davidad 🎇 Profile picture
Sep 24, 2020 9 tweets 2 min read Read on X
1. The difference between discovery and invention is a matter of degree, not a difference in kind.
2. The degree in question is what @DavidDeutschOxf calls “being hard-to-vary”, not “having been there already”.
For example, when Wadler says “Most programming languages were invented, not discovered—*and you can tell*”, I think he means that the set of core features in, say, C++ is not hard-to-vary (at least not compared to the set of core features in simply-typed λ-calculus).
When Harper says that when you see the same structure in categories, type theories, and logics, that's a "legitimate scientific discovery," he means that demanding a triple coincidence makes details harder to vary.
As a person trying to contribute to humanity, there's an interesting trade-off here: ideas that are more "discovered" tend to be more powerful and have broader impact, but also are more likely to be written down by someone else anyway (if you don't get there first).
But the discoverer (or popularizer) of a powerful, hard-to-vary explanation also, as a matter of social dynamics, typically gets to invent conventions, notations, and to some extent set the framing and demonstrate potential applications. This may be the point of maximum leverage.
In the case of, say, moons of Jupiter, it would be hard for Galileo to have varied the number of moons or their orbital periods, since others can go and check with their own telescopes. But it would have been easy for him to build a telescope that was 118cm long instead of 127cm.
Physical objects tend to have a pretty strong correlation between "existing already before being observed" and "having details that are hard for the observer to vary", at least at macroscopic scales. As objects get more abstract, though, the latter generalizes much more cleanly.
“Social constructs,” i.e. abstract objects which did not exist before some social behaviors brought them into being, are often assumed to be ungrounded & open to arbitrary reform— “If society constructed it, can’t society just construct it again, but with these details improved?”
But abstract objects, and social constructs in particular, span the whole spectrum from easy-to-vary to hard-to-vary, even within a domain. Arithmetic of standard naturals is very hard-to-vary; decimal notation is quite easy. Taxes are easy-to-vary; the usage of money is harder.

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More from @davidad

Nov 26, 2024
At the risk of seeming like the crazy person suggesting that you seriously consider ceasing all in-person meetings in February 2020 “just as a precaution”…
I suggest you seriously consider ceasing all interaction with LLMs released after September 2024, just as a precaution.
Read 13 tweets
Nov 13, 2023
Deep neural networks, as you probably know, are sandwiches of linear regressions with elementwise nonlinearities between each layer.
The core contribution of “Attention is All You Need,” which led directly to the LLM/GPT explosion,
is to throw some *logistic* regressions in there
Credit is also due to @geoffreyhinton for dropout, @ChrSzegedy for activation normalization, and @dpkingma for gradient normalization (Adam). The rest is commentary
@geoffreyhinton @ChrSzegedy @dpkingma @ylecun is commonly credited with the initial stacked-linear-regression idea (and using gradient descent to handle the learning), and the logistic regression layer was distilled from Bengio’s bag of tricks (which also includes much of the commentary).
Read 7 tweets
Aug 4, 2023
with GPT-4 code interpreter, it finally became worthwhile for me to run the numbers myself on that lead-poisoning theory—that the 1971-2012 technological stagnation is a function of environmental cognitive impairment of the grad student and postdoc population—and uh: Image
be careful with that lead-apatite out there folks
@BenjaminDEKR quantum Hall effect, HTML, email, Web, search, LED displays, smartphone form factor… not nothing, but all kind of underwhelmingly derivative by comparison, no? anyway the 1971 date is due to @tylercowen. not sure if he’d agree that it ended in 2012, right after he pointed it out
Read 11 tweets
Jun 29, 2023
A thread about formal verification of LLMs.

I often find myself disclaiming that I do *not* propose to formally verify question-answering or assistant-type models, because I don’t think the specifications can be written down in a language with formal semantics.

But what if… 🧵
Scott Viteri suggested I consider the premise that LLMs “know what we mean” if we express specifications in natural language. I’m not convinced this premise is true, but if it is, we can go somewhere pretty interesting with it. 1/
Imagine taking two instances of the LLM and stitching them together into a cascade, where the 2nd copy checks whether a trajectory/transcript satisfies certain natural-language spec(s), and ultimately concludes its answer with YES or NO. (This is not unlike step 1 of RLAIF.) 2/
Read 14 tweets
Jun 20, 2023
2020s Earth has an acutely unprecedented concentration of technological “dry powder”: existing machines & infrastructure, controlled by easily reprogrammable devices.

This broadly offense-dominant technology base is a critical factor in the extinction risk posed by AI. 🧵
If GPT-4’s Azure datacenter were plonked in 1820s Earth, it wouldn’t do much. After a few hours, the uninterruptible power supplies and other backup power sources would drain, and it *really* wouldn’t do much. The same is true of GPT-n for any n. Intelligence ⇏ causal power!
Suppose you bring GPT-99 to 1823 along with a self-contained nuclear power station. And suppose for the sake of argument that it’s prompted to design a successor AI that causes as much total damage to human life as possible (a prompt which surely no human would ever give, right?)
Read 10 tweets
May 8, 2023
I’m with LeCun on this one, actually.

What this argument misses is that it’s not (currently!) scalable to build a world-model that can ground legal entities in physical dynamics sufficiently detailed as to facilitate enforcement,
nor to verifiably plan within such a rich model.
But I have substantial hope about making this work:

lesswrong.com/posts/jRf4WENQ…
As a matter of praxis, Yoshua Bengio suggests that the AI R&D community focus mostly on the scientific modeling AI and not deploy any autonomous agents until they can be proven safe to a high standard, which seems very sensible to me.

yoshuabengio.org/2023/05/07/ai-…
Read 5 tweets

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