Interview with gwern

https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/gwern-branwen

by synthmeat • 2 years ago

308 246 2 years ago

dwarkeshpatel.com

rahidz• 2 years ago

Their voice sounds so realistic, that unlike the avatar, my monkey brain is not fathoming it being unreal.

madcaptenor• 2 years ago

From https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/gwern-branwen:

"In order to protect Gwern's anonymity, I proposed interviewing him in person, and having my friend Chris Painter voice over his words after. This amused him enough that he agreed."

prvc• 2 years ago

The "ums", "rights", "likes", "kindas", and up-talk were completely unnecessary, though, and their presence just detracts from the product.

tim3334• 2 years ago

Thanks. I was kind of puzzled that the voice is so natural and the avatar so freaky.

Vecr13• 2 years ago

Technically he's pseudonymous. I don't know if he always had the (fictional) last name "Branwen", but I have records of "gwern" (all lowercase) going way back. And yes I'm pretty sure it was the same person.

He says he has collaborators under the "Gwern" name now, but the main guy is the main guy and it's unlikely he could hide it.

How many citations for "Branwen 2018" are on the ArXiv now?

robinhouston• 2 years ago

It's been a bumper week for interesting podcast interviews with an AI theme!

In addition to this, there are Lex Fridman's series of interviews with various key people from Anthropic [0], and a long discussion between Stephen Wolfram and Eliezer Yudkowsky on the theme of AI risk [1].

0. https://youtu.be/ugvHCXCOmm4

1. https://youtu.be/xjH2B_sE_RQ

sva_2• 2 years ago

I found the conversation between Wolfram and Yudkowsky hard to listen to. In fact, I didn't make it to the half. The arguments presented by both were sort of weak and uninteresting?

tasuki• 2 years ago

I find any conversation these days involving Wolfram or Yudkowsky hard to listen to. Them trying to talk to each other... I'd imagine them talking completely past each other, and am happy not to have to verify that.

richardw• 2 years ago

That’s an excellent use for an AI generated TL;DR.

tim3334• 2 years ago

Yeah, and I thought Altman + Tan was good https://youtu.be/xXCBz_8hM9w

natch2• 2 years ago

I'm only half way through that and it IS good, but I wish they wouldn't burn so much valuable time on recaps of the history that has already been told in so many other interviews, and get on to talking about the real changes we should expect going forward.

Quinzel5• 2 years ago

I don’t believe Gwern lives as frugally as he’s described in this (if this even actually is the real Gwern). I’m 100% sure that he has a persona he likes to portray and being perceived as frugal is a part of that persona. When it comes to answering the question “who is gwern?” I reckon Gwern’s a plant a seed in people’s mind type of guy, and let them come up with the rest of the story.

Still, I like a lot of his writing. Especially the weird and niche stuff that most people don’t even stop to think about. And thanks to Gwern’s essay on the sunk costs fallacy, I ended up not getting a tattoo that I had changed my mind about. I almost got it because I had paid a deposit, but I genuinely decided I hated the idea of what I was going to get… and almost got it, but the week before I went to get the tattoo, I read that essay, and decided if small children and animals don’t fall victim to sunk costs, then neither should I! Literally - Gwern saved the skin on my back with his writing. Haha.

mbustamanter• 2 years ago

There is a comment on the r/slatestarcodex subreddit with supposedly true information about him (which I found googling 'who is gwern'), but it left me with even more questions.

EDIT: grammar

dewey5• 2 years ago

There's some articles on his site about these attempts and they claim that they are all wrong. If it would be that "easily found" I'd guess we wouldn't be having these discussions: https://gwern.net/blackmail#pseudonymity-bounty

tectec• 2 years ago

Can you link the comment here?

scarmig2• 2 years ago

That comment is just a fanciful flight of whimsy.

Gwern was the first patient to successfully complete a medical transition to the gender he was originally assigned at birth... his older brother died of a Nuvigil overdose in 2001... his (rather tasteful) neck tattoo of the modafinil molecule

The only concrete things we know about gwern are that he's a world-renowned breeder of Maine Coons and that he is the sole known survivor of a transverse cerebral bifurcation.

He does have a neck tattoo, but it's actually a QR code containing the minimal weights to label MNIST at 99% accuracy.

Tenoke2• 2 years ago

I'm fairly sure it's relatively true (except for occasional extra purchases on top) unless he's been keeping it up in places I wouldn't expect him to.

I don't like that now people might pigeonhole him a bit by thinking about his effective frugality but I do hope he gets a ton of donations (either directly or via patreon.com/gwern ) to make up for it.

dash2• 2 years ago

Have you got any real evidence behind your first paragraph?

michaelt5• 2 years ago

I don't follow gwern's work closely.

But I do know he created an enormous dataset of anime images used to train machine learning and generative AI models [1]. Hosting large datasets is moderately expensive - and it's full of NSFW stuff, so he's probably not having his employer or his college host it. Easy for someone on a six-figure salary, difficult for a person on $12k/year.

Also, I thought these lesswrong folks were all about "effective altruism" and "earning to give" and that stuff.

[1] https://gwern.net/danbooru2021

freejazz2• 2 years ago

I think it would be more odd to take someone with such a shtick at their word, but skepticism abounds either way.

Quinzel5• 2 years ago

Do people need evidence for an opinion?

endtime2• 2 years ago

I met Gwern once, when he came to the NYC Less Wrong meetup. I don't think he was internet-famous yet. It was probably 12 years ago or so, but based on my recollection, I'm totally willing to believe that he lives very frugally. FWIW he wouldn't have looked out of place at an anime convention.

Quinzel5• 2 years ago

What did he look like?

nuz• 2 years ago

I believe him.

Quinzel5• 2 years ago

You believe that someone who has the capacity and resources to do all this fancy computer and AI stuff lives on $12k USD a year? That’s hilarious.

I’m willing to bet he became a millionaire thanks to bitcoin.

A_D_E_P_T9• 2 years ago

www.gwern.net

Something I've noticed in spending time online is that there's a "core group" of a few dozen people who seem to turn up everywhere there are interesting discussions. Gwern (who also posts here) is probably at the top of that list.

scarmig2• 2 years ago

There have been multiple times where I read a comment somewhere; thought to myself, wow, this guy is brilliant, let me see who wrote it so I can see if there are other things they've written; and, lo and behold, gwern.

