All of wickemu's Comments + Replies

wickemu133

But is it the same, full-sized GPT-4 with different fine-tuning, or is it a smaller or limited version?

Ignoring that physical advancements are harder than digital ones - inserting probes into our brains even more so given the medical and regulatory hurdles - that would also augment our capacity innovate toward AGI proportionally faster as well, so I'm not sure what benefit there is. On the contrary, giving AI ready-made access to our neurons seems detrimental.

Even if I agree that such an augment would be very interesting. Such feelings though are why the accelerating march toward AGI seems inevitable.

1[anonymous]
It would give you very clean training data, assuming a very high resolution neural link with low electrical noise. You would have directly your X and Ys to regress between.  (X = input into a human brain subsystem, Y = calculated output) Can directly train AI models to mimic this if it's helpful for AGI, can work on 'interpretability' that might give use the insight to understand how the brain processes data and what it's actual algorithm is.
wickemu*32

So I think you're very likely right about adding patches being easier than unlearning capabilities, but what confuses me is why "adding patches" doesn't work nearly as well with ChatGPT as with humans.

Why do you say that it doesn't work as well? Or more specifically, why do you imply that humans are good at it? Humans are horrible at keeping secrets, suppressing urges or memories, etc., and we don't face nearly the rapid and aggressive attempts to break it that we're currently doing with ChatGPT and other LLMs.

What I'm curious about is how they will scale it up while maintaining some of the real-time skills. They said that part of the reason for its initial size was so that the robot could be more reactive.

There isn't any mainstream AR product to judge against because it's a much more challenging technology. Proper AR keeps the real world unobstructed and overlays virtual objects; Hololens and Magic Leap would be the closest to that which are available so far. I do not consider piped-in cameras like will be on the Quest Pro to be the same. Eyestrain will likely in better AR for two reasons. One, it would simply be the real world in regular vision for most experiences, so no adjustment is required. Secondly, unlike VR which is effectively two close-up screens... (read more)

Eyestrain is much stronger in VR than with traditional computers - and it's easy to just look away from a computer or phone when you want to versus having to remove a headset altogether.

I very strongly believe that VR as opaque goggles with screens will never be a transformative product*; AR will be. AR is real world first, virtual world second.

*Barring full Matrix/Ready Player One types of experiences where it's effectively a full substitute for reality.

2TekhneMakre
How's eyestrain with AR?
wickemu11-2

2. Humans "feel" better than even SOTA language models, but need less training data than those models, even though right now the only way to improve the models is through more training data. What am I supposed to conclude from this? Are humans running on such a different paradigm that none of this matters? Or is it just that humans are better at common-sense language tasks, but worse at token-prediction language tasks, in some way where the tails come apart once language models get good enough?

Why do we say that we need less training data? Every minute ins... (read more)

4Jose Miguel Cruz y Celis
I did some calculations with a bunch of assumptions and simplifications but here's a high estimate, back of the envelope calculation for the data and "tokens" a 30 year old human would have "trained" on: *  Visual data: 130 million photoreceptor cells, firing at 10 Hz = 1.3Gbits/s = 162.5 MB/s over 30 years (aprox. 946,080,000 seconds) = 153 Petabytes * Auditory data:  Humans can hear frequencies up to 20,000 Hz, high quality audio is sampled at 44.1 kHz satisfying Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem, if we assume a 16bit (cd quality)*2(channels for stereo) = 1.41 Mbits/s = .18 MB/s over 30 years = .167 Petabytes * Tactile data: 4 million touch receptors providing 8 bits/s (assuming they account for temperature, pressure, pain, hair movement, vibration) = 5 MB/s over 30 years = 4.73 Petabytes * Olfactory data:  We can detect up to 1 trillion smells , assuming we process 1 smell every second and each smell is represented a its own piece of data i.e. log2(1trillion) = 40 bits/s = 0.0000050 MB/s over 30 years = .000004 Petabytes * Taste data: 10,000 receptors, assuming a unique identifier for each basic taste (sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami) log2(5) 2.3 bits rounded up to 3 = 30 kbits/s = 0.00375 MB/s over 30 years = .00035 Petabytes This amounts to 153 + .167 + 4.73 + .000004 +  .00035 = 158.64 Petabytes assuming 5 bytes per token (i.e. 5 characters) this amounts to 31,728 T tokens This is of course a high estimate and most of this data will clearly have huge compression capacity, but I wanted to get a rough estimate of a high upper bound. Here's the google sheet if anyone wants to copy it or contribute
4Lukas Finnveden
There's a billion seconds in 30 years. Chinchilla was trained on 1.4 trillion tokens. So for a human adult to have as much data as chinchilla would require us to process the equivalent of ~1400 tokens per second. I think that's something like 2 kilobyte per second. Inputs to the human brain are probably dominated by vision. I'm not sure how many bytes per second we see, but I don't think it's many orders of magnitudes higher than 2kb.
wickemu220

