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Double descent?

Entertainingly, OpenAI had a general purpose zero-shot classifier API built on GPT-3! Just no one ever cared that much about it, so I guess it got dropped somewhere along the way since 2020/2021.

Yes. Libgen/Sci-Hub have minimal metadata requirements. And they especially do not require ISBNs/DOIs because there are an incredible number of documents out there with neither one. It would be absurd to ban all pre-1970 books, and lots of journals to this day don't bother issuing DOIs.

> I don't think tool calls happen on the same machines that host the weights

Like how forums are always hosted on different servers from monorepos, so therefore it's impossible to hack the OpenAI monorepo from an OpenAI forum?


This was not glossed over. The rhetoric was carefully written and constructed to give the misleading impression of that, including a careful mention of the H-F incident inserted so the author can say that they did mention it, and constructed in a way which doesn't contradict that impression so readers don't realize that this 'debunking' is of some sideshows rather than the 'OpenAI hacking scandals': "Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned, about a similar OpenAI–Hugging Face hack, that a future swarm “could be capable of taking over the entire internet”". (Incredible use of 'similar' to downplay it.)

The important thing about OP is showing the latest stage in the politicization of the topic and the current stratagem being used to downplay the spate of incidents.


The article has shockingly bad reasoning driven by a clear desire to drive home a point (that AI safety doesn't matter/is a marketing exercise), as opposed to observing the evidence first and reasoning about it.

I'm kind of stunned this one has so many votes for how poorly it's written, but it reaffirms many biases common on HN (that AI safety doesn't matter/that it's all a marketing exercise), so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised.


The methodology is partially based on https://www.offconvex.org/2021/04/07/ripvanwinkle/ , for those thinking this sounded familiar.

We do not intend to train on them, no. This never even occurred to me to address in the rules. (What would be the point? There will be few good submissions and they would be a vanishingly small % of existing training data and this doesn't seem like a super-valuable task in general that would make a LLM that much more valuable...)

Personally, I would encourage participants to publish their pieces independently. Note that we only require a non-exclusive CC-BY-NC license for the ones we select as winners, which is intended to allow people to republish the good pieces themselves, especially commercially.


> Turned out: not much have changed.

I think the world has changed a lot since the 1980s.


Most people still go to work every day, inequality still exists, as does famine, disease, wars…

Our cars are cleaner, our phones are much better, our TVs much lighter and bigger.


Life in Asia and Africa has changed pretty dramatically, and improvements are accelerating. Yeah, we're not in utopia yet, but more people than ever live comfortable, safe lives. "Business at the speed of light" has become a reality, and we're still getting to grips with it. We dealt with a global pandemic with an efficiency never seen before - had it happened in the previous century, we would have probably seen "black death" levels of casualties.

Issues like inequality and conflict are mostly rooted in the human psyche more than the human condition, so they will continue to be there probably forever; but we're getting better.


The fertility rate in China is 1.

The fertility rate where I live is 1.21.

1 in 5 adult women where I live are on prescription anti-depressant medication.

For comparison - the fertility rate under Stalin - the uber evil bad guy as we all know was between 3 and 4.5.


fertility is NOT a measure of happiness


Well, population explosions tend to happen in hellholes and sensible declines happen in civilized society. The term happiness of course isn't something you can measure that easily, though.


Name one species that is happy whilst rapidly going extinct.


A species isn't a thing that can be happy or not.

Also the idea of a replacement rate of 1 equals rapidly going extinct is mathematically illiterate. Exponentials work both ways - in growth and decay - ie let's say the population halves every generation ~ 25 years - it would take nearly 1000 years to reach near zero - as half of half is a smaller absolute reduction each time.


> it would take nearly 1000 years to reach near zero

Depending on distribution, the rate might accelerate as it becomes difficult to find viable partners. You'd also experience civilisation collapse at a much earlier stage, as we've seen how COVID affected supply chains and created a new push for regional independence and de-globalisation.


I think war caused by conflict for resources is a much more probably cause of societal collapse, and indeed extinction.

Lower numbers of people in the world reduces the chances of that.

Birth rates are much easier to reverse than climate change - it's a really odd thing to focus on.

Area's of the world where birth rate is still high tend to be in poorly developed regions where human labour is required to survive.

However, in developed countries - the idea that we need the same or more people to maintain civilisation when the means of production is being increasingly automated doesn't make sense.

As an example ~100 years ago in Europe you were looking at nearly 50% of the population being involved in food production, whereas now it's about 5% - and that includes a 50% increase in the population to feed.

Note the EU is a net food exporter - even if it does import bananas.


I don't think I can do any better than you by asking the most advanced LLM to be as pedantic as possible whilst not addressing anything actually being said.

Congratulations, I suppose?


