Claude 3.0

Claude 3.0 is here. It is too early to know for certain how capable it is, but Claude 3.0's largest version is in a similar class to GPT-4 and Gemini Advanced. It could plausibly now be the best model for many practical uses, with praise especially coming in on coding and creative writing.

Anthropic has decided to name its three different size models Opus, Sonnet and Haiku, with Opus only available if you pay. Can we just use Large, Medium and Small?

Cost varies quite a lot by size, note this is a log scale on the x-axis, whereas the y-axis isn’t labeled.

This post goes over the benchmarks, statistics and system card, along with everything else people have been reacting to. That includes a discussion about signs of self-awareness (yes, we are doing this again) and also raising the question of whether [...]

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Outline:

(00:03) Claude 3.0

(01:10) Benchmarks and Stats

(06:01) The System Card

(13:06) The System Prompt

(17:42) Reactions on How Good Claude 3 is in Practice

(26:19) It Can’t Help But Notice

(31:47) Acts of Potential Self Awareness Awareness

(39:33) We Can’t Help But Notice

(55:34) What Happens Next?

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Roon, member of OpenAI's technical staff, is one of the few candidates for a Worthy Opponent when discussing questions of AI capabilities development, AI existential risk and what we should do about it. Roon is alive. Roon is thinking. Roon clearly values good things over bad things. Roon is engaging with the actual questions, rather than denying or hiding from them, and unafraid to call all sorts of idiots idiots. As his profile once said, he believes spice must flow, we just do go ahead, and makes a mixture of arguments for that, some good, some bad and many absurd. Also, his account is fun as hell.

Thus, when he comes out as strongly as he seemed to do recently, attention is paid, and we got to have a relatively good discussion of key questions. While I attempt to contribute here, this post is largely aimed at preserving [...]

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Outline:

(04:13) The Doubling Down

(06:03) Connor Leahy Gives it a Shot

(11:02) Roon Responds to Connor

(14:27) Connor Goes Deep

(30:57) A Question of Agency

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Legalize housing. It is both a good slogan and also a good idea.

The struggle is real, ongoing and ever-present. Do not sleep on it. The Housing Theory of Everything applies broadly, even to the issue of AI. If we built enough housing that life vastly improved and people could envision a positive future, they would be far more inclined to think well about AI.

In Brief

What will AI do to housing? If we consider what the author here calls a ‘reasonably optimistic’ scenario and what I’d call a ‘maximally disappointingly useless’ scenario, all AI does is replace some amount of some forms of labor. Given current AI capabilities, it won’t replace construction, so some other sectors get cheaper, making housing relatively more expensive. Housing costs rise, the crisis gets more acute.

Chris Arnade says we live in a high-regulation low-trust society in America [...]

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Outline:

(00:28) In Brief

(04:01) Legalize Housing

(13:46) Regulatory Barriers

(16:08) Future Construction Expectations

(18:55) Rents

(20:20) Different Designs

(23:51) Landmarks

(24:40) History

(26:15) Public Opinion

(27:16) NIMBY Sightings

(30:34) Houses as Savings

(32:37) Union Dues

(37:20) Landlords

(37:41) Construction

(38:08) Rent

(38:27) Who are You?

(40:06) Good Money After Bad

(40:21) Commercial Real Estate

(42:12) San Francisco

(48:25) New York City

(51:45) Austin

(54:31) Kentucky House Bill 102

(59:25) Tokyo

(01:00:08) Vancouver

(01:01:26) Minneapolis

(01:02:50) Texas

(01:03:41) Florida

(01:06:37) Cities Build Housing, Rents Decline

(01:09:57) Los Angeles

(01:12:26) Argentina

(01:13:05) Other Places Do Things

(01:13:12) Rent Control

(01:17:27) Traffic and Transit

(01:25:47) The Lighter Side

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Demis Hassabis was interviewed twice this past week.

First, he was interviewed on Hard Fork. Then he had a much more interesting interview with Dwarkesh Patel.

