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The Age of AI has begun

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Re: The Age of AI has begun

#101

Post by wizofaus »

epups wrote: post #80

I like Bill Gates - out of the major iconic tech personas, he is one of the most interesting to me. Yes he kind of didn't see internet or phones coming, so it's not like he is an oracle, but he is right on many issues too. I think he is right on this one as well. The most intriguing prediction was the medical one. He envisions training "medical AIs" that can act as a source of knowledge in poorer countries. Honestly,…

I would think an LLM trained on an accurate description of virtually every medical diagnosis ever made (along with a description of the treatment and outcome) would be far more capable of diagnosing almost any newly described condition better than any human doctor. What I'd expect is a good deal further off is a AI- controlled surgical robots, but we'll likely see them used within our lifetimes.

Re: The Age of AI has begun

#102

Post by megaman821 »

drawBr0 wrote: post #84
megaman821 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes. The founder of one of the top tech firms in the world really just doesn't know much about tech. Thanks for your analysis. You must be swimming in the millions from your genius investments.

[dead]

[flagged]

Re: The Age of AI has begun

#103

Post by paxys »

lixtra wrote: post #51
paxys wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet never had its "aha" moment like AI is now. Most people didn't know or care about it until decades into its existence.

I don’t think this is true. I would agree that the aha moment was not for everyone at the same time. But for most people that I saw accessing the internet the first time it clicked immediately and they were hooked.

> I would agree that the aha moment was not for everyone at the same time.

Yes, and the aha moment for (generative) AI is at the same time for everyone. That's what makes it a true aha moment.

Re: The Age of AI has begun

#104

Post by adventured »

paxys wrote: post #33
system16 wrote: post #14

> In my lifetime, I’ve seen two demonstrations of technology that struck me as revolutionary. > The first time was in 1980, when I was introduced to a graphical user interface > The second big surprise came just last year. I’d been meeting with the team from OpenAI I guess it's not surprising since Microsoft was late to the game with IE, but it's interesting he never mentions "the internet" in this list.

The internet never had its "aha" moment like AI is now. Most people didn't know or care about it until decades into its existence.

It did. Netscape provided that aha moment - via the Web - in the mid to late 1990s. It shook the landscape at the time. If you lived through it, you know what I'm talking about. It was suddenly popping up everywhere, across all media, across the general population. It rocketed into the mainstream in the matter of a few years. Even if people didn't fully realize it was the Internet making it possible.

Re: The Age of AI has begun

#105

Post by ewhanley »

chadash wrote: post #53
pphysch wrote: post #34

> I picked AP Bio because the test is more than a simple regurgitation of scientific facts—it asks you to think critically about biology. Of course, the LLM is just regurgitating the facts from the textbooks as well as thousands or millions of test samples. It's certainly possible to formulate a biology question that a decent student would be able to answer easily, but LLM would be helpless at (by carefully choosing…

> Of course, the LLM is just regurgitating the facts from the textbooks as well as thousands or millions of test samples. Sure, it is regurgitating facts. What's impressive is that it knows which facts to regurgitate.

It also makes me question how different this is from what we (humans) do. We learn a bunch of information from a variety of sources and experiences and synthesize that into answers. Sometimes we are correct and sometimes we are not. I suppose the difference is that we can extrapolate from our synthesized information vs simply formulating answers, but what the best LLMs do doesn't seem radically different than the average person.

Re: The Age of AI has begun

#106

Post by baq »

xtracto wrote: post #87
capableweb wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI has been around for as long (or even longer, depending on how you see it) as the internet (counting the start of internet as the beginning of TCP/IP).

As someone who has done some research on AI in the last 25 years I find this current iteration amazing. 25 years ago when I was just starting my Bachelor's degree, AI was in a sort of "hiatus". The "great" AI procedures were mostly rule based systems. We read about MYCIN and similar expert systems and how they could do amazing stuff. We also read about AI generating new strategies for Backgammon. That was amazing. Bu…

2023 AI is basically magic.

LLMs and diffusors are the first AI technology to keep the AI name. All previously developed AIs lost their AI naming rights - magic powers - soon after production deployment. These two are truly AI - they’re still magic, perhaps even more so than even 3 months ago and given the number of parameters in them, this will likely remain true for a while. Working with ChatGPT and stable diffusion, seeing GPT-4 write games and midjourney generate presidents of US as Warhammer 40k characters really feels surreal.

This is the sufficiently advanced technology. Literally indistinguishable from magic.

Re: The Age of AI has begun

#107

Post by paxys »

adventured wrote: post #104
paxys wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet never had its "aha" moment like AI is now. Most people didn't know or care about it until decades into its existence.

It did. Netscape provided that aha moment - via the Web - in the mid to late 1990s. It shook the landscape at the time. If you lived through it, you know what I'm talking about. It was suddenly popping up everywhere, across all media, across the general population. It rocketed into the mainstream in the matter of a few years. Even if people didn't fully realize it was the Internet making it possible.

For a small group of enthusiasts, sure. Ask random people whether they know or have used Netscape Navigator and 95%+ of the responses will be "huh, what is that?" Now ask them about ChatGPT and you will see the difference.

Re: The Age of AI has begun

#108

Post by wizofaus »

0xmarcin wrote: post #70
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #22

I thought this was a pretty good post, but I'm still pretty shocked that people as intelligent as Gates don't spend more time on the potential downsides. To be clear, he does highlight some of the downsides, but his responses are just "handwavy" in my opinion. What is most baffling to me is that the highlight of this post is that Gates talks about the potential for AI to reduce worldwide inequality, where in all hone…

Gates is still a stakeholder in Microsoft. I think this piece is not independent of what Microsoft is doing right now.

Even if had he no financial stake in the company it's clear (and understandable) that he feels a sense of ownership of what it does today and wants to see it continue to succeed. To the point he's definitely likely to be somewhat blind to its failings.

Re: The Age of AI has begun

#109

Post by WA »

basch wrote: post #66
paxys wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet never had its "aha" moment like AI is now. Most people didn't know or care about it until decades into its existence.

For the longest time I would have said the internet was the most revolutionary moment in the last century. But the more I dwell on it, I debate if the pocket touchscreen smartphone was really the moment. Before phone, I printed Mapquest onto paper. The end result was pretty similar to me using an old paper map. The internet was evolutionary in that regard. It replaced some newspaper, and letters/phone calls. Text mes…

The internet would work just fine without smartphones.

Smartphones would be pretty useless without internet.

Re: The Age of AI has begun

#110

Post by akomtu »

rf15 wrote: post #36

Considering everything, it sounds more like another big wegde hammered into the divide. This will just make the rich richer, because now they can even save on artists, writers and other "expenses", all of which they can just add to their bonus now. All while you of course will still pay full price for whatever they offer. Admittedly I write this in frustration, from the perspective of someone who has friends who did…

AI will take the "means of production" from knowledge workers: their brains.
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