Sean McCarthy

• Sean McCarthy 14 Sep 2021 19:58 UTC

  3 points

  on: GPT-Aug­mented Blogging

  I thought each article revealed itself to be obvious garbage within the first paragraph or two. What do you think?

  There was some nonsensical gibberish, like this:

  In particular, I see the primary relationship as being more intense, but usually shorter in duration, rather than a question of “how much sex can we have?”

  But mainly what I mean is that within a couple sentences you can tell it’s in the “internet garbage” genre. E.g.

  Some writers are better at discovery writing than others. Some are better at plotting. Many writers use a combination of both techniques. There are even writers who are good at both, but they are rare.

• Sean McCarthy 6 Sep 2021 21:37 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: p.b.’s comment on: Rough notes on the Sam Alt­man Q&A: GPT and AGI

  You’ve improved the summary, thank you.

  The main issue is still missing context. For example, if someone asks “is x possible” and he answers that it is, summarizing that was “x is possible” is misleading. Simply because there is a difference between calling out a thing unprompted, and answering a question about it. Former is what I meant by “Sam claims”.

  His answer about Turing test was that they were planning to not do it, though if they tried, they thought they could build that with a lot of effort. You summarized it as gpt5 might be able to pass it. I don’t know what else to say about that, they seem pretty different to me.

  Other people have mentioned some wrong things.

• Sean McCarthy 6 Sep 2021 16:29 UTC

  23 points

  on: Rough notes on the Sam Alt­man Q&A: GPT and AGI

  Reading through these notes I was alarmed by how much they misrepresented what Sam Altman said. I feel bad for the guy that he came on and so thoughtfully answered a ton of questions and then it gets posted online as “Sam Altman claims _____!”

  An example:

  GPT-5 might be able to pass the Turing test. But probably not worth the effort.

  A question was asked about how far out he thought we were from being able to pass the Turing Test. Sam thought that this was technically feasible in the near term but would take a lot of effort that was better spent elsewhere, so they were quite unlikely to work on it. So “GPT-5 might be able to pass the Turing test.” is technically true because “might” makes the whole sentence almost meaningless, but to the extent that it does have meaning, that meaning is giving you directionally false information.

  I didn’t take notes, and I don’t want to try to correct the record from memory and plausibly make things worse. But just, take these all with a huge grain of salt. There’s a lot where these notes say “X” but what I remember him saying was along the lines of “that’s a good question, it’s tricky, I’m currently leaning towards X over Y”. And some things that are flat wrong.

• Sean McCarthy 10 Jul 2020 20:30 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: tinyanon’s comment on: Kelly Bet on Everything

  This might not be for you, but I found http://​​mindingourway.com/​​ to be very helpful in terms of finding motivation.

  The other main thing I’d target would be to spend time around people who make you feel excited about stuff. Don’t try to do it alone.