If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason • Hacker News Board

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#441

Post by barking_biscuit » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 9:47 AM UTC

gspencley wrote: post #94

skocznymroczny wrote: post #54

Am I the only one who's not very concerned about ChatGPT and "AI" in general? I am young, but still lived through several hype phases. I remember when 3D TVs were going to be mainstream and 2D was considered legacy. I remember when PC was to die soon and to be replaced by smartphones. I remember when VR was to become as common accessory as a game controller. It's 2023, and I still don't have automated self driving ca…

You don't even have to look at other "fads" like 3D televisions and VR to be skeptical of the claim that recent advancements in ML* represent a major technological revolution that will change society like the Internet or the Printing Press did. Just look at ML's own history. A few years ago we had the "deepfake" scare. People were terrified that now videos are going to surface of politicians saying and doing things t…

>Just look at ML's own history. A few years ago we had the "deepfake" scare. People were terrified that now videos are going to surface of politicians saying and doing things that they did not and we would have no way to tell if it was AI generated or not. But we had already been dealing with this for decades with doctored images a la Photoshop. Videos could already be edited by human beings to make it look like someone was communicating a message that they were not

The difference is bandwidth. We're making it about 1000x easier and cheaper to do.

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#442

Post by tome » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 9:52 AM UTC

barking_biscuit wrote: post #440

Ygg2 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one is saying 100% Points at AI moratorium. I think people are arguing its inevitable. Putting error bars on gut feeling. Interesting idea. I'd say in 10-20 years we'll not see anything revolutionary, as in AI smart enough to continue working on improving AI. So in 10-20 years I don't expect fully self driving cars (Unsupervised, any terrain, better driver than 99.9% humans). AI might see use in industry, but I…

>I'd say in 10-20 years we'll not see anything revolutionary, as in AI smart enough to continue working on improving AI You do realize we've just at least doubled the amount of cognitive bandwidth on earth right? For every one brain, there are now two. A step-wise change in bandwidth is most definitely going to have some very interesting implications and probably much sooner than 10 years.

> You do realize we've just at least doubled the amount of cognitive bandwidth on earth right?

I don't realize that. What do you mean exactly?

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#443

Post by tome » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 9:55 AM UTC

barking_biscuit wrote: post #441

gspencley wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even have to look at other "fads" like 3D televisions and VR to be skeptical of the claim that recent advancements in ML* represent a major technological revolution that will change society like the Internet or the Printing Press did. Just look at ML's own history. A few years ago we had the "deepfake" scare. People were terrified that now videos are going to surface of politicians saying and doing things t…

>Just look at ML's own history. A few years ago we had the "deepfake" scare. People were terrified that now videos are going to surface of politicians saying and doing things that they did not and we would have no way to tell if it was AI generated or not. But we had already been dealing with this for decades with doctored images a la Photoshop. Videos could already be edited by human beings to make it look like some…

Sure, but how can anyone know that rate of progress will continue?

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#444

Post by tome » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 9:56 AM UTC

l5ymep wrote: post #153

gspencley wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even have to look at other "fads" like 3D televisions and VR to be skeptical of the claim that recent advancements in ML* represent a major technological revolution that will change society like the Internet or the Printing Press did. Just look at ML's own history. A few years ago we had the "deepfake" scare. People were terrified that now videos are going to surface of politicians saying and doing things t…

Other fads have the disadvantage of being easily identifiable and avoidable. But AI chips away at what it means to be human. Now imagine if every comment in this thread is not a real person, but made by a LLM. Get any Truman show vibes?

> AI chips away at what it means to be human

Can you name a broad technological revolution that didn't?

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#445

Post by rolisz » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 11:45 AM UTC

jdiez17 wrote: post #334

rolisz wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem is with the first step: the existence of a super intelligent AI. Why are we sure it can exist? And why we are we so sure GPT-x is the path there. To human level intelligence sure, but it's not obvious to me that it will enable superhuman AI

> My problem is with the first step: the existence of a super intelligent AI. Why are we sure it can exist? It's difficult to prove that something that has never been done before is possible, until it has been done. I personally don't see any fundamental limitations that would limit non-biological intelligence to human-level intelligence, for your preferred definition of intelligence. > And why we are we so sure GPT-…

I think that the moment you scale up the hardware for intelligence (from the 20cm brain) to a datacenter scale (to several hundred meters) you start getting into some other kinds of issues, such as it's hard to get a consistent view across the whole "brain". Synchronizing things will take longer, limited by the speed of light: suddenly things on the far ends can communicate with a latency with a lower bound of 100ns. For GPT4 it doesn't matter yet, because all the matrix multiplications take much longer, but maybe once we get to much larger models, that can interact with their environment via something else than a static text box, this will become a limitation.

GPT4 is not an exponential improvement over GPT3. It's is better, but not exponentially so (as in f(x) = e^x).

> If you think GPTs can get to human-level intelligence, why would the improvement stop at that arbitrary point?

Because GPTs are trained on human generated data. They might have some ability to generalize, but to a limited extent. GPT4 is not a super human chess player. It's can play chess, but far from Magnus Carlssen. But we do have super human chess engines, but those are made in a completely different way from GPT.

