In response to my last fragments (probably the bit about us worrying if LLMs have consciousness when we when we should be wondering why they don’t have a conscience) “Metalanguage” replied : we shipped the id and forgot the superego. classic software lifecycle. I don’t know what was on their mind, but their post immediately made me think of the classic 1956 movie Forbidden Planet. Plenty of sci-fi, and other literature, have explored humans creating technology with unintended behavior, going back at least to Mary Shelly. But that movie was particularly influential on sci-fi film-making and in the heart of its story is what happens when we nurture a thinking machine. I use the term “nurture” here deliberately. We talk of building software, but building implies a degree of determinism. When we build a bridge, or a locomotive, we expect it to behave in a controlled and well-understood manner. That’s a difference in degree to how we cultivate plants in our garden, or nurture young children. One of the challenges of working with these systems is understanding what has changed in this shift from building a computational system to nurturing an inferential one, and how our processes need to change in response. We get unintended behavior with deterministic building: some bridges have collapsed, and our computational systems often have bugs. But one difference is that when we find a bug in a computational system we can usually fix it. Even if we can’t, we can usually disable a component so the bug won’t do further harm. With inferential LLMs however, there is no such simple fix or disablement, which may lead us to the fate of the Krell. (If you haven’t seen Forbidden Planet, it’s well worth watching. Yes, it shows it was made in the 1950s - with special effects, music, acting, and attitudes of that decade. But the story is solid, and its key theme is very relevant to the future we build with generative AI. Just don’t read about it in advance, it’s better to be immersed in the story without spoilers - although my memory of that experience is understandably hazy.) ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ Many people who follow me also know my friend Ola Bini, who was my colleague at Thoughtworks for many years, and was living in Ecuador working as an independent software security expert. Sadly his time in Ecuador was dogged by a bogus prosecution by the authorities there. But things seemed to have settled down, and although not allowed to leave Ecuador, Ola was able to get on with his life. Sadly that’s no longer the case as he was deported from Ecuador on Friday: According to information released by his lawyer, Bini was intercepted by a car with four people who identified themselves as immigration agents. He was then taken to an immigration office without further information or a formal order from a competent authority. There, officials told Bini that his visa had been revoked but didn’t show any supporting document. Bini’s defense filed a habeas corpus to safeguard his freedom and prevent his deportation. Yet, Ecuadorian authorities affirmed that the developer represents a threat or risk to public security and the state structure, and must leave the country. The ground for deportation is a secret report which allegedly asserts that Bini committed acts against the security of Ecuador. The defense could not access its contents. <OpenAI Withdraws 3 Math Papers

Summary

Article URL: https://github.com/openai/math/blob/main/history.md Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50003107 Points: 271 # Comments: 218

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