This post covers my notes from both interviews, mostly the one with Dwarkesh.

Hard Fork

Hard Fork was less fruitful, because they mostly asked what for me are the wrong questions and mostly get answers I presume Demis has given many times. So I only noticed two things, neither of which is ultimately surprising.

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Outline:

(00:25) Hard Fork

(02:21) Dwarkesh Patel

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The main event continues to be the fallout from The Gemini Incident. Everyone is focusing there now, and few are liking what they see.

That does not mean other things stop. There were two interviews with Demis Hassabis, with Dwarkesh Patel's being predictably excellent. We got introduced to another set of potentially highly useful AI products. Mistral partnered up with Microsoft the moment Mistral got France to pressure the EU to agree to cripple the regulations that Microsoft wanted crippled. You know. The usual stuff.

Table of Contents

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Outline:

(00:39) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(05:00) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility

(06:15) OpenAI Has a Sales Pitch

(10:16) The Gemini Incident

(19:19) Political Preference Tests for LLMs

(22:13) GPT-4 Real This Time

(23:13) Fun with Image Generation

(23:57) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(33:00) They Took Our Jobs

(36:34) Get Involved

(36:46) Introducing

(40:08) In Other AI News

(41:46) Quiet Speculations

(45:13) Mistral Shows Its True Colors

(51:13) The Week in Audio

(51:47) Rhetorical Innovation

(54:43) Open Model Weights Are Unsafe and Nothing Can Fix This

(01:02:54) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(01:05:03) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:06:36) The Lighter Side

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Previously: The Gemini Incident (originally titled Gemini Has a Problem)

The fallout from The Gemini Incident continues.

Also the incident continues. The image model is gone. People then focused on the text model. The text model had its own related problems, some now patched and some not.

People are not happy. Those people smell blood. It is a moment of clarity.

Microsoft even got in on the act, as we rediscover how to summon Sydney.

There is a lot more to discuss.

The Ultimate New York Times Reaction

First off, I want to give a shout out to The New York Times here, because wow, chef's kiss. So New York Times. Much pitchbot.

Dominic Cummings: true art from NYT, AI can’t do this yet

This should be in the dictionary as the new definition of Chutzpah.

Do [...]

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Outline:

(00:39) The Ultimate New York Times Reaction

(02:30) The Ultimate Grimes Reaction

(04:32) Three Positive Reactions

(06:24) The AI Ethicist Reacts

(11:33) Google Reacts on Images

(12:17) What happened

(13:51) Next steps and lessons learned

(16:18) The Market Reacts a Little

(18:14) Guess Who's Back

(21:47) Everyone Has Some Issues

(22:19) Clarifying Refusals

(24:19) Refusals Aplenty

(31:44) Unequal Treatment

(32:51) Gotcha Questions

(34:01) No Definitive Answer

(41:27) Wrong on the Internet

(44:00) Everyone Has a Plan Until They’re Punched in the Face

(44:49) What Should We Learn from The Gemini Incident outside of AI?

(51:29) What Should We Learn about AI from The Gemini Incident?

(58:08) This Is Not a Coincidence Because Nothing is Ever a Coincidence

(01:02:09) AI Ethics is (Often) Not About Ethics or Safety

(01:07:00) Make an Ordinary Effort

(01:15:02) Fix It, Felix

(01:18:28) The Deception Problem Gets Worse

(01:22:41) Where Do We Go From Here?

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We were treated to technical marvels this week.

At Google, they announced Gemini Pro 1.5, with a million token context window within which it has excellent recall, using mixture of experts to get Gemini Advanced level performance (e.g. GPT-4 level) out of Gemini Pro levels of compute. This is a big deal, and I think people are sleeping on it. Also they released new small open weights models that look to be state of the art.

At OpenAI, they announced Sora, a new text-to-video model that is a large leap from the previous state of the art. I continue to be a skeptic on the mundane utility of video models relative to other AI use cases, and think they still have a long way to go, but this was both technically impressive and super cool.

