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The AI Battle

aifuture.substack.com

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Re: The AI Battle

#51

Post by ben_w »

stuckinhell wrote: post #13

AI that can do creative work is scary for its implications on humanity. Are we at best biological AI's ? I've played around with several of them. These artwork AI's are way more scary than GPT-3 et al because they seem to do something so creative with such good visible results. I don't think the genie goes back in the bottle. I think humanity has an existential crisis on its hands. Whats the point in doing things if…

People run for fun, even though cars beat us for both range and speed before the end of the Ottoman Empire and the departure of Ireland from the United Kingdom.

We'll do creative things for fun too, even if/when AI convincingly bests us in such endeavours by the margin it does in chess.

I, for example, still sometimes make musical noises, even though my musical talent is so bad that I wrote a procedural generator better than me back in 2009 — https://youtu.be/depj8C21YHg and https://youtu.be/k7RM7GsGeUI won't impress anyone, but me thinking I'm worse when I try to do it myself doesn't stop me having fun.

Re: The AI Battle

#52

Post by psi75 »

rendang wrote: post #21
psi75 wrote: post #3

If we don't implement universal basic income, we are utterly screwed. Markets where one side is desperate are inelastic, which means that a small change in supply or demand can cause huge price swings. Usually, this works against those who are out of power; for example, oil producers can cause price spikes if they can hold a cartel together. The job market is also extremely inelastic. We might only see 10 or 20 perce…

Is there any historical precedent for a short term, big dive in the wages of a certain sector based on a 20% decline in demand for that labor? If that were the expected outcome, wouldn't one have predicted that the economy-wide declines in the workforce in the Great Recession would have sunk wages?

I don't know if the numbers match (e.g. 20%) but this is basically what happened in the Great Depression. The advent of industrial nitrogen fixation led to increased agricultural productivity, which caused food prices to decline, which seems like it should be a good thing, but led to the impoverishment of many farmers who could no longer compete.

The Great Recession did shrink wages, although for office workers it mostly produced permanent increases in work demands (Millennial nightmare jobs vs. cushy Boomer jobs which, by the way, won't be backfilled when those who hold them vacate) with wages merely flat.

Re: The AI Battle

#53

Post by carapace »

ajafari1 wrote: post #31
tialaramex wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> those systems are not a path to AGI If that's the actual meat of your claim, it's weird to just put it unsupported at the end. If you think it's an aside you've got a big problem, because without it the rest is pretty weak. We saw this with chess. Anybody who was clinging on to the idea that well, the machines can't really play chess, because technically there do seem to be a few humans who are better, was screwed…

Right on. When do you expect a productized AI that can replace your average skilled programmer?

Here's me almost exactly six years ago, predicting "most coding and design tasks will be automated within three to five years."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11718300

If we count GitHub Copilot as the tip of the spear then I was too optimistic.

> GitHub Copilot ... was first announced by GitHub on 29 June 2021

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub_Copilot

Re: The AI Battle

#54

Post by CuriouslyC »

Retric wrote: post #49
CuriouslyC wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think these sorts of tools will ever be used to generate a novel or something on that scale. We're building really sexy autocomplete tools that creators will use to fill in the blanks much like the great masters of the renaissance used apprentices to do much of the work in their masterpieces. People will outline what they want, then ask the AI to fill in the blanks, and iteratively refine the result. As long…

Modern word processors haven’t suddenly and dramatically increased the number of great books available. They save a lot of time and effort relative to a typewriter, but such drudgery isn’t the bottleneck on creativity that you’re suggesting.

I know a lot of writers who are very good at creating an outline and describing what's going on but poor at actually sitting down and getting words on paper for any extended period of time. These same people can read and critique/edit/etc endlessly. I think it's a fairly common problem because block is the number one topic in most forums for writers. Having a tool that takes an outline and generates a rough draft of a chapter that can be iterated on would make a huge difference for the non-Stephen Kings among us.

Re: The AI Battle

#55

Post by ok_dad »

bearjaws wrote: post #30
qualudeheart wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the horse picture sucks. Other people might say that they like Dall-E’s output on Twitter, for signalling purposes, but I still think they don’t really believe that. Still, it’s only a matter of time till nicer graphics are possible. Most graphic designers and artists are still worse than this thing, especially the type that bought a $200 drawing tablet on Amazon and sell their services on Fiverr. Those…

The way I have put it to my artist friends is in the form of litmus test: If I sat at a local farmers market selling this art, people would likely buy some of it. If the delineation can only be made because you are an art major, or practicing artist, that is not really compelling to your own market. We are on the third generation of these type of "AI" and they are already past the point where people would exchange ca…

Not a bad idea: use the AI to generate some sketch for the user, then the user finishes it. You might be able to teach art this way, slowly reduce the help the AI gives a student over time until they don’t need the AI anymore, or perhaps at some point they’ll realize they like coloring more than drawing and just keep asking the AI to produce sketches they can fill in with color, depth, and texture.

