I'm still waiting for the end of the world caused by AI as predicted by a very large number of prominent figures such as Sam Altman, Hinton, Musk, signers of the Center for AI Safety statement, Shane Legg, Martin Minsky, Eliezer Yudkowsky.
No sign yet.
On the other hand, LLMs are writing code which I can debug and eventually get to work in a real code base - and script writers everywhere are writing scripts more quickly, marketing people are writing better ad copy, employers are writing better job ads and real estate agents writing better ads for houses.
Yes, except half of the list isn't made of prominent people. Whose stock price was Eliezer boosting when he was talking about these things 15 years ago?
Nah, it's more that the masses got exposed to those ideas recently - ideas which existed long ago, in obscurity - and of course now everyone is a fucking expert in this New Thing No One Talked About Before ChatGPT.
Even the list GP gave, the specific names on it - the only thing that this particular grouping communicates is one having no first clue what they're talking about.
The oddity isn't that people lie, the oddity is that people continue to believe those who lie. They even give more trust to those who constantly lie. This is certainly odd
TBF people like Eliezer warn about the general threat of AI, not LLMs. Not just isolated AI systems either, but the societal forces that lead to it. Strong AI is the result of a civilization developing it and being dependent on (sub-components of) it and that's where the interesting/dangerous parts of the narrative begin.
If you've got untold billions being spent over many decades with a significant percentage of the world's smartest people obsessing over it you _are_ going to get something and characterizing that something in advance does not seem like a completely idiotic thing to do.
No sign yet.
On the other hand, LLMs are writing code which I can debug and eventually get to work in a real code base - and script writers everywhere are writing scripts more quickly, marketing people are writing better ad copy, employers are writing better job ads and real estate agents writing better ads for houses.