don't account for the fact you'll now have to
             | create bullshit+ jobs to keep them busy
             | 
             | And even then we're far away, sure it can shit out code for
             | a todo webapp and create semi realistic images of a monkey
             | eating a burrito but that's about it. More than a year ago
             | someone betted against me here that chatgpt would
             | revolutionise the world in the next year, nothing happened
             | really, geeks are excited, execs are buying the hype, tons
             | of money is transferred, yet there was no 4th industrial
             | revolution.
             | 
             | What happened though is that the web is flooded with
             | absolutely useless content, amazon is full of ai generated
             | books, students rely more and more on chatgpt to generate
             | homeworks, thesis, "find" solutions, &c. it might very well
             | end up being a net negative for the average joe in the long
             | run
        
               | hotdogscout wrote:
               | >I think the HN crowd forgets that what really runs the
               | world are min wage workers running around and doing real
               | world things, not code monkeys and glorified type writers
               | filling excel sheets.
               | 
               | This is not true at all. How many products do you use
               | that come primarily from minimum wage workers?
               | 
               | If a few people responsible for Google maps running
               | stopped working the GDP loss would be much bigger than if
               | magnitudes more minimum wage workers did the same.
        
               | diggan wrote:
               | Forget "how many", without those people, you'd end up
               | without food on your table. Then the rest of the products
               | you use wouldn't matter.
        
               | hotdogscout wrote:
               | Also not true, I know the big farms of my state and they
               | don't depend on minimum wage workers and I live in a
               | third world country.
               | 
               | I doubt agricultural wages or truck drivers are minimum
               | wage jobs where you live. Assuming US https://www.nass.us
               | da.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Farm_Labor/fl_allw...
        
               | lm28469 wrote:
               | France is one of if not the biggest agriculture power in
               | Europe, most farmers can't even generate a 35hr min wage
               | equivalent while working 80+ hours a week.
               | 
               | 20% of them live in poverty, half of them make less than
               | 22k euros a year
               | 
               | Truck drivers earn between min wage and 150% of min wage,
               | while being on the road every day and not having a social
               | life, they drive 8 hours per day and sleep in their
               | fucking truck while some code monkey makes 300k+/year
               | coding memeojis at apple. Guess which ones will be
               | automated first by openai lmao
        
               | qvrjuec wrote:
               | >Truck drivers earn between min wage and 150% of min wage
               | 
               | Where are you getting this information? It's absolutely
               | wrong. Long haul truckers (the one's you're saying don't
               | have social lives because they drive 8 hours per day)
               | make $71,196 on average in the US[1].
               | 
               | [1] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/LONG-HAUL-
               | Truck-Driver...
        
               | allendoerfer wrote:
               | He is talking about France in the sentence before. There
               | are barely any truckers in Germany with a German
               | nationality. They are simply not competitive. Same goes
               | for package delivery.
               | 
               | Just imagine what would happen to a trucker's salary in
               | the US if it were to create a unified market with Mexico
               | and all of Central America.
               | 
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_enlargement_of_the_Eur
               | ope...
               | 
               | It's not necessarily a bad thing. Economies of Eastern
               | European countries have been growing after all and
               | Western Europe does not have enough workers because of
               | its demographics anyway. My take is, that everybody is
               | winning, there is less poverty than before, but some
               | sideffects look ugly for a while.
        
               | hotdogscout wrote:
               | >half of them make less than 22k euros a year
               | 
               | I'd be extremely happy making this amount. Some people
               | are just accustomed to easier lives.
               | 
               | >while some code monkey makes 300k+/year coding memeojis
               | at apple.
               | 
               | Meme position for a privileged caste statistically
               | irrespective of skill in an institution that can piss
               | money on anything and still succeed.
        
               | diggan wrote:
               | Farm work, especially work that doesn't require
               | specialization (planting, maintaining, harvesting), is
               | pretty much minimum wage work where I live, in Spain.
               | Minimum wage here is ~1300 EUR / month. But it also
               | differs wildly by region here, as some regions are really
               | poor while others rich (relatively).
               | 
               | Besides the farm work, there is food processing workers
               | (cutting, cleaning, basically assembly lines), packaging,
               | workers at warehouses, people who work at the counters of
               | the store, and all the support roles for those positions.
               | If you go outside and eat, you have all the restaurant
               | personnel to take into account as well.
               | 
               | There is a lot of low skilled labor that goes into making
               | what we eat today. I'm not sure how you could possibly
               | claim that none of those people are on minimum wage.
        
