LW - AI #76: Six Shorts Stories About OpenAI by Zvi

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: AI #76: Six Shorts Stories About OpenAI, published by Zvi on August 8, 2024 on LessWrong.
If you're looking for audio of my posts, you're in luck. Thanks to multiple volunteers you have two options.
1. Option one is Askwho, who uses a Substack. You can get an ElevenLabs-quality production, with a voice that makes me smile. For Apple Podcasts that means you can add them here, Spotify here, Pocket Casts here, RSS here.
2. Alternatively, for a more traditional AI treatment in podcast form, you can listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, and RSS.
These should be permanent links so you can incorporate those into 'wherever you get your podcasts.' I use Castbox myself, it works but it's not special.
If you're looking forward to next week's AI #77, I am going on a two-part trip this week. First I'll be going to Steamboat in Colorado to give a talk, then I'll be swinging by Washington, DC on Wednesday, although outside of that morning my time there will be limited. My goal is still to get #77 released before Shabbat dinner, we'll see if that works. Some topics may of course get pushed a bit.
It's crazy how many of this week's developments are from OpenAI. You've got their voice mode alpha, JSON formatting, answering the letter from several senators, sitting on watermarking for a year, endorsement of three bills before Congress and also them losing a cofounder to Anthropic and potentially another one via sabbatical.
Also Google found to be a monopolist, we have the prompts for Apple Intelligence and other neat stuff like that.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction.
2. Table of Contents.
3. Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. Surveys without the pesky humans.
4. Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility. Ask a silly question.
5. Activate Voice Mode. When I know more, dear readers, so will you.
6. Apple Intelligence. We have its system prompts. They're highly normal.
7. Antitrust Antitrust. Google found to be an illegal monopolist.
8. Copyright Confrontation. Nvidia takes notes on scraping YouTube videos.
9. Fun With Image Generation. The days of Verify Me seem numbered.
10. Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon. OpenAI built a watermarking system.
11. They Took Our Jobs. We have met the enemy, and he is us. For now.
12. Chipping Up. If you want a chip expert ban, you have to enforce it.
13. Get Involved. Safeguard AI.
14. Introducing. JSONs, METR, Gemma, Rendernet, Thrive.
15. In Other AI News. Google more or less buys out Character.ai.
16. Quiet Speculations. Llama-4 only ten times more expensive than Llama-3?
17. The Quest for Sane Regulations. More on SB 1047 but nothing new yet.
18. That's Not a Good Idea. S. 2770 on deepfakes, and the EU AI Act.
19. The Week in Audio. They keep getting longer.
20. Exact Words. Three bills endorsed by OpenAI. We figure out why.
21. Openly Evil AI. OpenAI replies to the questions from Senators.
22. Goodbye to OpenAI. One cofounder leaves, another takes a break.
23. Rhetorical Innovation. Guardian really will print anything.
24. Open Weights Are Unsafe and Nothing Can Fix This. Possible fix?
25. Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult. What do we want?
26. People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone. Janus tried to warn us.
27. Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone. Disbelief.
28. The Lighter Side. So much to draw upon these days.
Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
Predict the results of social science survey experiments, with (r = 0.85, adj r = 0.91) across 70 studies, with (r = .9, adj r = .94) for the unpublished studies. If these weren't surveys I would be highly suspicious because this would be implying the results could reliably replicate at all. If it's only surveys, sure, I suppose surveys should replicate.
This suggests that we mostly do not actually need the surveys, we can get close (...