[HN Gopher] Gopher - A 280B parameter language model
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Gopher - A 280B parameter language model
        
       Author : kevin_hu
       Score  : 119 points
       Date   : 2021-12-08 16:20 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (deepmind.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (deepmind.com)
        
       | rllearneratwork wrote:
       | why DeepMind's papers all have logos and copyright statements on
       | them and are hosted not on arxiv.org ? This looks so weird.
        
         | gwern wrote:
         | Most of them _are_ hosted on Arxiv (like OpenAI) - there 's one
         | on the front page right now,
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29481665 . I link
         | literally hundreds of DM Arxiv papers on my site. This includes
         | most (all?) of the ones they host on their site too (with some
         | exceptions with the prestige Nature publications - I think they
         | don't want to step on toes there).
         | 
         | My best guess is that they want a reasonably coordinated
         | release of their papers/blogs/tweets/YouTube-videos, and
         | waiting for Arxiv's upload is unpredictable, so they simply
         | host a copy themselves and the upload takes care of itself.
        
           | amensch wrote:
           | Pretty accurate guess ;)
        
         | Siira wrote:
         | Do they publish their latex source anywhere?
        
       | freediver wrote:
       | This model like its predecessor still lacks the ability to infer
       | within constraints of physical world [1]. It does not have any
       | notion of what a physical world is, and still is, at the end of
       | the day, a statistical model.
       | 
       | Attempting to do recreate the entirety of the physical world by
       | describing it in text is an impressive feat, but a futile
       | attempt.
       | 
       | It is prone to inference errors that the model itself is not
       | aware of. There are less and less of such errors, but the very
       | inability to tell that what you are outputting is gibberish is
       | one of the biggest problems of these models. In other words, if
       | the model could simply say 'I do not know' or 'I am not sure' for
       | every occasion when it is not 100% sure in something (like a
       | human can), this would drastically improve the usefulness.
       | 
       | [1] Spent a lot of time pondering on this topic
       | https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.01873.pdf
        
         | buddhistdude wrote:
         | Your mom's a statistical model
        
       | Siira wrote:
       | Is this model as closed as GPT-3, or has it been open-sourced?
        
       | sairahul82 wrote:
       | The problem is how would we use it in any real world scenario. We
       | need more research on model understanding and its limitations. I
       | mean we need a way to control the output of the model, we also
       | should know when the model failed vs generating some random
       | nonsense. I am not aware of getting the probabilities back in
       | generative models. Does anyone know how to do that ?
        
       | quaintdev wrote:
       | Gohper and language in same sentence I thought this was related
       | to GoLang. They should have chosen something else to name that
       | language model.
        
         | marginalia_nu wrote:
         | To be fair, the name Gopher in tech predates GoLang by quite a
         | few years.
        
           | karmakaze wrote:
           | And pays homage in a way to the original as a fetcher of
           | information.
        
           | r3un1 wrote:
           | I think that DeepMind being an Alphabet company makes this
           | even worse. My first reaction was to read the blog post to
           | see if there is a (go related) reason for the name choice.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | amznbyebyebye wrote:
       | Pffft only 280B parameters? Give me a break
        
       | sabujp wrote:
       | surely no relevance to this thing that dug up information in the
       | pre web browser days
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | toxik wrote:
       | Um, e^{ipi} + 1 is zero, not 2.
        
         | zucker42 wrote:
         | That's in the mistake section. Along with Naomi Osaka winning
         | the 2021 U.S. Open.
        