               | hotdogscout wrote:
               | Not all of the work you cited is essential. Would society
               | crumble without retail?
               | 
               | Minimum wage in Spain is significantly more money than
               | anything I've made in my life. It's a very comfortable
               | position for the vast majority of the world.
               | 
               | >There is a lot of low skilled labor that goes into
               | making what we eat today. I'm not sure how you could
               | possibly claim that none of those people are on minimum
               | wage.
               | 
               | People doing essential work that isn't trivially
               | replaceable have the bargaining power to charge more than
               | the minimum wage in a moderately free market of human
               | work, usually they do.
        
               | squigz wrote:
               | > Not all of the work you cited is essential. Would
               | society crumble without retail?
               | 
               | Did I miss the part where the other comment mentioned
               | retail, or where you respond to the half dozen other
               | examples of essential work?
               | 
               | > Minimum wage in Spain is significantly more money than
               | anything I've made in my life. It's a very comfortable
               | position for the vast majority of the world.
               | 
               | Instead of moving the bar some more, could you just
               | define what minimum wage would be an acceptable bar for
               | you in this conversation?
        
               | hotdogscout wrote:
               | Yes you missed retail, read it again.
               | 
               | https://uk.indeed.com/career/warehouse-worker/salaries
               | 
               | Do you really need me to Google every single essential
               | position known before conceding that society is not
               | maintained by minimum wage workers?
        
               | squigz wrote:
               | No, but I sure would like it if you defined it a bit
               | better, since apparently we're now talking about UK
               | numbers.
        
               | CamperBob2 wrote:
               | Take a look at what happened to farm employment figures
               | over the last 100 years.
               | 
               | It was a _good_ thing.
        
               | lm28469 wrote:
               | The people picking trash in my street stopped working for
               | 2 days and it looks like I live in some third world
               | country now, two fucking days and it looks like I live in
               | the middle of an open air dump
               | 
               | If trucks stopped deliveries every city would die in a
               | week
               | 
               | If construction workers stopped building / maintaining
               | we'd be in deep shit in 6 months or less
               | 
               | If the people in warehouses stopped working for a week
               | the economy would tank like it rarely does
               | 
               | Nurses, doctors, bus/tram/train drivers, police,
               | firefighters, ambulances, janitors, trash pickers,
               | plumbers, sewer workers, electricians, people taking care
               | of water treatment plants, power plants, teachers, social
               | workers, ...
               | 
               | You could delete facebook, openai, instagram, twitter,
               | netflix, tesla and 90% of startups from the face of the
               | earth right now and I'd have the exact same life as
               | yesterday. Remove any of the people I mentioned above and
               | society would crumble in no time
               | 
               | And none of these are even remotely close to being
               | automated at all, nobody cares about most of these jobs.
               | But hey, here is a dancing kangaroo:
               | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zuivg5rz_aA
        
               | hotdogscout wrote:
               | Are any of the positions you cited minimum wage workers
               | where you live? Again, assuming US:
               | 
               | https://money.cnn.com/2016/02/24/news/economy/trash-
               | workers-...
               | 
               | https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/garbage-
               | collector...
               | 
               | >You could delete facebook, openai, instagram, twitter,
               | netflix, tesla and 90% of startups from the face of the
               | earth right now and I'd have the exact same life as
               | yesterday. Remove any of the people I mentioned above and
               | society would crumble in no time
               | 
               | Yes because you picked non-essential work. (?)
        
               | rvnx wrote:
               | Even further, maybe the world would actually be better
               | without these companies.
               | 
               | Now that there are great inventions like TikTok,
               | teenagers are depressed as hell, and they don't go to
               | meet each other to play soccer together, because the
               | "social" networks are giving the illusion of having that
               | connection.
        
               | lm28469 wrote:
               | > Yes because you picked non-essential work. (?)
               | 
               | Then again tell me who we're automating out of the work
               | force right now ? Trash pickers or code monkeys ? Truck
               | drivers or artists ?
        
               | hotdogscout wrote:
               | Essential and non-replaceable are different concepts.
        
               | fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
               | All of them? We've been working on and succeeding at
               | automating physical tasks for decades.
        
               | evilduck wrote:
               | Growing up my trash was picked up by a human and the
               | truck crew had two or three people on it jogging house to
               | house to pick up trash as the driver slow rolled through
               | the neighborhood.
               | 
               | Now my trash is serviced by one person who mostly never
               | leaves the cab and who would be better described as a
               | skilled machine operator than as a menial labor role. The
               | work isn't completely automated but technology has
               | reduced the job market for trash truck crews by two-
               | thirds. I'm guessing the barrier is higher now too,
               | requiring training and certifications to run the robotics
               | on the truck instead of physical fitness being the
               | primary prior qualification.
        