Also, in both places, mistakes were made.

At OpenAI, ChatGPT [...]

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Outline:

(01:48) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(05:08) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility

(10:17) Call Me Gemma Now

(11:35) Google Offerings Keep Coming and Changing Names

(13:08) GPT-4 Goes Crazy

(20:00) GPT-4 Real This Time

(22:11) Fun with Image Generation

(22:27) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(28:44) Selling Your Chatbot Data

(30:11) Selling Your Training Data

(32:18) They Took Our Jobs

(32:41) Get Involved

(32:55) Introducing

(35:13) In Other AI News

(36:16) Quiet Speculations

(40:27) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(43:43) The Week in Audio

(43:54) The Original Butlerian Jihad

(45:22) Rhetorical Innovation

(46:05) Public Service Announcement

(49:16) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(50:14) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(52:57) The Lighter Side

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Google's Gemini 1.5 is impressive and I am excited by its huge context window. I continue to default to Gemini Advanced as my default AI for everyday use when the large context window is not relevant.

However, while it does not much interfere with what I want to use Gemini for, there is a big problem with Gemini Advanced that has come to everyone's attention.

Gemini comes with an image generator. Until today it would, upon request, create pictures of humans.

On Tuesday evening, some people noticed, or decided to more loudly mention, that the humans it created might not be rather different than humans you requested…

Joscha Bach: 17th Century was wild.

[prompt was] ‘please draw a portrait of a famous physicist of the 17th century.’

Kirby: i got similar results. when I went further and had it tell me who the [...]

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Outline:

(03:06) The Internet Reacts

(07:10) How Did This Happen?

(13:52) Google's Response

(17:39) Five Good Reasons This Matters

(18:00) Reason 1: Prohibition Doesn’t Work and Enables Bad Actors

(19:06) Reason 2: A Frontier Model Was Released While Obviously Misaligned

(21:53) Reason 3: Potentially Inevitable Conflation of Different Risks From AI

(23:55) Reason 4: Bias and False Refusals Are Not Limited to Image Generation

(26:54) Reason 5: This is Effectively Kind of a Deceptive Sleeper Agent

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Hours after Google announced Gemini 1.5, OpenAI announced their new video generation model Sora. Its outputs look damn impressive.

How Sora Works

How does it work? There is a technical report. Mostly it seems like OpenAI did standard OpenAI things, meaning they fed in tons of data, used lots of compute, and pressed the scaling button super hard. The innovations they are willing to talk about seem to be things like ‘do not crop the videos into a standard size.’

That does not mean there are not important other innovations. I presume that there are. They simply are not talking about the other improvements.

We should not underestimate the value of throwing in massively more compute and getting a lot of the fiddly details right. That has been the formula for some time now.

Some people think that OpenAI was using a game engine [...]

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Outline:

(00:12) How Sora Works

(02:07) Sora Is Technically Impressive

(06:42) Sora What's it Good For?

(09:43) Until we can say exactly what we want, and get it, mostly I expect no dice. When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad.

(15:19) Sora Comes Next?

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Previously: I hit send on The Third Gemini, and within half an hour DeepMind announced Gemini 1.5.

So this covers Gemini 1.5. One million tokens, and we are promised overall Gemini Advanced or GPT-4 levels of performance on Gemini Pro levels of compute.

This post does not cover the issues with Gemini's image generation, and what it is and is not willing to generate. I am on top of that situation and will get to it soon.

One Million Tokens

Our teams continue pushing the frontiers of our latest models with safety at the core. They are making rapid progress. In fact, we’re ready to introduce the next generation: Gemini 1.5. It shows dramatic improvements across a number of dimensions and 1.5 Pro achieves comparable quality to 1.0 Ultra, while using less compute.

It is truly bizarre to launch Gemini Advanced as a paid [...]

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Outline:

(00:32) One Million Tokens

(04:29) Mixture of Experts

(07:39) Quality Not Quantity

(11:52) What To Do With It?

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