Re: The AI Battle

#56

Post by LeanderK »

stuckinhell wrote: post #13

AI that can do creative work is scary for its implications on humanity. Are we at best biological AI's ? I've played around with several of them. These artwork AI's are way more scary than GPT-3 et al because they seem to do something so creative with such good visible results. I don't think the genie goes back in the bottle. I think humanity has an existential crisis on its hands. Whats the point in doing things if…

> Are we at best biological AI's ?

imho yes. But don't have an existential crisis just yet. It's a very narrow task where the AI systems do well in a way that we don't expected from computers. But it's well chosen, there are still only few tasks where significant progress was made. They really can't make "logical deductions" at all and we have no idea how. Everything you see is learned via a massive amount of labeled data, but imagine you are a tradesmen repairing machines. We have no idea how to build a system that you could explain some basics on how to repair a simple machine and the system understanding what's going on. We can't learn from explanations. It turns out "AI" is not a single skill we have to master, but orthogonal concepts where we managed to conquer a single one. This doesn't mean the next one is around the corner.

I think it's a bit like the early mechanical age where people thought everything in the future will be mechanical (those fun retro-future posts). In my opinion we are in a similar situation. We are surprised by machines automating tasks that we thought are reserved for humans and just extrapolate, but it's not that simple. We have to find out exactly where to extrapolate to, but it currently very much looks like there are bounds to our current approach.

Re: The AI Battle

#57

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

tialaramex wrote: post #29
slowmovintarget wrote: post #10

This very much requires acceptance of the worse-is-better model. That "beautiful" drawing of an an astronaut riding a horse is aesthetically... crap. It may take a person 5 hours to paint or draw that, but, arguably, a person wouldn't. GPT-3 might generate a novel, but, generally speaking the prose is jarring and awful to read, because there is no intent (danger: philosophically loaded word) behind it. It's all autom…

> those systems are not a path to AGI If that's the actual meat of your claim, it's weird to just put it unsupported at the end. If you think it's an aside you've got a big problem, because without it the rest is pretty weak. We saw this with chess. Anybody who was clinging on to the idea that well, the machines can't really play chess, because technically there do seem to be a few humans who are better, was screwed…

>> Anybody who was clinging on to the idea that well, the machines can't really play chess, because technically there do seem to be a few humans who are better, was screwed the moment the machines begin routinely beating grand masters.

Who was "clinging on to the idea that well, the machines can't really play chess" and when was that?

Re: The AI Battle

#58

Post by bilsbie »

ajafari1 wrote: post #8

Any bets on when the majority of software development is automated? My estimate based on the exponential improvement rate of AI on various tests like MMLU and MATH is within 3 years. I know that might sound crazy, but a year ago it would have been crazy to think that graphics design jobs could be automated by an AI in 2022. Feel free to disagree and discuss why.

Well what if it gets 99.9% automated but instead it means each programmer can now program like a team of 50 programmers, devops, pms, and qa people from today.

Re: The AI Battle

#59

Post by ajafari1 »

astrange wrote: post #45
qualudeheart wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the horse picture sucks. Other people might say that they like Dall-E’s output on Twitter, for signalling purposes, but I still think they don’t really believe that. Still, it’s only a matter of time till nicer graphics are possible. Most graphic designers and artists are still worse than this thing, especially the type that bought a $200 drawing tablet on Amazon and sell their services on Fiverr. Those…

Nicer graphics are already possible from freely available colab notebooks like StableDiffusion. DALLE has the cruded interface possible; it's more a demonstration that the idea works at all than something you could use.

And a strategic way for OpenAI to garner more than 1M business and people on their waitlist as I outline in the article.

Re: The AI Battle

#60

Post by ajafari1 »

carapace wrote: post #53
ajafari1 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right on. When do you expect a productized AI that can replace your average skilled programmer?

Here's me almost exactly six years ago, predicting "most coding and design tasks will be automated within three to five years." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11718300 If we count GitHub Copilot as the tip of the spear then I was too optimistic. > GitHub Copilot ... was first announced by GitHub on 29 June 2021 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub_Copilot

Nice! You were very close. With any exponential curve, it takes forever to get to point A, but once there, it's an immediate job to point Z.
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