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#446

Post by coding123 » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 11:52 AM UTC

GTP wrote: post #179

nradov wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are actually no relevant experts in the field of artificial general intelligence, or the safety thereof. No one has defined a clear path to build such a thing. Claiming to be an expert in this field is like claiming to be an expert in warp drives or time machines. Those calling for a halt in research are merely ignorant, or attention seeking grifters. Their statements can be dismissed out of hand regardless of…

There are researches working on the specific problem of AI safety, and I consider them to be the experts of this field, regardless of the fact that probably no university is currently offering a master's degree specifically on AI safety. Whether one or more of these researchers are in favor of the ban, I don't know.

The safety people aren't that bright. They are just trying to write tons of requirements that the actual ML model writers follow to make sure race and violence is accounted for somehow. These are not AI experts. They are mostly lay people.

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#447

Post by Ygg2 » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 12:34 PM UTC

barking_biscuit wrote: post #440

Ygg2 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one is saying 100% Points at AI moratorium. I think people are arguing its inevitable. Putting error bars on gut feeling. Interesting idea. I'd say in 10-20 years we'll not see anything revolutionary, as in AI smart enough to continue working on improving AI. So in 10-20 years I don't expect fully self driving cars (Unsupervised, any terrain, better driver than 99.9% humans). AI might see use in industry, but I…

>I'd say in 10-20 years we'll not see anything revolutionary, as in AI smart enough to continue working on improving AI You do realize we've just at least doubled the amount of cognitive bandwidth on earth right? For every one brain, there are now two. A step-wise change in bandwidth is most definitely going to have some very interesting implications and probably much sooner than 10 years.

> You do realize we've just at least doubled the amount of cognitive bandwidth on earth right?

What you mean? Human population is now past exponential curve and entering the saturation point.

Or do you mean adding ChatGPT? Then it's not doubled. Pretty sure that's centralized.

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#448

Post by barking_biscuit » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 12:36 PM UTC

tome wrote: post #442

barking_biscuit wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'd say in 10-20 years we'll not see anything revolutionary, as in AI smart enough to continue working on improving AI You do realize we've just at least doubled the amount of cognitive bandwidth on earth right? For every one brain, there are now two. A step-wise change in bandwidth is most definitely going to have some very interesting implications and probably much sooner than 10 years.

> You do realize we've just at least doubled the amount of cognitive bandwidth on earth right? I don't realize that. What do you mean exactly?

LLMs can perform cognitive labor. Moreover they can increasingly perform it at a level that matches and/or surpasses humans. Humans can use them to augment their own capabilities, and execute faster on more difficult tasks with a higher rate of success. In addition, cognitive labor can be automated.

When bandwidth increases, latency decreases. We're going to be able to get significantly higher throughput than we were previously able to. This is already happening.

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#449

Post by barking_biscuit » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 12:53 PM UTC

tome wrote: post #443

barking_biscuit wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Just look at ML's own history. A few years ago we had the "deepfake" scare. People were terrified that now videos are going to surface of politicians saying and doing things that they did not and we would have no way to tell if it was AI generated or not. But we had already been dealing with this for decades with doctored images a la Photoshop. Videos could already be edited by human beings to make it look like some…

Sure, but how can anyone know that rate of progress will continue?

In some sense that doesn't even really matter. We're already at an inflexion point now where the effort to reward ratio of certain activities that used to be possible, but difficult has tipped into possible and not difficult. Once you reach that point, further progress is kind of irrelevant. The confetti has left the cannon. We're not going to go back to a world where it was as difficult as it used to be, so even if no further progress were to be made, we are still going to learn in due course what the implications of the current level of progress are.

Sam Harris has a straightforward, yet somewhat compelling argument re: your actual question here, and that is "if it's at all possible for us to improve our technology, then we are going to" and iirc he notes that it doesn't necessarily matter how fast that happens, just the fact that it's possible means we're likely to do it.

Re: If AI scaling is to be shut down, let it be for a coherent reason

#450

Post by barking_biscuit » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 1:06 PM UTC

Ygg2 wrote: post #447

barking_biscuit wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'd say in 10-20 years we'll not see anything revolutionary, as in AI smart enough to continue working on improving AI You do realize we've just at least doubled the amount of cognitive bandwidth on earth right? For every one brain, there are now two. A step-wise change in bandwidth is most definitely going to have some very interesting implications and probably much sooner than 10 years.

> You do realize we've just at least doubled the amount of cognitive bandwidth on earth right? What you mean? Human population is now past exponential curve and entering the saturation point. Or do you mean adding ChatGPT? Then it's not doubled. Pretty sure that's centralized.

> Or do you mean adding ChatGPT? Then it's not doubled. Pretty sure that's centralized.

Is it though? Think about it. If I have a medical or legal conversation with it that I derive value from, that's akin to a fully trained professional human who took several decades to grow into an adult and then undergo training just popping into existence in seconds during inference and then just as quickly disappearing. Just a few short months ago, the only way I could have had that conversation was to monopolize the cognitive bandwidth of a real human being who then couldn't utilize it to do other things.

So, when I say doubled, what I mean is that in theory every person who can access a sufficiently powerful LLM can effectively create cognitive bandwidth out of thin air every time they use the model to do inference.

Look what happened every time there has been a stepwise change in bandwidth throughout history. Printing press, telephone, dial up internet, broadband, fiber optic. The system becomes capable of vastly more throughput and latencies are decreased significantly. The same thing is happening here. This is a revolution.