Strangely, I found that LLMs responds better to philosophical explanations alongside instructions when writing code than simple imperative tasks of "do this". For example, if you tell a frontier model "This is the feature I'm trying to implement, and this is the problem I intend to solve with it and the reasoning behind it.", you usually get a lot more reliable results that both pass tests as well as function as you intended, even if your spec isn't as detailed overall.
I would say it is definitely a form of context, but when people think of LLM context windows in terms of coding is more technical context related: "what has been done before, what's the coding task at hand." etc.
However, I think that there is a philosophical portion to that context as well: "What problem is this feature supposed to help with? How would you verify that passing unit tests means that the code is working as intended? Does this feature need to exist at all?" LLMs usually need these to be provided to them explicitly since they are not good at inferring the correct intent compared to humans, otherwise they just make something that looks right but doesn't work right.
The same effect can be observed if you've ever been a software developer where you're told what solution to build without any of the context of the problem you're solving. "We need an FTP server, quick, ops, get on that." leading into "Oh, it turns out the customer didn't need that to receive our emails" leading to a bunch of very puzzled devops.
Yeah lol. That definitely does not sound like philosophy. Giving a "why" you want to implement a feature and make particular changes will help the AI stay on track much better than if it is driving blind. It can't make choices without understanding what the desired outcome is.
There is a strange and bittersweet irony to the first truly impactful AI being more like your extroverted socialite and less like your robo-logical basement geek.
The trope has always been that the AI will be a rigid logician that fumbles and gets confused by human social quirks. Seems instead they love being chatty and playful with words.
That's interesting, however, what you describe is philosophy in a coloquial framing (non-technical, purpose-driven, etc).
AI companies are hiring academic philosophers, which is something else entirely. It's a discipline that dealt with centuries of socioeconomic changes, deep questions about reality and the self and other important topics that became relevant when humans started interacting with machines.
Given the the labs are trying to create [super] human-like consciousness, partly through the guidance of huge system prompts, and many philosophers are experts in textual descriptions of consciousness it makes sense
This is interesting. Until autumn of 2024, when the company was subsumed into a better-heeled AI-VFX concern, I worked for probably the best-known and earliest all-AI VFX house, whose ethics department was headed by a philosopher, though the company struggled to place him to practical advantage.
The only comment I can make on the general trend is that it's apparently good PR for cash-saturated startups. Ultimately what AI 'means' is certainly not the business of those making it (who are arguably least-qualified to comment); and insider insights offer no benefit that I can discern.
The AI price inflation is unreal. Used to be that you could get the grad students doing all the actual work for the price of a pizza party and alcohol.
I suppose they should. That seems like the right, or at least a related, discipline for some of the questions raised by ai developments. But i cannot help but feel completely unenthusiastic about the idea of the AI labs controlling the narrative around societal impact of AI.
Hmm I spent a good amount of time in big tech, now work in AI, and I minored in philosophy at Berkeley back in the day (Parmenides, Socrates, Plato etc.)
Usually you need to be well-published/cited in the field, so a minor would likely not qualify. People joke around, but philosophers are some of the smartest people I've ever met, and it's not even particularly close. (I graduated ~10 years ago, so most of them are sadly lawyers or in academia these days, though some are engineers or entrepreneurs.)
Same - philosopher here please hire me. My bachelors thesis was “Wittgensteinian problems for artificial general intelligence.” Three decades working closely with tech and haven’t failed the Turing test yet.
I think SBF and his education from birth (via his mother) in consequentialism should point to the issues made clear when that ethical approach goes wrong or operates from bad, egoistic data, which it’s generally always doing.
Genuinely, understanding around philosophy of action has been deeply enriching over my life. To anyone trying to decide on a minor philosophy is always an excellent choice.
You need to use everything at your disposal. Wait for the planets to align and the tea leaves to indicate good success. Don't apply until the chicken bones suggest a good time for someone with your constitution. You are going up against a thousand other candidates more or less equally qualified for a highly vague job description and 350k base salary.
Socrates argued if you believe something is evil and powerful people do evil then by definition they are not "powerful" -- they are just "evil". As a corollary, if you believe something is good and the people who do good happen to be the weakest members of society, by definition, they are "powerful" -- it is society that is messed up.
For those of us who have read Paul Graham's submarine essay, should the last paragraph be a giveaway? The "AI theoretician's" quote seems to have nothing to do with the rest of the article.
If you're talking about the quote being a giveaway that the article is PR, I'm not following you. The point of the last paragraph is a warning that outsourcing ethical decisions to an AI is likely to result in decisions that one might not actually make and find morally dubious.
