LessWrong 2.0 Reader

see also: These Are Your Doges, If It Please You

It should be pointed out that the original paper/press release describing GPT-4 explicitly says that they found that BIG-bench had contaminated their training data, and therefore excluded it as an evaluation. As far as I know there was no similar disclosure for claude or other models. See footnote 5 here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.08774v1

I thought that this post on strategy [EA · GW] and this talk [EA · GW] were well done. Obviously, I'll have to see how this translates into practise.

Having an expensive 3.5 Opus would be cool, but it's not my top wish. I'd prefer to have a variety of "flavors" of Sonnet. Different specializations for different use cases.

For example:

Science fiction writer / General Creative writer

Poet

Actor

Philosopher / Humanities professor

Chem/Bio professor

Math/Physics professor

Literary Editor

Coder

Lawyer/Political Science professor

Clerical worker for mundane repetitive tasks (probably should be a Haiku, actually)

The main things missing from Sonnet 3.5 that Opus 3 has are creativity, open mindedness, ability to analyze multi-sided complex philosophical questions better, ability to roleplay convincingly.

Why try to cram all abilities into one single model? Distilling down to smaller models seems like a perfect place to allow for specialization.

How many of those green lights could the Wright Brothers have shown you?

I'm going to ignore all "AI is different" arguments for the sake of this comment, even though I agree with some of them. Let's assume I grant all your points. The agricultural revolution took a couple of millennia. The industrial revolution took a couple of centuries. And now, the AI revolution will take decades.

This means I can equivalently restate your conclusion as, "Human activity will lose almost all economic value by the time my newborn niece would have finished grad school." This is certainly slower than many timeline predictions today, but it's hardly "slow" by most standards, and is in fact still faster than the median timelines of most experts as of 5 years ago.

Of course, one of the important facts about these past transitions is that each petered out after bootstrapping civilization far enough to start the next one that's 10x faster. So, if the world in 2047 is 1000x richer and moving at AGI speeds compared to today, then the next 1000x change should take a few years, and the next one after that a few months. This still implies "singularity by 2050." We'd probably have about an extra decade to ensure our survival, though, which I would agree is great.

What is a “deontic mesh”? I am not familiar with this term; do you have a link that explains it?

Fair! Though when the alternative is my own fiction writing skills... let's just say I appreciated Claude's version the most amongst the set of possible options available ^^;

You may well be right, I'll look into my hyperparameters. I looked at the code Claude had generated with my interference and that greatly lowered my confidence in them, lol (see edit to this comment [LW(p) · GW(p)]).

Hmm. Maybe here’s an analogy. Suppose somebody said:

There’s a certain kind of interoceptive sensory input, consisting of such-and-such signal coming from blah type of thermoreceptor in the peripheral nervous system. Your brain does its usual thing of transforming that sensation into its own “color” of “metaphysical paint” (as in §3.3.2) that forms a concept / property in your conscious awareness and world-model, and you know it by the everyday term “cold”.

On the one hand, I would defend this passage as basically true. On the other hand, there’s clearly a lot of connotations and associations of the word “cold” that go way beyond the natural generalization of things that trigger this thermoreceptor. “Concepts are clusters in thingspace” [LW · GW], as the saying goes, and thus things that go along with coldness often enough kinda get roped in as a connation or aspect of the coldness concept itself. And then all those aspects of coldness can in turn get analogized into other domains, and now here we are talking about cold personalities and cold starts and cold cases and cold symptoms and the Cold War and on and on.

By the same token, I’m happy to defend a claim along the lines of “intrinsic unpredictability is the seed / core at the center of concepts like animation, vitality, agency, etc.”, but I acknowledge that intrinsic unpredictability in and of itself is not the entirety of those terms and their various connotations and associations.

(This is a helpful discussion for me, thanks.)