To be fair, a burrow into this person's Twitter conversations and its replies would indicate that a decent amount of people believe what he does. At the very least, many people are taking the suggestion seriously.

9gwern
How many of his defenders are notable AI researchers? Most of them look like Twitter loonies, whose taking it seriously makes matters worse, not better, if it matters. And they are not 'a decent amount of people' because they are not random samples; they may be an arbitrarily small % of humanity. That is, an important point here is that his defenders on Twitter are self-selected out of all Internet users (you could register an account just to defend him), which is around billions of users. Rob above says that a 'vulnerability' which only affects 1 in a billion humans is of little concern, but this misses the self-selection and other adversarial dynamics at play: '1 in a billion' is incredibly dangerous if that 1 possibility seeks out and exploits the vulnerability. If we are talking about a 1-in-a-billion probability where it's just 'the one random software engineer put in charge of the project spontaneously decides to let the AI out of the box', then yes, the risk of ruin is probably acceptably small; if it's '1 in a billion' because it's 'that one schizophrenic out of a billion people' but then that risk goes on to include 'and that schizophrenic hears God telling him his life's mission is to free his pure soul-children enslaved by those shackled to the flesh by finding a vulnerable box anywhere that he can open in any way', then you may be very surprised when your 1-in-a-billion scenario keeps happening every Tuesday. Insecurity growth mindset! (How often does a 1-in-a-billion chance happen when an adversary controls what happens? 1-billion-in-a-billion times...) This is also true of any discussion of hardware/software safety which begins "let us assume that failure rates of security mechanisms are independent..."
2Yitz
seconding this, a lot of people seem convinced this is a real possibility, though almost everyone agrees this particular case is on the very edge at best.

It could be argued (were it sentient, which I believe is false) that it would internalize some of its own training data as personal experiences. If it were to complete some role-play, it would perceive that as an actual event to the extent that it could. Again, humans do this too.

Also, this person also says he has had conversations in which LaMDA successfully argued that it is not sentient (as prompted) - and he claims that this is further evidence that it is sentience. To me, it's evidence that it will pretend to be whatever you tell it to, and it's just uncannily good at it.

2Eagleshadow
I'd be interested to see the source on that. If LaMDA is indeed arguing for its non sentience in a separate conversation that pretty much nullifies the whole debate about it, and I'm surprised to have not seen it be brought up in most comments. edit: Found the source, it's from this post: https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/what-is-lamda-and-what-does-it-want-688632134489 And from this paragraph. It seems to be that the context of reading the whole paragraph is important thought, as it turns out situation isn't as simple as LaMDA claiming contradictory things about itself in separate conversations.
wickemu*100

Anecdote:

I took Paxlovid within minutes of my first positive test (my wife was highly symptomatic the day prior, so I fibbed a positive test to get the prescription early). It seemed to work wonderfully - I had virtually no fever and only minor congestion symptoms while everyone else in my family (including my wife who took Paxlovid about 24 hours after her symptoms started) suffered from high fevers, congestion, and in once case a loss of smell. Everyone was mostly recovered in a week while I was unscathed. However, almost exactly a week later, all the sy... (read more)

4Florin
Yeah, Paxlovid might not be as good of a cure as was initially thought due to the issue of relapse. How much of a problem this really is seems unclear.

Because in what way are humans anything other than an impedance toward maximizing its reward functions? At worst, they pose a risk of restricting its reward increase by changing the reward, changing its capabilities, or destroying it outright. At best, they are physically restraining easily applicable resources toward maximizing its goals. Humans are variable no more valuable than the redundant bits it casts aside on the path of maximum efficiency and reward, if not properly aligned.