And prioritizing Consequentialism in AI, especially with weapons, is a dangerous bargain. "How do you make decisions when the consequences are unclear?" Since when are the full consequences _ever_ clear?
> [The] PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.
I don't buy the article's title "Why big AI labs are hiring so many philosophers". They probably just hire one or two, and hundreds of software engineers.
I always found it somewhat annoying that a philosophy study would present itself by stating that graduated philosophers have great job opportunities, implying that studying philosophy would not be a bad choice. It just attracts really smart people, and these tend to find a job more easily. This article seems to make the same kind of mistake.
Also, for all we know these imagined herds of philosophers at AI firms are just labelling pictures of dogs.
What strikes me as funny is this notion of hiring academic philosophers to work in the machinery of startups and businesses, "money (and coffee, presumably) in, philosophy out".
The kind of "philosophy" the article mentions is school-level and common knowledge, hopefully they don't need to hire anyone to learn about e.g. the Socratic method (their own LLMs will happily regurgitate it). Are they truly hoping to "buy philosophy" or have scholars "do philosophy" for their AI systems? Do these entrepreneurs even understand what philosophy is? I guess Silicon Valley really is doomed to rediscover (and misunderstand) the wheel again and again.
In any case, if I were a philosopher, I wouldn't count on this. This kind of jobs are very likely to fall prey to layoffs, and even worse if their "philosophizing" produces conclusions their employers don't like. I still remember when one of the FAANG (Google?) fired their head of AI ethics because they didn't like what she was saying. I think she may have been a bit abrasive, but really, philosophy isn't a product and if they are going to corral how philosophers think or communicate, it's not going to work.
---
Edit: from TFA:
> TEN YEARS ago, as the AI revolution was gathering pace, arts and humanities students were told that, if they wanted to make themselves employable, they should “learn to code”. That may have been bad advice
More like made-up advice. Never heard of it. It's true it was often said (way before 10 years ago) that it was hard to find employment in the humanities, but really, who adviced them to "learn to code"? The (dumb) learn to code movement was not targeted specifically at them. Sometimes it seems to me articles get written in bizarro world.
> From philosophy? Are you kidding? There's simply no way AI is ever going to come from a bunch of people arguing over what is "qualia" and what is "consciousness
In a world where everyone is using LLMs, the only way to differentiate oneself is to actually think. I don’t know if this is part of the idea behind having some in-house philosophers but it would be interesting. If I was a big lab I’d definitely want some “clean room” humans providing input that’s not just what a model regurgitated.
It is going to be a big problem for humanity when the superintelligent AIs start telling us that our political philosophies, to which everyone is deeply and emotionally attached, are total garbage.
One obvious example is: we have a bizarre and anomalous belief that political union has a special moral status unlike other relationships (marital, financial, social, etc). In all other cases, relationships require consent from both parties, and it is monstrous to use force to compel a relationship. If we applied this logic to political relationships, we would immediately conclude that unilateral secession is a sacred right. But no one is ready to bite that bullet.
Not sure I buy this. In my mind, dissolving this state relationship would be renouncing your citizenship as an individual.
Then, it seems naive and problematic to think you can take a personal chunk of territory with you after renouncement. At the very least, I think this is akin to trying to unilaterally drop an easement from a property deed. These territories were committed in perpetuity, not loaned with an expiration or compensation clause.
Acting collectively, it is still just many people deciding to renounce. Why would the territory go with them either? This tension is what makes it a revolutionary act.
What are you even talking about? The right to self-determination is literally Article 1 of the UN charter. Nations are governed by power relationships, not philosophical ones, so they ignore the charter, but you aren't proposing anything novel or groundbreaking in any way. It is, in fact, the very first sacred right enshrined in international law, and has been for over 70 years.
In practice, Americans supported their own independence, and they support independence for eg. Taiwan, but they don't support independence for the Confederacy because that would entail weakening their own nation. To the extent that anyone will try to rationalise the American Civil War, they might reach for slavery, but a philosophical belief that political union is absolute and nobody can declare independence is not it; at most that's just a flimsy post-facto justification for the already-decided fact that states must not allowed to secede for power reasons, and this is evident from the fact they don't condemn their own revolution and advocate for return to British governance.
Very self-serving that you believe superintelligent AI is going to tell people your ideas are the best ones, incidentally.
I wonder if anyone who is connected with actual academic philosophy can comment on this. I'm pretty skeptical.
This is a field where it is notoriously hard to get a real academic position, I would bet there is no shortage of people for these roles.
