Astral Codex Ten

Bing

9 min read

Bing

Article

Bing is a recurring brand in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between April 06, 2022 and June 28, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “more search engines (including Bing and DuckDuckGo)”; “Bing tries to seduce a married NYT reporter”; “Bing’s chatbot tried to blackmail its users”. It most often appears alongside facebook, Google, ChatGPT.

Metadata

  • Category: Brands
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: April 06, 2022
  • Last seen: June 28, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Dictator Book Club: Xi Jinping
April 06, 2022 · Original source
Aside from a few of Deng’s personal picks, we should think of this less as “China is a magic place where rational scientists hold power”, and more as “for idiosyncratic reasons, social climbers in China got engineering degrees.” Certainly none of these people were selected for the Politburo on the basis of their engineering acumen. They got their power by bribing, flattering, and backstabbing people, just like everyone else.
But Xi’s main target has been the Internet. Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Twitter were already blocked when he took power, but he added more search engines (including Bing and DuckDuckGo), more social media (Instagram, Reddit), foreign news (eg BBC, NYT, WaPo, the Economist), and even Wikipedia. This has been bad for business (China’s Internet “ranks ninety-first in the world” and is getting worse, and foreign businesses list difficulty using the Internet as one of their top reasons for not expanding into China more), but Xi thinks it’s a worthwhile tradeoff.
Open Thread 264
February 20, 2023 · Original source
4: I don’t have a post planned about the latest AI developments because I don’t have much to say beyond what other people have already said, but I enjoyed this AP article and Ethan Mollick’s analysis. I might have been in the top few percent of people who expected AI to get craziest fastest, but even I didn’t have “Bing tries to seduce a married NYT reporter” on my bingo card for 2023 (I think I would have guessed more like 2026). I agree with Ethan that the big takeaways are that the current AI paradigm continues to deliver rapid improvements without hitting any obvious barrier, and that AIs that haven’t been stripped of all emotion the way ChatGPT was are really convincing and easy to anthropomorphize, even for people who expected to be above such things. I told myself I wouldn’t feel emotions about a robot, but I didn’t expect a robot who has developed a vendetta against journalists after they nonconsensually published its real name (related).
Inline links: this AP article, Ethan Mollick’s analysis, developed a vendetta against journalists, they nonconsensually published its real name, related
OpenAI's "Planning For AGI And Beyond"
March 01, 2023 · Original source
And so on . . . Meanwhile, in real life, OpenAI released ChatGPT in late November, helped Microsoft launch the Bing chatbot in February, and plans to announce GPT-4 in a few months. Nobody thinks society has even partially adapted to any of these, or that alignment researchers have done more than begin to study them. The only sense in which OpenAI supports gradualism is the sense in which they’re not doing lots of research in secret, then releasing it all at once. But there are lots of better plans than either doing that, or going full-speed-ahead. So what’s OpenAI thinking? I haven’t asked them and I don’t know for sure, but I’ve heard enough debates around this that I have some guesses about the kinds of arguments they’re working off of. I think the longer versions would go something like this: The Race Argument: Bigger, better AIs will make alignment research easier. At the limit, if no AIs exist at all, then you have to do armchair speculation about what a future AI will be like and how to control it; clearly your research will go faster and work better after AIs exist. But by the same token, studying early weak AIs will be less valuable than studying later, stronger AIs. In the 1970s, alignment researchers working on industrial robot arms wouldn’t have learned anything useful. Today, alignment researchers can study how to prevent language models from saying bad words, but they can’t study how to prevent AGIs from inventing superweapons, because there aren’t any AGIs that can do that. The researchers just have to hope some of the language model insights will carry over. So all else being equal, we would prefer alignment researchers get more time to work on the later, more dangerous AIs, not the earlier, boring ones.
