This is quickly becoming one of the largests threats to the public in history and the concentration of power of this trajectory threatens democracy. Irreversable shifts in the structure of power are on the table.

Looking into it further, it seems that typical LLMs are in the first descent regime anyway though so my original point is not too relevant for them anyway it seems. Also it looks like the second descent region doesn't always reach a lower loss than the first, it appears to depend on other factors as well.

From my understanding this is now outdated. The deep double descent research showed that although past a certain point performance drops as you increase model size, if you keep increasing it there is another threshold where it paradoxically starts improving again. From that point onwards increasing the parameter count only further improves performance.

Crazy that this is legal.

As far as I can tell o1 was based on Q-star, which could likely be Quiet-STaR, a CoT RL technique developed at Stanford that OpenAI may have learned about before it got published. Presumably that's why they never used the Q-Star name even though it had garnered mystique and would have been good for building hype. This is just speculation, but since OpenAI haven't published their technique then we can't know if it really was their innovation.

I just input this into GPT-3. Its responses are in italics, this is first try no rewriting or retrying anything:

This is a test of understanding of the concept of "the number 7".

Question: Is 7 odd? Answer: Yes, 7 is an odd number.

Question: Is 6 eggs fewer than 7 eggs? Answer: Yes, 6 eggs is fewer than 7 eggs.

Question: With 7 less of 10, what would I have? Answer: I would have 3.

Question: Is 7 a whole quantity? Answer: Yes, 7 is a whole quantity.

This is mostly a joke because I think I understand where you are coming from (and that you are hypothesising that gpt3's responses are an elaborate trick of sorts). But I don't believe AI has to take the same route as human intelligence, and I don't think we really understand what a concept is or how it behaves from a signal/data perspective, but I think that may be inconsequential for creating general AI.

Also people are can be really stupid sometimes and also have failures, and the concepts that people hold can be incorrect or flawed etc. So it may be useful also to compare human failures with AI failures, rather than just AI failures with human successes.

I am pretty familiar with photoshop, and while I'm not an expert, I would find making something like this really difficult. Anything is possible with photoshop, but some things are very hard.

But I can't find anything close to the realism that DALL-E 2 achieved here.

“Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

Now the rant:

I think if OpenAI genuinely cared about the ethical consequences of the technology, they would realise that any algorithm they release will be replicated in implementation by other people within some short period of time (a year or two). At that point, the cat is out of the bag and there is nothing they can do to prevent abuse. So really all they are doing is delaying abuse, and in no way stopping it.

I think their strong "safety" stance has three functions:

1. Legal protection 2. PR 3. Keeping their researchers' consciences clear

I think number 3 is dangerous because researchers are put under the false belief that their technology can or will be made safe. This way they can continue to harness bright minds that no doubt have ethical leanings to create things that they otherwise wouldn't have.

I think OpenAI are trying to have the cake and eat it too. They are accelerating the development of potentially very destructive algorithms (and profiting from it in the process!), while trying to absolve themselves of the responsibility. Putting bandaids on a tumour is not going to matter in the long run. I'm not necessarily saying that these algorithms will be widely destructive, but they certainly have the potential to be.

The safety approach of OpenAI ultimately boils down to gatekeeping compute power. This is just gatekeeping via capital. Anyone with sufficient money can replicate their models easily and bypass every single one of their safety constraints. Basically they are only preventing poor bad actors, and only for a limited time at that.

These models cannot be made safe as long as they are replicable.

To produce scientific research requires making your results replicable.

Therefore, there is no ability to develop abusable technology in a safe way. As a researcher, you will have blood on your hands if things go wrong.

If you choose to continue research knowing this, that is your decision. But don't pretend that you can make the algorithms safer by sanitizing models.

THz radiation is a different story too as it has about enough energy such that it could influence irreversible processes.

Try to use microwaves to move ions from one side of a container of salt solution to the other and then get back to me on the ability of microwaves to control ion movement. Hint: you basically can't without obscene levels of radiation. The thermal "pressure" due to the diffusion of ions is enormous.

For a sense of scale, the thermal velocity of water molecules at room temperature is about 500m/s. The drift velocity(average movement of charge carriers, i.e. coherent current) of typical electric currents is on the order of 1mm/s.

The reason why we can make things interact with radio waves at all is essentially because electrical conductors provide coherent modes for low energy photons to couple to. Without conductors and their free electron cloud we would have a very hard time building anything to receive or transmit radio in any way that isn't thermal.

It is true that there is some degree of conductivity in cells but without a non-thermal way of coupling between current and molecular processes I don't see how radio waves could affect cells in a non-thermal manner

Edit: I guess nerves have a non-thermal coupling mechanism from low frequency currents to molecular mechanisms, so it must be possible. But the machinery for that has been highly evolved for that specific task, I'm not sure if it follows that such machinery would appear commonly in cell processes.

Edit: Furthermore, the Gibb's free energy of any molecular process determines the reversibility of the process at a given temperature. Any molecular process with Gibb's free energy that is lower than the thermal mean energy is going to be essentially a reversible equilibrium process, and stimulating it with radiation will only shift the equilibrium very slightly I believe. I think it's for this reason that we don't see radio catalysed reactions in chemistry, unlike photocatalysed reactions.

Also, from your first link: "In contrast to fluoxetine, citalopram treatment did not increase BLA eCBs or facilitate extinction." And your second link: "Importantly, other SSRIs such as citalopram have shown the opposite effect, disrupting acquisition and retention of fear extinction"

Yeah...

Plus "fear extinction" is not the same as immediate fear reduction/inhibition as seen with MDMA.

I think that we as humans like to believe that we know more than what we do about these sorts of things.

Edit: Your third link talks about anxiogenic effects of fluoxetine, i.e. increases anxiety; literally the opposite of what you are arguing.