Introduction

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: AI #52: Oops, published by Zvi on February 23, 2024 on LessWrong.
We were treated to technical marvels this week.
At Google, they announced Gemini Pro 1.5, with a million token context window within which it has excellent recall, using mixture of experts to get Gemini Advanced level performance (e.g. GPT-4 level) out of Gemini Pro levels of compute. This is a big deal, and I think people are sleeping on it. Also they released new small open weights models that look to be state of the art.
At OpenAI, they announced Sora, a new text-to-video model that is a large leap from the previous state of the art. I continue to be a skeptic on the mundane utility of video models relative to other AI use cases, and think they still have a long way to go, but this was both technically impressive and super cool.
Also, in both places, mistakes were made.
At OpenAI, ChatGPT briefly lost its damn mind. For a day, faced with record traffic, the model would degenerate into nonsense. It was annoying, and a warning about putting our trust in such systems and the things that can go wrong, but in this particular context it was weird and beautiful and also hilarious. This has now been fixed.
At Google, people noticed that Gemini Has a Problem. In particular, its image generator was making some highly systematic errors and flagrantly disregarding user requests, also lying about it to users, and once it got people's attention things kept looking worse and worse. Google has, to their credit, responded by disabling entirely the ability of their image model to output people until they can find a fix.
I hope both serve as important warnings, and allow us to fix problems. Much better to face such issues now, when the stakes are low.
Table of Contents
Covered separately: Gemini Has a Problem, Sora What, and Gemini 1.5 Pro.
Introduction. We've got some good news, and some bad news.
Table of Contents.
Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. Probable probabilities?
Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility. Air Canada finds out.
Call me Gemma Now. Google offers new state of the art tiny open weight models.
Google Offerings Keep Coming and Changing Names. What a deal.
GPT-4 Goes Crazy. But it's feeling much better now.
GPT-4 Real This Time. Offer feedback on GPTs, see their profiles.
Fun With Image Generation. Image generation for journal articles.
Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon. Several approaches to impersonation risks.
Selling Your Chatbot Data. I don't really know what you were expecting.
Selling Your Training Data. I still don't really know what you were expecting.
They Took Our Jobs. There is a third option.
Get Involved. Apart Research is hiring.
Introducing. Groq, Lindy, Podcaster Copilot, potentially Magic and Altera.
In Other AI News. Altman looks to move his chip plans forward.
Quiet Speculations. Arguing over slow versus fast takeoff during takeoff.
The Quest for Sane Regulations. There will be many bills along the way.
The Week in Audio. I'm back on the Cognitive Revolution.
The Original Butlerian Jihad. What was Dune a cautionary tale against again?
Rhetorical Innovation. Another open letter, another trillion dollars. Ho hum.
Public Service Announcement. Fentanyl, both literally and as metaphor.
People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone. There is a pattern to who.
Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone. Sure, why not.
The Lighter Side. There is not enough information to solve the problem.
Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
Steven Johnson strongly endorses NotebookLM, offers YouTube tutorial. This is definitely one of those 'I need to try using this more and it's weird I don't find excuses' situations.
Automatically email everyone to tell them to remove your email address from their database.
Patrick McKenzie: Interestingly, one of the first denial of service vi...