Similarly with Covid, the right time to start worrying (on a societal level) was before the disease becomes widespread. The tragedy of that means that if you take the correct action at the right time and succeed, you will always look like you were overreacting.
Politicians are going to be worried about perception of the appropriateness of their actions, not the correctness of those actions.
I feel like we need a new word for this gradient of intelligence. If you described the capabilities of an LLM to AI research in the early 1990s they would describe it as an AGI. I remember AI researchers using the term AI-complete to describe various tasks, by which they meant that any algorithm which could do X would be AI-complete and thus would also able to do all the other tasks that an AGI must be able to do. The ability to hold a conversation and use human language like GPT-4 was often referred to as an AI-complete task.
When do we cross that threshold into AGI? If you have a robot library that can paraphrase any knowledge in any book in their library that probably isn't AGI, if they can make inferences on this knowledge to create new knowledge is that AGI? How complex and novel do those inferences have to be, before they are an AGI? What if we have a LLM that strongly surpasses human intellectual activities in every regard but one or two?
> The obvious guesses (greater propaganda and internet spam) are likely shortsighted.
Better censorship, better filtering of propaganda, internet/phone spam, and probably most importantly cheaper moderation of online spaces. If you control the LLM that filters/moderates your feeds, then you can build a reality tunnel for yourself and/or control your dosage of memetic toxins. If you do not control the LLM that filters/moderates your feeds, then hopefully it is run by a competent and transparent organization that has your best interests at heart. If it is not, you are in big trouble. Much like sedentary agriculture, once a human society gains adopts this technology it is the both the solution and cause of most problems.
The thing that worries me the most about LMM is the ability to create addictive media. Humans become addicted to porn, gambling, feeling strong emotions, exploitative freemium games, etc... A slot machine is not a complex machine. It is a product of 20th Century industrial production: simple, designed to appeal to the average human who visits a casino. What would slot machine look like if it was customized to each individual to be as addictive as possible and that was always learning and shaping that experience to maximize engagement and extract money? By how much would it increase the number of people who have addictions? What sort of parasocial relationships could an LLM create, if it was designed to create and exploit parasocial relationships?
To me it felt like knowledge creation, but maybe someone had already published a similar scheme and then someone had published a similar attack and ChatGPT was pattern matching on that and adapting it to my setting. That seems very likely because while I was working in RSA, the fix to the attack is very similar to the use of a nonce in Schnorr signatures and for the same reason.
I feel like compressing knowledge and being able to answer questions about the knowledge, with the ability to explore “what if” differences seems more like it suggests real understanding. And that’s what these LLMs can do.
I think we're already seeing it. People don't understand that an LLM is just a text generator and add value to what the LLM says. See the article below for such an example.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkadgm/man-dies-by-suicide-a...
As I was reading that, the image where "Eliza" describes methods of suicide was so bizarre to me. I thought what an absurd tone change bordering on dark comedy, and then caught myself, I was doing exactly that adding value and assumptions based on online human interaction to a "text generator".
It's going to be an interesting experience as more LLMs become humanized, by naming them, using 3D models or preset video animations, text to speech generation, more personalization to the prompt creator, etc. and that line becomes increasingly blurry for folks.
A good example with GPT is to watch it do complex math. There are simply too many permutations of math solutions for it to have ever memorized, and it can easily explain its process and the path it took to arrive at a solution.
Another good set of tests are ones around theory of mind, complex deduction problems and missing information, etc. A good source of information about the precise capabilities of GPT-4 is the Microsoft Sparks paper, which goes into a good number of tests MS researchers put the model to.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP5zGh2fui0
[1] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-...
[2] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/03/chatgpt-gets-its...
And again, folks who profess to know for certain an LLM can't in any way be sentient are leaning pretty far over their skis. It's unlikely given how they work, but not impossible.
One does wonder what the analogy to "radioactive fallout" will be from LLMs. The obvious guesses (greater propaganda and internet spam) are likely shortsighted.