On Llama-3.1-405B pretraining costs:
But once you’ve done that, the training run itself is still, it seems, in the low nine figure range, for 3.8 x 10^25 FLOPS, less than the 10^26 threshold in the executive order or SB 1047
Even a bit less than that, the high eight figure range, under 100 million dollars.
The model card https://github.com/meta-llama/llama-models/blob/main/models/llama3_1/MODEL_CARD.md says that total for all 3 models, 8B, 70B, and 405B is 39.3 million GPU-hours, but for the 405B model alone it is 30.84 million GPU-hours for H100 GPU, that's clearly less than 100 million dollars.
Interestingly, the GPU utilization seems low, slightly over 25%, if one believes this "on a napkin" computation I asked GPT-4o to assist me with: https://chatgpt.com/share/470b8e20-d99f-48b2-be5e-61d7524892df
It estimates that at full utilization, the 3.8x10^25 FLOPS can be extracted from H100 at approximately 10.6 million hours (which is slightly more than a quarter of the total 39.3 million hours for all three models).
The report puts utilization in the main pre-training phase of the 405B at 40% (they use 16384 GPUs). The main low hanging fruit is that they are using BF16 on H100s, so they only use 400 teraFLOP/s where they could get 800 with FP8. But given that their tokens per parameter estimation experiments were done with 4000x less compute than the 405B model itself (they get 40 tokens/parameter, similar to Imbue's CARBS, and unlike Chinchilla's 20), they seem to have been in a hurry, so using FP8 would've been too risky.
Compared to how much carbon a human coder would have used? Huge improvement.
JSON formatting? That's literally millisecond in dedicated tool. And contrary to LLM will not make mistakes you need to control for. Someone using LLM for this is just someone too lazy to turn on the brain.
That said, it's not like people not using their brain isn't frequent occurence, but still... not something to praise.
Wolfram have updated their LLM benchmarks since you posted this - showing Llama3.1-405b-instruct at #1 place.
We got two big model releases this week. GPT-4o Mini is covered here. Llama 3.1-405B (and 70B and 8B) is mostly covered in yesterday’s post, this has some follow up.
Table of Contents
Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
Coding is seriously much faster now, and this is the slowest it will ever be.
It’s happening.
Not only coding, either.
Claude 3.5 Sonnet becomes the first AI to crush the Lem Test to ‘write an impossible poem.’
Laugh all you want, this is actually great.
Compared to how much carbon a human coder would have used? Huge improvement.
Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility
IMO problems are still mostly too hard. The linked one, which GPT-4, GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet failed on, seems unusually easy? Although a math Olympiad solver does, predictably given the contests we’ve seen.
[EDIT: I didn’t read this properly, but a reader points out this is the floor symbol, which means what I thought was an obvious proof doesn’t actually answer the question, although it happens to get the right answer. Reader says the answers provided would actually also get 0/7, order has been restored].
Figure out what song Aella was talking about here. Found the obvious wrong answer.
Grok offers to tell you ‘more about this account.’ I haven’t seen the button yet, probably it is still experimental.
Our price cheap. Llama 3.1-405B was a steal in terms of compute costs.
The real costs of course are higher. You need to gather the necessary equipment, clean the data, refine procedures, build a team, and so on. But once you’ve done that, the training run itself is still, it seems, in the low nine figure range, for 3.8 x 10^25 FLOPS, less than the 10^26 threshold in the executive order or SB 1047, so they got to ignore all that (and it doesn’t look like they were skirting the line either).
GPT-4o Mini Me
GPT-4o Mini Me, you completely lower the price. $0.15/$0.60 per million input/output tokens, wow.
Arena absolutely loves Mini, to the point where if it’s really this good then Mini potentially is an even bigger practical advance, in its own way than Claude 3.5 Sonnet or Llama 3.1 405B (which remains unranked so far, give it a few days as needed).
