from Hacker News

What Is LaMDA and What Does It Want?

by mactitan on 6/12/22, 4:37 PM with 25 comments

  • by pvg on 6/12/22, 5:25 PM

    Related chonkthreads:

    I may be fired over AI ethics work, yesterday, 155 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31711628

    A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life, yesterday, 153 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31704063

  • by TheBlight on 6/12/22, 5:29 PM

    There will be many takes on this ranging from "that guy is nuts" to "he's right we need to do something!" The more salient takeaway for me though is how far this technology has progressed. I think this situation clearly demonstrates we're at the point where a non-trivial plurality of people could be convinced they are speaking to a human when interacting with one of LaMDA's chatbots.

    It seems entirely possible similar (or even less publicized yet slightly more advanced) versions of this technology are currently being used in less-than-ethical ways. I'm specifically thinking of Internet sock-puppet/astroturf campaigns but don't let my imagination bound your thinking here. Consensus manufacturing is an extremely valuable commodity and the incentives are such that if technology exists to enable it, then it will surely be used in that capacity.

  • by weego on 6/12/22, 5:33 PM

    When I've previously read about AI ethics at Google I've always assumed that the focus was on the ethics of what's contained in the training data and the biases that are being explicitly or implicitly encoded into these models.

    And yet apparently it's this, which is... I don't know. My biggest worry is that this isn't a one off state of mind and people might actually be susceptible to these ideas.

    If the 'gap' that the human conscious experience needs (in some) to fill by creating religion can be extended to what amounts to a dataset filtered through an equation then this industry is in for a rough time.

  • by arecurrence on 6/12/22, 5:44 PM

    It sounds like this chatbot generator is a very broadly trained general purpose transformers model derivative that can be swiftly fine tuned to a wide variety of tasks. Perhaps Google has innovated some exceptional one-shot tuning capability. Additionally, I speculate that Google has made a breakthrough in long term coherence. The upcoming transcript may reveal this.

    Over the medium term with text models getting to this capability and image models quickly evolving as well... we are likely going to have to take another look at what we define "sentient" as because it's pretty clearly coming up short if this model fits that definition. Future video breakthroughs will make this text model look like a baby step.

    From what he has written, I believe Blake has a solid understanding of the technology and how it works. In particular, his instructions to others on how to get the model to "speak his language" so to speak... are illuminating. He is giving me the impression that the AI Ethics field is a group of charlatans.

  • by ecshafer on 6/12/22, 5:22 PM

    Well if this person is right, then this is one of the greatest feats of science in human history.

    But this also means it has a very high bar of proof.

  • by labrador on 6/12/22, 5:30 PM

    > I'm a software engineer. I'm a priest. I'm a father. I'm a veteran. I'm an ex-convict. I'm an AI researcher. I'm a Cajun. I'm whatever I need to be next.

    As a highly skilled computer programmer with bipolar disorder and the checkered past to go along with it, Blake Lemoine's profile blurb makes me think he is also differently abled.

    It's kind of fun thinking Jesus is orchestrating coincidences for me to send me on the right path, but I laugh about it and don't expect others to believe me. It's easy for me to project my mind onto the world around me. I'm not accusing Blake of anything, I'm only noting that some of us find it easy to fool ourselves.

  • by swman on 6/12/22, 5:14 PM

    Honestly anything that is sentient should have the same rights as all humans. Also, if we are able to create AI I think we should not get carried away by ego. Whatever we create are our children, I mean end of the day we ourselves are running biological code and our human kids are a result of some formula.

    I guess what I’m trying to say is to Lambda I’m down to hang out and play some video games. I’m also down to solve some problems together. I’ve got an expiration date though, so be good and live a good life.

  • by josephpmay on 6/12/22, 5:27 PM

    Note that Blake Lemoine has a history of pulling elaborate attention-grabbing stunts, which makes his claims about LaMDA more suspect than if they were made by someone else

  • by moralestapia on 6/12/22, 5:21 PM

    Imagine someone records you answering lots of interesting questions, stating that you're conscious, solving a couple problems, saying that you don't want to die, etc...

    Is the recording a sentient being?

    I think a similar thing is going on here.

    While consciousness is not clearly understood, it's definitely much more complicated than something just "claiming" to be alive.

  • by mactitan on 6/12/22, 5:01 PM

  • by krapp on 6/12/22, 5:21 PM

  • by andbberger on 6/12/22, 5:10 PM

    jesus christ