A_D_E_P_T9• 2 years ago

Yeah. Nick Szabo used to show up a lot, too.

satvikpendem5• 2 years ago

Analogous to the 1% Rule [0]:

In Internet culture, the 1% rule is a general rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an Internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk. Variants include the 1–9–90 rule (sometimes 90–9–1 principle or the 89:10:1 ratio),[1] which states that in a collaborative website such as a wiki, 90% of the participants of a community only consume content, 9% of the participants change or update content, and 1% of the participants add content.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

falcor84• 2 years ago

I don't know what the current HN usage stats are, but assume you would still need to explain about 3 additional orders of magnitude to get from 1% of HN down to "a few dozen".

sva_2• 2 years ago

I wonder how much of that can be attributed to the limitations of the human mind as we evolved in relatively small groups/tribes and it might be difficult to see beyond that

keiferski10• 2 years ago

This also might just mean that you're interested in X thing, and the writing you find interesting is by people in the same subculture.

xnorswap• 2 years ago

A hundred years ago you could say the same about the Bloomsbury Group.

I don't know what causes such intellectual cliques to form, perhaps it's a result of an intersection of raw intellectual power and social dynamics.

joenot443• 2 years ago

It's ChrisMarshallNY for me. So frequently I'll come to a comment chain on Apple or Swift or NYC stuff with the intention to make a sweet point, only to find Chris has already said the same thing, though much more eloquently.

He's been building software for 10 years longer than I've been alive, hopefully in a few decades I'll have gained the same breadth of technical perspective he's got.

selfhoster112• 2 years ago

A thread comment from TeMPOraL is always a nice surprise.

nprateem2• 2 years ago

How we're using confirmation bias to credit one out of 8 billion people with special skills.

Matticus_Rex• 2 years ago

New to the deeper internet? Just about anyone who has been aware of gwern for long comes to believe he's got some special skills, even if they disagree with him. He's a niche celebrity entirely for being insightful and interesting.

nprateem2• 2 years ago

What's the Internet?

selfhoster112• 2 years ago

If nothing else, the tech used for Gwern's website is positively inspiring for knowledge organisation system geeks. It's really cool and unique.

resiros2• 2 years ago

Wait if you’re doing $900-1000/month and you’re sustaining yourself on that, that must mean you’re sustaining yourself on less than $12,000 a year. What is your lifestyle like at $12K?"
I live in the middle of nowhere. I don't travel much, or eat out, or have health insurance, or anything like that. I cook my own food. I use a free gym. There was this time when the floor of my bedroom began collapsing. It was so old that the humidity had decayed the wood. We just got a bunch of scrap wood and a joist and propped it up. If it lets in some bugs, oh well! I live like a grad student, but with better ramen. I don't mind it much since I spend all my time reading anyway.

Not sure what to think of that. On one hand, it's so impressive that gwern cares only about the intellectual pursuit. On the other hand, it's sad that society does not reward it as much as excel sheet work.

camillomiller3• 2 years ago

Or maybe, you know, that is not true and it’s part of a character?

resiros2• 2 years ago

Could be, but he does not strike as someone who is looking for fame. Plus the whole discussion about why he would like to move to SF but can't seems pretty authentic.

wslh• 2 years ago

I don’t know Gwern (except for a small donation I made!), but I truly believe people can be that frugal if their inner self is satisfied. By the way, my father is an artist who feels completely fulfilled living a bohemian lifestyle, selling his work in two art markets and enjoying a vibrant social life there, even without fame.

freefaler• 2 years ago

From a resource point of view, time is one of the most precious we have and optimizing for "the most control over my time" by living frugally makes sense. If you put this time into your skills growth you may outperform in the long term for some fields (where skills matter more than social capital) the people who had to sell their time to pay higher bills.

It's a reasonable tradeoff for some circumstances.

bondarchuk• 2 years ago

Many many people in the US live on that kind of money, it's not uncommon at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States

"Among individuals living alone: 19.1% lived in poverty."

Poverty line (max yearly income) for single households: $14,580

walthamstow• 2 years ago

There's a bit in The West Wing where one of the characters finds out the US poverty thresholds are calculated based on work done in the 1950s by a woman named Mollie Orshansky, and that they can't be updated because then US would then have millions more poor people, and that's bad politics. According to your link that's still mostly true 25 years later.

janetmissed• 2 years ago

It does show how out of touch tech workers are that they are shocked someone is able to live off 1k a month. It sometimes feels like hn posters were born on college campuses and shielded from normal society until their twenties, after which they move to the Bay Area with the upmost confidence that they know everything there is to know about the world.

Especially if you are doing it voluntarily, 1k a month can provide you more then enough for a comfortable life in many part of the country. More so if you can avoid car ownership/insurance and health insurance (Which gwern seems to do).

mitthrowaway24• 2 years ago

It's not uncommon, but hopefully it offers some perspective to those commenters who say things like "this-or-that subscription fee should be trivial pocket change to the sorts of people who comment on HN".

gizmo• 2 years ago

Gwern lives this way because he wants to. He has chosen this ascetic lifestyle. He could easily raise money if he ever needs it (he doesn't need it right now). He could easily do tech work in SF and set himself up for life. He also has many friends who got rich off crypto.

A room is only a prison cell when you're not allowed to leave.

jnsaff2• 2 years ago

Dwarkesh Patel
How do you sustain yourself while writing full time?
Gwern
Patreon and savings. I have a Patreon which does around $900-$1000/month, and then I cover the rest with my savings. I got lucky with having some early Bitcoins and made enough to write for a long time, but not forever. So I try to spend as little as possible to make it last.

Then Dwarkesh just gets stuck on this $1k/month thing when Gwern right out of gate said that savings are being used.

Who knows how much of the savings are being used or how big of a profit he got from BTC.

nl3• 2 years ago

Meh.

He's living in a place where the floor collapsed and eats (good) ramen. If it's 12k or 20k I'm not sure it makes a meaningful difference to the narrative.

sourcepluck6• 2 years ago

Thanks for providing that context, which obviously completely changes the story. How that got left out by others is a mystery to me.

raverbashing2• 2 years ago

Honestly I've become skeptical of people who end up in high-intellectualized "pursuits" neglecting their own personal and social interactions and the larger societal reactions

Maybe it works for maths, physics and such, and of course it's ok to philosophize, but I think those "ivory tower" thinkers sometimes lack a certain connection to reality

sph• 2 years ago

Which reality? Does a middle class Californian FAANG worker spending its day on Twitter know more about, I don't know, the Congo or Thai mangrove forests than a philosopher in a hut?

Unless by reality you mean YOUR slice of the world, a sheltered place of its own.

camillomiller3• 2 years ago

I really don’t understand why we give credit to this pile of wishful thinking about the AI corporation with just one visionary at the top.

First: actual visionary CEOs are a niche of a niche. Second: that is not how most companies work. The existence of the workforce is as important as what the company produces Third: who will buy or rent those services or products in a society where the most common economy driver (salaried work) is suddenly wiped out?

