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Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

thenewatlantis.com

121–130 of 231 posts

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#121

Something I’ve realized in the midst of all this hype is that many, many people seem to actually want to build AGI, for its own sake, and many take for granted that this is a goal. I don’t understand why. It seems like we’re racing right past using the tools we already have to solve humanity’s many very real and solvable problems, in favor of trying to invent something just because it sounds neat.

"When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it." Hinton referenced Oppenheimer some time before he changed direction on this and resigned from Google. It sounds like what made the difference to him was a flip from "far mode" thinking where something like human level seemed at least decades off, and thus felt like a cloudy abstraction, to near mode.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI sounds neat because the hype says that it will solve all human problems at once. That's obviously fake and wrong, but so is the idea of solving current human problems with current tools.

> That's obviously fake and wrong, but so is the idea of solving current human problems with current tools. There are easily stated problems like "Reduce US car accidents by 50%" that should be solvable with AI as it stands today. This seems like a useful and achievable goal that would save money and lives. I've never understood why full self-driving was the problem most people chose to solve instead. But perhaps I'm…

this is how you know the AI moment is not real. its all marketing for the likes of capitalistic shit like Tesla and self-driving as its some kind of savior for humanity instead of some marketing gimmick for some car dealer. like bro trains exists.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI sounds neat because the hype says that it will solve all human problems at once. That's obviously fake and wrong, but so is the idea of solving current human problems with current tools.

> That's obviously fake and wrong, but so is the idea of solving current human problems with current tools. There are easily stated problems like "Reduce US car accidents by 50%" that should be solvable with AI as it stands today. This seems like a useful and achievable goal that would save money and lives. I've never understood why full self-driving was the problem most people chose to solve instead. But perhaps I'm…

Solving some percentage car accidents with AI requires a law or a common agreement by car companies to put AI in cars. That's an investment of time and money that isn't going to solving some other problem. Everything is a trade off, and some problems simply come with the territory of being human.

The appeal of self-driving is usually just financial.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI sounds neat because the hype says that it will solve all human problems at once. That's obviously fake and wrong, but so is the idea of solving current human problems with current tools.

> That's obviously fake and wrong, but so is the idea of solving current human problems with current tools. There are easily stated problems like "Reduce US car accidents by 50%" that should be solvable with AI as it stands today. This seems like a useful and achievable goal that would save money and lives. I've never understood why full self-driving was the problem most people chose to solve instead. But perhaps I'm…

> There are easily stated problems like “Reduce US car accidents by 50%” that should be solvable with AI as it stands today.

IF you really want to solve that, that’s an urban design problem that doesn’t take AI at all; it isn’t solved because there is insufficient desire to solve it, not because of technology. But as far as AI-use-in-cars goes…

> This seems like a useful and achievable goal that would save money and lives. I’ve never understood why full self-driving was the problem most people chose to solve instead.

In the space of auto safety technology it’s not. Driver assistance short of full self-driving is much more widely deployed, and continuously improving, by far more automakers than FSD. Full self-driving gets the media attention because its dramatic and showy.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#125
post #117

I wish people would stop with the bizarre AI-latry that has gripped them en masse and realize that if its a "moment" at all, its a human moment. The impressive feat is the ability of researchers to manipulate a generic statistical model paradigm to fit large amounts data and be reused for something apparently useful. Whether that path has a future depends not on AI bootstraping itself but on said researchers to keep…

> AI-latry Nice neologism! But wouldn't "AI-dolatry" be even better?

AI-dolatry is 100% better sounding and the proximity to idolatry is almost surreal.

Asking for permission to use this going forward :-)

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#126
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's a large language model doing when it's not being queried? Nothing. > Am I correct that they only compute information when dealing with a prompt? Yes. > If so, that seems like a fundamental flaw. Flawed in what way? It clearly doesn't need to be like us to be useful, because it's useful and definitely not like us. > An actual "thinking machine" would be constantly running computations on its accumulated exper…

Do AIs dream of electric sheep?

Yes, if you prompt them nicely.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#127
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a turn of phrase that means you got 100% beaten without challenge.

Is it, imagine saying this to your kids, "Hey Sam, your sister totally curb stomped you at practice today..."??

It's not clear to me that we need to talk to each other like we're talking to our own children. That would be odd.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's obviously fake and wrong, but so is the idea of solving current human problems with current tools. There are easily stated problems like "Reduce US car accidents by 50%" that should be solvable with AI as it stands today. This seems like a useful and achievable goal that would save money and lives. I've never understood why full self-driving was the problem most people chose to solve instead. But perhaps I'm…

Solving some percentage car accidents with AI requires a law or a common agreement by car companies to put AI in cars. That's an investment of time and money that isn't going to solving some other problem. Everything is a trade off, and some problems simply come with the territory of being human. The appeal of self-driving is usually just financial.

> Solving some percentage car accidents with AI requires a law or a common agreement by car companies to put AI in cars.

No, it doesn’t require a law or a common agreement, it just requires the absence of a law preventing it and salable benefit in a competitive market. Cf., computer vision and other AI components for lane keeping, throttle control, and automatic braking, which is “solving some percentage of car accidents with AI”.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#129

It's not combining an LLM with data/memory recollection and infinite agency that will lead to leaps in cognition. Complex systems still can do that and still not have self-awareness / cognition. We will need to take some more fundamental leaps to synthesize memory, agency and prediction to operate within a single system where self-awareness resides in the entity and not in the building blocks. LLM's represent a build…

I think we'll need more than that too, but in humans and other animals it isn't the building blocks that are self-aware -- neurons aren't any more aware than any other cell -- self-awareness is a property of a set of connected neurons, not in the neurons themselves.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#130
post #7
post #2

> Study Deep Blue’s 1997 defeat of world chess champion Garry Kasparov, and your excitement about how quickly this technology would take over other cognitive work would wane as you learned just how much brute human force went into fine-tuning the software specifically to beat Kasparov. That was ~26 yeas ago. In the intervening 26 years humans have been curb-stomped so hard at chess that certain microwaves might be co…

When you have to manually input the scores for the various board positions, feels much less exciting.

Again, your information is tremendously out of date. AlphaZero crushes grandmasters and had no human training whatsoever as to board evaluation functions.
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