I think that it was 3 years ago is pretty relevant. The technology keeps moving.
If in 2027, all the strongest examples of AI misbehavior were from 2025 or earlier, I think it would be legitimate to posit that these were problems with early AI systems that have been resolved in more recent versions.
It is also a simple fact that in any exponentially growing technology, it will be a ‘pop culture’: no one remembers X because they were literally not around then. If we look at how fast investment and market caps and paper count have grown, ‘LLMs’ must have a doubling time under a year. In which case, anything 3 years ago is before the vast majority of people were even interested in LLMs! (Even in AI/tech circles I talk with plenty of people who got into it and started paying attention only post-ChatGPT...) You can’t memory-hole something you never knew.
A lot of people don’t talk about Sydney for the same reason they don’t talk about Tay, say.
People still talk about Sydney. Owain Evans mentioned Bing Sidney during his first talk in the recent hintonlectures.com series. I attended in person, and it resonated extremely well with a general audience. I was at Microsoft during the relevant period, which definitely played a strong role in my transition to alignment research, and still informs my thinking today.
I think that it was 3 years ago is pretty relevant. The technology keeps moving.
If in 2027, all the strongest examples of AI misbehavior were from 2025 or earlier, I think it would be legitimate to posit that these were problems with early AI systems that have been resolved in more recent versions.
It is also a simple fact that in any exponentially growing technology, it will be a ‘pop culture’: no one remembers X because they were literally not around then. If we look at how fast investment and market caps and paper count have grown, ‘LLMs’ must have a doubling time under a year. In which case, anything 3 years ago is before the vast majority of people were even interested in LLMs! (Even in AI/tech circles I talk with plenty of people who got into it and started paying attention only post-ChatGPT...) You can’t memory-hole something you never knew.
A lot of people don’t talk about Sydney for the same reason they don’t talk about Tay, say.
People still talk about Sydney. Owain Evans mentioned Bing Sidney during his first talk in the recent hintonlectures.com series. I attended in person, and it resonated extremely well with a general audience. I was at Microsoft during the relevant period, which definitely played a strong role in my transition to alignment research, and still informs my thinking today.