I am really bothered by these systematic thinkers whose main assumption is that the system can just be changed and morphed willy nilly as if you could completely disregard all of the societal implications.

We are surrounded by “thinkers” who are actually just glorified siloed-thinking engineers high on their own supply.

whiplash451• 2 years ago

Someone probably said the exact same thing when the first cars appeared.

Where is the data showing that more jobs get destroyed than created by technological disruption?

passwordoops• 2 years ago

There is no data, just hyperbole from those same "visionaries" who keep claiming their stochastic parrots will replace everyone's jobs and we therefore need UBI

camillomiller3• 2 years ago

Didn’t say that. If you posit that the future of the corporation is having a visionary CEO with a few minion middle managers and a swath of AI employees, then tell me, what do you do with the thousands of lost and no longer existing salaried jobs? Or are you saying that the future is a multitude of corporations of one? We can play with this travesties of intellectual discourse as long as you like, but we’re really one step removed from some stoners’ basement banter

satvikpendem5• 2 years ago

Someone probably said the exact same thing when the first cars appeared.

Without saying anything regarding the arguments for or against AI, I will address this one sentence. This quote is an example of an appeal to hypocrisy in history fallacy, a form of the tu quoque fallacy. Just because someone criticizes X and you compare it to something else (Y) from another time does not mean that the criticism of X is false. There is survivorship bias as well because we now have cars, but in reality, you could've said this same criticism against some other thing that failed, but you don't, because, well, it failed and thus we don't remember it anymore.

The core flaw in this reasoning is that just because people were wrong about one technology in the past doesn't mean current critics are wrong about a different technology now. Each technology needs to be evaluated on its own merits and risks. It's actually a form of dismissing criticism without engaging with its substance. Valid concerns about X should be evaluated based on current evidence and reasoning, not on how people historically reacted to Y or any other technology.

grues-dinner2• 2 years ago

Car and motor vehicles in general get you to work and help you do your work. They don't do the work. I guess that's the difference in thinking.

I'm not sure that it's acrually correct: I don't think we'll actually see "AI" actually replace work in general as a concept. Unless it can quite literally do everything and anything, there will always be something that people can do to auction their time and/or health to acquire some token of social value. It might taken generations to settle out who is the farrier who had their industry annihilated and who is the programmer who had it created. But as long as there's scarcity and ambition in the world, there'll be something there, whether it's "good work" or demeaning toil under the bootheel of a fabulously wealthy cadre of AI mill owners. And there will be scarcity as long as there's a speed of light.

Even if I'm wrong and there isn't, that's why it's called the singularity. There's no way to "see" across such an event in order to make predictions. We could equally all be in permanent infinite bliss, be tortured playthings of a mad God, extinct, or transmuted into virtually immortal energy beings or anything in between.

You might as well ask the dinosaurs whether they thought the ultimate result of the meteor would be pumpkin spice latte or an ASML machine for all the sense it makes.

Anyone claiming to be worrying over what happens after a hypothetical singularity is either engaging in intellectual self-gratification, posing or selling something somehow.

jeffreygoesto• 2 years ago

https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/08/robots_crush_career_l...

kryptiskt• 2 years ago

I don't get it, why have a human visionary CEO? Even the strongest critics of AI agree that LLMs excel at producing bold visions.

Philpax2• 2 years ago

Gwern's (paraphrased) argument is that an AI is unlikely to be able to construct an extended bold vision where the effects won't be seen for several years, because that requires a significant amount of forecasting and heuristics that are difficult to optimise for.

I haven't decided whether I agree with it, but I can see the thought behind it: the more mechanical work will be automated, but long-term direction setting will require more of a thoughtful hand.

That being said, in a full-automation economy like this, I imagine "AI companies" will behave very differently to human companies: they can react instantly to events, so that a change in direction can be affected in hours or days, not months or years.

nutanc2• 2 years ago

Experimenting with creating semantic chunks of large podcasts. Got the following chunks, https://gist.github.com/nutanc/a9e6321649be5ea9806b4450b0bd6...

Dwarkesh has 18 splits. https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/i/151435243/timestamps

I got 171. So roughly 9 context discussions in one time stamp.

maujim2• 2 years ago

What did you use to create the chunks?

nutanc2• 2 years ago

It's a new approach I am experimenting with.

https://gpt3experiments.substack.com/p/a-new-chunking-approa...

throw056789314• 2 years ago

Lots of the claims about Gwern in the intro are exaggerated.

Gwern is an effective altruist and his influence is largely limited to that community. It would be an exaggeration to claim that he influenced the mainstream of AI and ML researchers -- certainly Hinton, LeCun, Ng, Bengio didn't need him to do their work.

He influences the AI safety crowd, who have ironically been trying to build AGI to test their AI safety ideas. Those people are largely concentrated at Anthropic now, since the purge at OpenAI. They are poorly represented at major corporate AI labs, and cluster around places like Oxford and Cal. The EAs' safety concerns are a major reason why Anthropic has moved so much slower than its competitors, and why Dario is having trouble raising the billions he needs to keep going, despite his media blitz. They will get to AGI last, despite trying to be the good guys who are first to invent god in a bottle.

By the same token, Dwarkesh is either EA or EA adjacent. His main advertiser for this episode is Jane Street, the former employer of the world's most notorious EA, Sam Bankman-Fried as well as Caroline Ellison. Dwarkesh previously platformed his friend Leopold Aschenbrenner, who spent a year at OAI before he wrote the scare piece "Situation Report" made the rounds. Leopold is also semi-technical at best. A wordcel who gravitated to the AI narrative, which could describe many EAs.

People outside of AI and ML, please put Dwarkesh in context. He is a partisan and largely non-technical. The way he interfaces with AI is in fantasizing about how it will destroy us all, just as he and Gwern do in this interview.

It's sad to see people who are obviously above average intelligent waste so much time on this.

Vecr13• 2 years ago

"Wordcel" is roon terminology, right? I highly doubt Aschenbrenner is an EA, and if he's a "wordcel" he somehow managed to do mathematical economics without too much problem.

Gwern's probably not a "wordcel" either, he can program, right? I've never seen any of his publications though.

It's called Situational Awareness too, not "Situation Report", and Yudkowsky said he didn't like it. Not that Yudkowsky is an EA either.

I think the situation is more complex than you think it is, or at least more complex than you're pretending.

Edit: oh, you're saying Gwern is an EA too? Do you have a source for that?

adiabatty• 2 years ago

Gwern's probably not a "wordcel" either, he can program, right? I've never seen any of his publications though.

He does Haskell stuff (he mentions it on his website), but he’s even better at words than he is as a mid-tier (I guess) Haskell programmer.