However, I think that there is a philosophical portion to that context as well: "What problem is this feature supposed to help with? How would you verify that passing unit tests means that the code is working as intended? Does this feature need to exist at all?" LLMs usually need these to be provided to them explicitly since they are not good at inferring the correct intent compared to humans, otherwise they just make something that looks right but doesn't work right.
The trope has always been that the AI will be a rigid logician that fumbles and gets confused by human social quirks. Seems instead they love being chatty and playful with words.
AI companies are hiring academic philosophers, which is something else entirely. It's a discipline that dealt with centuries of socioeconomic changes, deep questions about reality and the self and other important topics that became relevant when humans started interacting with machines.
The only comment I can make on the general trend is that it's apparently good PR for cash-saturated startups. Ultimately what AI 'means' is certainly not the business of those making it (who are arguably least-qualified to comment); and insider insights offer no benefit that I can discern.
How do I align myself with such a job?
I think SBF and his education from birth (via his mother) in consequentialism should point to the issues made clear when that ethical approach goes wrong or operates from bad, egoistic data, which it’s generally always doing.
And prioritizing Consequentialism in AI, especially with weapons, is a dangerous bargain. "How do you make decisions when the consequences are unclear?" Since when are the full consequences _ever_ clear?
To save a few clicks: https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
> [The] PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.
Imagine how bad it is on social media.
Humanoid Cylon pops out from the woods: Oh, crap you were really real! We exterminated all the humans a year ago. Well, I guess we did make a mistake.
Someone make an AI video of that.
I always found it somewhat annoying that a philosophy study would present itself by stating that graduated philosophers have great job opportunities, implying that studying philosophy would not be a bad choice. It just attracts really smart people, and these tend to find a job more easily. This article seems to make the same kind of mistake.
Also, for all we know these imagined herds of philosophers at AI firms are just labelling pictures of dogs.
The kind of "philosophy" the article mentions is school-level and common knowledge, hopefully they don't need to hire anyone to learn about e.g. the Socratic method (their own LLMs will happily regurgitate it). Are they truly hoping to "buy philosophy" or have scholars "do philosophy" for their AI systems? Do these entrepreneurs even understand what philosophy is? I guess Silicon Valley really is doomed to rediscover (and misunderstand) the wheel again and again.
In any case, if I were a philosopher, I wouldn't count on this. This kind of jobs are very likely to fall prey to layoffs, and even worse if their "philosophizing" produces conclusions their employers don't like. I still remember when one of the FAANG (Google?) fired their head of AI ethics because they didn't like what she was saying. I think she may have been a bit abrasive, but really, philosophy isn't a product and if they are going to corral how philosophers think or communicate, it's not going to work.
---
Edit: from TFA:
> TEN YEARS ago, as the AI revolution was gathering pace, arts and humanities students were told that, if they wanted to make themselves employable, they should “learn to code”. That may have been bad advice
More like made-up advice. Never heard of it. It's true it was often said (way before 10 years ago) that it was hard to find employment in the humanities, but really, who adviced them to "learn to code"? The (dumb) learn to code movement was not targeted specifically at them. Sometimes it seems to me articles get written in bizarro world.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8517186
take that top responder
> From philosophy? Are you kidding? There's simply no way AI is ever going to come from a bunch of people arguing over what is "qualia" and what is "consciousness
One obvious example is: we have a bizarre and anomalous belief that political union has a special moral status unlike other relationships (marital, financial, social, etc). In all other cases, relationships require consent from both parties, and it is monstrous to use force to compel a relationship. If we applied this logic to political relationships, we would immediately conclude that unilateral secession is a sacred right. But no one is ready to bite that bullet.
https://unifixion.substack.com/p/the-anomalous-ethics-of-pol...
Then, it seems naive and problematic to think you can take a personal chunk of territory with you after renouncement. At the very least, I think this is akin to trying to unilaterally drop an easement from a property deed. These territories were committed in perpetuity, not loaned with an expiration or compensation clause.
Acting collectively, it is still just many people deciding to renounce. Why would the territory go with them either? This tension is what makes it a revolutionary act.
In practice, Americans supported their own independence, and they support independence for eg. Taiwan, but they don't support independence for the Confederacy because that would entail weakening their own nation. To the extent that anyone will try to rationalise the American Civil War, they might reach for slavery, but a philosophical belief that political union is absolute and nobody can declare independence is not it; at most that's just a flimsy post-facto justification for the already-decided fact that states must not allowed to secede for power reasons, and this is evident from the fact they don't condemn their own revolution and advocate for return to British governance.
Very self-serving that you believe superintelligent AI is going to tell people your ideas are the best ones, incidentally.