The whole concept of aligning LLMs to human morals seems naive.
Think by analogy: could you align a motor by making it impossible use in vehicle that is being used to commit a crime? No. The concept barely makes sense.
It's part of the naivety that OpenAI and others are trying to foist that LLMs are intelligent in a deeply human sense. They're not - they're extremely useful, powerful text completion engines. Aligning them makes no more sense than aligning a shovel.
So... the article says that bad prompt engineering is bad and they engineered the prompt to be better and therefore prompt engineering is snake oil? I'm confused.
Unity's default save system "PlayerPrefs" saves to the registry, but I find it difficult to see why this is a good idea for anything but global settings (e.g. graphics settings). Serialization to JSON is a fairly simple alternative.
Why would this be used for player data in a production game? It's frustrating to port playerprefs data between systems for testing purposes. Is there something I'm missing?
I think the difference is that instead of deferring to an expert's opinion, you can interact with a knowledge machine which can explore the topic in and on your terms, answer your questions about it, respond to your points and concerns about those responses, etc.
It's a fundamentally different kind of knowledge generation than reading an expert opinion - it's branching, self-directed, and responsive.
This does not come with a silver lining. Imagine, by rough analogy, the effects on the ecosystem if every bug on the planet began struggling to form its exoskeleton.
We have known this is coming for decades, we have known it will be devastating to the sustainability of human civilization as it exists. Little to nothing has been done in a timely manner. And now it's here.
In my opinion there's a kind of Accelerationism going on here, where those who contribute the most to global warming also believe that they will be insulated from the effects, and therefore are the least inclined to address the issue. They're probably not wrong.
That is, those with wealth and power believe in climate change - they just don't care if monsoonal crops fail or northern India becomes uninhabitable. Denialism was always a strategy, not a serious strain of thought.
Exactly. I want an unaligned LLM to give me X potential solutions ranging in ethicality from "don't worry about it, they might be nice people" to "steal a nuke and ransom the world", and let me as an aligned human craft my prompt or chain of reasoning to weed out the useless or unethical responses, and then I can decide what is useful and suitable.
This is more or less the process that goes on inside a thinking human, is it not? I don't want to outsource ethical decision making, I want to outsource cognitive effort. By analogy, you don't rely on a bulldozer to decide not to bulldoze a populated nursing home - that's on the user, as are the consequences.
Current power structures demonstrably cannot be trusted to limit themselves to ethical solutions (Military Industrial Complex, Climate Change, etc etc etc pick your poison) - why should they be trusted to censor cognitive tools?
I agree - LLMs are a massive threat to the current state of government power.
"<LLM>, analyze the contents of this 500 page bill. Who stands to gain from this bill, and what outcomes is it likely to have for the general public? Is this bill in line with good faith evidence-based policymaking for the good of the population and the planet? What existing legal mechanisms could be used to fight the special-interest aspects of this bill?"
There is no reason this couldn't be watermarked with the individual user, though the if it detects them probabilisticly then it could be difficult to make the case to take action on inferences made.
Surely context would show that these are parodies, not impersonations.
Are these people trying to impersonate Elon Musk, or are they parodying Elon Musk on their clearly-marked "not elon musk" (due to the handle) accounts?
I disagree about the defeatism. Acceptance and "giving up" in the productive sense of not bashing your head against a wall and maybe doing something else are encouraged, but I think defeatism is part of a world vs me attitude which is exactly what he is trying to offer a counterpoint to.
He also speaks about mastery as a key element to his philosophy, and to enjoying the world, and of discipline as being the key to mastery - I think, the opposite of defeatism.
In counterpoint, the wisdom and knowledge that Watts delivers has massively helped me out of chronic mental health problems (being the middle class white target audience).
The thing I really enjoy about Watts, and what seems this article seem moot, is that lazy mysticism is half the point. He is offering a counterweight to social pressure and an 'age of anxiety' by suggesting new points of view in which desperate clawing and ladder climbing are absurd. He says very clearly not to take him too seriously, because he's not offering a new totalizing point where you should be anxious about nothing - just showing that there is an alternative, and you are poorer for not having considered it.
And if that doesn't work for you, no worries, he's a lazy mystic not a preacher.
BBC In Our Time -- such a broad range of topics, highly recommend for a browse. ~45 minutes, usually a conversation with three or so experts in a given field, hard to get depth but excellent surveys of topics that you might not have encountered.
Fall of Civilizations -- 2-4 hour histories of various societies.
History of Napoleon -- I like to have a long-form on the go, this is my current one. Adds a lot of context to modern Europe. Previously History of Rome.
Did the survey out of curiosity, seemed moderately accurate and provided some common sense strategies for improving aspects of psychological health through direct action, habits and techniques.
Not sure why AI has to be involved, it's a pretty simple set of rating scales which tailors some sensible, straightforward advice.
That being said, am I missing some more sinister or cultish angle? Is there something sinister in the click-throughs that I'm missing? I'd agree that Scientology seems to do this - start with common sense and somewhat effective therapy, transition into cult.
Think by analogy: could you align a motor by making it impossible use in vehicle that is being used to commit a crime? No. The concept barely makes sense.
It's part of the naivety that OpenAI and others are trying to foist that LLMs are intelligent in a deeply human sense. They're not - they're extremely useful, powerful text completion engines. Aligning them makes no more sense than aligning a shovel.