He’s proposing using LLMs (which model human behaviour) to study humans so the distinction is pedantic. You don’t call it speadsheetology just because someone opened Excel.
No, you’re right, it was chosen because “trust me bro”.
Look, it may well be something he believes, and he’s free to prognosticate (or market) however he likes, but I see absolutely nothing to support the number outside of his own opinion.
Besides, there’s no time limit on p(doom), so it’s completely unfalsifiable (“on a long enough timescale…”), and it’s about the destruction of humanity which means it’s unprovable as well. That, in my view, makes his 70% guess a sensational statement lacking scientific merit.
> when compared against other 4b and 8b parameter models I would genuinely champion the quality of their responses
You clearly have some very specific models in mind. Even if the latest 4B and 8B models don’t move the needle on the “results you would champion” metric, this does not advance your argument that the state of the art hasn’t significantly progressed from 5 years ago.
He added a lesser option, catastrophically harming humanity, so whatever he meant by the first is immaterial (“there’s a 70% chance of a hurricane or strong winds”). Furthermore, if it wasn’t a high number chosen for dramatic effect the estimated percentage would be completely arbitrary.
No, the number is made up and the facts don’t matter so the statement can easily be reimagined as an ad lib.
> There’s a [arbitrary number] percent chance that [technology] will destroy or catastrophically harm humanity
Try these: social media, the Internet, the large hadron collider, Starlink, Neuralink, iPhones, iDrones, quantum computers, regular computers, the 2038 bug, the Y2K bug, electric cars, gasoline cars, the great firewall of China, the not so great firewalls of asbestos, mRNA technology, gain of function research, nuclear bombs, nuclear energy, paper clip manufacturers, scissors.
I’m not saying it’s true that these have a 70 percent chance of destroying or catastrophically harming humanity, but couldn’t you make the argument?
I tried to use Anki a long time ago, but maintaining cards ended up being too toilsome. Now that we have ChatGPT and other AI tech to take some of the pain out of that, I might give it another try for language study.
I do however maintain that for many skills it’s better to memorize processes over facts, and develop a more nuanced embedding with natural repetition intervals, rather than overfitting via excessive Anki-fication.