HN submissions have a bunch of examples in them, but worth remembering they were released as "Look at this somewhat cool and potentially useful stuff" rather than what we see today, LLMs marketed as tools.
I've been running gps for a long time, and I always liked that there was something in my pocket (and not just me). One day when driving to work on the highway with no GPS app installed, I noticed one of the drivers had gone out after 5 hours without looking. He never came back! What's up with this?
So i thought it would be cool if a community can create an open source GPT2 application which will allow you not only to get around using your smartphone but also track how long you've been driving and use that data in the future for improving yourself...and I think everyone is pretty interested.
[Updated on July 20]
I'll have this running from here, along with a few other features such as: - an update of my Google Maps app to take advantage it's GPS capabilities (it does not yet support driving directions) - GPT2 integration into your favorite web browser so you can access data straight from the dashboard without leaving any site!
Here is what I got working.
Wow that is terrible. In my memory GPT 2 was more interesting than that. I remember thinking it could pass a Turing test but that output is barely better than a Markov chain.
I was first made aware of GPT2 from reading Gwern -- "huh, that sounds interesting" -- but really didn't start really reading model output until I saw this subreddit:
> New AI fake text generator may be too dangerous to release, say creators
> The Elon Musk-backed nonprofit company OpenAI declines to release research publicly for fear of misuse.
> OpenAI, an nonprofit research company backed by Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Sam Altman, and others, says its new AI model, called GPT2 is so good and the risk of malicious use so high that it is breaking from its normal practice of releasing the full research to the public in order to allow more time to discuss the ramifications of the technological breakthrough.
Or - making sensational statements gets attention. A dangerous tool is necessarily a powerful tool, so that statement is pretty much exactly what you'd say if you wanted to generate hype, make people excited and curious about your mysterious product that you won't let them use.
Think about all the possible explanations carefully. Weight them based on the best information you have.
(I think the most likely explanation for Mythos is that it's asymmetrically a very big deal. Come to your own conclusions, but don't simply fall back on the "oh this fits the hype pattern" thought terminating cliché.)
Also be aware of what you want to see. If you want the world to fit your narrative, you're more likely construct explanations for that. (In my friend group at least, I feel like most fall prey to this, at least some of the time, including myself. These people are successful and intelligent by most measures.)
Then make a plan to become more disciplined about thinking clearly and probabilistically. Make it a system, not just something you do sometimes. I recommend the book "the Scout Mindset".
Concretely, if one hasn't spent a couple of quality hours really studying AI safety I think one is probably missing out. Dan Hendrycks has a great book.
