Category: Web/Tech

Deep Prasad writes:

OpenAI just released an AI as smart as most PhDs in physics, mathematics and the life sciences. Wake up. The world will never be the same and in many ways, it will be unrecognizable a decade from now.

Mckay Wrigley is enthusiastic:

o1’s ability to think, plan, and execute is off the charts.

Ethan Mollick says:

There are a lot of milestones that AI passed today. Gold medal at the Math Olympiad among them.

Like Ethan, however, I agree the model is not necessarily better at a lot of non-reasoning tasks.  Ethan also notes that AGI will be jagged and uneven.

Subbarao makes guesses as to how it works.  Here is some other guy saying a bunch of stuff.  And yet further commentary.

Whatever you think of those specific claims, there is a lot of room, as with the John Lennon “Strawberry Fields Forever” demo, to get a lot better yet.  For one thing, it can think for longer yet!  Whole new doors have been opened, and if you are reading some lukewarm commentary that is probably what the person does not grasp.  It is the people who think “…if they can do this…” who have been most successful in predicting the course of AI.

Shital Shah remarks:

This is truly a game changer and step change. It takes us out of slow progress constrained by compute capital and training tokens to rather open world where time is the only limit.

I would love to have one of these (with some tweaks) as my agent.

Taelin claims AGI is achieved.  Here is the closest Gary Marcus ever will come to eating crow.  Here is how I would troll OpenAI.

Meanwhile, the status of people who do energy policy is due to rise.

Brian Chau recommends it for looking up citations.

Matt Clifford says “crosswords!”

“Model this!”, he demanded of the new fruit.  That is Benjamin Manning, economics graduate student at MIT.  He got his wish.

Is it “It’s happening!”, or rather “It has happened!”?

Here is another song by Strawberry Alarm Clock, sadly no one got the reference the first time around.  It is from the album “Wake Up, It’s Tomorrow”…

Addendum: For context and background, my two previous introductory posts are here and here.

Introducing PaperQA2, the first AI agent that conducts entire scientific literature reviews on its own. PaperQA2 is also the first agent to beat PhD and Postdoc-level biology researchers on multiple literature research tasks, as measured both by accuracy on objective benchmarks and assessments by human experts. We are publishing a paper and open-sourcing the code. This is the first example of AI agents exceeding human performance on a major portion of scientific research, and will be a game-changer for the way humans interact with the scientific literature.

That is from Sam Rodriques, with further links.  I have not had a chance to try this out.

Announced today, here is the website: “A network of thinkers and builders advancing human flourishing in the AI era.”

Here is a tweet storm from Brendan McCord.  Here is the video and Substack post.

Much of the value of writing done recently or now is simply to get stuff into LLMs. I would, in fact, pay money to ensure Gwern.net is in training corpuses, and I upload source code to Github, heavy with documentation, rationale, and examples, in order to make LLMs more customized to my use-cases. For the trifling cost of some writing, all the worlds’ LLM providers are competing to make their LLMs ever more like, and useful to, me.

And that’s just today! Who knows how important it will be to be represented in the initial seed training datasets…? Especially as they bootstrap with synthetic data & self-generated worlds & AI civilizations, and your text can change the trajectory at the start. When you write online under stable nyms, you may be literally “writing yourself into the future”. (For example, apparently, aside from LLMs being able to identify my anonymous comments or imitate my writing style, there is a “Gwern” mentor persona in current LLMs which is often summoned when discussion goes meta or the LLMs become situated as LLMs, which Janus traces to my early GPT-3 writings and sympathetic qualitative descriptions of LLM outputs, where I was one of the only people genuinely asking “what is it like to be a LLM?” and thinking about the consequences of eg. seeing in BPEs. On the flip side, you have Sydney/Roose as an example of what careless writing can do now.) Humans don’t seem to be too complex, but you can’t squeeze blood from a stone… (“Beta uploading” is such an ugly phrase; I prefer “apotheosis”.)

This is one of my beliefs: there has never been a more vital hinge-y time to write, it’s just that the threats are upfront and the payoff delayed, and so short-sighted or risk-averse people are increasingly opting-out and going dark.

If you write, you should think about what you are writing, and ask yourself, “is this useful for an LLM to learn?” and “if I knew for sure that a LLM could write or do this thing in 4 years, would I still be doing it now?”

Here is the link, or try this link.  Of course not many people have the actual purpose of mind to believe such a thing.  But a few do.