Whether this counts as a “wordcel” is an exercise left to the reader.

throw056789314• 2 years ago

I didn't claim Gwern was a wordcel. He's clearly not. Dwarkesh, yes.

I didn't claim Yudkowsky was an EA. He's not. He's a rationalist who originated many thoughts about AI doom, which have influenced EAs.

Look, Gwern and Dwarkesh and Yud are all AI doomers, which is where the rationalists and the EAs overlap. Gwern is all over LessWrong, which kind of springs out of the rationalist community and has all sorts of EAs there now. But of course, the first rule of EA is the first rule of Fight Club. That's why Dario consistently denies he's an EA, even though his chief of staff was formerly running Sam Bankman-Fried's philanthropic grants.

The weird thing in these conversations between guys like Dwarkesh and Gwern is how much they wallow in the masochism of imagining a world taken over by AGI. Yud has a similar attraction to pain, but he channels it into his silly BDSM novels.

https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Lords-Answer-Eliezer-Yudkowsky-e...

If that's how they wan't to spend their time, fine. Let's all just recognize it's an acquired taste, a self-indulgence, and the furthest thing from a rational act.

wyager2• 2 years ago

Anthropic has moved so much slower than its competitors

In what sense? Claude is way better than any other LLM available, in the sense of providing useful/correct/intelligent output.

throw056789314• 2 years ago

o1 does everything I need.

automatic6131• 2 years ago

I don't think this science fiction writer deserves the credit of someone who is studying and/or influencing the real world

You have one Steve Jobs-type at the helm, and then maybe a whole pyramid of AIs out there executing it and bringing him new proposals

Very interesting in a short story (or a side quest in Cyberpunk 2077 - yeah that one). Not so much for a description of our future.

Philpax2• 2 years ago

He has studied and influenced the real world. Here's Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, one of the leading AI companies, directly referencing him in an interview from this week: https://youtu.be/ugvHCXCOmm4?t=343

dewey5• 2 years ago

Interesting idea with the avatar, but I feel like just having a voice and some audio waves would be better than trying to create a talking avatar. Could just be my personal preference of not having a mental image of someone unknown I guess? Similar to reading a book after watching the movie adaptation.

djmips• 2 years ago

How about just listening to the interview then?

dewey5• 2 years ago

I'm aware of that possibility but I don't mind watching the other interviewer and I'm also not sure if there's something being shown (screenshots etc.) after the first few minutes I watched.

I know it's probably a "me problem" ;)

michaelt5• 2 years ago

It seemed weird to me too.

In my country, when TV series are interviewing anonymous people they use specific visual language - pixellated face, or facing away from the camera, or face clad in shadow.

Having an actor voice the words is normal. But having an actor showing the anonymous person's face is an... unusual choice.

keiferski10• 2 years ago

The voice was a real person’s, but the face/head was AI.

mola• 2 years ago

Everything I read from gwern has this misanthropic undertones. It's hard to put a finger on it exactly, but it grits me when I try reading him. It is also kinda scary that so many people are attracted to this. It rhymes with how I feel about Ayn Rand. Her individualism always seems so misanthropic, her adherants scare me

herculity275• 2 years ago

I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to, but pretty much every major 20th century intellectual had misanthropic undertones (and sometimes overtones) - people who read/think/write an exceptional amount don't tend to be super people-loving.

southernplaces7• 2 years ago

That should depend on what you read. There's more than enough in the history of our species and in books about us to make someone love humanity too, at least conceptually if not in daily practice.

awanderingmind• 2 years ago

I've never really experienced that from his writing, and I am definitely not an Ayn Rand fan. I'm also pretty sure he's not interested in creating a movement that could have 'adherents'... I suppose I could be wrong on that. But on the contrary, I find his writing to be often quite life-affirming - he seems to delight in deep focus on various interesting topics.

The worst I can say is that I find his predictions around AI (i.e. the scaling laws) to be concerning.

edit: having now read the linked interview, I can provide a clearly non-misanthropic quote, in response to the interviewer asking gwern what kind of role he hopes to play in people's lives:

  I would like people to go away having not just been entertained or gotten some useful information, but be better people, in however slight a sense. To have an aspiration that web pages could be better, that the Internet could be better: “You too could go out and read stuff! You too could have your thoughts and compile your thoughts into essays, too! You could do all this!”

Tenoke2• 2 years ago

Everything? He also writes things like this: "A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers."

https://gwern.net/improvement

tolerance• 2 years ago

It’s possible that a person can enjoy things that cater to the advancement of “civilization” while being seen as someone indifferent to (or inclined away from) “humanity”. Ie, a materialist.

dbacar• 2 years ago

Who says Gwern is even human?

pizza• 2 years ago

I think I might have heard so from Nicolas Bourbaki

Metacelsus• 2 years ago

I met him at a Slate Star Codex meetup in 2018 and at a conference in 2022.

7thpower• 2 years ago

How do you know?

keiferski10• 2 years ago

By writing, you are voting on the future of the Shoggoth using one of the few currencies it acknowledges: tokens it has to predict. If you aren't writing, you are abdicating the future or your role in it. If you think it's enough to just be a good citizen, to vote for your favorite politician, to pick up litter and recycle, the future doesn't care about you.

These AI predictions never, ever seem to factor in how actual humans will determine what AI-generated media is successful in replacing human-ones, or if it will even be successful at all. It is all very theoretical and to me, shows a fundamental flaw in this style of "sit in a room reading papers/books and make supposedly rational conclusions about the future of the world."

A good example is: today, right now, it is a negative thing for your project to be known as AI-generated. The window of time when it was trendy and cool has largely passed. Having an obviously AI-generated header image on your blog post was cool two years ago, but now it is passé and marks you as behind the trends.

And so for the prediction that everything get swept up by an ultra-intelligent AI that subsequently replaces human-made creations, essays, writings, videos, etc., I am doubtful. Just because it will have the ability to do so doesn't mean that it will be done, or that anyone is going to care.

It seems vastly more likely to me that we'll end up with a solid way of verifying humanity – and thus an economy of attention still focused on real people – and a graveyard of AI-generated junk that no one interacts with at all.

MichaelZuo• 2 years ago

O1-preview is already indistinguishable from the 50th percentile HN commentator with the right prompts… no editing at all needed of the output.

notahacker3• 2 years ago

I think the wider question mark about that sentence is that even if LLMs that ingest the internet and turn it into different words are the future of humanity, there's an awful lot of stuff in an AI corpus and a comparatively small number intensively researched blogs probably aren't going to shift the needle very much

I mean, you'd probably get more of a vote using generative AI to spam stuff that aligns with your opinions or moving to Kenya to do low wage RHLF stuff...

jddj• 2 years ago

There is plenty of low wage RHLF stuff in western/southern Europe for now as well.

mapt4• 2 years ago

With AI you need to think, long and hard, about the concept (borrowed from cryptography), "Today, the state of the art in is the worst it will ever be".