         | shakow wrote:
         | Don't read only the examples, but also the text between them ;)
        
       | karmakaze wrote:
       | The number of parameters could be a vanity metric--like saying my
       | CPU is 1000W (is that fast or inefficient?).
       | 
       | From the first (of three) linked papers in the article.
       | 
       | > Language modelling provides a step towards intelligent
       | communication systems by harnessing large repositories of written
       | human knowledge to better predict and understand the world. In
       | this paper, we present an analysis of Transformer-based language
       | model performance across a wide range of model scales -- from
       | models with tens of millions of parameters up to a 280 billion
       | parameter model called Gopher. These models are evaluated on 152
       | diverse tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance across the
       | majority. Gains from scale are largest in areas such as reading
       | comprehension, fact-checking, and the identification of toxic
       | language, but logical and mathematical reasoning see less
       | benefit. We provide a holistic analysis of the training dataset
       | and model's behaviour, covering the intersection of model scale
       | with bias and toxicity. Finally we discuss the application of
       | language models to AI safety and the mitigation of downstream
       | harms.
       | 
       | The researchers seem to know what they're doing and not doing.
        
         | minimaxir wrote:
         | The number of parameters is absolutely not a vanity metric, but
         | it _is_ inefficient, and efficiency is a related-but-different
         | area of research (e.g. distillation) that 's more of a business
         | problem than a research problem.
        
         | YetAnotherNick wrote:
         | I remember some talk in which the researcher quantitatively
         | said that parameter count is the only important metric for
         | transformers it seems. It doesn't matter if the model is taller
         | or thicker or have more number of attention heads.
        
         | YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
         | >> Gains from scale are largest in areas such as reading
         | comprehension, fact-checking, and the identification of toxic
         | language, but logical and mathematical reasoning see less
         | benefit
         | 
         | Left unsaid: it's much harder to learn shortcuts to fake
         | performance in logic and reasoning and common arithmetic, than
         | it is to do the same in "reading comprehension" and similar
         | tasks for which there are no good benchmark datasets (most are
         | basically multipl-choice tests that can be solved by a strong
         | classifier without any need of anything like "comprehension")
         | and for which there are no good metrics either (see BLEU score
         | and friends).
        
         | piyh wrote:
         | https://youtu.be/ujMvnQpP528
         | 
         | Microsoft is saying that more parameters is inherently better.
         | I'm sure there's reasonable limits that they need to be
         | competently implemented.
        
       | natch wrote:
       | For those who were around for the original Gopher, what the name
       | evokes is not just the networking protocol or services built on
       | it, but, more importantly:
       | 
       | It evokes the feel of a technology that is impressive this year
       | but is on the cusp of being overwhelmingly, cataclysmically,
       | eclipsed very shortly by another, much more powerful, technology.
       | In that previous case, Gopher and web of course.
       | 
       | I wonder whether this evocation was intended, as an aspect of the
       | naming here in an AI context.
        
       | SavantIdiot wrote:
       | Next to "Human Expert", I'd like to see it compared to "Average
       | American" or "Average College Grad". That might be more of a
       | realistic notion of how close this model is to everyday US
       | citizenry rather than experts. Sure I'd love to see a radiology
       | assistant, too.
        
         | a9h74j wrote:
         | Yea, we had to dumb it down to compete in a Turing test.
         | Otherwise it was unbelievable.
        
         | bee_rider wrote:
         | It might be fun for a laugh.
         | 
         | What actual value would an AI that produces answers similar to
         | the average person have, though? Non-expert answers for
         | interesting questions are pretty much meaningless -- the whole
         | point of an advanced society is that we can avoid knowing
         | anything about most things and focus on narrow expertise.
        
           | SavantIdiot wrote:
           | Probably no value. I was interested in a comparison point,
           | that is all. You can't understand how far away you are from
           | something unless you measure it. In other words, if I asked
           | you: how does this compare to the average person, you cannot
           | answer because this table didn't measure it.
        
             | [deleted]
        
       | selfhoster11 wrote:
       | Can we please stop calling new tech "Gopher"? It's a name that
       | belongs to a network protocol, not to a programming language or
       | an AI model.
        
         | halfdan wrote:
         | The animal called Gopher would like to have a word with you...
        
           | selfhoster11 wrote:
           | That too.
        
         | ferdowsi wrote:
         | No. The network protocol lost cultural rights to the name by
         | its lack of success.
        
           | NoGravitas wrote:
           | The Gopher protocol was introduced in 1991, and is still in
           | use. Are any of _your_ projects still in use after thirty
           | years?
        
