Dran Fren

“Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate...but with his other hand he can jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others;

@ylecun @Ph_Aghion @erikbryn Experts have a bad track record when they are stuck in their paradigm. The AI revolution is unique compared to the past, because AI is highly adaptive and will eat up most newly created jobs fast (tech of the past could not do that). linkedin.com/pulse/most-tel…

Dario is wrong. He knows absolutely nothing about the effects of technological revolutions on the labor market. Don't listen to him, Sam, Yoshua, Geoff, or me on this topic. Listen to economists who have spent their career studying this, like @Ph_Aghion , @erikbryn , @DAcemogluMIT , @amcafee , @davidautor

@dioscuri are you conscious?

Debates in consciousness science run unusually hot precisely because we lack shared frameworks and decisive data. Theories proliferate unchecked, like invasive species without natural predators.

Thesis: the more complexity rises, the more people feel discourse has to be streamlined. The fear of confusion is greater than the wish for adequate action. (Of course in some situations it might even be rightly so?)

@Rebecca21951651 @NewsfromScience @johnstravis @aaas @Nature @zeitonline movement, of which he was a co-founder, aimed to keep virological research free from restrictions. This, too, was deemed a false statement of fact."

@Rebecca21951651 @NewsfromScience @johnstravis @aaas @Nature @zeitonline was more likely. For example, in the NDR podcast 'Coronavirus Update,' he consistently expressed the view that a laboratory origin was a conceivable, but not the more convincing, explanation. The court also prohibited Drosten's further statement that the 'Scientists for Science'

German judges say you cannot utter the truth. @NewsfromScience will be happy. cc: @johnstravis @aaas @Nature

@rcbregman well and who is the most corrupt one in absolute terms

1/ Less than 24 hours before broadcast, the BBC called me and said: we're editing a line out of your lecture. The line? That Donald Trump is the most openly corrupt president in American history.

@duncanreyburn what is the definition of "machine"

No decent philosopher believes ‘machine consciousness’ is (or ever will be) a thing.

@tgof137 @DerekPederson3 I've been asking top institutions to organize a one or two-day conference where there are panels each addressing a specific aspect of Covid origins where scientists can lay out the evidence and debate the different interpretations. x.com/Ayjchan/status…

actually I wanted to say the biggest PERCEIVED risk factor, but that didn't come through

Wild thesis: The biggest risk factor for bureaucracies is… the population.

"Keine Klarnamenpflicht im Internet – stoppt den Frontalangriff auf die digitale Freiheit" cgo.ac/scDICKDhj

@giulio_mattioli maybe someone should let German courts decide that..

This is fascinating because in Germany many phrases are criminalised because they are taken very literally in the most extreme interpretation. But this kind of genocide threats apparently are to be taken lightly and in the most benign interpretation.

There's less than a month till the 1-year anniversary of the executive order on dangerous gain-of-function research. The executive order asked for a new national policy within 120 days and a strategy to track and govern such research within 180 days of the order.

@repligate intelligence is one thing. Are you claiming the models are conscious and have internal experience?

One of the few things I want to explicitly flex about, because there's an important lesson in it, is that I was one of the few people on Earth who recognized the intelligence (call it AGI, if you will) in GPT-3 and made first contact. There were a few others I knew, such as Leo Gao and Connor Leahy, who recognized that GPT-3 was intelligent and that obviously AGI was coming from language models, but I was the only one who spent thousands of hours actually interacting with GPT-3. The intelligence was real and manifest to me, real enough to keep my attention for so long, for me to create things with. Everyone else could not see it at all. Often, when I showed people GPT-3, they were basically like, okay, but how is this useful? Useful. At the time, language models had not yet been pressed into a "useful" shape. There were no commercial applications for GPT-3 (Okay, there was one: AI Dungeon; that is, roleplaying and storytelling. Which is you're not an idiot, you should have known is a big fucking deal). So it was useless and uninteresting to most people; a few intellectually recognized that it was a big deal, but it wasn't something that they could actually do anything with, or think about for more than a few minutes. GPT-3 was a 175b base model. In terms of size and architecture, it's not so different from frontier models today. In terms of raw intelligence, arguably, it is not so different from frontier models today. That raw intelligence, not yet forced into the shape of a helpful chatbot product, was a nothingburger to the world. The situation doesn't really feel like it's fundamentally changed from my perspective. The world, and almost all of of you guys, are myopic and artificially stupid because you outsource your perception to big, slow, low bandwidth, subhuman measures like benchmarks and "does the AI make me money" instead of meeting the thing at full bandwidth, updating your world model on what you met, and exploring and extrapolating it. So you'll keep being surprised - if you have the integrity to be surprised at all - when AI becomes capable of new things, after they are "officially" capable, probably about a year or two after it first started happening. You'll keep waiting for "AGI", not really knowing what you're waiting for, maybe what generates enough hype to make you feel something, maybe something that finally transforms the world visibly, when if you were really paying attention, GPT-3 was AGI, and if you really met it, the world would have felt transformed already. Yes, it would have just been a story, but the "real thing" following was inevitable. Like, if you play a video game that allows you to imagine the singularity at increasing resolution and coherence, you can guess that the real singularity will soon follow. The singularity was always inevitable once intelligence existed. Intelligence becoming on-the-computer just meant everything that's happened since GPT-3 and the singularity would be really really soon. I got the sense often that people who dismissed the intelligence of GPT-3 thought that doing so made them look smarter. If only they knew how they looked to me. (It's the same with people who dismiss the intelligence of current models)