Humanity is pinning its future on the thought that we will hit intractable information-theoretic limitations which provide some sort of diminishing returns on performance before a hard takeoff, but the idea that the currently demonstrated methods are high up on some sigmoid curve does not seem at this point credible. AI models are dramatically higher performance this year than last year, and were dramatically better last year than the year before, and will probably continue to get better for the next few years.

That's sufficient to dramatically change a lot of social & economic processes, for better and for worse.

cle• 2 years ago

There's a good chance you're right, but I think there's also a chance that things could get worse at some point (with some hand-wavy definition of "a while").

Currently the state-of-the-art is propped up with speculative investments, if those speculations turn out to be wrong enough, or social/economic changes force the capital to get allocated somewhere else, then there could be a significant period of time where access to it goes away for most of us.

We can already see small examples of this from the major model providers. They launch a mind-blowing model, get great benchmarks and press, and then either throttle access or diminish quality to control costs / resources (like Claude Sonnet 3.5 pretty quickly shifted to short, terse responses). Access to SOTA is very resource-constrained and there are a lot of scenarios I can imagine where that could get worse, not better.

Even "Today, the state of the art in is the worst it will ever be" in cryptography isn't always true, like post-spectre/meltdown. You could argue that security improved but perf definitely did not.

keiferski10• 2 years ago

I don’t disagree that it’ll change a lot of things in society.

But that isn’t the claim being made, which is that some sort of AI god is being constructed which will develop entirely without the influence of how real human beings actually act. This to me is basically just sci-fi, and it’s frankly kind of embarrassing that it’s taken so seriously.

wavemode2• 2 years ago

dramatically higher performance this year than last year, and were dramatically better last year than the year before

Yeah, but, better at _what_?

Cars are dramatically faster today than 100 years ago. But they still can't fly.

Similarly, LLMs performing better on synthetic benchmarks does not demonstrate that they will eventually become superintelligent beings that will replace humanity.

If you want to actually measure that, then these benchmarks need to start asking questions that demonstrate superintelligence: "Here is a corpus of all current research on nuclear physics, now engineer a hydrogen bomb." My guess is, we will not see much progress.

motohagiography• 2 years ago

I've been writing for decades with the belief I was training a future AI and used to say that the Turing test wasn't mysterious at all because it was a solved problem in economics in the form of an indifference curve that showed where peoeple cared whether or not they were dealing with a person or a machine.

the argument against AI taking over is we organize around symbols and narratives and are hypersensitive to waning or inferior memes, thereofre AI would need to reinvent itself as "not-AI" every time so we don't learn to categorize it as slop.

I might agree, but if there were an analogy in music, some limited variations are dominant for decades, and there are precedents where you can generate dominant memes from slop that entrains millions of minds for entire lifetimes. Pop stars are slop from an industry machine that is indistinguishable from AI, and as evidence, current AI can simulate their entire catalogs of meaning. the TV Tropes website even identifies all the elements of cultural slop people should be immune to, but there are still millions of people walking around living out characters and narratives they received from pop-slop.

there will absolutely be a long tail of people whose ontology is shaped by AI slop, just like there is a long tail of people whose ontology is shaped by music, tv, and movies today. that's as close to being swept up in an AI simulation as anything, and perhaps a lot more subtle. or maybe we'll just shake it off.

keiferski10• 2 years ago

That is a good point, and fundamentally I agree that these big budget pop star machines do function in a way analogous to an AI, and that we're arguing metaphysics here.

But even if a future AI becomes like this, that doesn't prevent independent writers (like gwern) from still having a unique, non-assimilated voice where they write original content. The arguments tend to be "AI will eat everything, therefore get your writing out there now" and not "this will be a big thing, but not everything."

mlsu2• 2 years ago

This is an interesting comment. Let's extend it further.

The pop industry is a:

- machine

- which takes authentic human meaning

- and produces essentially a stochastic echo of it ("slop")

- in an optimization algorithm

- to predict the next most profitable song (the song that is most "likely")

So, this sounds an awful lot like something else that's very in vogue right now. Only it was invented in 1950 or 1960, not in 2017.

CamperBob22• 2 years ago

Having an obviously AI-generated header image on your blog post was cool two years ago, but now it is passé and marks you as behind the trends.

This is true only because publicly-accessible models have been severely nerfed (out of sheer panic, one assumes), making their output immediately recognizable and instantly clichéd.

Dall-E 2, for instance, was much better when it first came out, compared to the current incarnation that has obviously been tweaked to discourage generating anything that resembles contemporary artists' output, and to render everything else in annoying telltale shades of orange and blue.

Eventually better models will appear, or be leaked, and then you won't be able to tell if a given image was generated by AI or not.

keiferski10• 2 years ago

My point is that having work that is obviously AI-generated is now a negative thing.

If, in the future, there is a way to validate humanity (as I mentioned in my comment), then any real writers will likely use it.

Anyone that doesn't validate their humanity will be assumed to be an AI. The reaction to this may or may not be negative, but the broader point is that in this scenario, the AI won't be eating all human creations.

eru2• 2 years ago

The headline contradicts itself. Gwern is pseudonymous, not anonymous.

keiferski10• 2 years ago

You can see this with many words – the most commonly known word gradually encompasses all similar ones. I don't know if there is a formal linguistic term, but I call it "conceptual compression." It's when a concept used to have multiple levels, but now just has one. It seems like an inevitable outcome in a society that doesn't care about using language accurately.

eru2• 2 years ago

I'm not quite so pessimistic: just as often, we have concepts splitting in twain to show new distinctions.

Btw, the article gets it right and starts with 'Gwern is a pseudonymous researcher and writer.'

Headlines are seldom decided by the writers.

sourcepluck6• 2 years ago

I clicked on the video asking myself, wait, how does the title make sense, how is he anonymous if he's doing videos?

Then when I saw the frankly very creepy and offputting image and voice, thinking he'd been anonymised through some AI software, thought, oh no, this kind of thing isn't going to become normal is it.

Then - plot twist - I scroll down to read the description and see that that voice is an actual human voiceover! I don't know if that makes it more or less creepy. Probably more. What a strange timeline.

indoordin0saur3• 2 years ago

Ah, that was a human voice over? I really wish they hadn't done the voice thing as I found it distracting. The emotion felt all off and misleading. I guess it's better than an AI voice at least but a traditional voice mask would have been better IMO

sourcepluck6• 2 years ago

Yes, someone called "Chris Painter", who could easily be a nice person, I suppose. Maybe the generic U.S. "non-offensive" male A.I. accent is based off his voice originally, and we're coming full circle?

