The Nonlinear Library LW - AI #45: To Be Determined by Zvi
Jan 5, 2024
48:20
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 #45: To Be Determined, published by Zvi on January 5, 2024 on LessWrong.
The first half of the week was filled with continued talk about the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI, which I covered in its own post. Then that talk seemed to mostly die down,, and things were relatively quiet. We got a bunch of predictions for 2024, and I experimented with prediction markets for many of them.
Note that if you want to help contribute in a fun, free and low-key, participating in my prediction markets on Manifold is a way to do that. Each new participant in each market, even if small, adds intelligence, adds liquidity and provides me a tiny bonus. Also, of course, it is great to help get the word out to those who would be interested. Paid subscriptions and contributions to Balsa are of course also welcome.
I will hopefully be doing both a review of my 2023 predictions (mostly not about AI) once grading is complete, and also a post of 2024 predictions some time in January. I am taking suggestions for things to make additional predictions on in the comments.
Table of Contents
Copyright Confrontation #1 covered the New York Times lawsuit.
AI Impacts did an updated survey for 2023. Link goes to the survey. I plan to do a post summarizing the key results, once I have fully processed them, so I can refer back to it in the future.
Introduction.
Table of Contents.
Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. Google providing less every year?
Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility. Left-libertarian or bust.
GPT-4 Real This Time. It's not getting stupider, the world is changing.
Fun With Image Generation. The fun is all with MidJourney 6.0 these days.
Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon. Confirm you are buying a real book.
They Took Our Jobs. Plans to compensate losers are not realistic.
Get Involved. Support Dwarkesh Patel, apply for Emergent Ventures.
Introducing. DPO methods? 'On benchmarks' is the new 'in mice.'
In Other AI News. Square Enix say they're going in on generative AI.
Doom? As many estimates of p(doom) went up in 2023 as went down. Why?
Quiet Speculations. Some other predictions.
The Week in Audio. Eric Jang on AI girlfriend empowerment.
Rhetorical Innovation. Machines and people, very different of course.
Politico Problems. Some sort of ongoing slanderous crusade.
Cup of Coffee. Just like advanced AI, it proves that you don't love me.
Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult. What's The Plan?
People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone. Daniel Dennett, Cory Booker.
The Lighter Side. Oh, we are doing this.
Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
Remember that one line from that book about the guy with the thing.
Dan Luu tries to get answers, comparing ChatGPT, Google and other options. Columns are queries, rows are sources.
Marginalia appears to be a tiny DIY search engine focusing on non-commercial content that I'd never hear of before, that specializes in finding small, old and obscure websites about particular topics. Cool thing to have in one's toolbelt, I will be trying it out over time. Not every cool new toy needs to be AI.
While ChatGPT did hallucinate, Dan notes that at this point the major search engines also effectively hallucinate all the time due to recency bias, SEO spam and scam websites. He also notes how much ads now look like real search results on Google and Bing. I have mostly learned to avoid this, but not with 100% accuracy, and a lot of people doubtless fall for it.
Find out how many prime numbers under one billion have digits that sum to nine, via having code check one by one. I mean, sure, why not? There is an easier way if you already know what it is, but should the right algorithm know to look for it?
Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility
All LLMs tested continue to cluster in the left-libertarian quadrant.
Eliezer Yudkow...
The first half of the week was filled with continued talk about the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI, which I covered in its own post. Then that talk seemed to mostly die down,, and things were relatively quiet. We got a bunch of predictions for 2024, and I experimented with prediction markets for many of them.
Note that if you want to help contribute in a fun, free and low-key, participating in my prediction markets on Manifold is a way to do that. Each new participant in each market, even if small, adds intelligence, adds liquidity and provides me a tiny bonus. Also, of course, it is great to help get the word out to those who would be interested. Paid subscriptions and contributions to Balsa are of course also welcome.
I will hopefully be doing both a review of my 2023 predictions (mostly not about AI) once grading is complete, and also a post of 2024 predictions some time in January. I am taking suggestions for things to make additional predictions on in the comments.
Table of Contents
Copyright Confrontation #1 covered the New York Times lawsuit.
AI Impacts did an updated survey for 2023. Link goes to the survey. I plan to do a post summarizing the key results, once I have fully processed them, so I can refer back to it in the future.
Introduction.
Table of Contents.
Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. Google providing less every year?
Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility. Left-libertarian or bust.
GPT-4 Real This Time. It's not getting stupider, the world is changing.
Fun With Image Generation. The fun is all with MidJourney 6.0 these days.
Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon. Confirm you are buying a real book.
They Took Our Jobs. Plans to compensate losers are not realistic.
Get Involved. Support Dwarkesh Patel, apply for Emergent Ventures.
Introducing. DPO methods? 'On benchmarks' is the new 'in mice.'
In Other AI News. Square Enix say they're going in on generative AI.
Doom? As many estimates of p(doom) went up in 2023 as went down. Why?
Quiet Speculations. Some other predictions.
The Week in Audio. Eric Jang on AI girlfriend empowerment.
Rhetorical Innovation. Machines and people, very different of course.
Politico Problems. Some sort of ongoing slanderous crusade.
Cup of Coffee. Just like advanced AI, it proves that you don't love me.
Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult. What's The Plan?
People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone. Daniel Dennett, Cory Booker.
The Lighter Side. Oh, we are doing this.
Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
Remember that one line from that book about the guy with the thing.
Dan Luu tries to get answers, comparing ChatGPT, Google and other options. Columns are queries, rows are sources.
Marginalia appears to be a tiny DIY search engine focusing on non-commercial content that I'd never hear of before, that specializes in finding small, old and obscure websites about particular topics. Cool thing to have in one's toolbelt, I will be trying it out over time. Not every cool new toy needs to be AI.
While ChatGPT did hallucinate, Dan notes that at this point the major search engines also effectively hallucinate all the time due to recency bias, SEO spam and scam websites. He also notes how much ads now look like real search results on Google and Bing. I have mostly learned to avoid this, but not with 100% accuracy, and a lot of people doubtless fall for it.
Find out how many prime numbers under one billion have digits that sum to nine, via having code check one by one. I mean, sure, why not? There is an easier way if you already know what it is, but should the right algorithm know to look for it?
Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility
All LLMs tested continue to cluster in the left-libertarian quadrant.
Eliezer Yudkow...