Never denied this. I did not intentionally hide this. I will say your statement did not mention that one of the signers is the premier expert. The person who reignited interest in neural networks, Geoffrey Hinton.
It's not "some" experts. It's many many preeminent experts. It's more accurate to say, not "all" experts. That is the more fair characterization.
> People drive cars every day and can't explain the first thing about the technology. I think you grossly overestimate how deeply people understand technology they use every day. Just ask a cell phone user how cellular communications works.
Nobody fully understands these networks. Not even the people who build them. The "experts" admit this. What everyone understands is that these networks hallucinate. The hallucinations aren't deep things to understand, it's on the level of driving cars.
You misunderstand how trivial it is to use this technology and figure out the limitations just like you figure out how to drive a car. We are all talking about user level phenomenons. You don't even have to describe what a neuron is or what backpropagation is to understand "hallucinations". Hallucinations aren't technical level concepts.
>ChatGPT is already plugged into the Bing search engine, and into Windows, MS Office, and other products. New integrations and plugins get announced every day.
Yeah pretty much everyone I know has used LLMs in some form or manner. And none of them were fooled. I'm sure the same goes for the people you know. Yeah you characterized how popular LLMs are. What you failed to characterize is the proportion of people who are using the tool and getting fooled by it.
It is fact that the tool is popular and getting more popular but this says nothing about the topic at hand. How many people are getting fooled by chatGPT? Your just speculating the outcome based on how popular the tool is. Speculations prove nothing.
I'm still waiting for that one guy to come to this thread and tell everyone chatGPT is sentient. If one guy claims this then you're right I completely misunderstood how dumb people can get.
I mean don't even focus on this thread under my post. Let's focus on the entire thread under the main article. Is there even one person who completely thinks the AI is sentient?
Find one guy on this entire thread who is honestly fooled by chatGPT and I'll concede to your argument. If you can't find even one guy... Then if you're rational you'll see that my argument is true: nearly no one is fooled by chatGPT.
This is literally a data driven conclusion. Let's use some amateur science to get to the bottom of this.
That's repeated a lot but it's not entirely accurate. No one can explain how an LLM gives the answers it does (not even the LLM). LLMs have a vast search space of tokens and use probabilities to make their responses non-deterministic. But the people who build and train LLMs do know how they work -- obviously since quite a few people know how to make one. By analogy, if I give a pile of Legos to a six-year-old I don't know what they will make, though I do know the constraints and limits (imposed by how Legos work and what was in the pile). It's not correct to say "I don't understand how Legos work" when I really mean "I can't predict what a six-year-old will make from a pile of Legos."
> You misunderstand how trivial it is to use this technology and figure out the limitations ... Hallucinations aren't technical level concepts.
I get that. But when I have discussed ChatGPT hallucinations, with examples from my own chats, I'm surprised when people don't even recognize the hallucinations until I point them out. Anecdotally people seem to defend the "AI" by accusing me of misleading it, or giving unclear information. They have anthropomorphized and then want to impose human notions of fairness, give the "AI" the benefit of the doubt even when they know that a person would have not made the mistake, or answered "I don't know" rather than confidently make stuff up like ChatGPT will. I think people don't believe computers can lie or make a mistake -- they imagine an intelligence like Mr. Spock at the other end, not a stochastic parrot.
I got ChatGPT to tell me -- in its confident and authoritative tone -- that no even number is also evenly divisible by 3. When I gave it contradictory examples -- 6, 12, 24 -- it then apologized but maintained that no even number was divisible by both 3 and 5 (um, 30, 60, 90...). I was just trying to get it to solve FizzBuzz with some variations. I could feed my younger children that same misinformation and they wouldn't question it. I could tell my parents that their Alexa listens to everything they say and records it forever on a big disk on a satellite in orbit, and they would believe me. Elon Musk can tell the world Teslas can drive from SF to New York without human intervention and get a whole TEDTalk audience and media "experts" to believe him. P.T. Barnum had some quips about that tendency.
> Find one guy on this entire thread who is honestly fooled by chatGPT and I'll concede to your argument. If you can't find even one guy... Then if you're rational you'll see that my argument is true: nearly no one is fooled by chatGPT.
That's not proof of anything. Maybe no one will chime in on this thread but you can easily find posts and comments on HN with people claiming LLMs are sentient. A Google researcher said that publicly (he got fired), and much discussion took place here. If I was more interested in the topic I could poll people, but I'm pretty sure I would find that quite a lot of people think current "AI" (LLMs like ChatGPT) are sentient, or they will be in the next couple of years. And then I could ask them what "sentient" means and never stop face-palming.
