alt Hacker NewsIs it so hard to imagine they just believe what they are saying?
15 years ago, if you asked 100 people in tech to define "artificial general intelligence", 90 of them would have come up with a standard that LLMs today easily clear.
Now that we're here I think we can have a much clearer vision, and we can notice limitations that we couldn't have articulated before.
But I'm starting to notice more "polarization" around this topic and it's weird. We're in a new era and I think no one knows the future, a lot of different beliefs are reasonable.
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Yes, Sam Altman is a known liar and cheat. With hundreds of billions of dollars on the line, the simplest answer is these are publicity stunts to grow revenue before an IPO.
I mean, really, if they were so dangerous, like "everyone" working in these companies believes, you think they would do more than amateur hour to build sandboxes?
The danger stunt is also a major distraction from talking about the real quality issues of LLMaS (LLMs as a Service). How many tokens are consumed? What quality? Was I downgraded?
By forcing the discussion about doomerism, they avoid real discussions about their service. Which is exactly what they want. You can bet when they go to "regulate" LLMs, they won't be asking the department of weights and measures to validate they are counting tokens fairly. No.
Maximum skepticism should be employed.
“Beliefs” are reasonable in a technical field?
Hypotheses would be reasonable. Beliefs, almost by definition, don’t have much to do reasoning, and thus, definitely not _reasonable_.
I appreciate that you have correctly designated them as beliefs though.
Sorry but that’s a very naive mindset. These are companies run by verified liars with billions of invested dollars. They don’t believe in anything except extracting labor and capital to make billions more, and they will say whatever they need to say to achieve those goals. Any “belief” they may have had went out the window the moment they accepted VC money.
> 90 of them would have come up with a standard that LLMs today easily clear.
> Now that we're here I think we can have a much clearer vision, and we can notice limitations that we couldn't have articulated before.
Okay, but had you been able to time travel and show them today's LLMs back then, how many of them would have agreed that we had "AGI", and how many would have instantly recognized the limitations they'd failed to articulate?
Because the way that some people talk about current models supposedly "passing the Turing test" makes me think they would have given ELIZA a pass too. It's just so obvious that none of them are convincingly human out of the box.