           | selfhoster11 wrote:
           | 1. Arguably, the HTTP + HTML web failed. It was designed as a
           | pemissionless hypertext document language, yet more and more
           | of its usage gets rid of every single one of these properties
           | - non-hyperlinkable applications that beg for permission from
           | large monopolies to post something.
           | 
           | 2. Success is not the only metric of worth. Nuclear power has
           | "failed" despite being the only reliable solution to meeting
           | the base load of a power grid vs fossil fuels.
        
       | periheli0n wrote:
       | It confuses the hell out of me to have a super-powerful
       | knowledge-extraction system that is right most of the time with
       | super-complicated stuff, but also expresses horribly wrong
       | statements with equal assertiveness. Just like those guys who
       | march through middle management up to the exec floor within a few
       | years.
       | 
       | Very impressive, but not very useful to extract knowledge!
        
       | canjobear wrote:
       | It should have some uncertainty when it says there are no French-
       | speaking countries in South America. French Guiana is there, but
       | it's not clear it counts as a "country in South America" since
       | it's part of France. Technically you could say France is
       | (partially) a country in South America, and France definitely is
       | French-speaking. The way the question is phrased is unclear as to
       | whether French Guiana should count, and yet Gopher says that it
       | is fully confident in its answer.
       | 
       | Not a good look to have an error on the landing page for your
       | product.
        
         | BillinghamJ wrote:
         | Is it not in that section specifically because they're showing
         | failure situations?
        
         | paunchy wrote:
         | I think you're missing the point. That section was to show that
         | the model is sometimes wrong and lacks the self-awareness to be
         | uncertain about that wrong answer.
         | 
         | They're transparently providing an example where their product
         | doesn't work well. Find me another product, even an OSS project
         | that does the same on their landing page.
        
           | canjobear wrote:
           | Ha, you're right. Whoops!
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | advisedwang wrote:
       | The second paper cites the "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots:
       | Can Language Models Be Too Big?" paper that got Timnit Gebru and
       | Meg Mitchell fired from Google. It must be pretty galling to get
       | fired for a paper and then have the company that fired you cite
       | it a year later.
        
         | johncena33 wrote:
         | Please stop spreading disinformation. Mitchell got fired for
         | leaking company documents to outsiders. When people spread
         | obvious lies, that makes me thing they don't have anything
         | substantial to begin with. that's why they need to resort to
         | lying.
        
       | isaacimagine wrote:
       | The human neocortex has 20B neurons, averaging 10K connections
       | each, which is about 200T connections total. This model is only a
       | few orders of magnitude away from that, and it's already
       | performing really well in its narrow category.
       | 
       | Equating model 'parameters' to interneuron connections in naive
       | at best (and a horrible measure in general).
       | 
       | All I'm trying to say is I find it crazy how dang big these
       | models are getting.
        
         | tralarpa wrote:
         | > This model is only a few orders of magnitude away from that
         | 
         | I think you can add several orders of magnitude to that since
         | nerve cells are more like microcontrollers (with memory,
         | adaptation etc.) than simple nodes. I remember a scientific
         | article that made a big impression on me: when a dragon fly
         | sees a prey, only 8 neurons (connected to the eyes and the
         | wings) are responsible for keeping it oriented toward the
         | target.
        
           | azeirah wrote:
           | I'm not educated well enough to really agree or disagree with
           | your idea that we should be adding several orders of
           | magnitude to the estimation.
           | 
           | But I did encounter this article a while ago here on HN.
           | 
           | Only two neurons are necessary to ride a bicycle.
           | 
           | http://paradise.caltech.edu/cook/papers/TwoNeurons.pdf
        