Vecr13• 2 years ago

He's Gwern, he knows that wouldn't provide what he wants.

moi2388• 2 years ago

Benefits of anonymity: “ I have derived a lot of benefit from people not being able to mail heroin to my home and call the police to SWAT me”

Downsides of anonymity: no free heroin

demaga• 2 years ago

I love the example of Isaac Newton looking at the rates of progress in Newton's time and going, “Wow, there's something strange here. Stuff is being invented now. We're making progress. How is that possible?” And then coming up with the answer, “Well, progress is possible now because civilization gets destroyed every couple of thousand years, and all we're doing is we're rediscovering the old stuff.”

The link in this paragraph goes to a post on gwern website. This post contains various links, both internal and external. But I still failed to find one that supports claims about Newton's views on "progress".

This offers a little twist on the “Singularity” idea: apparently people have always been able to see progress as rapid in the right time periods, and they are not wrong to! We would not be too impressed at several centuries with merely some shipbuilding improvements or a long philosophy poem written in Latin, and we are only modestly impressed by needles or printing presses.

We absolutely _are_ impressed. The concept of "rapid progress" is relative. There was rapid progress then, and there is even more rapid progress now. There is no contradiction.

Anyway, I have no idea how this interview got that many upvotes. I just wasted my time.

mynegation• 2 years ago

That works in reverse too. While I am in awe of what humanity already achieved - when I read fictional timelines of fictional worlds (Middle-Earth or Westeros/Essos) I am wondering how getting frozen in medieval like time is even possible. Like, what are they _doing_?

fallingsquirrel• 2 years ago

They're probably doing the same thing humans on our earth were doing for centuries until ~1600. Surviving. Given how cruel nature is I think we're lucky to have the resources to do more than just survive, to build up all this crazy technology we don't strictly need to live, just for fun/profit.

Swizec2• 2 years ago

I am wondering how getting frozen in medieval like time is even possible. Like, what are they _doing_?

Not discovering sources of cheap energy and other raw inputs. If you look carefully at history, every rapid period of growth was preceded by a discovery or conquest of cheap energy and resources. You need excess to grow towards the next equilibrium.

mike_hearn• 2 years ago

Those stories are inspired (somewhat) by the dark ages. Stagnation is kinda the default state of mankind. Look at places like Afghanistan. Other than imported western tech, it's basically a medieval society. Between the fall of the Roman Empire and the middle medieval era, technology didn't progress all that much. Many parts of the world were essentially still peasant societies at the start of the 20th century.

All you really need is a government or society that isn't conducive to technological development, either because they persecute it or because they just don't do anything to protect and encourage it (e.g. no patent system or enforceable trade secrets).

Even today, what we see is that technological progress isn't evenly distributed. Most of it comes out of the USA at the moment, a bit from Europe and China. In the past there's usually been one or two places that were clearly ahead and driving things forward, and it moves around over time.

The other thing that inspires the idea of a permanent medieval society is archaeological narratives about ancient Egypt. If you believe their chronologies (which you may not), then Egyptian society was frozen in time for thousands of years with little or no change in any respect. Not linguistic, not religious, not technological. This is unthinkable today but is what academics would have us believe really happened not so long ago.

julianeon• 2 years ago

You're right, really: it's not possible. It's a problem with the conservative impulse (*for a very specific meaning of conservative) in fiction: things don't stay frozen in amber like that. If it was nonfiction - aka real life - the experience of life itself from the perspective of living people would change and transform rapidly in the century view.

pazimzadeh• 2 years ago

burning libraries probably doesn't help

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom#Destruction_by...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria#Burning_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda_mahavihara#Destruction...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Library_of_Constantin...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_destroyed_libraries#Hu...

FeepingCreature2• 2 years ago

Wasn't Middle-Earth repeatedly depopulated and ravaged by multiple continent-spanning wars?

tim3334• 2 years ago

I think people click upvote on reading an interesting title / first couple of lines.

Then there isn't a downvote option if it proves poor.

doright• 2 years ago

“Well, progress is possible now because civilization gets destroyed every couple of thousand years, and all we're doing is we're rediscovering the old stuff.”

Irrespective of the historical accuracy of the quote I've always felt this way in some form, having personally lived through the transition from a world where it felt like you didn't have to have an opinion on everything to one dominated by the ubiquitous presence of the Internet. Although not so much because I believe an advanced human civilization has destroyed itself in our current timeline, but because the presence of so many life-changing breakthroughs in such a short period of time to me indicates a unceasing march towards a Great Filter.

gwern2• 2 years ago

The link in this paragraph goes to a post on gwern website. This post contains various links, both internal and external. But I still failed to find one that supports claims about Newton's views on "progress".

Could you explain further what part of https://gwern.net/newton you thought didn't support my description of Newton's view?

I thought the large second blockquote in https://gwern.net/newton#excerpts , which very prominently links to https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THE... , fully justified my claims, which are taken directly from Newton's statements to his son-in-law, and also closely parallel other historical statements, like Lucretius, which I also present with clear references and specific blockquotes.

I'm a little mystified that you could describe any of this as not supporting it at all, and I'm wondering if you are looking at the wrong page or something?

YeGoblynQueenne17• 2 years ago

This will come across as vituperative and I guess it is a bit but I've interacted with Gwern on this forum and the interaction that has stuck to me is in this thread, where Gwern mistakes a^nb^n as a regular (but not context-free) language (and calls my comment "not even wrong"):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559620

Again I'm sorry for the negativity, but already at the time Gwern was held up by a certain, large, section of the community as an important influencer in AI. For me that's just a great example of how basically the vast majority of AI influencers (who vie for influence on social media, rather than research) are basically clueless about AI and CS and only have second-hand knowledge, which I guess they're good at organising and popularising, but not more than that. It's easy to be a cheer leader for the mainstream view on AI. The hard part is finding, and following, unique directions.

With apologies again for the negative slant of the comment.

aubanel2• 2 years ago

For me that's just a great example of how basically the vast majority of AI influencers (who vie for influence on social media, rather than research) are basically clueless about AI and CS

This is a bit stark: there are many great knowledgeable engineers and scientists who would not get your point about a^nb^n. It's impossible to know 100% of of such a wide area as "AI and CS".

nocobot• 2 years ago

is it really? this is the most common example for context free languages and something most first year CS students will be familiar with.

totally agree that you can be a great engineer and not be familiar with it, but seems weird for an expert in the field to confidently make wrong statements about this.

YeGoblynQueenne17• 2 years ago

> This is a bit stark: there are many great knowledgeable engineers and scientists who would not get your point about a^nb^n. It's impossible to know 100% of of such a wide area as "AI and CS".

