smodad

Say what you want about OpenAI, and trust me I think there's a lot of material there, but you can't say they don't ship. Nobody else is even close.

For example, think of a college freshmen who knows Algebra and begins Calculus. Even though they have all the fundamental "mental tools" available at their disposal to figure out how to prove that an infinite series converges (or not), I would guess that very few students can actually connect the concepts in the right way to see that. They have to be given examples and be shown how to use the knowledge they gained in algebra and how it applies to infinite series. Is their inability to generalize well evidence that they aren't intelligent?

Perhaps what we're really saying, and the real problem for us, is that these systems aren't intelligent enough to be useful to us. Just like we might say that a very smart student, like a von Neumann, would likely be able to figure out how to solve an infinite series without having seen it before. I think it's reasonable to say "we want transformers to generalize better than the average human."

To that end, I think we'll have to imitate the way that a very smart human solves new problems. For example, the students who are capable of solving an infinite series without having seen the concept before, might use a creative approach of trying different things to see if they can discover the pattern. So, my hunch would be that we will need to provide transformers with bolted-on sub-routines like "generate several hypotheses and test them to see which pattern fits the data best" before we can expect them to generalize well.

Tl;dr: Transformers don't generalize well, but I don't think humans generalize well either, so I don't think that fact precludes their ability to be intelligent in the limit. I think we'll have to imitate how humans generalize by giving the transformers additional "mental tools" before they can generalize like very intelligent humans.

I heard Elon say something interesting during the discussion/launch of xAI: "My prediction is that we will go from an extreme silicon shortage today, to probably a voltage-transformer shortage in about year, and then an electricity shortage in about a year, two years."

I'm not sure about the timeline, but it's an intriguing idea that soon the rate limiting resource will be electricity. I wonder how true that is and if we're prepared for that.

This is one of the things I thought of right away when ChatGPT got released last year. "God, there's probably so many PhD candidates right now in NLP feeling despair like all their work was pointless ...as if million of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."

It's hard in the moment to know whether what you're working on has any utility. So just do your best and keep chugging!

I think the solution is releasing it to the general public with batteries included. At least that way, the rogue AI's that might develop due to irresponsible experiments could be mitigated by white hat researchers who have their own AI bot swarm. In other words, "the only way to stop a bad guy with an AI is a good guy with an AI."

It's tangentially related to this, but I've seen posts on social media over the years of how people visualize different kinds of information. For example, some people think of the months of the year in a vertical fashion, others horizontal.

I'm curious if this is something similar where some people find a certain way of thinking of probability easier than others.