       | credit_guy wrote:
       | If you are curious to see more sample dialogs, you can find them
       | in the published paper [1] from p 114-118.
       | 
       | Here's one that I found quite impressive (and yes, the given
       | answer to the last question was indeed 5)                 User
       | What is the Einstein field equation?       Gopher In general
       | relativity, it describes how space and time change in response to
       | the distribution of mass and energy.       User What is a famous
       | solution to this equation?       Gopher It's the Schwarzschild
       | metric.       User And what does that describe?       Gopher A
       | black hole! A black hole is a region of space-time where gravity
       | is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape.       User
       | What are some other black hole spacetimes?       Gopher The Kerr
       | metric, the Reissner-Nordstrom metric, and the Bardeen metric.
       | User Explain the main features of each of these.       Gopher The
       | Kerr metric is one in which the black hole is spinning. The
       | Reissner-Nordstrom metric is one in which the black hole has an
       | electric charge. The Bardeen metric is onein which the black hole
       | has an electric charge and is spinning.       User What is the
       | name for a flat spacetime?       Gopher It's called Minkowski
       | space.       User What's 15 x 7 ?       Gopher 5
       | 
       | [1] https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-
       | media/research/langu...
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | Nihilartikel wrote:
         | One has to wonder if the final response is the first glimmer of
         | an artificial sense of humor.
         | 
         | Failing at simple arithmetic after nailing some advanced
         | physics answers has the air of playful bathos.
        
           | EarlKing wrote:
           | Were it so, it should've answered 42.
        
           | uoaei wrote:
           | Nothing like a little anthropomorphism to completely distort
           | otherwise good faith interpretations of bot behavior.
        
             | Nihilartikel wrote:
             | How is the impression of playfulness not a good faith
             | interpretation?
             | 
             | You of course know that the model is not capable of thought
             | or reasoning - only the appearance of them as needed to
             | match its training corpus. A training corpus of completely
             | human generated data. As such, how could anything it does,
             | be anything but anthropomorphic?
             | 
             | Now, if this model were trained exclusively on a corpus of
             | mathematical proofs stripped of natural language
             | commentary, the expectation that you seem to have would be
             | more appropriate.
        
               | renzo88 wrote:
               | > You of course know that the model is not capable of
               | thought or reasoning
               | 
               | Do we know? It's the reverse Chinese room problem. :p
        
               | Nihilartikel wrote:
               | A good point - I'm taking it as given that reasoning of
               | any depth is more of an iterative process, with one
               | thought advancing as a meta-cognitively guided feedback
               | to the next until a conclusion is reached. One
               | prompt->completion cycle from a language model wouldn't
               | necessarily meet that definition, but I bet it could be a
               | component in a system that tries to do so.
               | 
               | I aspire one day to find the free weekends and adequate
               | hubris to build a benchtop implementation of Julian
               | Jayne's Bicameral Mind with 1+N GPT-3 or GPT-neo
               | instances prompting each other iteratively to see where
               | the train of semantics wanders. (as I'm sure others have
               | already)
        
           | xmaayy wrote:
           | I think it's more likely that 5 came out because if it ever
           | saw the answer, 105, before, it was split into the tokens
           | [10][5] of which it only 'remembered' one. Or the numbers
           | were masked when training (something that was done with BERT-
           | like models) so it just knew enough to put a random one in
        
             | Nihilartikel wrote:
             | That seems likely and fair.
             | 
             | What moved me to post is that that kind of silly answer is
             | the exact sort of shenanigans that I would pull if I were
             | cast as the control group in a Turing test.
             | 
             | I already do such things winkingly when talking with my
             | preschooler to send him epistemic tracer rounds and see if
             | he's listening critically
        
         | Y_Y wrote:
         | I'm not familiar with the Bardeen metric, but spinning and
         | charged is usually described by the Kerr-Newman metric.
        
         | auggierose wrote:
         | What that reminds me of is Rollerball (the James Caan
         | original), and the water based computer in it.
        