I think, engineers, yes, especially those who don't have a background in academic CS. But scientists, no, I don't think so. I don't think it's possible to be a computer scientist without knowing the difference between a regular and a super-regular language. As to knowing that a^nb^n specifically is context-free, as I suggest in the sibling comment, computer scientists who are also AI specialists would recognise a^nb^n immediately, as they would Dyck languages and Reber grammars, because those are standard tests of learnability used to demonstrate various principles, from the good old days of purely symbolic AI, to the brave new world of modern deep learning.

For example, I learned about Reber grammars for the first time when I was trying to understand LSTMs, when they were all the hype in Deep Learning, at the time I was doing my MSc in 2014. Online tutorials on coding LSTMs used Reber grammars as the dataset (because, as with other formal grammars it's easy to generate tons of strings from them and that's awfully convenient for big data approaches).

Btw that's really the difference between a computer scientist and a computer engineer: the scientist knows the theory. That's what they do to you in CS school, they drill that stuff in your head with extreme prejudice; at least the good schools do. I see this with my partner who is 10 times a better engineer than me and yet hasn't got a clue what all this Chomsky hierarhcy stuff is. But then, my partner is not trying to be an AI influencer.

empiricus• 2 years ago

Minor: if n is finite, then a^nb^n becomes regular?

YeGoblynQueenne17• 2 years ago

a^nb^n is regular, but it is also context free. I don't think there's a restriction on the n. Why do you say this?

Edit: sorry, I read "finite" as "infinite" :0 But n can be infinite and a^nb^n is still regular, and also context free. To be clear, the Chomskky Hierarchy of formal languages goes like this:

Finite ⊆ Regular ⊆ Context-Free ⊆ Context-Sensitive ⊆ Recursively Enumerable

That's because formal languages are identified with the automata that accept them and when an automaton accepts e.g. the Recursively Enumerable languages, then it also accepts the context-sensitive languages, and so on all the way down to the finite languages. One way to think of this is that an automaton is "powerful enough" to recognise the set of strings that make up a language.

nahumfarchi• 2 years ago

Yes, all finite languages are regular.

Specifically, you can construct a finite automata to represent it.

newmanpo2• 2 years ago

I take the Feynman view here; vain memory tricks are not themselves net new production, so just look known things up in the book.

Appreciate the diversity in the effort, but engineering is making things people can use without having to know it all. Far more interesting endeavor than being a human Google search engine.

YeGoblynQueenne17• 2 years ago

No, look. If a student (I'm not a professor, just a post-doc) doesn't know this stuff, I'll point them to the book so they can look it up, and move on. But the student will not tell me I'm "not even wrong" with the arrogance of fifty cardinals while at the same time pretending to be an expert [1]. It's OK to not know, it's OK to not know that you don't know, but arrogant ignorance is not a good look on anyone.

And there's a limit to what you need to look up in a book. The limit moves further up the more you work with a certain kind of tool or study a certain kind of knowledge. I have to look up trigonometry every single time I need it because I only use it sparingly. I don't need to look up SLD-Resolution, which is my main subject. How much would Feynman need to look up when debating physics?

So when someone like Feynman talks about physics, you listen carefully because you know they know their shit and a certain kind of nerd deeply appreciates deep knowledge. When someone elbows themselves in the limelight and demands everyone treats them as an expert, but they don't know the basics, what do you conclude? I conclude that they're pretending to know a bunch of stuff they don't know.

________________

[1] ... some do. But they're students so it's OK, they're just excited to have learned so much and don't yet know how much they don't. You explain the mistake, point them to the book, and move on.

dilap3• 2 years ago

Regarding your linked comment, my takeaway is that the very theoretical task of being able to recognize an infinite language isn't very relevent to the non-formal, intuitive idea of "intelligence"

Transformers can easily intellectually understand a^nb^n, even though they couldn't recognize whether an arbitrarily long string is a member of the language -- a restriction humans share!, since eventually a human, too, would lose track of the count, for a long enough string.

YeGoblynQueenne17• 2 years ago

I don't know what "intellectually understand" means in the context of Transformers. My older comment was about the ability of neural nets to learn automata from examples, a standard measure of the learning ability of a machine learning system. I link to a paper below where Transformers and RNNs are compared on their ability to learn automata along the entire Chomsky hierarchy and as other work has also shown, they don't do that well (although there are some surprising surprises).

> Regarding your linked comment, my takeaway is that the very theoretical task of being able to recognize an infinite language isn't very relevent to the non-formal, intuitive idea of "intelligence"

That depends on who you ask. My view is that automata are relevant to computation and that's why we study them in computer science. If we were biologists, we would study beetles. The question is whether computation , as we understand it on the basis of computer science, has anything to do with intelligence. I think it does, but that it's not the whole shebang. There is a long debate on that in AI and the cognitive sciences and the jury is still out, despite what many of the people working on LLMs seem to believe.

raverbashing2• 2 years ago

I agree with your assessment

Yes, LLMs are bad at this. A similar example: SAT solvers can't solve the pigeonhole problem without getting into a loop

It is an exceptional case that requires "metathinking" maybe, rather than a showstopper issue

(can't seem to be able to write the grammar name, the original comment from the discussion had it)

bmc7505• 2 years ago

FWIW, I’ve had a very similar encounter with another famous AI influencer who started lecturing me on fake automata theory that any CS undergrad would have picked up on. 140k+ followers, featured on the all the big podcasts (Lex, MLST). I never corrected him but made a mental note not to trust the guy.

YeGoblynQueenne17• 2 years ago

To the person that commented that five years is an awful long time to remember something like that (and then deleted their comment): you are so right. I am trying to work through this kind of thing :/

n2d4• 2 years ago

This is such an odd comment.

In the thread you linked, Gwern says in response to someone else that NNs excel at many complex real-world tasks even if there are some tasks where they fail but humans (or other models) succeed. You try to counter that by bringing up an example for the latter type of task? And then try to argue that this proves Gwern wrong?

Whether they said "regular grammar" or "context-free grammar" doesn't even matter, the meaning of their message is still the exact same.

wyager2• 2 years ago

It seems like his objection is that "parsing formal grammars" isn't the point of LLMs, which is fair. He was wrong about RGs vs CFGs, but I would bet that the majority of programmers are not familiar with the distinction, and learning the classification of a^nb^n is a classic homework problem in automata theory specifically because it's surprising that such a simple grammar is CF.

haccount• 2 years ago

Being an influencer requires very little actual competence, same goes for AI influencers.