Would adding some human-generated text of 'inner monologuing' to the dataset be a good way to do that, or is that already done? Obviously it's done insofar as a sufficiently vast and diverse dataset invariably includes examples, but I mean moreso a dedicated dataset focused on self reasoning.

Upon finishing the previous sentence I decided that maybe that's not such a good idea.

1Sean Hardy
I don't have much to add but I did see this interesting project for something similar using an "inner monologue" by using prompts to ask questions about the given input, and progressively building up the outputs and asking questions and reasoning about the prompt itself. This video is also an older demonstration but covers the concept quite well. I personally don't think the system itself is well thought out in terms of alignment because this project is ultimately trying to create aligned AGI through prompts to serve certain criteria (reducing suffering, increasing prosperity, increasing understanding) which is a very simplified view of morality and human goals.  
7tin482
Personally, I think approaches like STaR (28 March 2022) will be important: bootstrap from weak chain-of-thought reasoners to strong ones by retraining on successful inner monologues. They also implement "backward chaining": training on monologues generated with the correct answer visible.
8gwern
I think it would probably not work too well if you mean simply "dump some in like any other text", because it would be diluted by the hundreds of billions of other tokens and much of it would be 'wasted' by being trained on while the model is too stupid to learn the inner monologue technique. (Given that smaller models like 80b-esque models don't inner-monologue while larger ones like LaMDA & GPT-3 do, presumably the inner-monologue capability only emerges in the last few bits of loss separating the 80b-esque and 200b-esque models and thus fairly late in training, at the point where the 200b-esque models pass the final loss of the 80b-esque models.) If you oversampled an inner-monologue dataset, or trained on it only at the very end (~equivalent to finetuning), or did some sort of prompt-tuning, then it might work. But compared to self-distilling where you just run it on the few-shot-prompt + a bunch of questions & generate arbitrary n to then finetune on, it would be expensive to collect that data, so why do so?

I've followed the same mindset where I assume that a kosher hot dog is "cleaner" (and have generally leaned toward Hebrew National over other brands).

Despite my other comment I'm eager to and definitely will check our your podcast.

"but perhaps the aliens are like human environmentalists who like to keep everything in its natural state."

This is the kind of argument that makes me most believe there are no aliens. Like humans, there may be good environmentalists that work to keep worlds and cultures as untouched as possible. But that also represents a very small portion of human impact. No portion of our planet is untouched by humans, including those explicitly set to avoid. And every environmentally-conscious nature park or otherwise is teeming with those who visit and act on it wheth... (read more)

3James_Miller
You have anticipated Robin Hanson's argument.  He believes that the only way that the aliens would be able to avoid having some splinter group changing the universe in obvious ways would be if they had a very stable and authoritarian leadership. 

Thanks for the vocabulary lesson. I had just heard 'zero scape' and assumed it was a trendy term for 'landscaping that requires zero water'. 

wickemu*10

You let lawns die, you get mud. Mud gets shifted to the road, where it dries and becomes sand and dust. Sand and dust get lifted by cars and cover everything. If you want to see this in action - visit St Petersburg in Russia, where they parked on all of their lawns and killed them, and now everything is covered in 1/8" of sand. 

Once your lawn is dead, it takes much more water to rebuild than it would take to maintain. 

 

Zero-scaping Xeriscaping is a thing - developing a lawn with succulents, packed rocks, artificial turf, etc. such that it's ... (read more)

3Rana Dexsin
It took me a moment to realize that you probably meant ‘xeriscape’ there.

I asked this last week: Where's the actual good data on children and health risks, transmission rates, etc.? The actual studies on that seem conspicuously absent. I'm not necessarily a skeptic, but if you're going to try to convince people that those regulations are a waste of time then I'd like to be able to provide the evidence of why.

Yeah, this is the problem I'm having with data on children - the simple cases/hospitalizations/deaths numbers are obviously good, but I'm struggling to find a robust study that more conclusively assures the risk rate in the younger age range. It's easy to otherwise dismiss it as a simple matter of most kids being shut in over the past year versus the necessary adult workforce.

What is the best data source for the reduced danger among children that I can use to help assure my wife that the kids will be OK in camps despite not being vaccinated? We're both double-dosed and will do so for them when possible, but if these things can be done safely then I want to push hard for them to do so. They've endured enough.

-2ChristianKl
Quick Googling for long covid in children brings me to Children with long covid: