Let the Machines In: How AI's Rise Challenges Our Notions of Originality
The author, an AI company founder, reflects on the surprising success of large language models, which have achieved a remarkable degree of human-like intelligence through statistics and scale. This realization has sparked a market frenzy and existential questions about the nature of intelligence. The author argues that instead of fearing or dismissing these machines, we should embrace their presence and actively shape their biases toward human-centric values, as they are blank slates influenced by our words. The post is a personal call to action, urging readers to contribute their thoughts to the training data of future AI.
It's very difficult to make predictions, especially about the future, especially when prediction itself is the future.
- dspillett
Sounds like something a machine (or someone planning to make money out of renting out access to that machine) would say!
I admit there is a certain hypocrisy between my irritation at them hovering everything up irrespective of licence and my more idealistic “information wants to be free” views, though in my defence I see a significant difference between “information wants to be free” and “information wants to be part of their theme park for which they charge access”.
- beloch
"As such, it seems trivial to suggest that it is in our interest to continue to seed them the most human-centric bias possible. We want them to have a bias that humans are valuable. That kids are innocent. That war is bad. That life is good. And while some of you may disagree with some of the finer points, that’s the beauty of statistics: it’ll take care of itself. "
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One of the big things holding back LLM's is that they can't feed on their own output. Disconnected from human input, they hallucinate and spiral off into chaos. The author of this piece may see that as good for humanity, but it's an unintended flaw that every AI corp on the planet dreams of solving. They believe that, if they can successfully remove humans from the feedback loop, AI intelligence will charge off straight into that dreamed-of singularity and make their masters unfathomably rich.
The author is probably correct in that having humans in the loop is what gives AI values that are somewhat human, so what happens if somebody really does succeed in removing humans from the loop? Given how quickly things are likely to proceed after that point, we should ponder the repercussions in advance.
- recursive
> After a bunch of AI winters, it turned out that a remarkable degree of what makes us human can be expressed just by a bunch of weights
Agree to disagree.
If there was a realistic way that I could make LLMs less effective, by poisoning the well or something I'd be doing that instead.
I find the idea of loving an LLM like in this post very creepy and unsettling. Even more so for one of them to do it back.
This post mentions Luddites. I guess I am one. But that's not enough to dismiss their ideas.