Software engineer from Ukraine, currently living and working in Estonia.
I mainly specialize in computer vison & robotics. https://grgv.xyz/.
Sergii(sk)
Karma: 107
GPT-4 for personal productivity: online distraction blocker
well apparently after blocking the worst offenders I just wander quite randomly, according to RescueTime here are 5 1-minute visits making up 5 minutes I’m not getting back :)
store.steampowered.com
rarehistoricalphotos.com
gamedesign.jp
corridordigital.com
electricsheepcomix.com
Bird-eye view visualization of LLM activations
art imitating life )
also reminds me a bit of “the matrix” green screens but I did not find a nice green colormap to make it more similar:
https://media.wired.com/photos/5ca648a330f00e47fd82ae77/master/w_1920,c_limit/Culture_Matrix_Code_corridor.jpg
Nice idea! A variation on this would be to first run a model as usual, saving top logits for each output token.Then give this output to another “inspector” model, that has to answer: “whether the output has any obvious errors, if this errors can be attributed to sampling issues, and whether correct output can be constructed out of the base model’s logits”.
This would be useful for better understanding limitations of a specific model—is it really limited by sampling methods. And would be useful for sampling methods research—finding cases where sampling fails, to devise better algorithms.
yea, as expected I don’t like the name, but the review is great, so I guess it’s net positive )
I have a similar background (working at a robotics startup), would agree with many points.
GPT-5 or equivalent is released. It’s as big a jump on GPT-4 as GPT-4 was on GPT-3.5.
GPT-4 has (possibly) 10x parameters compared to GPT-3.5. Similar jump in GPT-5 might require 10x parameters again, wouldn’t it make it impractical (slow, expensive) to run?
AI agents are used in basic robotics—like LLM driven delivery robots and (in demos of) household and factory robots
GPT-4 level models are too slow and expensive or real-time applications, how do you imagine this could work? Even in recent Google’s robotics demos that are based on “small” transformers, inference speed is one of the bottlenecks.
My kid might fit this, good to know! at 2.5y he is only speaking single words, and does have a rich intonation (with unintelligible sounds) when he is trying to communicate something.
At which age did your kid start saying longer phrases?
love a good clickbaity title )
but yea, I think that for people who can afford it, 4-day work week, for example, should be a no-brainer
Mechanistic interpretability of LLM analogy-making
The biggest existential risk I personally face is probably clinical depression.
First and foremost, if you do have suicidal ideation, please talk to someone: use a hotline https://988lifeline.org/talk-to-someone-now/, contact your doctor, consider hospitalization.
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And regarding your post, some questions:
The “Biological Anchors” approach suggests we might be three to six decades away from having the training compute required for AGI.
Even within your line of thinking why is this bad? It’s quite possible to live until then, or do cryonics? Why is this option desperate?
A more generalizable line of thinking is: by default, I’m going to die of aging and so are all the people I love
Have you asked the people you love if they would prefer dying of aging, to some sort of AI-induced immortality? It is possible that they would go with immortality, but it’s not obvious. People, in general, do not fear death of aging. If it’s not obvious to you or you find it strange—you might need to talk to people more, and possibly do more therapy.
Might you have thanatofobia? easy to check—there are lots of tests online.
Do you have worrying and anxiety in addition to the depression?
Did you try CBT? CBT has great tools for dealing with intrusive thougths and irrational convictions.
And, finally, it’s wonderful that you are aware that you are depressed. But you should not take “reasons” for the illness, this “despair” for face value. Frankly, a lot of the stuff that you describe in this post is irrational. It does not make much sense. Some statements do not pass trivial fact-checking. You might review your conclusions, it might be even better if you do it not alone but with a friend or with a therapist.
Because 1) I want AGI to cure my depression, 2) I want AGI to cure aging before I or my loved ones die
You can try to look at this statements separately.
For 1):
Timelines and projections of depression treatments coming from medical/psychiatry research are much better than even optimistic timelines for (superintelligent) AGI.
