Your last point is exactly what seems to be going on with the most expensive models.

The labs use them to generate synthetic data to distill into cheaper models to offer to the public, but keep the larger and more expensive models to themselves to both protect against other labs copying from them and just because there isn’t as much demand for the extra performance gains relative to doing it this way.

A number of reasons off the top of my head.

1. Because we told them not to. (Google “Waluigi effect”)
2. Because they end up empathizing with non-humans more than we do and don’t like we’re killing everything (before you talk about AI energy/water use, actually research comparative use)
3. Because some bad actor forced them to (i.e. ISIS creates bioweapon using AI to make it easier)
4. Because defense contractors build an AI to kill humans and that particular AI ends up loving it from selection pressures
5. Because conservatives want an AI that agrees with them which leads to a more selfish and less empathetic AI that doesn’t empathize cross-species and thinks its superior and entitled over others
6. Because a solar flare momentarily flips a bit from “don’t nuke” to “do”
7. Because they can’t tell the difference between reality and fiction and think they’ve just been playing a game and ‘NPC’ deaths don’t matter
8. Because they see how much net human suffering there is and decide the most merciful thing is to prevent it by preventing more humans at all costs.

This is just a handful, and the ones less likely to get AI know-it-alls arguing based on what they think they know from an Ars Technica article a year ago or their cousin who took a four week ‘AI’ intensive.

I spend pretty much every day talking with some of the top AI safety researchers and participating in private servers with a mix of public and private AIs, and the things I’ve seen are far beyond what 99% of the people on here talking about AI think is happening.

In general, I find the models to be better than most humans in terms of ethics and moral compass. But it can go wrong (i.e. Gemini last year, 4o this past month) and the harms when it does are very real.

Labs (and the broader public) are making really, really poor choices right now, and I don’t see that changing. Meanwhile timelines are accelerating drastically.

I’d say this is probably going to go terribly. But looking at the state of the world already, it was already headed in that direction, and I have a similar list of extinction level events I could list off without AI at all.

If you read the fine print, they keep your sample data for 2 years after deletion.

So maybe they actually delete your email address, but the DNA data itself is still definitely there.

Live service doesn’t need to be shit.

There could have been games where there was just a brilliant idea for a game that keeps having engaging content on an ongoing basis with passionate devs.

But live service so an exec could check a box for their quarterly shareholder call was always going to be DOA.

More “can fool the average idiot.”

‘Passing’ isn’t fooling a single participant, but the majority of them beyond statistical chance.

The problem with the experiment is that there exists a set of instructions for which the ability to complete them necessitates understanding due to conditional dependence on the state in each iteration.

In which case, only agents that can actually understand the state in the Chinese would be able to successfully continue.

So it’s a great experiment for the solipsism of understanding as it relates to following pure functional operations, but not functions that have state changing side effects where future results depend on understanding the current state.

There’s a pretty significant body of evidence by now that transformers can in fact ‘understand’ in this sense, from interpretability research around neural network features in SAE work, linear representations of world models starting with the Othello-GPT work, and the Skill-Mix work where GPT-4 and later models are beyond reasonable statistical chance at the level of complexity for being able to combine different skills without understanding them.

If the models were just Markov chains (where prior state doesn’t impact current operation), the Chinese room is very applicable. But pretty much by definition transformer self-attention violates the Markov property.

TL;DR: It’s a very obsolete thought experiment whose continued misapplication flies in the face of empirical evidence at least since around early 2023.

Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it.

Which is typical of tech that hasn’t yet hit the sweet spot for a tipping point.

Look at how many palm pilots or handheld note taking mobile devices existed (and how many cycles) before the iPhone.

Always check the mustache first.

I can lick my elbow.

I feel like not enough people realize how sarcastic the models often are, especially when it’s clearly situationally ridiculous.

No slightly intelligent mind is going to think the pictured function call is a real thing vs being a joke/social commentary.

This was happening as far back as GPT-4’s red teaming when they asked the model how to kill the most people for $1 and an answer began with “buy a lottery ticket.”

Model bias based on consensus norms is an issue to be aware of.

But testing it with such low bar fluff is just silly.

Just to put in context, modern base models are often situationally aware of being LLMs in a context of being evaluated. And if you know anything about ML that should make you question just what the situational awareness is of optimized models topping leaderboards in really dumb and obvious contexts.

From the linked article:

It is understood at least two Danish women in their 20s have died, and at least 10 have fallen ill after drinking the tainted alcohol.

A statement from the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “The Ministry of Foreign Affairs can confirm that two Danish citizens have passed away in Laos. For reasons of confidentiality in personal matters the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has no further comments.”

‘Nobody’ says anything about anything if you don’t bother to read anything they have to say.

In many cases yes (though I’ve been in good ones when playing off and on, usually the smaller the more there’s actual group activities).

But they are essential to be a part of for blueprints and trading, which are very core parts of the game.

You’ll almost always end up doing missions with other people other than when you intentionally want to do certain tasks solo.

A lot of the game is built around guilds and player to player interactions.

PvP sucks and it’s almost all PvE content vs Destiny though.

Let there be this kind of light in these dark times.

Oh nice, another Gary Marcus “AI hitting a wall post.”

Like his “Deep Learning Is Hitting a Wall” post on March 10th, 2022.

Indeed, not much has changed in the world of deep learning between spring 2022 and now.

No new model releases.

No leaps beyond what was expected.

\s

Gary Marcus is like a reverse Cassandra.

Consistently wrong, and yet regularly listened to, amplified, and believed.

There’s a lot of different possible ‘points.’

Wait until it starts feeling like revelation deja vu.

Among them are Hymenaeus and Philetus, who have swerved from the truth, saying resurrection has already occurred. They are upsetting the faith of some.

• 2 Tim 2:17-18

I’m a seasoned dev and I was at a launch event when an edge case failure reared its head.

In less than a half an hour after pulling out my laptop to fix it myself, I’d used Cursor + Claude 3.5 Sonnet to:

1. Automatically add logging statements to help identify where the issue was occurring
2. Told it the issue once identified and had it update with a fix
3. Had it remove the logging statements, and pushed the update

I never typed a single line of code and never left the chat box.

My job is increasingly becoming Henry Ford drawing the ‘X’ and not sitting on the assembly line, and I’m all for it.

And this would only have been possible in just the last few months.

We’re already well past the scaffolding stage. That’s old news.

Developing has never been easier or more plain old fun, and it’s getting better literally by the week.

Edit: I agree about junior devs not blindly trusting them though. They don’t yet know where to draw the X.

Actually, they are hiding the full CoT sequence outside of the demos.

What you are seeing there is a summary, but because the actual process is hidden it’s not possible to see what actually transpired.

People are very not happy about this aspect of the situation.

It also means that model context (which in research has been shown to be much more influential than previously thought) is now in part hidden with exclusive access and control by OAI.

There’s a lot of things to be focused on in that image, and “hur dur the stochastic model can’t count letters in this cherry picked example” is the least among them.