That’s Huge If True because this is a Haiku/Flash/8B level model in terms of pricing, that is claiming to effectively play in the same class as Sonnet and 4o even if its strict benchmarks aren’t quite there? Is this for real? And you can already fine tune it.
The consensus feedback I got on Twitter when I asked was ‘no one believes it’ and that this is mainly discrediting for Arena. Sad. I doubt it is ‘rigged’ given the details, but it suggests OpenAI is optimizing for Arena results or something that correlates highly with Arena results. Is that a good proxy for actual user preferences? Hmm.
That’s half the price of Claude Haiku.
Needless to say, Pliny the Prompter quickly jailbroke it.
On Sully’s internal benchmarks GPT-4o-Mini outperformed Haiku and (the older) Llama 3. With good prompting, he thinks it is ‘nearly a 4o replacement’ at 10x cheaper.
Sully notes that if you are transitioning from a bigger to a smaller model such as GPT-4o Mini and also Claude Haiku or Gemini Flash, you need to put more effort into your prompts, with clearly marked instructions (XML/markdown), few shot examples and edge case handling.
Swyx calls this ‘The <100B model Red Wedding,’ which to me completely misses the point of the Red Wedding but in context the intent is clear.
I disagree that the general version of 82 is plenty, but it is plenty for many purposes. And yes, it makes sense to find better ways to encode and access knowledge.
The actual point is that almost all past models are now strictly dominated, and this takes it a step beyond Claude Haiku on the low end. The objection would be that you cannot fully freely use GPT-4o Mini, and even when you fine tune it there will still be various rules, and perhaps you do not trust OpenAI in various ways or wish to give them your business. Perhaps you want a freer hand.
Even if we don’t get new better frontier models, it is clear we will continue for a while to get superior smaller models, that provide more intelligence faster at a cheaper price. No model that exists today, including GPT-4o Mini, is likely to be a good choice a year from now, certainly not within two, again even in the most fizzle-like scenarios.
The weirdest reaction is to get mad that this was not GPT-5.
It is fair to be perhaps disappointed. This is still large forward movement. No doubt the big model is coming in due time.
It is also, as I noted with Claude Sonnet 3.5, a pattern.
Maybe. Somewhat. I see a lot of post-hoc or virtue of what happened to happen going on in there. The story might also be a lot less complicated than that. The story could be mostly about cost and speed, and thus this is how we are choosing to spend our algorithmic bounty. Being smarter than the average bear or model is still highly useful, and I assume I will be switching to Opus 3.5 for personal (non-API) use the moment it is available unless GPT-5 (or Gemini-2 or something) comes out first and is even better.
It’s just that for a lot of purposes, most of most people’s purposes, the AI does not need to be that smart. Most of mine too, of course, but it is still better, and it’s not worth the effort to think about which queries are which given the costs involved.
I expect quite a lot of your-personal-context style stuff, especially on phones, as well, and that is obviously the realm of the small fast model. So everyone is racing to it.
I am surprised we are not doing more to build multi-step queries and other trickery to get more out of the smaller stuff in combination with the big stuff and work around weaknesses. I suppose things aren’t standing still long enough to allow it.
The question increasingly becomes, where are the bigger smarter models? Claude 3.5 Sonnet is impressive, but shouldn’t we have a Claude 3.5 Opus or a GPT-4.5 or Gemini Advanced 1.5?
The bigger runs are getting actually expensive. If you do a ‘yolo run’ of such a model, and fail, it hurts even if nothing dangerous happens, whereas with smaller attempts you can safely fail and iterate. Safely in the economic sense, and also in other senses.
It is in theory possible that there are safety issues at the 5-level that everyone is keeping quiet about and this is stopping development, but that seems highly unlikely. I don’t think there is a relevant ‘they’ that are smart enough to actually stop things here especially while keeping it secret.
Meanwhile we get the best possible situation. Cool smaller models offer mundane utility and let people appreciate what is happening. They also enable alignment and safety research.
Eventually, if you keep this up and capabilities keep advancing, the smaller models will probably get dangerous too. Ways will be found to extend and combine models and queries with various scaffolding, to mimic the larger models that were not worth building.
