Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

Reporting on AI and the future of the economy. CS masters degree from Princeton. Subscribe to my newsletter (Understanding AI) and podcast (AI Summer)! understandingai.org Washington, DC Joined March 2008

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Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

27 minutes ago

@rumham1986 I mean it's not clear how long she continued dating him after finding out.

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Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

21 hours ago

It seems pretty clear Platner is lying about when he learned that he had a Nazi tattoo. When @chrislhayes asked him about it yesterday (how could your girlfriend have known about your tattoo two months before you did?) he didn't have an explanation.

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Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

27 minutes ago

@TheGeorgePowell What implications does it have?

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Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

10 hours ago

@dearmadisonblue But consciousness strikes me as being in a different category, since it refers to a supposed inner experience rather than an obvervation about behabior.

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Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

10 hours ago

@dearmadisonblue I would also so that it is often useful to attribute human-like cognitive attributes (like understanding, reasoning, knowing, remembering, etc), and we shouldn't get hung up on whether they "really" have these attributes.

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Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

2 days ago

Like "do we have free will," "is AI conscious" seems to me like a semantic question that people pretend is an empirical question. Both concepts are too vague for empirical investigation and they have no real-world stakes.

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Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

11 hours ago

@dearmadisonblue Everyone agrees that human beings have the capacity for consciousness, and the question is whether a particular human being is fulfilling that potential at a point in time. With an AI the question is whether we want to choose a definition of "concious" that encompasses AI.

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Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

11 hours ago

@dearmadisonblue To use an analogy I used in another thread: "can a submarine swim" is a semantic question, not one with real-world stakes." "Can this human being swim" is a practical question with obvious stakes. It's not a contradiction even though you are using the same word in both cases.

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Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

11 hours ago

@dearmadisonblue I am not familiar with Ted Chiang's work so can't really comment on that unfortunately.

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Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

11 hours ago

@dearmadisonblue The question "will I be conscious during this surgery" has real-world stakes because humans experience pain while conscious that they don't experience when anestetized. Clearly LLMs don't experience this, since among other things they don't have a physical body.

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Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

11 hours ago

@dearmadisonblue Whether a human being is currently awake or asleep has no bearing on whether they are a moral patient, whether it's "like something to be" a human being, etc.

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Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

11 hours ago

@dearmadisonblue Like many terms "consciousness" has multiple meanings. When people ask "are LLMs conscious" they clearly mean something different than "as opposed to the unconsciousness we experience when we are sleeping or in a coma."

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Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

15 hours ago

@MattZeitlin Won't the superintelligent AIs be in charge by then?

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Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

16 hours ago

@campaignist1 @wideofthepost idgi.

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Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

17 hours ago

@jizzwhistle @FredipusRex @chrislhayes Which... seems fine? He's been one of he court's more moderate members.

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Tom Lee @tjl

20 hours ago

to me this seems like evidence we've moved up a level of abstraction--at one point you could measure punch cards, or lines of assembly. we moved to higher-order ways of designing software and redenominated LoC real velocity increase. but also costs in complexity/reliability/perf

Joe Weisenthal @TheStalwart

a day ago

Interesting chart, but the bar could go up 100x, and theoretically not be evidence that we’re closer to RSI

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Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

21 hours ago

🤔

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Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

21 hours ago

@lyndseyfifield (And kudos for being able to speak publicly. That takes a lot of courage.)

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Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

21 hours ago

@lyndseyfifield Can you say more about why you believe it was a setup? Based on your other tweets it sounds like other victims weren't willing to go on the record — maybe that's why the story didn't focus on them? The story certainly did not strike me as a gift to the Platner campaign.