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AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

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Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#41

Post by EGreg »

No, just no!

Because the whole thing is, a dog’s abstract mental capabilities are far below a human — thus why it would be ASTOUNDING that a dog could master even a primitive form of speaking English.

On the other hand, here we are brute forcing a solution from analyzing millions of man-years of published English speech, by using a huge array of computing power to precompute various answers and sift them.

It is a bit like “solving checkers” and then claiming “wow, a dog could have done this”. It is like making a cheat sheet for a test by analyzing all answers ever given, and then summarizing them in a vector of 102827 dimensions, and claiming that it is the same as coming up with clever and relevant one liners on the spot using the brain of a dog.

NO. It’s not nearly as astounding or impressive.

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#42

Post by sanxiyn »

ipaddr wrote: post #37
ianbutler wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has it been over hyped? Some ML created in the last 8 years is in most major products now. It has been transformative even if you don’t see it, is informing most things you use. We’re not close to AGI but I’ve never heard an actual researcher make that claim or the orgs they work for. They just consistently show for the tasks they pick they beat most baselines and in a lot of cases humans. The models just don’t gener…

It is overhyped because in the end it has failed to deliver the breakthrough promised years ago. Car drinking cars are a great example. The AI that has taken over google search has made a great product kinda of awful now. What breakthroughs are you referring to?

I mean, Zoom can change your background of video in real time, and people all over the world do so every day. This was an unimaginable breakthrough 10 years ago.

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#43

Post by gambiting »

ianbutler wrote: post #21
stephc_int13 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI has been over-hyped, that's all. The machine learning techniques that were developed and enhanced during the last decade are not magical, like any other machines/software. But people have different and irrational expectations about AI.

Has it been over hyped? Some ML created in the last 8 years is in most major products now. It has been transformative even if you don’t see it, is informing most things you use. We’re not close to AGI but I’ve never heard an actual researcher make that claim or the orgs they work for. They just consistently show for the tasks they pick they beat most baselines and in a lot of cases humans. The models just don’t gener…

It's just that the day to day instances of "AI" that you might run into are nowhere near the level of hype they initially got. For instance all kinds of voice assistants are just DUMB. Like, so so bad they actively put people off using them, with countless examples of them failing at even the most basic queries. And the instances where they feel smart it looks like it's only because you actually hit a magic passphrase that someone hardcoded in.

My point is - if you don't actually work with state of the art AI research, then yeah, it's easy to see it as nothing more than overhyped garbage, because that's exactly what's being sold to regular consumers.

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#44

Post by gambiting »

sanxiyn wrote: post #42
ipaddr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is overhyped because in the end it has failed to deliver the breakthrough promised years ago. Car drinking cars are a great example. The AI that has taken over google search has made a great product kinda of awful now. What breakthroughs are you referring to?

I mean, Zoom can change your background of video in real time, and people all over the world do so every day. This was an unimaginable breakthrough 10 years ago.

What does that have to do with AI though??

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#45

Post by shagie »

EGreg wrote: post #41

No, just no! Because the whole thing is, a dog’s abstract mental capabilities are far below a human — thus why it would be ASTOUNDING that a dog could master even a primitive form of speaking English. On the other hand, here we are brute forcing a solution from analyzing millions of man-years of published English speech, by using a huge array of computing power to precompute various answers and sift them. It is a bit…

Bunny is a neat dog... https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEa46rlHqEP6ClWitFd2QOQ

The vocal apparatus is not there, but there is certainly more cognition than what people think dogs have (there's a question that I wonder if language enables thought or if thought enables language)

And this is even something that a cat can do (not as much language skills, but there's thought going on) https://www.youtube.com/c/BilliSpeaks

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#46

Post by ianbutler »

ipaddr wrote: post #37
ianbutler wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has it been over hyped? Some ML created in the last 8 years is in most major products now. It has been transformative even if you don’t see it, is informing most things you use. We’re not close to AGI but I’ve never heard an actual researcher make that claim or the orgs they work for. They just consistently show for the tasks they pick they beat most baselines and in a lot of cases humans. The models just don’t gener…

It is overhyped because in the end it has failed to deliver the breakthrough promised years ago. Car drinking cars are a great example. The AI that has taken over google search has made a great product kinda of awful now. What breakthroughs are you referring to?

A. Most people still think Google search is good. B. Unless you work for Google specifically on that search team I'm going to say you don't know what you're talking about. So we can safely throw that point away.

I've implemented a natural language search using bleeding edge work, the results I can assure you are impressive.

Everything from route planning to spam filtering has seen major upgrades thanks to ML in the last 8 years. Someone mentioned the zoom backgrounds, besides that image generation and the field of image processing in general. Document classification, translation. Recommendations. Malware detection, code completion. I could go on.

No one promised me AGI so idk what you're on about and that certainly wasn't the promise billed to me when things thawed out this time but the results have pretty undeniably changed a lot of tech we use.

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#47

Post by ianbutler »

gambiting wrote: post #44
sanxiyn wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, Zoom can change your background of video in real time, and people all over the world do so every day. This was an unimaginable breakthrough 10 years ago.

What does that have to do with AI though??

How do you think that's done?

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#48

Post by gambiting »

ianbutler wrote: post #47
gambiting wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does that have to do with AI though??

How do you think that's done?

Definitely not with AI?

I mean Photoshop could do that 10+ years ago without "machine learning" even being a thing people talked about.

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#49

Post by password321 »

ipaddr wrote: post #37
ianbutler wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has it been over hyped? Some ML created in the last 8 years is in most major products now. It has been transformative even if you don’t see it, is informing most things you use. We’re not close to AGI but I’ve never heard an actual researcher make that claim or the orgs they work for. They just consistently show for the tasks they pick they beat most baselines and in a lot of cases humans. The models just don’t gener…

It is overhyped because in the end it has failed to deliver the breakthrough promised years ago. Car drinking cars are a great example. The AI that has taken over google search has made a great product kinda of awful now. What breakthroughs are you referring to?

If we are going to start saying "but it hasn't achieved X yet when Y said it would" as a way to classify a field as overhyped then I don't know what even remains.

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#50

Post by 323 »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #5
evrydayhustling wrote: post #3

I love this take. Most AI results provoke a torrent of articles listing pratfalls that prove it's not AGI. Of course it's not AGI! But it is as unexpected as a talking dog. Take a second to be amazed, at least amused. Then read how they did it and think about how to do better.

It's rarely productive to take internet criticism into account, but it feels like AI is an especially strong instance of this. It seems like a lot of folks just want to pooh pooh any possible outcome. I'm not sure why this is. Possibly because of animosity toward big tech, given big tech is driving a lot of the research and practical implementation in this area?

> It seems like a lot of folks just want to pooh pooh any possible outcome. I'm not sure why this is. Possibly because of animosity toward big tech

It's much more simple, and more deep: most humans believe they are special/unique/non-machine like spiritual beings. Anything suggesting they could be as simple as the result of mechanical matrix multiplications is deeply disturbing and unacceptable.

There is a rich recent anti-AGI literature written by philosophy people which basically boils down to this: "a machine could never be as meaningful and creative as I am, because I am human, while the AGI is just operations on bits".

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