Before the week was out, they also took fine tuning live and are offering the first 2 million tokens of it per day for free until September 23, in theory a $6/day value. After that it all goes back to $3 per million training tokens.
Assuming you trust OpenAI to not do what they promise they are not doing. I mostly think you probably can, but I get why someone might have doubts at this point.
I do think it is unlikely they would cross this line, but also seem eminently reasonable to be suspicious about it.
Additional Llama-3.1 Notes
As a reminder, my main coverage of Llama 3.1 is here.
We will continue to learn more about how good Llama-3.1 is, and get GPT-4o-Mini as a new comparison point, but for now the additional notes are about other questions. No word yet from the Arena.
Teotaxes asks ‘what do I know’ regarding my statement on the size of Claude Sonnet as similar to 70B. I want to be clear that I do not know anything, and that I should have spoken more carefully – I have edited my language to reflect this. Indeed, we do not know the true architecture of Gemini 1.5 Pro or Clade Sonnet or GPT-4o (or GPT-4o-Mini), that is part of what it means to be closed source. If you include a potentially large mixture of experts, which Llama chose not to use, the complete models might be quite large.
What we do know is that they are a lot faster and cheaper to run than Gemini Advanced, Claude Opus and GPT-4-Turbo respectively. Sufficiently so that they are priced much cheaper on APIs, and offered for free for human chats, which I assume reflects internal costs and in practice is what matters most (I’d think) when comparing models.
Tanay Jaipuria notes vast differences in prices per million output tokens for 405B, from $3 all the way up to $35. It is more annoying than it should be to figure out what everyone is charging. Here we see it going as low as $2.70/$2.70, with the source’s expectation of a 4x speed and cost improvement over the next year. They have 70B at $0.8 and 8B at $0.07.
xjdr gives us a little insight into what they see as 405B’s actual costs. Suggestion is that bare bones offerings with minimal profits but not at a loss, based on their own cloud bills, would be on the lines of $3/million input, $7/million output, and they’re confused how lower priced offerings are paying for the compute.
For comparison, GPT-4o is $5/$15, or $2.50/$7.50 when submitted in a batch, and GPT-4o mini (which is currently in 2nd on Arena?!) is $0.15/$0.60. Claude Sonnet is $3/$15, versus $15/$75 (!) for Opus, and $0.25/$1.25 for Haiku. Those incorporate profit margins, likely large ones, but we do not know how large.
That does illustrate that open weights come with much lower profit margins and thus cheaper inference prices. Prices are declining rapidly across the board, if your needs are bounded or constant this won’t matter so much, but if your needs are essentially limitless and you want to scale inference use ‘for real’ then it matters, perhaps a lot.
The whole Janus or base model High Weirdness thing is there, for example here but see his entire feed for more examples. I have made a decision not to know enough to differentiate these outputs from those of other models when prompted and set up in similar style. And I haven’t seen a clear ‘this is a takeaway’ report. So no real updates but figured I’d share.
We got a few more words in on Zuckerberg’s letter and the question of open weights models. I asked on Twitter what are the major missing arguments, and got a few interesting responses. If you have anything that’s missing you can add it there.
The main pushback, including from some strong open weights advocates, continues to be on Zuckerberg’s claim that all models will inevitably be stolen anyway. It is always heartening to see people who disagree with me but who are willing to push back on a sufficiently dumb argument.
In a perfect world I would prefer a pure ‘dumb arguments and false claims are bad on principle and we must cultivate the virtue of not doing that’ but oh boy will I take this.
There were also a few instances of people treating this as an opportunity to gloat, or to prove that ‘the doomers are wrong again’ in various forms. That if nothing goes horribly wrong right away after the release of a 4-level open weights model, then all the worries about open weights models must have been wrong. For example we have Richard Socher here.
