I'm relieved that this time around, they have provided partial reasoning traces and prompts for a small number of problems. Do they now also share data with the other model providers..
They structurally cannot understand what we are doing at the place where we hit our ceiling. Only with our highest technology (well beyond their understanding) do we have the tools to go back for them, and try to bring them along and interface better with us (re: recent work in animal communication)
The cynic in me says it wouldn't change a thing as plenty of people know the horrors factory farmed animals face and still continue to consume them anyways.
Hopefully GPT 8 will treat as a bit better than we treat the cows.
The answer is that humans are inherently only capable of local empathy, on average. We have enough empathy to cover the local tribal unit and that's about it.
My hope is that AI, while probably causing great societal turmoil in the short term, leads to such abundance that a) everyone can live a dignified existence, and b) we'll have such great alternatives to animal products that nobody will chose to consume animals anymore due to its replacement either tasting better, being cheaper, etc.
The cynic in me says we'll all just be rendered useless and disposable by AI, but I'm doing my best to look for silver linings for the sake of my own mental health.
The famous "how does it feel to be a bat" also comes to mind as a tangent consideration.
Two people can just exchange a sight, and both understand what the situation means and what each need to do to reach a common mutually beneficial ground.
Two people might exchange at length with highly technical vocabulary and still both feel deeply not understood.
Worth noting that this is an invisibly small part of the sum total of our global efforts, especially versus the much more tangible effort we put into enslaving and slaughtering them, then mangling their carcasses for our own uses as we drive more and more of them to extinction.
We simply don't care about anything beyond ourselves and even there it breaks down on closer analysis when we see how many within our species don't truly value the collective whole beyond themselves.
It's just atoms all the way down.
I'm frankly offended by this mischaracterization of human-animal relationships. So called "slaves" like horses and dogs have been dearly beloved companions for centuries and actively seek our companionship too.
The animals we raise for slaughter are often mistreated, yes, but many humans treat them with respect; billions on billions are voluntarily spent to improve their condition. Despite our own needs, many people pay higher prices for animal products that involve better treatment of animals. And they are in no risk of extinction! Much to the contrary, their domestic variants would not exist if humans didn't raise and protect them.
> We simply don't care about anything beyond ourselves
Have you seen modern westerners with their dogs??
If we end up in a future where AIs have as much concern for our welfare as we have for the welfare of the average animal (not the minuscule percentage of domesticated dogs, but the overwhelming majority of factory-farmed or simply driven to extinction), then I doubt you would consider it a “mischaracterization” to say that the whole AI thing did not work out to our advantage.
Bringing up “modern Westerners with their dogs” as a counterexample is almost self-parody.
It would be absurd to claim that all animals live some sort of charmed life due to humans.
But saying that animals (especially those most similar to us like intelligent mammals) are nothing more than "atoms" to humans is equally absurd.
"Often mistreated". Dude, they are held in tiny cages injected with hormones and what not till we kill them so we can have a big mac. It's very hard to argue we do any of this for nutrition reasons, we do it because we like the taste of burgers and roast.
I had suspected...
This is a supposition that I fear will soon be proven false.
There is nothing here today that is unpredictable or impossible to control.
It is everyone's choice to let the greed continue, to let unelected sociopaths capture and feed society to the model.
It is not acceptable to put others at risk. It can stop and it can be done the right way instead.
That is, inform the industry that those causing these risks will be prosecuted regardless of their messiah complex.
The US government must not under any circumstances allow the ai industry to form a cartel.
We can make some effort to encourage open source models and thus stop the companies from causing hysteria by hiding the model, shrouding it it mysticism and prophesying the end times. China is doing a great service to everyone by making llms available to the public.