Andrew Burns's Shortform
Feb 10, 20242
Andrew Burns
172
1
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The Amelia Bedelia defense.
I acknowledge this. My thinking is a bit scattered and my posts are often just an attempt to articulate publically somewhere intuitions that I have no outlet elsewhere to discuss and refine.
I'm saying first off, there is no moat. Yet I observe people on this and similar forums with the usual refrain: but look, the West is so far ahead in doing X in AI, so we shouldn't use China as a boogie man when discussing AI policy. I claim this is bogus. The West isn't far ahead in X because everything can be fast copied, stolen, brute forced and limits on hardware, etc. appear ineffective. Lots of the arguments in favor... (read more)
Before 30, I was also a moron. But I only know this because I had an ideological epiphany after that and my belief system changed abruptly. Scales-fell-from-my-eyes type situation. When I turned 33, I started keeping a diary because I noticed I have a terrible memory for even fairly recent things, so maybe going forward subtle changes will become more salient.
That said, some things seem more impervious to change. For instance the "shape" of things that give you pleasure. Maybe you liked 3d puzzles as a child and now you like playing in Blender in your free time. Not the same thing, but the same shape.
Good point.
I'd like to be convinced that I'm wrong, but I just watched a Kling AI video of Justin Timberlake drinking soda and it was pretty real looking. This plus Voice delay from OpenAI plus Yi-Large in top 10 on the LMSYS leader board after company has only existed 1 year plus just the general vibe has me really convinced that:
- There is no moat. Chinese labs are now at peer level to Western AI labs. I mean, maybe they don't have big text context lengths yet and maybe they have fewer GPUs, but Zvi, gwern and other's insistance about not needing to worry--they don't have the secret sauce yet--is, to put it politely,
Replying toThe Leopold Model: Analysis and Reactions
I would argue that leaders like Xi would not immediately choose general human flourishing as the goal. Xi has a giant chip on his shoulder. I suspect (not with any real proof, but just from a general intuition) that he feels western powers humiliated imperial China and that permanently disabling them is the first order of business. That means immediately dissolving western governments and placing them under CCP control. Part of human flourishing is the feeling of agency. Having a foreign government use AI to remove their government is probably not conducive to human flourishing. Instead, it will produce utter despair and hopelessness.
Consider what the US did with Native Americans using complete... (read more)
There are lots of language that use a "to-be" copula far less frequently than English. I don't know that it actually affects people's ontologies. It would be evidence in favor of Sapir-Worf if it did.
Nvidia just low-key released its own 340B parameter model. For those of you worried about the releasing of model weights becoming the norm, this will probably aggravate your fears.
Here is the link: https://research.nvidia.com/publication/2024-06_nemotron-4-340b
Oh, and they also released their synthetic data generation pipeline:
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/nemotron-4-synthetic-data-generation-llm-training/
I think I've switched positions on open source models. Before I felt that we must not release them because they can be easily fine-tuned to remove safety measures and represent a tech donation to adversaries. But now I feel the harm posed by these open source models seems pretty small and that because Alibaba is releasing them at an exceptionally rapid pace, western forbearance will not affect their proliferation.
Now, apparently, someone has used Kling to make a commercial for a Mad Max-themed beer. Zvi would call this mundane utility.
What it demonstrates is that the Chinese can fast copy anything we do, improve around the edges, and release a product. Frontier model...boom, fast copied. The amount of compute required for some of these tasks makes me suspect big leaks from frontier labs. Also, because big labs here are reluctant to release any new models ahead of this years elections, Chinese counterparts get a head start with copying and product diffusion. We could see a situation like the one with TikTok. A Chinese firm creates an intel slurping app that it releases... (read more)
A Chinese company released a new SORA competitor--Kling--and it is arguably superior to SORA publically available. Could be exfiltration or could be genuinely home grown. In any case, the moat is all gone.
10 AI dropped a model on Lmsys that is doing fairly well, briefly overtaking Claude Opus before slipping a bit. Just another reminder that, as we wring our hands about dodgy behavior by Open AI, apparently these Chinese firms are getting compute (despite our efforts to restrict this) and releasing powerful and competitive models.
Anyone paying attention to the mystery of the GPT-2 chatbot that has appeared on lmsys? People are saying it operates at levels comparable to or exceeding GPT-4. I'm writing because I think the appearance of mysterious unannounced chatbots for public use without provenance makes me update my p(doom) upward.
Possibilities:
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this is a OpenAI chatbot based on GPT-4, just like it says it is. It has undergone some more tuning and maybe has boosted reasoning because of methods described in one of the more recently published papers
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this is another big American AI company masquarading OpenAI
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this is a big Chinese AI company masquerading as OpenAI
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this is an anonymous person or group who is using some
So the usual refrain from Zvi and others is that the specter of China beating us to the punch with AGI is not real because limits on compute, etc. I think Zvi has tempered his position on this in light of Meta's promise to release the weights of its 400B+ model. Now there is word that SenseTime just released a model that beats GPT-4 Turbo on various metrics. Of course, maybe Meta chooses not to release its big model, and maybe SenseTime is bluffing--I would point out though that Alibaba's Qwen model seems to do pretty okay in the arena...anyway, my point is that I don't think the "what if China" argument can be dismissed as quickly as some people on here seem to be ready to do.
When I was in middle school, our instructor was trying to teach us about the Bill of Rights. She handed out a paper copy and I immediately identified that Article the first (sic) and Article the second (sic) were not among the first ten amendments and that the numbers for the others were wrong. I boldly asserted that this wasn't the Bill of Rights and the teacher apologized and cursed the unreliable Internet. But I was wrong. This WAS the Bill of Rights, but the BILL rather than the ten ratified amendments. Everyone came away wrongly informed from that exchange.
Edit: I wrote before that I identified that they were not in the Constitution, but article the second is, as the 27th amendment, and I knew that, but it wasn't among the first ten.
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I would be willing to bet maybe $100 on the video prediction one. Kling is already in beta. As soon as it is released to the general public, that is satisfied. The only uncertainty is whether Chinese authorities crack down on such services for insufficient censorship of requests.