Uh I literally said no one fully understands these networks. And you go on to say that my statement isn't accurate then confirm my statement by saying:
>No one can explain how an LLM gives the answers it does (not even the LLM).
I mean this is exactly what I said. We can't explain it... Because we don't fully understand it..
>But the people who build and train LLMs do know how they work -
No they actually don't. The surprising accurate responses of chatGPT were actually not predicted. Many experts literally do not fully understand what's going on. This is categorically true and I can quote them if you need it, but this is easily googable.
>I could feed my younger children that same misinformation and they wouldn't question it. I could tell my parents that their Alexa listens to everything they say and records it forever on a big disk on a satellite in orbit, and they would believe me.
>A Google researcher said that publicly (he got fired), and much discussion took place here. If I was more interested in the topic I could poll people,
I already polled people and did a Google search of HN.
The researcher who got fired by Google is an interesting case. The reason is because he's not referring to chatGPT or gpt3.5 or bard. In subsequent interviews he has said that he's referring to lambda. An internal google LLM that hasn't been released yet. He said that one is "awake" and specified directly that it's different from the LLMs the public currently plays with.
Nobody can confirm or deny that statement because we can't directly interact with the AI as Google has it locked down pretty hard.
You don't need expertise building LLMs to interpret the hype and see who has financial interests in promoting non-existent technology, calling it AI and allowing people to get excited and/or scared because the same terminology gets used in 2001 and Terminator. How LLMs actually work has very little to do with how people perceive them, or how they might affect daily life, to say nothing of how they might affect share prices.
> it's the actually the experts who started the extinction AI petition
Some experts, and lots of people who have not themselves built LLMs, such as Elon Musk, Yuval Noah Harari, Steve Wozniak. Look at the foundation behind the letter and show me all the AI experts who know how to build LLMs [1]. Alan Alda? Morgan Freeman? Sure, some people with respected names in the field did sign, as did some VCs and executives most likely trying to buy time for their own products.
Some experts who didn't sign the letter: Stephen Wolfram [2], Juergen "father of AI" Schmidhuber [3], Rodney Brooks [4], Donald Knuth [5]. I think I can safely state that no consensus exists among the "experts" who do know how LLMs work, and how other things that got called "AI" in the past work. You can find just as much skepticism as FUD. Rather conveniently the AI hype-train makes forgetting about Web3, the metaverse, and crypto easier, even if you see the same names come up.
> Anyway an hour with chatGPT and reading some articles on LLMs is enough for anyone to know the boundaries of LLMs.
No, that isn't enough time, not even for someone who knows a little about what they're looking at.
You seem to make two inconsistent rebuttals: Most people can quickly figure out the limitations of LLMs like ChatGPT, and critics who haven't made LLMs don't know what they're talking about and should shut up. As for the first claim, I'll point out that people have used microwave ovens for five decades and way too many everyday users associate microwave ovens with radioactivity. People drive cars every day and can't explain the first thing about the technology. I think you grossly overestimate how deeply people understand technology they use every day. Just ask a cell phone user how cellular communications works.
Dr. Johnson punctured the second argument a long time ago: "You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables."
> Mind you, there will be stories of people that are fooled but those people are obviously a huge minority of chatGPT users.
ChatGPT is already plugged into the Bing search engine, and into Windows, MS Office, and other products. New integrations and plugins get announced every day. The technology is rolling out behind other products and applications, and very soon (if not already) regular users will interact with ChatGPT or something like it without knowing that. They may spend hours with a chatbot and not interpret bad information as a hallucination or error. As so many experts have already talked about, the danger from what we're calling AI this decade isn't SkyNet or getting turned into paperclips, but people fooling themselves, or getting deliberately tricked and scammed, by a technology that they don't understand and have attached sci-fi capabilities to. People with financial interests like Sam Altman out there promoting fantasies of AI threatening humanity perpetuate the ignorance by pretending we're on the edge of the sci-fi dystopia, when actually LLMs are nowhere near AGI, and Altman knows that. "Look over there, watch out for the killer robots while I pick your pocket." Ker-ching.
[1] https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experime...
[2] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-...
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hessiejones/2023/05/23/juergen-...
[4] https://spectrum.ieee.org/gpt-4-calm-down
[5] https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/chatGPT20.txt