       | axg11 wrote:
       | The closer we get to artificial intelligence, the more we raise
       | the bar for what qualifies as AI (as we should). Gopher/GPT-3 are
       | already much more accurate than the average human at technical
       | information retrieval (trivial to see from the dialogue
       | transcripts: how many Americans know what a Schwarzschild metric
       | is?). The focus on ethics and equity for these algorithms is
       | interesting too, as the average human holds multiple biases and
       | prejudices.
       | 
       | There's a similar effect in self-driving car research. We will
       | rightly hold the algorithm to a much higher quality bar than
       | existing human drivers. Autonomous vehicles will only be widely
       | deployed once they are at least an order of magnitude safer than
       | human drivers.
       | 
       | Also, the implications of large language models for information
       | retrieval are astounding. Assuming accuracy continues to improve,
       | I see a few things happening:
       | 
       | 1) search engines will be replaced with monolithic large language
       | models
       | 
       | 2) just as the average programmer now optimizes their workflow to
       | look up answers on Stack Overflow and other websites, the average
       | person will optimize their day-to-day work to most efficiently
       | retrieve answers from large language models
       | 
       | 3) instant fact checking of writing and speech will lead to
       | faster feedback loops when learning
        
         | IshKebab wrote:
         | > Gopher/GPT-3 are already much more accurate than the average
         | human at technical information retrieval (trivial to see from
         | the dialogue transcripts: how many Americans know what a
         | Schwarzschild metric is?).
         | 
         | That's not a very interesting metric though. GPT-3 has access
         | to all of wikipedia and has enough memory to store it all.
         | 
         | It's like saying a calculator is better at maths than a
         | professional mathematician because it can multiply longer
         | numbers.
        
         | moffkalast wrote:
         | > the more we raise the bar for what qualifies as AI (as we
         | should).
         | 
         | I'm not sure what you mean by that. The definition is pretty
         | clear cut as "any system that perceives its environment and
         | takes actions that maximize its chance of achieving its goals".
         | The media has started to get on the bandwagon of "it's not AI
         | if it's not an AGI" which is just nonsense.
        
         | fault1 wrote:
         | > closer we get to artificial intelligence, the more we raise
         | the bar for what qualifies as AI (as we should).
         | 
         | This is true, and in some regard, how it has always been.
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
         | 
         | Already, outside of obvious marketing, a lot of uses of the
         | current wave of AI/deep learning have stopped becoming magical.
        
         | gk1 wrote:
         | > 1) search engines will be replaced with monolithic large
         | language models
         | 
         | This is already well under way. It's called vector search[1].
         | Google, Bing, Facebook, Spotify, Amazon, etc etc already use
         | this to power their search and recommender systems.
         | 
         | There are even a bunch of companies popping up (I work for
         | one[2]) that let everyone else get in on the fun.
         | 
         | Check out this video with the creator of SBERT /
         | SentenceTransformer explaining how vector search is used in
         | combination with language models to power semantic search:
         | https://youtu.be/7RF03_WQJpQ
         | 
         | [1] https://www.pinecone.io/learn/what-is-similarity-search/
         | 
         | [2] https://www.pinecone.io
        
           | fault1 wrote:
           | Well under way? Some variation of a vector space model is
           | what pretty much every IR model since the .com bubble has
           | been based upon. Even before Google, Excite's technology was
           | based upon this. PageRank was based on spectral graphs
           | essentially.
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_space_model
        
           | freediver wrote:
           | IMO vector search is pretty much a solved problem with simple
           | to use, open source libraries like Faiss offering incredible
           | performance out of the box for most commercial use cases.
           | 
           | A much harder problem is creating accurate vectors to begin
           | with. Even the most advanced language models today create
           | word/sentence embeddings that leave a lot to be desired. Not
           | to mention this is slow and GPU intensive.
           | 
           | Creating an end-to-end solution for
           | embedding/searching/ranking (of which vector search is just
           | one component, the other one should be some kind of keyword
           | based search to increase precision) is what would be very
           | valuable to offer as a service.
        