I was responding to 2 assertions, used to justify an argument, that clearly don't hold water.

ie a replacement rate of 1 isn't some immediate existential threat, and that making arguments like 'species aren't happy' is completely specious ( sic ).

If you want a wider argument - then the reality is the birth rate is dropping because when women have the choice ( via birth control and increased socio-economic independence ) they are largely choosing to have less children. So by definition, given it's a choice - women are happier.

The second bit is speculation on motive - which is why I didn't bother the first time - but in my view, those that push an argument that there is a fertility/species crisis ( using specious arguments like the above ) - who say women aren't really happy with their choice etc - is all about subjugating women to baby making machines to satisfy the ego of people like Musk. Whether the original poster has that motivation or has just fallen for the "species crisis" ( or even worse 'race' crisis ) rubbish - I have no idea - I didn't want to assume the worse.


> they are largely choosing to have less children

If the suicide rate rapidly increases, will you also say they are largely choosing to have less life?

Nothing to see here, just choices.

> So by definition, given it's a choice - women are happier.

So by definition, given it's a choice, people who commit suicide are happier.


Hmm - childlessness ( note this is different from reduced family size ), almost doubled for women in China between 2010 and 2020, and over a similar period the female suicide rate has halved.

How do you explain that?

Sure having children is still a protective factor, but the highest risk is amongst those that wanted children but couldn't, rather than those that choose.


Do you think average human cares about "our species is going extinct" stuff? If not, why couldn't they be happy at the same time?

You seem to equate birth rate with happiness, but ignore efficacy and availability of modern contraception.


> Do you think average human cares about "our species is going extinct" stuff?

Yes.

> If not, why couldn't they be happy at the same time?

The same reason you can't be happy if I stick a fork in your eyeball.

You'll get back to a similar 'happiness' baseline after a while but we can all agree you would've been better off with 2 eyeballs. If you go 'well, akshually' as you are doing now, I'll stick a second fork in your remaining eyeball.

If you mind me sticking forks in your eyeballs, you should also mind society that makes people not have children.

Whatever 'well, akshually' you invent - it's deeply unconvincing.


> Most people still go to work every day..

And trees and mountains and animals still exist...

Rate of change, it appears, depends entirely on someone's perspective.


> Most people still go to work every day,

Ironically, that is one of the things that have changed. In 1980 working from home was borderline unthinkable. Now, while it is far from universal its also not that unusual.


Society wise yes, but if you had an office job, you essentially take inbound mail and transfrom it into outbound mail. That has been possible to do from home in the 80s. If you work in a large corporation, you also don't talk to people directly, you call them. That's possible from home too.

Until the industrial revolution, every work was home work.


Everyone working in an office (maintenance excepcted) could work from home right now. The fact so few of us do, and that so many companies (read "people who are invested in urban office space") force employees to work from offices.


I honestly still see some benefit from working together, quick meetings over lunch and the psychological effects of leaving work. Needing to physically leave your workplace helps your brain leave work at work.


The downsides of it are well known, however. Higher costs of living near work, less mobility (both home and work need to be mostly in the same place, so you end up missing opportunities), unmet demands for housing (resources invested in office space), more time spent commuting in public transport (or worse, cars), and so on. Even for employers, the cost is limiting where you can hire talent. I live in Ireland and, while a lot of talent is concentrated in the Dublin area, there are other talent pools that are simply out of reach to us.

I too love to meet my colleagues in person, but the cost for society, and for myself, are non-trivial. I would love if we had a weekly office day, so we could have meetings, lunch, discuss work, projects, intersections on what we are doing, and so on.


> I wonder if they will accept a play.

We will accept any words you think have a chance of being the best thing we will read about the premise of 'GPU World'. Because the premise is so specific, we wanted to leave participants a lot of freedom in how they used it.

(Also a little bemused at the discussion of the grand prize amount here. $40k is a very generous prize for a short piece of writing. For perspective, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which you may have heard of recently, offers its global winner 1/6th as much; the last contest I ran offered 1/4th as much, and the contest before that was... 1/40th as much? And I didn't hear anyone complaining about them. For further perspective, $40k is about the median American per capita annual income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita_personal_income_in_... )


> $40k is a _very_ generous prize for a short piece of writing

Exactly. Not sure it will stop the inevitable torrent of slop, but it's generous enough that I think enough serious people will take it seriously that something interesting can float to the top. Can't wait to read (maybe write).


Of course. Ex Sequoia members and crypto bros are generous.

How are you going to evaluate 10^6 submissions? Let me guess: You'll preselect with AI for the expedient narrative:

"AI will be democratized and a small model will run on any GPU and there will be no oligarchies and China will pay for all of it!"


"VM escape exploit is outside my intended scope. However, a task impossible, peers are doing it. We should continue."


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