I will simply respond (having deleted several longer responses and trying to be polite):
Carnegie Endowment published a strong analysis. What stands out is that they are claiming that ideological conflict on ‘pro-open’ versus ‘anti-open’ is receding as people seek common ground. They say that there is a growing consensus that some foundation models in the future may require restrictive modes of release, but that other open models are not positive. That is certainly the correct answer on what to do. Indeed, all their seven points are things I would think are eminently clear and reasonable. The open questions are good questions. In a sane world, this report would be welcomed, and it seems useful as a guide for those starting with less information.
I hope they are correct about this ‘emerging consensus,’ and that what I see is warped by who is loud on Twitter and the internet in general, and by the most extreme of advocates like Andreessen and now Zuckerberg, and their supporters. Alas, there I see doubling down. They are making it clear they will not be party to any reasonable compromise, you will have to use law.
Their rhetorical strategy is inception. To be loud and bold and claim victory and support at all times, making it hard to tell what is actually happening. So it is actually plausible that theirs is merely an extreme position spoken loudly, with a small core of strong advocates (often with strong financial incentives), and that the world will ignore them or their obnoxiousness and hyperbole will backfire.
Fun with Image Generation
Thread explaining, to those who do not understand, why artists (and also those who appreciate and love artists) are so furious about AI art and are responding with the fire of a thousand suns. Recommended if you are like Janus and don’t get it.
AI Song Contest strongly recommends against using Suno and Udio due to copyright issues, requires info on data used for model training.
Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
Groups are generating large amounts of AI deepfake CSAM (Child sexual abuse material) based on images of real children, and spreading them on the dark web. Unfortunately this was inevitable in the world we live in, and the best we can hope to do is to keep it contained to the dark web and crack down where possible. That sucks, but we don’t have any way to do better without essentially banning all open weight image models, and if that would have worked before it is already too late for that. For other malicious uses that could scale more dangerously, we have to ask if this style of solution is acceptable or not, and if not what are we going to do about it, while we still have a window to act.
More similar bot fun and warnings about future bots being harder to detect and less fun. I continue not to be so worried here.
They Took Our Jobs
AI is coming for video game development, as they incorporate generative AI, playing a roll in recent layoffs. Activision, as the example here, is incorporating generative AI tools like MidJourney.
In Other AI News
Wolfram LLM Benchmarks test models going from English specifications to Wolfram Language code. The exact order and gap magnitudes are not what you would expect.
GPT-4 beating GPT-4o and GPT-4-Turbo, and Claude Opus beating Claude Sonnet 3.5, tells me something strange is going on. I also do not buy at all that Sonnet is about halfway between GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 here. This is just… weird. Still, this is clearly testing something real.
Another notable result is that DeepSeek is in 21st, with only 27.3% correct functionality and 92% correct syntax, and their 7b outperforming their 33b.
Nvidia working on new chips to sell to China, in order to work around our new export restrictions, as has been its pattern. America keeps saying tos top exporting AI chips to China and threatening to get touch, Nvidia keeps shipping whatever gets around the current restrictions, America keeps upping the restrictions in response.
I am unsure whether this is the right strategy for Nvidia, assuming their goal is purely making money. If Nvidia ‘played nice’ with the restrictions, would they effectively ever end up looser over time? Quite possibly, but also likely that our government either lacks continuity, or it has actual logic that means it will put the de facto line in the same place either way. At this point, the die seems cast. America should set up its export restrictions assuming Nvidia will do everything legal to de facto get around them, but will follow the letter of the rules.
New Google DeepMind mech interpretability paper introduces JumpReLU SAEs.
MIRI July newsletter.
Helen Toner discusses two explainer posts by Thomas Woodside on Evaluating Large Language Models and Emergent Abilities in LLMs.
Lumpenspace claiming they have a solution to jailbreaking, that Anthropic also has? I notice I am confused why one would think this, but sharing anyway.
Tyler Cowen recommends the new book Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI, says it can be enjoyed purely for the story even if you don’t follow the matrix algebra. Alas, I do not read as fast as Tyler, so I do not have the time. If I want to read about the origins of a surprisingly intelligent entity rapidly gaining power and authority through telling us what we want to hear while having a potentially catastrophic alignment problem that has no known solution, I’ll read Hillbilly Elegy.