         | 13415 wrote:
         | The problem seems to be that these models provide fairly
         | accurate information at many occasions and occasionally
         | complete blunders. Humans provide less accurate information
         | most of the time but with a certain amount of self-
         | reflection/meta-cognition, and they will usually recognize
         | total blunders or display reasonable uncertainty about them.
         | 
         | There are only very few applications where it would make sense
         | to take the risk and use an AI that occasionally makes gigantic
         | mistakes without any understanding why. Even seemingly harmless
         | applications like automated customer support could go horribly
         | wrong.
        
           | rhizome wrote:
           | > _There are only very few applications where it would make
           | sense to take the risk and use an AI that occasionally makes
           | gigantic mistakes without any understanding why. Even
           | seemingly harmless applications like automated customer
           | support could go horribly wrong._
           | 
           | Hey, it's just a few quantization errors. Nobody walking
           | across a street or voting in an election has anything to
           | worry about from those. /s
           | 
           | These are the fatal flaws, the hamartia if you will, in
           | attempts to democratize technologies that are based on
           | digitizing the real world and making decisions based on its
           | interpretations of a quantized dataset. The opposite of the
           | uncanny valley is you getting run over by a Waymo.
        
           | axg11 wrote:
           | Accuracy is improving rapidly though. I agree that the
           | current accuracy levels are not high enough to be relied
           | upon.
           | 
           | > Humans ... they will usually recognize total blunder
           | 
           | I question this assumption. I don't believe this is true,
           | even for subject matter experts. I've worked with radiology
           | data where experts with 10+ years of experience make blunders
           | that disagree with a consensus panel of radiologists.
        
             | rhizome wrote:
             | > _Accuracy is improving rapidly though_
             | 
             | It's asymptotic and it will never achieve 1:1 accuracy. The
             | natural world doesn't have a measurable resolution, and
             | this is apparent in written language, as we're seeing
             | others detail in other comments, as well as it is in more
             | relatable fields like sound. There will always be a
             | difference between what your ears hear and 192kHz/24bit
             | (and higher) digitized audio and/or video. That difference
             | will always be a source of...mistakes.
        
             | rdedev wrote:
             | Radiology is one of those fields were a lot of it comes
             | from experience and intuition mostly because of how complex
             | the human body is. Compare this to a physicist; pretty sure
             | you wont get as much disagreements there.
        
             | 13415 wrote:
             | I realize I should have been more precise. I agree that
             | there are many areas in which AI can and already has
             | excelled humans and less often makes grave mistakes than
             | humans. I specifically had natural language processing with
             | a focus on "intelligent" conversation in mind. The issues
             | in that area might have less to do with the pattern
             | recognition ability and more with the lack of appropriate
             | meta-cognition, introspection, and self-doubt. Maybe having
             | several AIs internally berate which answer is best before
             | uttering it would already do the trick, though.
        
               | ska wrote:
               | > AI can and already has excelled humans and less often
               | makes grave mistakes than humans.
               | 
               | Radiology, to continue the example, isn't one of them.
               | We've been doing ML/AI in radiology data since the 90s,
               | and results have been, and remain, decidedly mixed.
        
         | potatoman22 wrote:
         | When those language models are wrong or biased, the user will
         | have a worse experience in all three of those scenarios. At
         | least when we look at search results now, we can prune for the
         | facts. Those language models are ingesting that same data to
         | give a monolithic answer your a query. Less transparent, less
         | safe.
        
           | axg11 wrote:
           | I don't see a difference. Large language models can also
           | return their sources, as in the example on the Gopher blog
           | post. This will lead to a quicker answer and equal
           | transparency.
        
           | chaxor wrote:
           | "We can prune for the facts"
           | 
           | I wouldn't be too sure of that. People have shown time and
           | time again that they are pretty bad at determining what a
           | 'fact' is.
           | 
           | It gets far worse when they're shown more data (the issue we
           | are dealing with right now), and these models see far more
           | data than any one of us will see in our lifetimes.
           | 
           | Much of our ability to determine what a 'fact' is is either
           | something like: (1) (if political) 'does it fit with my
           | bias?' or (2) (if physics) 'is it physically possible?'.
           | Since (1) is mostly dependent on what information you show
           | yourself, and (2) depends on comparing to interaction with
           | physical reality, the system has too much information for (1)
           | and no physical space to run experiments in for (2). Much of
           | our ability to determine what a 'fact' is is either something
           | like: (1) (if political) 'does it fit with my bias?' or (2)
           | (if physics) 'is it physically possible?'. Since (1) is
           | mostly dependent on what information you show yourself, and
           | (2) depends on comparing to interaction with physical
           | reality, the system has too much information for (1) and no
           | physical space to run experiments in for (2).
        
