Showerthoughts

30378 readers

335 users here now

A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted, clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts: 1

Rules

All posts must be showerthoughts
The entire showerthought must be in the title
No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- If you feel strongly that you want politics back, please volunteer as a mod.
Posts must be original/unique
Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct

If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.

Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report the message goes away and you never worry about it.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

vatlark

forkball

Thekingoflorda

The problem with AI alignment is that humans aren't aligned (lemy.lol)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/showerthoughts

32 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm sure there are some AI peeps here. Neural networks scale with size because the number of combinations of parameter values that work for a given task scales exponentially (or, even better, factorially if that's a word???) with the network size. How can such a network be properly aligned when even humans, the most advanced natural neural nets, are not aligned? What can we realistically hope for?

Here's what I mean by alignment:

Ability to specify a loss function that humanity wants
Some strict or statistical guarantees on the deviation from that loss function as well as potentially unaccounted side effects

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'm not gonna go too deep into it because I'm not qualified to, but I think the issue currently at hand, is that we're throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. Most of the AI models currently used in different branches are being used because they showed promise in the original problem they were designed for. All these tools you see today were more or less designed over than 30 years ago. There's a lot of interesting stuff being done at an academic level today but we (understandably so) don't see those in an everyday conversation

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The idea of backpropagation and neural nets is quite old, but there's some significant new research being done now. Primarily in node types and computational efficiency. LSTM, transformers, ReLU - these are all new.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Haha reading your other replies, you're too humble for someone who knows what they're talking about