Software engineer and small time DS/ML practitioner.
Templarrr
Karma: 217
A general purpose AI from OpenAI has solved the unit distance problem
Nitpicking, but no, it didn’t. What it did is disprove a Erdos’s conjecture about the lower limit result of a unit distance problem, demonstrating that it should be possible to do better than square grid.
To actually “solve” the unit distance problem you need to find an answer to the question “Given N points in a plane, what is the maximum number of pairs...”. Right now we have upper limit of N^1.33 and moved our lower limit from stated by initial conjecture N^(1+C/loglogN) to N^1.014 which is asymptotically better (for any value of C we can find N big enough where 1.014 > C/loglogN).
For it to be a solution, you need not only to prove “this is better” but also “there cannot be results better than this” and OpenAI did only first part.
BDSM … second independent dimension
The problem is that it’s not a single dimension by itself, though? Famously BDSM is a portmanteau for BD/DS/SM and for each of those your opinion may vary widely. E.g. I’m very into both sides of restriction play of BD, neutral to pain play of SM (i.e. I can participate without problem if my partner into it, but will not actively seek myself) and actively disinterested in psychology play of DS.
you would think we would be able to keep people on a ship
Which is ironic, given this is literally what the original meaning of the word “quarantine” was—forty days of staying on the ship before landing in Venice during the Black Death.
On the topic of paying for the date I have a universal magic phrase. “I’m ok to pay for this, but if you’re more comfortable with split that’s fine too”. And then actually listen to the answer. Of course it’s not bulletproof, some people will get offended even by the fact you’ve asked, but those are people I specifically don’t want to deepen relationship with, so it’s a win win.
You don’t actually get to do that. Bayes Rule does not allow one to not update on evidence. Tons of things that happened between 2009 and today should have changed Legg’s estimates, in various directions, including the Transformer paper, and also including ‘nothing important happened today.’
Not necessary. If we’re doing batched updates (and noone updates on every single minute detail) and if the events happening in real world align with the timeline “50% of AGI by 2028” then you just update 50% → 50% every time. Which is pretty much my interpretation what Shane Legg meant in the first place—“what I see happening in the world is exactly what would’ve happened in the world that has 50% chance of getting AGI by 2028″.
looking closer to linear progress
There is no “linear” progress on the chart, 2 reference lines are “exponential” and “superexponential”. The Y axis is logarithmic.
least by my eyes even when they have relatively good taste they all reliably have terrible taste and even the samples people say are good are not good
We can get a lot here if we remember that a lot of “good writing” is centered around “not repeating itself” in different forms (words/phrases/structures etc) and current models are absolutely terrible in that. IF we can add temporary negative weights to the terms that were already used in answer that would decrease to zero with time, we can incentivise the LLMs to utilize wider variety of language.
engineer, honestly
First I thought this was hilarious, as in “we really just want an engineer FFS”, but then I checked.
Engineer, honesTY. As in “engineer to research and improve models honesty”.
Fun safety hiccup—the image generator is very persistent in not allowing to draw a hand that touches the blade of the sword, regardless how safe the context is. The hand can hover over it, be close to, touch the guard, but not the blade. I barely made it able to touch a blade by invoking the Mordhau and medieval fencing manuals, and even then it was just one hand on the blade, while it should’ve been both.
No trouble making it work with a wooden toy sword though, but that defeated the entire point of the picture.
Would this even be legal in Germany? No wonder Europe is falling behind.
Case study “how to make your post much worse in a single sentence”.
There’s literally nothing they describe that requires to do active face recognition (the only part that could be a problem in Europe).
Most of the office spaces use personalized electronic key cards.
Office systems KNOW who just entered.
Solving non-existing problem by harder-then-necessary and illegal-in-some-places way can be fun, but isn’t as much of a dunk on others as author believes it to be. Without the last part it was fun experiment of a fellow tech person, with it …
Which means, in turn, that you must (for that to make any sense) be using the AI in its non-aligned state to align itself and solve all those other problems
Strongly disagree on this.
The text doesn’t imply this at all. “While doing it” doesn’t mean you will be using AI, it just means that during the development your team uncovers a lot of corner cases and knowledge and skills needed that weren’t available to them before they started, which is how most of the engineering projects are done.
You may have general plan, but it is expected that you will come up with the details as your knowledge of the area extends.
Pointless busywork is bad.
100%. The problem usually is hidden in people mixing “I don’t (understand/agree with) the point of something” with “something is pointless”.
what the median essay, story, or response to the assignment will look like so they can avoid and transcend it all
Obligatory joke about how terrible our education is, that half of the scores are below median!
they’re 99% sure are AI-generated, but the current rules mean they can’t penalise them.
The issue is proving it.
That is very much not the issue. The issue is that academy spent last few hundred years to make sure papers are written in the most inhuman way possible. No human being ever talks like whitepapers are written. The “we can’t distinguish if this was written by a machine or human that is really good at pretending being one” can’t be a problem if it was heavily encouraged for centuries. Also fun reverse-Turing test situation.
Two things to note.
First—I feel like putting every occupation in the same pile and deciding are you for or against licensing isn’t helpful? I personally don’t need licensed lawnmower, but I would very much prefer licensed doctor. The cost of mistake in two occupations differs a lot and can be used for a threshold which jobs should require a license.
Second—there should be a difference between doing a thing to yourself (argument can be made even that here we shouldn’t have any limits), doing things for free to your friends/relatives with their full knowledge of your skill level and experience (most of the non life-threatening things can probably be allowed here) and selling your craft for money.
llms don’t work on unseen data
Unfortunately I hear this quite often, sometimes even from people who should know better.
A lof of them confuses this with the actual thing that exist: “supervised ML models (which LLM is just a particular type of) tend to work much worse on the out-of-training distribution data”. If you train your model to determine the volume of apples and oranges and melons and other round-y shapes—it will work quite well on any round-y shape, including all kind of unseen ones. But it will suck at predicting the volume of a box.
You don’t need model to see every single game of chess, you just need the new situations to be within the distribution built from massive training data, and they most often are.
Real out-of-distribution example in this case would’ve been to only train it on chess and then ask what is the next best move in checkers (relatively easy OOD—same board, same type of game) or minecraft.
the *real* problem is the huge number of prompts clearly designed to create CSAM images
So, people with harmful and deviant from the social norm taste instead of causing problems in the real world try to isolate themselves in the digital fantasies and that is a problem...exactly how?
I mean, obviously, it’s coping mechanism, not trying to fix the problem, but also our society isn’t known to be very understanding to people coming out with this kind of deviations when they want to fix it.
India getting remarkably better in at least one way, as the percentage of the bottom 20% who own a vehicle went from 6% to 40% in only ten years.
Is it better though? This stats show only “who owns a vehicle” not “who is happy about the fact”. It doesn’t show how many people were forced to take mortgage because owning a vehicle was an only way to live. In ideal world nobody should have a need for a personal vehicle to survive, leaving it only as a luxury, not a lifeline.
The inclusion of ‘natural disaster’ shows that this simply is not a thing people are thinking about at all.
Chicxulub and Popigai impactors were both pretty natural. Actually within the listed 5 things “natural disasters” is the only category that had actual extinction events in the past. So I’m a bit confused with this comment.
They seem to be doing quite well on that front. Regardless if you use Gini coefficient or income ratios, France has around ~33% better values than the USA.