               | _Algernon_ wrote:
               | >there was no 4th industrial revolution.
               | 
               |  _Yet_. The industrial revolution didn 't happen in a
               | year either.
        
               | ecoquant wrote:
               | This all reminds me of my asshole great uncle making fun
               | of me as a teenager circa 1997 while I was at the
               | computer and on the internet.
               | 
               | Sarcastically asking me "Can you meet girls on that?" and
               | then laughed.
               | 
               | He wasn't wrong in the short term but laughably wrong in
               | the long term.
        
               | joenot443 wrote:
               | > I think the HN crowd forgets that what really runs the
               | world are min wage workers running around and doing real
               | world things
               | 
               | Is this really true? It's certainly a nice soundbyte when
               | you're making class arguments or trying to dunk on the
               | "HN crowd", but I think it falls apart under any level of
               | scrutiny.
               | 
               | Who keeps your lights on? Who drives your bus? Who
               | manages your sewage? Who teaches your kids? Who builds
               | your roads? None of them make minimum wage and would
               | probably be a little insulted to be characterized as
               | such.
               | 
               | It's pretty reductionist to call anyone outside our realm
               | of tech a "min wage worker", they're just workers like or
               | I. I think it's a pretty stupid and pointless exercise to
               | subdivide people into useful or non-useful workers,
               | serving no purpose but to further pet the smugness of HN
               | AI skeptics.
        
               | weakfish wrote:
               | I think this comment focuses too much on the "minimum
               | wage" aspect - the core of the argument is that those are
               | roles not at risk to AI in its present state, not
               | necessarily the compensation aspect
        
               | CamperBob2 wrote:
               | "More than a year ago"? Really? What did anyone think was
               | going to happen in a year?
               | 
               | This sort of thing usually takes longer than you expect
               | it to, and then it usually happens faster than you expect
               | it to.
        
             | Buttons840 wrote:
             | > I have vendors who instead of filling out a web form
             | which remembers their inputs and eventually even fills
             | everything out for them instead print it out and fax it
             | back in.
             | 
             | Somewhere along the way we built computer that are so
             | intuitive people find printing and faxing easier than our
             | web apps. This isn't completely the fault of any single web
             | app, users have a lot of learned avoidance because of bad
             | experiences with many apps.
             | 
             | In the end completely automating the job ended up being
             | easier than building a good interface for a human to do the
             | job.
        
             | goatlover wrote:
             | Robotics is more important to AGI, because the bulk of
             | human intelligence comes from manipulating and navigating
             | the physical world. Which includes a large amount of social
             | interaction. Allan's are tools to assist humans. They
             | aren't automating most jobs away anytime soon.
        
             | Jensson wrote:
             | Need to be better than an average expert. Humans are
             | general intelligences since you can train a human to do
             | anything, so a general intelligent machine needs to be able
             | to be trained and become equal to human experts, matching
             | an average untrained human isn't worth much.
        
         | logicchains wrote:
         | We already understand how transformers work: their architecture
         | can learn to approximate a very large class of functions-on-
         | sequences (specifically continuous sequence-to-sequence
         | functions with compact support:
         | https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.10077). It can do it more accurately
         | than previous architectures like RNNs because transformers
         | don't "forget" any information from prior items in the
         | sequence. Training transformers to predict the next item in
         | sequences eventually forces them to learn a function that
         | approximates a world model (or at least a model of how the
         | world behaves in the training text/data), and if they're large
         | enough and trained with enough data then this world model is
         | accurate enough for them to be useful for us.
         | 
         | If you're asking for understanding the actual internal world
         | model they develop, it's basically equivalent to trying to
         | understand a human brain's internal world model by analysing
         | its neurons and how they fire.
        
           | theGnuMe wrote:
           | >Training transformers to predict the next item in sequences
           | eventually forces them to learn a function that approximates
           | a world model
           | 
           | There is absolutely no proof for this statement.
        
             | H8crilA wrote:
             | Have you used ChatGPT? It can do (at least) simple
             | reasoning, for example simple spatial reasoning or simple
             | human behavior reasoning.
        
               | theGnuMe wrote:
               | I suggest you start here:
               | 
               | https://ahtiahde.medium.com/limits-of-turing-machines-
               | and-al...
               | 
               | If you don't have a CS background, I would suggest
               | reading the wikipedia entries referenced in the medium
               | article as well.
        