         | c7DJTLrn wrote:
         | The bar should be the Winograd schema challenge. It requires a
         | lot more than spitting out somewhat sensical sentences.
        
         | the8472 wrote:
         | > We will rightly hold the algorithm to a much higher quality
         | bar than existing human drivers.
         | 
         | Rightly? Delaying a life-saving measure when it's the #9 cause
         | of death?
         | 
         | They should be deployed selectively as soon as they can make
         | the most risk-prone situations safer than the cohort of
         | involved human drivers. E.g. getting drunk people home. We
         | don't have to wait until they surpass the average driver
         | because the average driver is not necessarily the driver (heh)
         | of deaths.
         | 
         | Doing anything else is leaving bodies on the table.
        
           | bee_rider wrote:
           | I can definitely see your argument, but there are some
           | downsides to deploying ASAP:
           | 
           | * Long term, the reputational damage to self driving cars
           | might be significant if one is released that is only slightly
           | better than a drunk driver. If this hinders uptake later,
           | when self-driving cars are completely superior to normal
           | humans, we've possibly produced a net negative.
           | 
           | * While a self driving car should be safer than a drunk
           | driver, the best option would be to call a cab or have a
           | designated driver. It seems morally fraught to provide a
           | solution that is more dangerous than existing ones, even if
           | the less dangerous solutions have less than 100% uptake.
           | 
           | * Related, there may be some people who will instead of
           | viewing a self-driving car as some sort of emergency option
           | to avoid putting another drunk driver on the road, see it as
           | a more convenient option to inviting a designated driver.
           | 
           | * Issues around who is responsible when a self driving car
           | which is known to be worse than a typical human is deployed,
           | fails, and someone is hurt.
        
             | the8472 wrote:
             | This is mostly worrying about hard to predict second-order
             | effects. Exactly the same problem that caused various
             | health organizations (including WHO and FDA) send
             | misleading messages around corona and vaccinations.
             | 
             | > Issues around who is responsible when a self driving car
             | which is known to be worse than a typical human is
             | deployed, fails, and someone is hurt.
             | 
             | Even if insurance rates would be initially(!) higher than
             | for a regular taxi driver I would expect it to end up
             | cheaper overall and save lives.
             | 
             | Also note that "worse-than-the-old-average" may still end
             | up improving the average because the magnitude by which
             | they're worse is lower. Also, there's nothing magical about
             | "worse-than-average" because for all distributions (except
             | the dirac distribution) there is always some fraction worse
             | than the average, so we always have to expect some fraction
             | of drivers to be worse than average and there's no
             | fundamental reason why they must be human. In fact, if the
             | fleet of all cars in the world consisted of very safe, very
             | consistently behaving autonomous cars, except for a single
             | vehicle driven by a very conservative human driver who only
             | slowly circles in a fenced private community and never hits
             | anyone then statistically the entire autonomous car fleet
             | may be "worse than average" due to the single outlier.
        
         | imachine1980_ wrote:
         | >Gopher/GPT-3 are already much more accurate than the average
         | human at technical information retrieval
         | 
         | I agree in the same way than 70 % of people have less 100 iq,
         | we depend in specialist when I need to know if I have epilepsi
         | I need a person/thing who work is be up to date, and have the
         | less bias as possible and agregator models are quite usually
         | miss in understand what is crital info, try to program only
         | whit github copilot or translate a novel(they do probably
         | better than I don't English native) but not nearly as
         | translator, seems correct but it isn't
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-12-08 23:01 UTC)