Comment by fc417fc802
5 hours ago
I actually feel like it's the other way around. The online discourse over the past ~day or so has seemed unusually irrational to me for a technical audience. Commenters making emotionally charged claims of wrongdoing that appear inconsistent with the published claims without justification of the discrepancies. Granted you might well doubt openai's version of events but there's a general expectation of clear evidence when advancing claims of malfeasance.
Sort of, yeah. We are seeing more people commenting who have anti-AI sentiments or in the fence on the topic of AI usage.
On why some people are making emotionally charged claims, my guess: This affects the core belief of what is right or wrong, Impressions based on past doings of OpenAI, losing trust for OpenAI based on sequence of events.
I don't think we will get to see any clear evidence. I'm not even sure what would be the evidence. I would be surprised if OpenAI comes out clean if they have made a mistake. They move on to the next shiny thing.
I identify as neither mathematician nor "maker of things people want" (coder, hacker, engineer). But having friends who identify as those kinds of professionals, let me make some observations.
To use a metaanalogy from chess (once again), mathematicians play the opening game, and builders play the end game. AI is sort of a middleman connecting human understanding to applications.
I think there's a Technical argument to be made that openAI is a threat to the game itself. For example, could it have produced the navier-stokes counterexample without human inputs? since it seemed to have used the much gossiped research strategy "C" and "D", you can't absolutely be certain that Son of Astra (son of altman?) was magicking an unknown unknown from nothing (sorry to cue Rumsfeld). You have got to wait for the other five problems to be solved after general boycott
Subpar PR engine of the OpenAI leadership might kill the pipeline of inputs that they won't admit they still need in this dreamtime before "recursive self-improvement". You can call that emotional. Personally I would rather accuse mathematicians of "preferring local models that believe in the usefulness of unidentifiable individual contributors, and the uselessness of named generalist managers (ie the prompt writers at oAI)"
Big man tlb likes to say that science might be dead but engineering is just getting started. Navier-Stokes is the hammer of the nail in the science coffin. It kills science by killing the prestige of science. The engineers have to imagine that it's likely they will now get all their design ideas from the hypothetical future datacenters.
> The engineers have to imagine that it's likely they will now get all their design ideas from the hypothetical future datacenters.
At the current rate of advancement that phase will last, what, all of 6 months if we're lucky?
Do you think that's a good thing, killing science and the desire of humans to participate in scientific understanding?