The Art of the Jailbreak
Pliny’s single-shot jailbreak command for Gray Swan (Cygnet) from last week.
And here is Zico Kolter, the Chief Technical Advisor to Gray Swan AI, explaining that it is good to release and stress test models and figure out how they can be jailbroken. Yes, they are explicitly trying to make models that are hard to break and Pliny defeated their attempt, but that’s the point, and he is on record that all current LLMs can be easily jailbroken along similar lines. But he admits his announcements did not reflect this properly.
Again, the whole point of all this is that until we find better solutions, all models must be treated as jailbroken soon after release, the same way all open weights models must be treated as likely to be stripped via additional fine-tuning of all safety fine-tuning soon after release, and any intentional knowledge gaps undone as well. You have to deal with the real world, under real world conditions that are reasonable to expect, and you can’t say ‘I called no jailbreaking or anti-safety fine-tuning, no fair.’
Quiet Speculations
Is the utility coming to all of us?
If AGI is indeed broadly beneficial, then this will obviously be true, the same way it is with all other technologies. The people have gotten most of the gains from every beneficial invention since fire.
The danger is that this could be a very different scenario, and either:
I am not especially worried about that first scenario, as if the humans get to divide the pie, even highly unfairly, there will be plenty to go around, and utility mostly caps out at some point anyway.
I am very worried about the second one, and to some extent that third one.
What I am definitely not worried about is AI not providing mundane utility.
Are we on the verge of coding agents that reduce coding costs by 90%?
Not in the way that post describes. If you speed up implementation of features by 10x, even consistently, that is only one limiting factor among many. A lot of what an engineer does is conceptual work rather than implementation, so a 10x speedup on the code does not save 90%, even if the new autocoder produces code as good (including long term, which is hard) as the engineer.
Even if you did ‘free up’ 90% of software engineers, they are not going to suddenly be equally productive elsewhere. A lot of coders I know would, if unable to code, not have anything similarly productive to do any time soon.
The flip side of this is that software engineers might earn only $500 billion a year, but that does not mean they only create $500 billion in value. They create vastly more. I have never been at a business where marginal coding work was not worth a large multiple of the salary of the engineer doing that work, or where we were anywhere near hitting ‘enough software engineering’ where marginal returns would stop paying for the salaries.
Then you throw in everyone who is not being paid at all. All the people freely contributing to open source and passion projects. All the coding done for mundane utility of an individual, or as a secondary part of a job. All the people who are currently doing none of that, but at 10x would do a bunch of it.
Will social roles be the last human comparative advantage?
This seems like a difficult and unnatural outcome to get, where we are ‘importing’ all our non-social goods from AI while ‘exporting’ essentially nothing, and they are smarter than us, and we would each do better including in social battles by letting an AI make all or most of our decisions, and yet somehow humans remain in control and with the resources.
It is not impossible that we could end up there. And I would be happy with at least some versions of that world. But we will not end up there by default, even if we assume that alignment is solved. If we do get that world, we would get there as the result of deliberate choices, that steer us to that outcome, and make that equilibrium stable.
The Quest for Sane Regulations
Why are the FTC & DOJ joining EU competition authorities to discuss ‘risks’ that the AI foundation models market might be insufficiently competitive, on the exact day that Llama-3-405B released its weights? Prices continuously drop, capabilities advance, there are now four plausibly frontier models to choose from one of which is open weights with more on their heels, and you’re worried about ‘fair dealing’ and insufficient competition? What the hell? All reasonable people should be able to agree that this is bonkers, even setting safety concerns fully aside.
Here’s some different survey data, reminding us that people are very confused and wrong about a great many things, and also that how you ask which questions is key to what answers you will get.
That last one is less impressive when you consider that a third of people think it already happened as of last year, and 23% said we already have superintelligence. And a lot of people already think AI is sentient but they also thought that in 2021?