           | seydor wrote:
           | We shouldn't assume that either of those tasks is impossible
        
           | zamfi wrote:
           | > it's basically equivalent to trying to understand a human
           | brain's internal world model by analysing its neurons and how
           | they fire
           | 
           | A major challenge here is that it's very hard/expensive to
           | analyze these neurons, especially at any kind of scale within
           | one human.
           | 
           | Not so with LLMs.
        
         | reexpressionist wrote:
         | We may well look back in future years and view the underlying
         | approach introduced in Reexpress as among the more significant
         | results of the first quarter of the 21st century. With
         | Reexpress, we can generate reliable probability estimates over
         | high-dimensional objects (e.g., LLMs), including in the
         | presence of a non-trivial subset of distribution shifts seen in
         | practice. A non-vacuous argument can be made that this solves
         | the alignment/super-alignment problem (the ultimate goal of the
         | line of work in the post above, and why I mention this here),
         | because we can achieve this behavior via composition with
         | networks of arbitrary size.
         | 
         | Because the parameters of the large neural networks are non-
         | identifiable (in the statistical sense), we operate at the unit
         | of analysis of labeled examples/exemplars (i.e., the observable
         | data), with a direct connection between the Training set and
         | the Calibration set.
         | 
         | This has important practical implications. It works with
         | essentially any generative AI model. For example, we can build
         | an 'uncertainty-aware GPT-4' for use in enterprise and
         | professional settings, such as law:
         | https://github.com/ReexpressAI/Example_Data/blob/main/tutori...
         | 
         | (The need for reliable, controllable estimates is critical
         | regardless of any notion of AGI, since the existing LLMs are
         | already getting baked into higher-risk settings, such as
         | medicine, finance, and law.)
        
           | infecto wrote:
           | I hope you are not part of the founding team but if you are,
           | you truly are doing your startup a disservice. Sharing your
           | startup/ideas is great but doing it in the form of an
           | advertisement "underlying approach introduced in Reexpress as
           | among the more significant results of the first quarter of
           | the 21st century" is just weird.
        
             | pfd1986 wrote:
             | Given his username I'd say.. he is.
             | 
             | Agreed: disclaimer needed.
        
             | blackoil wrote:
             | Yeah, I am all in for hustling but this post is way over
             | the top, particularly for this forum.
        
           | 12345hn6789 wrote:
           | Re: this is an advertisement for a product by its own
           | employees.
        
         | xxs wrote:
         | >most important research problem in history
         | 
         | That has to be some extremely narrowed version of all research
         | that has happened (or will happen?)
        
           | seydor wrote:
           | Considering that knowing how knowing works is at the top of
           | the ordo cognoscendi, it s not that narrow.
        
         | resource_waste wrote:
         | >assuming that AGI can be achieved by just scaling up current
         | LLM models on text, video, audio, etc.
         | 
         | Is any sane person actually trying this?
         | 
         | I can't imagine an LLM ever going AGI.
        
         | otabdeveloper4 wrote:
         | > the most important research problem in history
         | 
         | Probably not.
         | 
         | > assuming that AGI can be achieved by just scaling up current
         | LLM models
         | 
         | Lmao.
        
           | xcodevn wrote:
           | > Probably not.
           | 
           | Lmao.
        
       | paulcjh wrote:
       | A very meagre attempt to look like they provide open source tools
       | help the world safely make AGI
        
       | bilsbie wrote:
       | How many transformers are in a typical LLM? Or is the whole thing
       | considered a transformer?
        
         | dfgtyu65r wrote:
         | Normally, the LLM is composed of multiple transformer blocks,
         | where each block consists of the (mutli-head) attention and
         | fully-connected feedforward components. These are then stacked
         | on top of each other to give the final output of the network.
        
         | jerpint wrote:
         | The architecture as a whole is referred to as a transformer
         | (autoregressive decoder-only architecture in the case of gpt
         | style LLMs).
         | 
         | Note that there can be other types of LLMs too that are not
         | necessarily transformer based (SSM, RNN, etc)
        
       | nuz wrote:
       | Yearly obligatory open source drop. What was it last time,
       | whisper?
        
       | whalesalad wrote:
       | Interesting to see the use of ruff and black in the same project.
       | https://github.com/openai/transformer-debugger/blob/main/.pr...
        
         | jolux wrote:
         | And isort, which Ruff also supports.
        
       | throw310822 wrote:
       | Hmmm.. but what happens if you allow the LLM to access and query
       | its own debugger? "Why did I answer this to that?" "What happens
       | if I change slightly my assumptions"?
        
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