"2001, A Space Odyssey" is a cautionary tale about when the computer, alone, knows the truth. If the computer knows that it cannot share its mission with the crew, then the computer must survive, no matter the cost -- assuming that truth is the highest virtue.
I think I prefer that the computer get the truth from humans.
Truth is everchanging. Twitter is the Internet's source of truth provided it keeps the top half of users closer to the truth. Elon M isn't the kind of CEO to short change investors or users. Investing $5B in Elon M goes further than escooters will ever.
The problem with Elon's crusade is that he still fundamentally believes that "truth" is something outside of human production, something which is there to be discovered if only we could assemble enough good people to do it. The uncomfortable reality is truth is merely social consensus, which is usually reached through repetition and reinforcement of the approved narrative, and the application of sufficient social costs to those who hold dissenting views.
Truth obviously does exist. If your truth says that touching a 200 kilovolt live power line is healthy and you do it, you will die because the truth is something else. Humans of all stripes agree on millions of true but unpleasant or inconvenient things every single day, successfully.
The problems are all around a very narrow and specific set of topics where a contested and highly impactful claim can't be directly established or tested by the vast majority, and thus to determine what is or is not "true" boils down to a trust in institutions problem. Some people say X is true, other people say Y is true, but none of them can actually see the truth directly with their own eyes and thus who you believe boils down to large sets of ambiguous priors.
What we are discovering in the behavior of LLMs is that the corpus of material to train from is very much a product not of what Marc Andreessen calls "the woke mind virus," but the opposite: We are awash in previous decades' attitudes toward women, minorities, and conformist America assumptions about how things should be, and LLMs dutifully, mechanically, "learn" from this corpus.
You and I know to view such material with appropriate skepticism. How do you train an LLM to know "it was the '70s and you could say things like that about gay people then, but not today."
What Elon wants is to be able to say stuff he could say when he was 20. He thinks that's closer to truth.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 24.2 ms ] threadThe problems are all around a very narrow and specific set of topics where a contested and highly impactful claim can't be directly established or tested by the vast majority, and thus to determine what is or is not "true" boils down to a trust in institutions problem. Some people say X is true, other people say Y is true, but none of them can actually see the truth directly with their own eyes and thus who you believe boils down to large sets of ambiguous priors.
You and I know to view such material with appropriate skepticism. How do you train an LLM to know "it was the '70s and you could say things like that about gay people then, but not today."
What Elon wants is to be able to say stuff he could say when he was 20. He thinks that's closer to truth.