Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
One thing I've heard repeated about OpenAI is that "the engineers don't even know how it works!" and I'm wondering what the rebuttal to that point is.
While it is possible to write near-incomprehensible code and make an extremely complex environment, there is no reason to think there is absolutely no way to derive a theory of operation especially since any part of the whole runs on deterministic machines. And yet I've heard this repeated at least twice (one was on the Panic World pod, the other QAA).
I would believe that it's possible to build a system so complex and with so little documentation that on its surface is incomprehensible but the context in which the claim is made is not that of technical incompetence, rather the claim is often hung as bait to draw one towards thinking that maybe we could bootstrap consciousness.
It seems like magical thinking to me, and a way of saying one or both of "we didn't write shit down and therefore have no idea how the functionality works" and "we do not practically have a way to determine how a specific output was arrived at from any given prompt." The first might be in part or on a whole unlikely as the system would need to be comprehensible enough so that new features could get added and thus engineers would have to grok things enough to do that. The second is a side effect of not being able to observe all actual input at the time a prompt was made (eg training data, user context, system context could all be viewed as implicit inputs to a function whose output is, say, 2 seconds of Coke Ad slop).
Anybody else have thoughts on countering the magic "the engineers don't know how it works!"?
Another ironic point... Lesswronger's actually do care about ML interpretability (to the extent they care about real ML at all; and as a solution to making their God AI serve their whims not for anything practical). A lack of interpretability is a major problem (like irl problem, not just scifi skynet problem) in ML, you can models with racism or other bias buried in them and not be able to tell except by manually experimenting with your model with data from outside the training set. But Sam Altman has turned it from a problem into a humble brag intended to imply their LLM is so powerful and mysterious and bordering on AGI.