Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: AI #25: Inflection Point, published by Zvi on August 17, 2023 on LessWrong.
Inflection.ai is the latest AI lab whose CEO is advocating for regulation of AI. I discuss that under the Quest for Sane Regulation. Amazon and Apple are incrementally stepping up their AI game. Hotz and Yudkowsky debate whether AI is existentially risky, cover all the usual bases with mixed results but do so in good faith. We have more discussion about whether GPT-4 is creative, and whether it can reason. Mostly we get the exact opposite of the title, more of the same.
Note: My posts get made into audio form via AI, for now you can listen to them at this link. This post will likely be available there later in the day on Thursday, or perhaps Friday.
Table of Contents
Introduction.
Table of Contents.
Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. Creativity is hard to pin down.
Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility. It's the other way.
GPT-4 Real This Time. An easy way to prove ability to do something is to do it.
Go Team Yeah. If you organize the events and award points, they will red team.
Fun With Image Generation. Some have fun, others have less fun.
Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon. Doesn't have to be this soon.
They Took Our Jobs. Low estimates of economic impact, strange metaphors.
Get Involved. Anthropic is hiring for comms positions.
Introducing. Amazon AI customer review summaries, private-GPT, AI town.
In Other AI News. Apple joins the AI chorus, questions on influence functions.
Quiet Speculations. Let's play the straight line extrapolation game.
The Quest for Sane Regulation. Inflection.ai's CEO steps into the arena.
The Week in Audio. Hotz and Yudkowsky debate.
People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone. Quite a lot of people.
Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone. All wrong anyways.
The Lighter Side. A well-deserved break.
Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
Replace crowdsourcing your business ideas, get a lower variance, lower upside set of concepts with a similar average quality. Does not seem especially useful, but can get ideas flowing perhaps. The AIs can give you many ideas, but were not very creative.
The connection between semantic diversity and novelty is stronger in human solutions, suggesting differences in how novelty is created by humans and AI or detected by human evaluators.
Alice Maz lays out how they get mundane utility from GPT, by giving GPT mundane tasks and coding requests, foreign language learning is one favorite.
Fine tune Llama-2 on anyone's text and see what happens. Paul Graham version seems to be doing some work. The version trained on my blog, so far, not so much, but I haven't played around with it myself yet.
Nature paper looks at scientific discovery in the age of artificial intelligence. Looks like the standard stuff based on abstract.
McKay Wrigley: I've wanted to try coding without AI for a day to answer the question "How much faster do I actually work now?" But I haven't done it because the opportunity cost is too high. And that turns out to be a great answer.
Johnny: I used to love cross country flights because not having wi-fi let me get lots done distraction free. Now I pay for wi-fi.
GPT custom instructions now available to everyone except in the UK and EU.
Ethan Mollick writes about automating creativity, taking the side that AI is creative, pointing out that it aces all our tests of creativity. It does seem suspicious to respond that 'the creativity the AI displays is not the true creativity' and hold that all existing tests miss the point, yet to some extent I am going to do exactly that. There is a kind of creativity that is capable of being original, and there is a kind of brute-force-combinatorics thing where you try out tons of different combinations, and the AI right now is excellent at the second and terrib...