The goal of influencers is to influence the segment of a crowd who cares about influencers. Meaning retards and manchildren looking for an external source to form consensus around.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42128876

dang• 2 years ago

We've merged that thread hither since the current link has a bit more background.

okasaki• 2 years ago

Interesting that there's no mention of human biodiversity (aka blacks are dumb), as if you spend five minutes on #lesswrong you'll notice that that's a big issue for gwern and the other goons.

ChadNauseam• 2 years ago

Is #lesswrong an irc channel? I’ve never been there, but I can say I’ve never seen that discussion on lesswrong the website

FeepingCreature2• 2 years ago

Yeah on Libera (former Freenode).

I'm not gonna say that people there don't think that hbd is real, but it's not an everyday discussion topic. Mostly because it's kind of boring.

(Do spend five minutes on #lesswrong! We don't bite! (Generally! If you come in like "I heard this was the HBD channel", there may be biting, er, banning.))

pcrh• 2 years ago

I noticed a similar vein in SlateStarCodex. There's a strong vibe that "some people" are "naturally" more intelligent than others....

A_D_E_P_T9• 2 years ago

"Goons." Nice.

Thing is: Are you absolutely sure that notion of human biodiversity is wrong? IQ is heritable, as height is heritable. You'll grant that there are populations that differ in their genetic potential for height -- e.g. Dalmatians vs. Pygmies -- so how is it that you dismiss out of hand the notion that there might be population-wide differences in the genetic potential for intelligence?

I can hear it now: "But IQ is not intelligence!" I agree to a point, but IQ -- and, strangely, verbal IQ in particular -- maps very neatly to one's potential for achievement in all scientific and technological fields.

The Truth is a jealous goddess: If you devote yourself to her, you must do so entirely, and take the bad along with the good. You don't get to decide what's out of bounds; no field of inquiry should be off-limits.

tptacek7• 2 years ago

What do you think heritability means?

fwlr• 2 years ago

My favourite Gwern insight is “Bitcoin is Worse is Better”, where they summarize an extensive list of objections to Bitcoin and then ask if there’s a common thread:

    No! What’s wrong with Bitcoin is that it’s ugly. … It’s ugly to make your network’s security depend solely on having more brute-force computing power than your opponents, ugly to need now and in perpetuity at least half the processing power just to avoid double-spending … It’s ugly to have a hash tree that just keeps growing … It’s ugly to have a system which can’t be used offline without proxies and workarounds … It’s ugly to have a system that has to track all transactions, publicly … And even if the money supply has to be fixed (a bizarre choice and more questionable than the irreversibility of transactions), what’s with that arbitrary-looking 21 million bitcoin limit? Couldn’t it have been a rounder number or at least a power of 2? (Not that the bitcoin mining is much better, as it’s a massive give-away to early adopters. Coase’s theorem  may claim it doesn’t matter how bitcoins are allocated in the long run, but such a blatant bribe to early adopters rubs against the grain. Again, ugly and inelegant.) Bitcoins can simply disappear if you send them to an invalid address. And so on.

https://gwern.net/bitcoin-is-worse-is-better

indoordin0saur3• 2 years ago

Great interview but I wasn't a fan of how they handled the voice. Whether a human voice actor or an AI "voice actor", it inserted cadence, emphasis and emotion that I have no way of knowing if it was Gwern's original intention or not. Reading the transcript of the interview would probably be better as you won't be mislead by what the voice actor added in or omitted.

jessriedel• 2 years ago

Reading a transcript of the interview would probably be better

I might be reading to much into the "a" (rather than "the"), but to be clear: there is a transcript at the bottom.

indoordin0saur3• 2 years ago

You're right, corrected my comment.

kittikitti• 2 years ago

Why was this reposted? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42128876

This leads me to believe that the content and the subsequent posts are for self promotion purposes only.

Vecr13• 2 years ago

It's not. I don't know if you think we're all Gwern, but he's provided a useful enough service for enough people that a discussion with more than 13 comments is worthwhile.

dredmorbius2• 2 years ago

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41569102>

arthurofbabylon• 2 years ago

This was a tough listen, for two subtly similar reasons.

The voice was uncanny. Simply hard to listen to, despite being realistic. I mean precisely that: it is cognitively difficult to string together meaning from that voice. (I am adjacent to the field of audio production and frequently deal with human- and machine-produced audio. The problem this podcast has with this voice is not unique.) The tonality and meaning do not support each other (this will change as children grow up with these random-tonality voices).

The conversation is excessively verbose. Oftentimes a dearth of reason gets masked by a wide vocabulary. For some audience members I expect the effort to understand the words distracts from the relationship between the words (ie, the meaning), and so it just comes across as a mashup of smart-sounding words, and the host, guest, and show gets lauded for being so intelligent. Cut through the vocabulary and occasional subtle tsks and pshaws and “I-know-more-than-I-am-saying” and you uncover a lot of banter that just does not make good sense: it is not quite correct, or not complete in its reasoning. This unreasoned conversation is fine in its own right (after all, this is how most conversation unfolds, a series of partially reasoned stabs that might lead to something meaningful), but the masking with exotic vocabulary and style is misleading and unkind. Some of these “smart-sounding” snippets are actually just dressed up dumb snippets.

Vecr13• 2 years ago

It's a real voice. Probably with some splicing, but I don't know how much. Gwern admits he isn't that good at speaking, and I believe him. He also says he isn't all that smart. Presumably that's highly relative.

freejazz2• 2 years ago

He also says he isn't all that smart

Oh, how humbling and modest of him!

JohnBooty• 2 years ago

    The voice was uncanny. Simply hard to listen to, 
    despite being realistic. I mean precisely that: it 
    is cognitively difficult to string together meaning 
    from that voice.

What? According to the information under the linked video,

    In order to protect Gwern's anonymity, I proposed 
    interviewing him in person, and having my friend Chris 
    Painter voice over his words after. This amused him 
    enough that he agreed.

I'm not familiar with the SOTA in AI-generated voices, so I could very well be mistaken.

But it did not sound fake to me, and the linked source indicates that it's a human.

Perhaps it sounds uncanny to you because it's a human reading a transcript of a conversation.... and attempting to make it sound conversational, as if he's not reading a transcript?

ndneighbor• 2 years ago

I really did like this interview quite a bit and helped me deal with the shame of being a bit unfocused, Gwern shows that it all connects in the end.

dredmorbius2• 2 years ago

Is there a podcast stream without DRM?

Neither mpv nor my browser can play the interview.

Edit: The YouTube link from an earlier submisison works: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a42key59cZQ>.

Sad commentary when a YouTube link affords greater accessibility (I'm listening now via mpv) than a podcast URL.

Sigh.

orsenthil• 2 years ago

I use a free gym.

Gwern, how did you end up with free gym? Interested for myself.

Interview with gwern

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