We should generally be skeptical of corporations (or even non-profits!) releasing pre-prints that look like scientific papers but might not pass peer review at a scientific journal. We should indeed view such pre-prints as somewhere between research and marketing. OpenAI’s pre-prints or white papers are a good example.
I think it’s hard to claim that a pre-print like Sparks of AGI is insincere (it might be, but how could we support that claim?), but this doesn’t undermine the general point. Suppose employees at Microsoft Research wanted to publish a similar report arguing that GPT-4′s seeming cognitive capabilities are actually just a bunch of cheap tricks and not sparks of anything. Would Microsoft publish that report? It’s not just about how financial or job-related incentives shape what you believe (although that is worth thinking about), it’s also about how they shape what you can say out loud. (And, importantly, what you are encouraged to focus on.)
We should generally be skeptical of corporations (or even non-profits!) releasing pre-prints that look like scientific papers but might not pass peer review at a scientific journal. We should indeed view such pre-prints as somewhere between research and marketing. OpenAI’s pre-prints or white papers are a good example.
I think it’s hard to claim that a pre-print like Sparks of AGI is insincere (it might be, but how could we support that claim?), but this doesn’t undermine the general point. Suppose employees at Microsoft Research wanted to publish a similar report arguing that GPT-4′s seeming cognitive capabilities are actually just a bunch of cheap tricks and not sparks of anything. Would Microsoft publish that report? It’s not just about how financial or job-related incentives shape what you believe (although that is worth thinking about), it’s also about how they shape what you can say out loud. (And, importantly, what you are encouraged to focus on.)