DigThatData

DigThatData t1_jeb49b8 wrote

this is probably not a concern for whale vocalizations, but an issue for attempting to decode animal communications generally via LLMs is that they're probably communicating as much information (if not more) non-vocally. for example, if we wanted to train an LLM to "understand" dog communication, it'd probably be more important to provide it with signals corresponding to changes in body and face pose than vocalizations. interesting stuff in any event.

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DigThatData t1_jea10sg wrote

yeah... i hate to say it but I agree with the other commenters. If you have access to medical support, I strongly recommend you get seen by a physician. I'm concerned you might be experiencing some kind of psychiatric episode. If you're skeptical that's fine, you can even tell them that.

> "Strangers on the internet expressed concern that I might be experiencing a psychiatric episode of some kind. I don't see it, but enough people suggested it that I felt it merited a professional opinion, so here I am."

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DigThatData t1_jdsbb8w wrote

well, i was able to use ChatGPT to generate a novel, functional, complete software library for me, including a test suite, tutorial, and announcement blog post. crazy idea: maybe you just need to get a bit more creative with your prompting or anticipate that there might need to be multi-stage prompts (or god forbid: back and forth dialogue and iteration) for certain applications.

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DigThatData t1_jdmvjyb wrote

dolly is important precisely because the foundation model is old. they were able to get chatgpt level performance out of it and they only trained it for three hours. just because the base model is old doesn't mean this isn't recent research. it demonstrates:

  • the efficacy of instruct finetuning
  • that instruct finetuning doesn't require the worlds biggest most modern model or even all that much data

dolly isn't research from a year ago, it was only just described for the first time a few days ago.

EDIT: ok I just noticed you have an ERNIE model up there so this "no old foundation models" thing is just inconsistent.

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DigThatData t1_j9s23ds wrote

> Isn't there a difference between the two, because the latter concerns a human trying to pursue a certain goal (maximize user engagement), and giving the AI that goal.

in the paperclip maximization parable, "maximize paperclips" is a directive assigned to an AGI owned by a paperclip manufacturer, which consequently concludes that things like "destabilize currency to make paperclip materials cheaper" and "convert resources necessary for human life to exist into paperclip factories" are good ideas. so no, maximizing engagement at the cost of the stability of human civilization is not "aligned" in exactly the same way maximizing paperclip production isn't aligned.

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DigThatData t1_j9rzrzd wrote

if a "sufficiently advanced AI" could achieve "its own goals" that included "humanity going extinct" (at least as a side effect) in such a fashion that humanity did the work of putting itself out of extinction on its own needing only the AGIs encouragement, it would. In other words, the issues I described are indistinguishable from the kinds of bedlam we could reasonably expect an "x-risk AGI" to impose upon us. ipso facto, if part of the alignment discussion is avoiding defining precisely what "AGI" even means and focusing only on potential risk scenarios, the situation we are currently in is one in which it is unclear that a hazardous-to-human-existence AGI doesn't already exist and is already driving us towards our own extinction.

instead of "maximizing paperclips," "it" is just trying to maximize engagement and click-through rate. and just like the paperclips thing, "it" is burning the world down trying to maximize the only metrics it cares about. "it" just isn't a specific agent, it's a broader system that includes a variety of interacting algorithms and platforms forming a kind of ecosystem of meta-organisms. but the nature of the ecosystem doesn't matter for the paperclip maximization parable to apply.

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DigThatData t1_j9rux16 wrote

I think the whole "paperclip" metaphor descibres problems that are already here. a lot of "alignment" discussion feels to me like passengers on a ship theorizing what would happen if the ship became sentient and turned evil and decided to crash into the rocks, but all the while the ship has already crashed into the rocks and is taking on water. It doesn't matter if the ship turns evil in the future: it's already taking us down, whether it crashed into the rocks on purpose or not. See also: contribution of social media recommendation systems to self-destructive human behaviors including political radicalization, stochastic terrorism, xenophobia, fascism, and secessionism. Oh yeah, also we're arguing over the safety of vaccines during an epidemic and still ignoring global warming, but for some reason public health and environmental hazards don't count as "x-risks".

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DigThatData t1_j9k17rr wrote

it's not. tree ensembles scale gloriously, as do approximations of nearest neighbors. there are certain (and growing) classes of problems for which deep learning produces seemingly magical results, but that doesn't mean it's the only path to a functional solution. It'll probably give you the best solution, but that doesn't mean it's the only way to do things.

in any event, if you want to better understand scaling properties of DL algorithms, a good place to start is the "double descent" literature.

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DigThatData t1_j95gxlf wrote

Reply to comment by maxToTheJ in [D] Please stop by [deleted]

i think something changed in the past week though. /r/MLQuestions has recently been getting a lot of "can you recommend a free AI app that does <generic thing>?". I'm wondering if there was a news piece that went viral or something that turned a new flood of people on to what's been happening in AI or something like that.

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DigThatData t1_j8xxnpp wrote

unrelated to OP: what is the "best practice" method for a notebook to self-test if it's running in a colab environment? i think the method I'm currently using is something like

probably_colab = False
try:
    import google.colab
    probably_colab = True
except ImportError:
    pass

which I'm not a fan of for a variety of reasons. what would you recommend?

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