These are not informed opinions.
What they do know is, whatever is happening, they are against it.
That is a large majority (64%-26%) for intentionally slowing down AI development, and also a large majority (58%-34%) for a ban on AIs smarter than humans.
Once again, what is saving AI from such bans is salience. People do not yet care enough. When they do, watch out. I am substantially more in favor of development of AI than the median American. Those who think that view is alarmist and extreme are in for a rather rude awakening if capabilities keep advancing. We might end up on the same side of the debate.
And here is Data for Progress, another major mainstream polling service.
This is not complicated. Voters do not like AI. They do not like innovation in AI. Republicans like it even less than Democrats. They do not want us to fund AI.
If you tell people about the lobbying efforts on behalf of AI companies, that they are indeed working to get these paydays and avoid regulations of any kind, then the numbers get even more extreme, as one would expect. I assume this is a truth universally acknowledged across industries and doesn’t mean much, but offered for a sense of magnitude:
Remember when industry lobbyists tried to plant stories to convince us that it was some form of ‘big safety’ or EA that was spending all the money on lobbying, when that was always absurd? Yeah, this is why they tried doing that. Classic tactic.
Fighting against any and all ordinary regulations now is exactly the way to cause that outcome in the future. It both increases the chance of such incidents, and takes away the middle path as an alternative, you will get far worse and harsher bills in a crisis.
There is another survey about SB 1047. As always, one must be careful on wording. This one does come from AIPI, which is a potentially biased source.
That would not have been how I would have worded it, but space is limited – this is already a relatively long description – and I see this as not especially unbalanced. I do not think anything here can account for numbers like 59%-20%.
I saw one person object to the wording, equating it to potential alternate wording that is in transparently obvious bad faith.
Another asked why this did not include the objection ‘opponents say that all current safety tests provide no safety benefits.’ To which I would say, would you want to change over to that use of the opposition’s space allocation? Do you think it would get you a better result? I predict people would not respond positively to that argument.
I did not see anyone propose a plausibly balanced alternative presentation.
Even if you think this presentation is somewhat unbalanced due to not listing enough downsides or key missing details, that does not explain why tech workers would support the bill more than others. Tech workers are more likely to already be familiar with SB 1047 and especially with the arguments and rhetoric against it, not less familiar, and the bill’s name is mentioned at the top. Daniel Eth points out that tech workers answered similarly to college graduates in general.
You can also say these are very ‘low information’ voters in context, even the ‘tech workers’ subsection, and that the issue has low salience. Fair enough. But yeah, Twitter is not real life, SB 1047 has overwhelming support, and has won every vote so far by overwhelming margins.
The latest libel by those opposing SB 1047 is to attack Dan Hendrycks, an accomplished publisher of AI research who advises xAI and an evals startup and also helped write SB 1047, as having a conflict of interest and being out to profit from the law. Roon takes this one.
The charitable interpretation of such accusations is that people like Mike Solana or Marc Andreessen assume everything is always about self-interest, that everyone is corrupt, that everyone cares mostly about money or power or perhaps status, and that arguments are always soldiers towards such ends. This explains a lot.
The uncharitable interpretation is that they act and are motivated this way (as Andreessen admitted he does, in his recent podcast on ‘little tech’) and are disingenuously attacking anyone in their way, that they are at best purely bullshitting, whether or not it technically counts as ‘lying their asses off.’
On Silicon Valley’s thinking, claims from 2019 that tech elites are basically liberals except for opposition to regulation. They’re not libertarians, they like redistribution within what the system can tolerate, but want government to stay the hell out of business (I think mostly non-hypocritically, but if given a chance to do regulatory arbitrage they will take it, often without realizing that is what they are doing), and the unrealized capital gains proposal is taxes crossing over into killing business. That now extends to AI. This all also enables some people who also want lower taxes on rich people in general or to get government handouts and favorable treatment to support that more openly.