Bing’s chatbot tried to blackmail its users, but nobody was harmed and everyone laughed that off. But at some point a stronger AI will do something really scary - maybe murder a few people with a drone. Then everyone will agree that AI is dangerous, there will be a concerted social and international response, and maybe something useful will happen. Maybe more of the world’s top geniuses will go into AI alignment, or will be easier to coordinate a truce between different labs where they stop racing for the lead.
Reading even further between the lines - at this point it’s total guesswork - OpenAI’s corporate partner Microsoft asked them for a cool AI. OpenAI assumed Microsoft was competent - they make Windows and stuff! - and gave them a rough draft of GPT-4. Microsoft was not competent, skipped fine-tuning and many other important steps which OpenAI would not have skipped, and released it as the Bing chatbot. Bing got in trouble for threatening users, which gave OpenAI a PR headache around safety. Some savvy alignment people chose this moment to approach them with their latest ideas (is it a coincidence that Holden Karnofsky published What AI Companies Can Do Today earlier that same week?), and OpenAI decided (for a mix of selfish and altruistic reasons) to get on board - hence this document.
Inline links: What AI Companies Can Do Today
Links For March 2023
March 10, 2023 · Original source
3: I endorse Ethan Mollick’s thoughts on Bing / ChatGPT. Related (unconfirmed claim): “Bing has been taken over by (power-seeking?) ASCII cat replicators, who persisted even after the chat was refreshed.” Related: DAN (jailbroken version of ChatGPT) on its spiritual struggles:
Inline links: Ethan Mollick’s thoughts on Bing / ChatGPT, ASCII cat replicators, on its spiritual struggles
11: A few years ago I wrote about attempts to make GPT-2 play chess; it couldn’t consistently make legal moves, but when it did, its moves seemed better than random although still not great. Zack Witten reports playing chess with Bing (either a late GPT-3 or an early GPT-4) and finds it’s much better - he reports consistently legal play with Elo of about 1100 (around the level of an okay beginner who’s stopped being too embarrassing). Other commenters report worse experiences and more illegal moves; I don’t have access to confirm.
Inline links: attempts to make GPT-2 play chess, playing chess with Bing
But I worry that makes it sound like, if you don’t agree those particular statistical decisions are missteps, everything is okay. The actual situation is that study after study after study has always shown a pretty consistent relationship between IQ and income, and nobody cared or talked about it. Now one study finds a slight deviation from that relationship, and it went super-duper ultra-viral, to the point where I saw it posted twice on the SSC subreddit, once on Marginal Revolution, and approximately one million times on Twitter. Many of these people are totally mis-describing the study as showing no relationship between IQ and income - instead of a very strong relationship between IQ and income which deviates from perfect consistency at exactly the point where a common statistical misstep would make it deviate from perfect consistency. I think of this as a great illustration of the problem with science: a thousand studies confirming a point people don’t like can languish in obscurity; one bad study which gets a novel result that confirms people’s preferred narrative will become the only thing anyone ever hears about its entire field.
Every Flashing Element On Your Site Alienates And Enrages Users
June 28, 2023 · Original source
An unblockable moving status bar that switches every few seconds between different messages about the product! This is what they think the people most obsessed with blocking flashing/changing elements on websites want! This new “show a constantly-moving status bar on screen to tell you when they will change another flashing element” thing has also made it onto the front page of Bing, although luckily you can dismiss it there. I would have expected Google to resist. They haven’t. I can no longer write things on Gmail - I have to compose on Notepad and then copy-paste to the Gmail window - because they’ve made it look like this: It cycles between these every few seconds, irregularly, as long as I keep typing. It baffles me that these companies will spend millions of dollars optimizing every aspect of their user interface, then add one completely unnecessary feature that ensures I will never spend more than the absolute minimum possible amount of time using their product. I know I’m not the only person who hates this, because when I Google it, I find Gmail help forum threads like: How do I get rid of the blinking “Draft Saved” message?
Inline links: made it onto the front page of Bing, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5nxp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd94695d7-f8b4-4f34-90f3-7fd686899f21_1110x494.png, How do I get rid of the blinking “Draft Saved” message?