Thursday, November 23, 2023

Learning

I don't worry about Skynet being activated. I do worry about "what if we took what computers were good at - precision - and took that away and decided that made them better." But this is funny.
Given vast computing resources, the new model was able to solve certain mathematical problems, the person said on condition of anonymity because the individual was not authorized to speak on behalf of the company. Though only performing math on the level of grade-school students, acing such tests made researchers very optimistic about Q*’s future success, the source said.
They taught their large language models how to do sums.

I think this highlights what a lot of people don't undertand: the spicy autocomplete can tell you that 2+2=4 and then in the next sentence tell you 3+3=7 because all it is doing is imitating text it read on the internet. Now it's imitating text plus someone taught it the times tables.

Can probably fuck up the world this way, just not in the way they think. More like unleashing malware on the world than creating an ominpotent supervillain.  Just GIGO at world scale.