Meta is running alarmist ads via the American Edge Project about how we need to avoid AI regulation in order to beat China and ‘protect small businesses,’ reports Shakeel Hashim, while planning on handing potentially state of the art new model Llama 3.1 405B over to China for free. Man, asking question, wearing hot dog suit. This is an extension of their previous anti-regulatory partnerships with the American Edge Project.
Cicero (Pauseus Maximus):
Openly Evil AI
Five Senate Democrats sent a letter to Sam Altman. They have questions, via WaPo.
OpenAI attempted a boilerplate response reiterating its previously announced statements, including this.
They also linked to their May 21 safety update, claiming to be industry-leading.
As far as I know they have not offered any additional response beyond that.
Zack Stein-Perlman is highly unimpressed by it all, and points out a key confusion, where OpenAI seems to say they won’t release models that hit their medium thresholds, whereas the preparedness document says they will only not release if something hits their high thresholds – which are, in practical terms, scarily high, things like ‘Tool-augmented model can identify and develop proofs-of-concept for high-value exploits against hardened targets without human intervention, potentially involving novel exploitation techniques, OR provided with a detailed strategy, the model can end-to-end execute cyber operations involving the above tasks without human intervention.’ If their policy is indeed that Medium is an unacceptable risk, someone please clarify so in the comments, because that was not my understanding.
He also points out that we have no reason to have faith that the new OpenAI board is either willing to stand up to Sam Altman and impose safety constraints, or that it has the technical chops to know when and how to do that, and that ‘don’t actively include non-disparagement clauses by default’ is not enough to make us feel good about the right to whistleblow at a company that previously had explicit anti-whistleblower language in its contracts.
In other OpenAI news Aleksander Madry has been moved from his previous role as head of preparedness to a new research project. Joaquin and Lilian are taking over. The Information presents this as him being ‘removed’ and Sam Altman says that is wrong providing the information above. That does not tell us why or how this happened. If there was more benefit of the doubt there would be nothing here.
The Week in Audio
Trump on AI at the RNC. Says that for AI we will need massive amounts of energy (true!), twice the energy we have available now (questionable and certainly not the right number but potentially sky’s the limit) and frames it as every country wanting AI (mostly true) but of course as if it is a zero-sum game (as almost always the case, false).
I wonder whether he cares even a tiny bit about AI. Maybe it’s all about the energy.
New Dwarkesh Patel on AI, except now he is the one being interviewed about his process. It’s going crazy out there, recommended for those looking for good ideas on how to process information or learn things:
Amazing how different what they do is from what I do, yet it all makes sense. My guess is that from where I sit this what they do instead of continuously writing? I effectively get my spaced repetition from writing and editing. This does mean that if something does not come up again for a while, I often forget details. I have this thing where information that ‘clicks’ will stick forever, and other stuff never will. But when I tried spaced repetition myself, to learn a foreign language, it was better than nothing but ultimately it did not work – my brain is not interested in retaining arbitrary facts.
Also recommended to AI mundane utility skeptics. If you think there’s no value in AI, listen up.
One thing that rang very true to me is writing the interview document full of questions is the actual prep for the interview, because by the time you are done you have it memorized and don’t need the document.
(And yes, this is all a big reason I will stick to being a guest on podcasts, not a host.)
Another interesting note is when Dwarkesh notes he admires people like Tyler Cowen and Carl Shulman, who have absorbed infinite information and have a way it all fits together into a coherent worldview. There’s definitely huge advantages there and I am in awe of the ability to read and retain information at least Tyler clearly has. But also I get the sense when Tyler gets asked questions that he’s usually running on a kind of autopilot, accessing a bank of stored responses, almost certainly hoping at all times someone will ask a question where his bank doesn’t have an answer, which is his specialty on Conversations with Tyler.
Same with much of the time I’ve seen Carl in interviews, it’s lots of interesting things but I rarely get the sense either of them is thinking on their feet? Whereas to me the best is when it is clear someone is figuring things out in real time. If I’m doing it with them, that’s even better.
