Joe @twitskeptic@qoto.org
Unprofessional data wrangler and Mastodon’s official fact checker. Older and crankier than you are.
Joined Nov 2022
@paulgowder Waiting for the inevitable first personal injury lawsuit against OpenAI caused by a credulous interpretation of a ChatGPT hallucination.
@katestarbird I don't think it's a coincidence that I'm a seeing a lot of media messages about conspiracy theories. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-24/walkable-cities-are-new-theme-of-conspiracy-theories-local-rage
@ct_bergstrom I can't stop watching it. It's like the Blue Angels without the noise and pollution.
@Riedl Someone needs to tell the JP Morgan CIO the bad news about GPT-4...
The new paper demonstrates that LLMs are terrible at autonomous planning but are helpful in improving the results of heurisitic planners.
Anyone remember Microsoft's "Sparks of AGI" paper that claimed that GPT-4 shows hints of human-like intelligence? Well, if you consider planning to be part of intelligence the authors might need to recalibrate their conclusions. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.15771.pdf
Joe
boosted
Big claim that shingles vaccine prevents dementia. This will be huge if it holds up.
Sadly for us men the effect seems to be mainly seen in women
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.23.23290253v1
Joe
boosted
Come the fall, seniors in the US will be urged to get vaccinated against #RSV, a respiratory pathogen that causes about as much illness in this group as does flu. But RSV experts worry neither seniors nor their doctors understand the risks RSV poses. https://www.statnews.com/2023/05/26/rsv-vaccines-will-older-adults-care/
@ct_bergstrom This is incredibly infuriating, but it's darkly funny that Elon is stupid enough to think that "screenshots that showcase evidence of removal” are ... evidence of removal.
And then there's the moral argument - if Elon refuses to pay rent for his SF Twitter headquarters, why should researchers pay rent in order to keep the data they cached from Twitter v1?
Joe
boosted
The loss of access to Twitter data under the new pricing plan was a dire blow to our research at the UW-CIP.
Now being forced to delete the data that dozens of people spent years collecting, curating, and studying—outrageous. It’s like burning lab notebooks, an attack on science for the sake of pure malice.
https://inews.co.uk/news/twitter-researchers-delete-data-unless-pay-2364535
@ct_bergstrom @emilymbender Quite a few of the commenters here are equating Bender's thought experiment with Searle's famous Chinese Room experiment. I think this is incorrect .
I think Bender is trying to answer the question: is it possible to derive the meaning of symbols without understanding the external representation of those symbols? Suppose you locked a newborn baby in a Skinner box (not recommended) and only allowed the child to listen to English audiobooks. Would that child learn to understand the meaning of the words it hears?
Searle's thought experiment, on the other hand, is designed to answer the question of whether is it possible to assign language understanding to a program that can accurately translate a language.
Quite a few of the commenters here are equating Bender's thought experiment with Searle's famous Chinese Room experiment. I think this is incorrect .
I think Bender is trying to answer the question: is it possible to derive the meaning of symbols without understanding the external representation of those symbols? Suppose you locked a newborn baby in a Skinner box (not recommended) and only allowed the child to listen to English audiobooks. Would that child learn to understand the meaning of the words it hears?
Searle's thought experiment, on the other hand, is designed to answer the question of whether is it possible to assign language understanding to a program that can accurately translate a language.
Joe
boosted
One of the decisive moments in my understanding of #LLMs and their limitations was when, last autumn, @emilymbender walked me through her Thai Library thought experiment.
She's now written it up as a Medium post, and you can read it here. The value comes from really pondering the question she poses, so take the time to think about it. What would YOU do in the situation she outlines?
Joe
boosted
We can expect to see a lot of this. Prof turns down a tenured job at University of Texas - to join their conservative institute no less - because of the legislature politicizing higher ed and uncertainty about tenure. Regardless of outcome, the government’s hostility to its state universities will leave a mark. https://www.texastribune.org/2023/05/23/civitas-institute-professor-tenure/?utm_source=articleshare&utm_medium=social
Joe
boosted
Lessons, living with parents with dementia: when an app on their phone spontaneously changes it's icon, it's a fucking disaster.
Some Google engineer launched a feature that got them a promotion and now my mom can't use her phone anymore. Silicon Valley is incapable of imagining a user who isn't a 27 year old white man.
"Look at our one pager on plans for dealing with imaginary unrealized dangerous superintelligent AI while ignoring any of the problems with our current products!" - OpenAI. https://openai.com/blog/governance-of-superintelligence
Joe
boosted
AI generated fake news briefly caused markets to fall, but the only thing we have to worry about regulating is the singularity, right?
https://www.insider.com/ai-generated-hoax-explosion-pentagon-viral-markets-dipped-2023-5
@mmitchell_ai Not if you care more about appearing to do something rather than doing something.
Unprofessional data wrangler and Mastodon’s official fact checker. Older and crankier than you are.
Joined Nov 2022