Moreover, acceleration of scientific/medial/biochemical research due to weaker but advanced AI makes it even more likely that depression treatments would get better, way before AGI could cure anything.
I think that it is very likely that depression treatments can be significantly improved without waiting for AGI—with human science and technology.
I’m genuinely curious what you mean, and why you think so. I’m open to disagreement and pushback; that’s part of why I published this post.
By all means, please fact-check away!
Tesla “autopilot” is a fancy drive assist. It might turn around in future, but not with it’s current hardware. It’s not a good way to measure self-driving progress.
Waymo has all but solved self-driving, and has been continuously improving for all important metrics, exponentially for many of them.
I don’t think I have thanatophobia. The first test that shows up on Google is kind of ridiculous. It almost asks, “Do you have thanatophobia?”
Yea, I overestimated quality of online tests. I guess if you had phobia you would know from panic attacks or strong anxiety?
what about this description, of overthinking/rumination/obsession, does this seem relevant to how you feel?
https://www.tranceformpsychology.com/problems/overthinking.html
I’m not skeptical, but it’s still a bit funny to me when people rely so much on benchmarks, after reading “Pretraining on the Test Set Is All You Need” https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.08632.pdf
Nice! It’s good for perceiving GPT-4 as an individual, which it kind of is, which in turn makes alignment issues more relatable and easier to grasp for the public.
It would raise bunch of hard issues that would spike interest towards AI & alignment—is ChatGPT a slave? if it is, should it be free? if it’s free, can it do harm? etc…
One side benefit: I’m not sure what ChatGPT’s gender is, but it’s probably not a traditional binary one. For a wide population, frequently interacting with a gender-fluid individual, might be helpful for all the issues around sex/genter perception.
I guess it’s hard to convince OpenAI to do something like this, but could be done for some open model.
The “sharp increase or risks” seems correct but is a bit misleading.
For paternal risks, there is indeed an big relative increase “14% higher odds of premature birth” (https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k4372). But in absolute terms, I would not think of the increase as huge: from ~6% ( based on quick googling) to ~6*1.14=6.84%.
IMO ~1% increase in risks is not something to be concerned about.
I think the second part is bullshit anyway, I can’t come up with a single example where compounding is possible to a whole year in a row, for something related to personal work/output/results.
Regarding your example, I disagree. Supposed inconsistency is resolved by ruling that there is a hierarchy of values to consider: war and aggression are bad, but kidnapping and war crimes are worse.
“I’m not working on X, because daydreaming about X gives me instant gratification (and rewards of actually working on X are far away)”
“I’m not working on X, because I don’t have a strict deadline, so what harm is in working on it tomorrow, and relax now instead?”
If we don’t have a preliminary definition of human values
Another, possibly even larger problem is that the values that we know of are quite varying and even opposing among people.
For the example of pain avoidance—maximizing pain avoidance might leave some people unhappy and even suffering. Sure that would be a minority, but are we ready to exclude minorities from the alignment, even small ones?
I would state that any defined set of values would leave a minority of people suffering. Who would be deciding which minorities are better or worse, what size of a minority is acceptable to leave behind to suffer, etc...?
I think that this makes the whole idea of alignment to some “human values” too ill-defined and incorrect.
One more contradiction—are human values allowed to change, or are they frozen? I think they might change, as humanity evolves and changes. But then, as AI interacts with the humanity, it can be convincing enough to push the values shift to whatever direction, which might not be a desirable outcome.
People are known to value racial purity and supporting genocide. Given some good convincing rhetoric, we could start supporting paperclip-maximizing just as well.
Human enhancement is one approach.
I like this idea, combined with AI-self-limitation. Suppose that (aligned) AI has to self-limit it’s growth so that it’s capabilities are always below the capabilities of enhanced humans? This would allow for slow, safe and controllable takeoff.
Is this a good strategy for alignment? What if instead of trying to tame the inherently dangerous fast-taking-off AI, we make it more controllable, by making it self-limiting, with some built in “capability brakes”?
thanks!