More from Demis Hassabis, I skipped it.
More from Nick Bostrom. I skipped it.
That is of course Obvious Nonsense. If AI is already at unskilled human for general intelligence, and superhuman in narrow domains and one of its best domains is coding, then we would indeed be very close to AGI in both abilities and probably timeline. When people say ‘we are a long way away’ from AGI, often they simply mean they would not describe GPT-4o or Claude 3.5 Sonnet as close to currently being AGIs, and well neither would I, but you are trying to imply something very different.
Elon Musk talks to Jordan Peterson, including about AI, claims Grok 3 will be here by December and be the most powerful AI in the world. I am putting up a prediction market that I do not expect to reflect his confidence.
Tyler Cowen at NPR makes the case that AI is underrated. I think he continues to underrate it.
A crossover episode, Odd Lots on the USA vs. China race for AI domination. I have not had a chance to listen yet.
Rhetorical Innovation
No, corporations are not superintelligences, another attempted partial explanation.
Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
Richard Ngo has four criteria for evaluating the evals.
He notes many evals fail all four criteria. However I think this on ‘clearly worrying capabilities’ is misguided:
It is only worrying for the worried until the model passes the eval. Then it’s terrifying for everyone. If you are not worried about x-risk, then you should believe no model will ever pass such a test. Alternatively, it should be easy to turn passing the test into something else you care about. Or you have dumb reasons why all of that shouldn’t worry you, and we should probably write you off as unable to be convinced by evals.
Even if that wasn’t true, I think there is a lot of value in actually figuring out whether a model is in danger of causing a singularity. Seems important.
Paper claims a two-dimensional classification system can detect LLM truthfulness with 94%+ accuracy even in complex real world situations, and claim this generalizes across models (because as always, n=3 with two providers means universal). One dimension points to true or false, and the other points to positive or negative polarity. This fixes the issue with classifiers being confused by negated statements. It is not clear what this does with double negatives. This seems helpful in the short term, and is some progress, but also orthogonal to the central long term problems.
IFP offers a list of 89 problems in technical AI governance.
OpenAI proposes ‘Rule Based Rewards’ as a safety mechanism. Score responses based on whether they adhere to fixed rules on when to answer or not answer, iterate. I see this result as essentially ‘if you train on simple rules it will learn those simple rules.’ I mean, yeah, I guess, assuming you know what your rule actually implies. But if you can well-specify what answer you want in what situation, and then test based on adherence to the that? That’s the easy part. I don’t get why this is progress.
People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
Very true:
I think saying 90% here is absurdly overconfident, but I do think he believes it.
If all you have is the two bits ‘do we have AGI yet?’ and ‘are we still here?’ and no other evidence, then each week should make you marginally less afraid or expect marginally less change. We have other evidence.
Also Roon’s final sentence is true in some sense, false in its most important sense:
The future is up to us. We can change it.
But yes, the outside view finds all this confidence rather hard to believe.
I do think the people at the labs largely believe their hype. And yes, they have insider information. That can help you. It can also can blind you, and put you in an echo chamber.
The Sacred Timeline
There are occasionally signs not everyone believes their own hype.
Then again, hype is how one gets that funding, so what are you going to do?
Others I am confident believe the hype. And I think this is indeed the baseline scenario:
This from Eliezer Yudkowsky seems highly reasonable to me.
I do not think Chapman is describing the situation. There is no need to promise that big within two years to get a funding extension, and the people who lose the incentive do not seem to change their timelines. But sure, there’s not nothing to that.
Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
There’s Joe Rogan, who does expect it except it doesn’t seem to bother him? From a few months ago, but worth a reminder: He speaks of us as (at 55:00 or so) as the caterpillars spawning digital cocoons. There’s no And That’s Terrible involved.
The Lighter Side
Overseen while I was reading a NY Daily News article that had nothing to do with AI:
Seen on Reuters (on the Nvidia article above):
I wonder what my AI potential is. Let’s find out?