LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I think you're mostly right about the world, but I'm going to continue to articulate disagreements based on my sense of dissatisfaction. You should probably mostly read me as speaking from a should-world rather than being very confused about the is-world.

The bitter lesson is insufficient to explain the lack of structure we're seeing. I gave the example of Whisper. I haven't actually used Whisper, so correct me if I'm wrong -- maybe there is a way to get more nuanced probabilistic information out of it? But the bitter lesson is about methods of achieving capabilities, not about the capabilities themselves. Producing a plain text output rather than a more richly annotated text that describes some of the uncertainty is a design choice.

To give another example, LLMs could learn a conditional model that's annotated with metadata like author, date and time, etc. Google Lambda reportedly had something like author-vectors, so that different "characters" could be easily summoned. I would love to play with that, EG, averaging the author-vectors of specific authors I'm interested in to see what it's like to mix their voices. In theory, LLMs could also learn to predict the metadata. You could use partially-labeled-data approaches such as the EM algorithm to train LLMs to predict the metadata labels while also training them to use those labels in text generation. This would give a rich set of useful capabilities. This would be scientifically useful, too: predictions of date, author, and other metadata would be interesting for historians.

In this way, we could actually get closer to a "truth machine". There's a world of difference between the kinds of inferences you can make from ChatGPT's opinion about a text vs inferences you could make by treating these as legit latent variables and seeing what latent-variable-inference algorithms think. 

To give a third example, there's Drexler's Quasilinguistic Neural Representations.

You say "it's a matter of demand". So why does it feel so much like big tech is eager to push the chatbot model on everyone? Everyone is scared to fall behind in the AI race, ever since ChatGPT made it feel plausible that AI would drive significant market share. But did big tech make the correct guess about what there was demand for? Or did everyone over-update on the specific form of ChatGPT, and now there's just not that much else out there to reveal what the demand really is? Little sparkle-emoji buttons decorate everything; press to talk to the modern equivalent of Clippy.

Not cynical enough! They make billions of dollars and for most of the time they've done this there have been little-to-no people with serious political power or prestige in the world who strongly and openly hold the position that it's doomed, so I think it's been pretty easy for people to come up with rationalizations that lets them go ahead and build some of the most incredible and powerful things humanity has ever built without facing much social pressure or incentive to do change course.

You might not think it, but basically none of the leadership of these organizations has even written a public justification for why they're willing to risk the lives of everyone on earth while getting rich, never mind argued with critics. So I don't take them very seriously as ethical/responsible people nor do I think their words about plans to avoid extinction/disempowerment should primarily be modeled as tracking reality rather than as useful rationalizations.

(Sorry dude. But it's good to be on Earth with you before some fools end it.)

If the default path is AI's taking over control from humans, then what is the current plan in leading AI labs? Surely all the work they put in AI safety is done to prevent exactly such scenarios. I would find it quite hard to believe that a large group of people would vigorously do something if they believed that their efforts will go to vain.

Just as one example, OpenAI was against SB 1047, whereas Musk was for it. I'm not optimistic about regulation being enough to save us, but presumably they would be helpful, and some AI companies like OpenAI were against even the limited regulations of SB 1047. Plus SB 1047 also included stuff like whistleblower protections, and that's the kind of thing that could help policymakers make better decisions in the future.

I'm sympathetic to Musk being genuinely worried about AI safety. My problem is that one of his first actions after learning about AI safety was to found OpenAI, and that hasn't worked out very well. Not just due to Altman; even the "Open" part was a highly questionable goal. Hopefully Musk's future actions in this area would have positive EV, but still.

What’s your opinion on the possible progress of systems like AlphaProof, o1, or Claude with computer use?

I don't expect that to be particularly relevant. The data wall is still there; scaling just compute has considerably worse returns than the curves we've been on for the past few years, and we're not expecting synthetic data to be anywhere near sufficient to bring us close to the old curves.

I don't really know, sorry. My memory is that 2023 already pretty bad for incumbent parties (e.g. the right-wing ruling party in Poland lost power), but I'm not sure.

How would removing Sam Altman significantly reduce extinction risk? Conditional on AI alignment being hard and Doom likely the exact identity of the Shoggoth Summoner seems immaterial. 

Yes, it does imply that the default path is permanent-disempowerment or extinction.