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The Age of AI has begun

gatesnotes.com

111–120 of 228 posts

Re: The Age of AI has begun

#111
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, the 70's AI is out there optimizing the software you write; making sure you can use all the bandwidth on your network links; routing people over the maps they have on their pockets. The 90's AI is out there making trucks and ships cheaper to run; reducing the amount of wood, steel, plastics, etc our industries use; helping design bridges or microprocessors; optimizing your code at runtime inside the CPU. The 10…

Deep learning is out there in real products a lot more than you think. Any system that’s processing images, video, audio, or natural language (better than what existed in 2010, which was almost universally very poor) is almost certainly using DL.

Re: The Age of AI has begun

#112

> 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.

Maybe he doesn't mention it because he didn't think it was revolutionary when it first appeared. From https://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/14/news/skeptics-cite-overlo... ( https://archive.is/r4F8T ) > Even Bill Gates, the founder and chairman of Microsoft Corp. and widely regarded as the crown prince of the World Wide Web, was taken unawares by the Internet's grassroots acceptance. > In his book, "The Road Ahead" (not av…

Uhm, crown prince of the WWW? Microsoft was actively working against the open web and instead they were trying to push their crappier Microsoft Networks(or whatever it was called) in the early 90s.

Re: The Age of AI has begun

#113
post #66
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…

> iPhone 4 introduced mobile copy and paste.

To the iPhone. There were phones on the market that supported copy and paste by the time the first iPhone rolled around.

I would tend to agree with you about the rest; the internet didn't strike the average person as very useful, or at least as revolutionary as it did with the advent of the smartphone. Arguably the iPhone was the mainstream breakthrough there.

But this is what kills me, and you said it yourself: "It was only when the internet became portable that it really infected every moment of life."

That was a good thing when the titans of today's web didn't employ armies of psychologists to hijack your attention to sell ads, inadvertently destroying the fabric of society. I don't have to tell the HN crowd how algorithms tuned to increase engagement blindly steer us toward outrage and division.

I recently posted comments about how I went from the Apple ecosystem to as open source as feasible. Nowadays the FairPhone only does duty as a GPS (hardmounted to my car). I have to be able to receive phone calls so I still use a Nokia, but it lives at home as much as possible.

For me personally, the total invasion of every aspect of life by the internet, and more specifically the tech giants in Silicon Valley, has killed all the joy and excitement I used to feel at the bleeding edge of tech. The bright-eyed sci-fi future turned out to be just another avenue for greed.

It's just a laptop now, and a gaming PC for the (very) occasional game with friends. If my house burned down with those in it, I doubt I'd feel loss.

Re: The Age of AI has begun

#114
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're wrong. I wonder if you've tried GPT-4 yet.

Let me be facetious here. If GPT-4 was truly all that, it would be classified and at work in Ukraine (or somewhere) right now. Not running Akinator-tier promo marketing gigs.

I would actually assume there is something more powerful than ChatGPT-4 at work helping the US military right now. Likewise for Russia. There's even a possibly that's the reason the conflict is dragging on so long.

Re: The Age of AI has begun

#115

I guess one of my own issues with AI, is seeing how the tools we already have, have been twisted by greedy, ruthless people (many of whom are on this very venue). I was one of the people that started off in tech with dreams of a digital Nirvana. I ignored the "negative naysayers," and sallied forth, with an open heart, and hope for the future. I'm really quite disappointed in what we've done with these marvelous tool…

I wonder if humans would behave better - or at least, be more reigned-in - if we could only interact with people we are physically close to.

You have thousands of years of human history to look back on to figure out whether that is true or not. I'm going to go ahead and say that the answer is a pretty clear "no".

Re: The Age of AI has begun

#116
post #106
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 diffusio…

> LLMs and diffusors are the first AI technology to keep the AI name

"AI" is not a static name that can be given to something and it remains AI. What was AI today will not be AI tomorrow, it'll be too simple by then.

Just as the AI written in the 1950s is not even AI by today standards, while it was groundbreaking at the time.

This moment will too come to pass, and people will look at 2023 AI as "AI that lost its naming rights".

Re: The Age of AI has begun

#117
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.

Only if you can provide an accurate description of the condition someone is suffering from. Without it, an LLM would probably recommend some average treatment.

Basically, prompt engineering for medical conditions.

Re: The Age of AI has begun

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe he doesn't mention it because he didn't think it was revolutionary when it first appeared. From https://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/14/news/skeptics-cite-overlo... ( https://archive.is/r4F8T ) > Even Bill Gates, the founder and chairman of Microsoft Corp. and widely regarded as the crown prince of the World Wide Web, was taken unawares by the Internet's grassroots acceptance. > In his book, "The Road Ahead" (not av…

Gates favored an approach he (and others) referred to as the information superhighway vs the post 1980s modern Internet. He regarded the Internet as a precursor to what he called the information superhighway in the book. It's not that he didn't see something equivalent to the Internet happening, he disagreed with exactly how it would look (who would own/control it is more likely what he had in mind given the context;…

He absolutely wanted a closed, proprietary network, and that’s also what he built: MSN.

But it didn’t work, so they recycled the name into the MSN we know today.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_Dial-up

Re: The Age of AI has begun

#119
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I honestly believe a lot more people have used Netscape Navigator than ChatGPT. If you include Internet Explorer(which quickly took the crown from Netscape), that number will be dramatically higher.

Re: The Age of AI has begun

#120

> 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.

> "Artificial intelligence is as revolutionary as mobile phones and the Internet."

This is subtitle of the article, just above the byline, so I suspect he's talking about how impressive the demonstration was to him.

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