Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal • Hacker News Board

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#131

Post by tshaddox » Tue, Aug 01, 2023, 4:13 PM UTC

unshavedyak wrote: post #75

strikelaserclaw wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although i fundamentally agree with you, i will say that it is impossible to know which "tricks" will lead to a leap in cognition, even looking evolutionarily, the difference in genome between a monkey and human is very small percentage wise, yet the effects of that small difference are stark.

I'm always on the position that at some point (i make no prediction of when) "AI" will still be labeled as not-intelligent, but to external observers it won't be possible to know. Ie we will be able to describe how a function of `add(1,2)` is most clearly definitely not intelligent. We will understand the internal makeup of these neurons better, the whole system will be deterministic and understood - just a very larg…

> If we can't tell it apart from us.. and if we know it is most definitely not alive or even mysterious.. what does that say about us?

That concepts like "consciousness," "free will," and "qualia" are nebulous precisely because they were invented by us to describe things we don't understand yet we feel obligated to insist are special and unique characteristics of our identity.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#132

Post by jhbadger » Tue, Aug 01, 2023, 4:15 PM UTC

mbgerring wrote: post #111

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.

Like Feynman said, you can only really understand something if you can make it yourself. AGI may have practical uses, but it is worth creating for its own sake to get a better understanding of how our own intelligence works.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#133

Post by lisper » Tue, Aug 01, 2023, 4:18 PM UTC

mcpackieh wrote: post #112

empath-nirvana wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is the 'real deal', exactly? I feel like people have this vague idea in their head of what everyone is trying to build, but don't really have it defined in a concrete way.

The fundamental issue is that all the talk of "self-awareness", "cognition", "souls", whatever you want to call it, is all beating around the bush to describe what we presumably each subjectively experience in our own minds but which cannot be empirically tested for in others. We generally assume that other people experience the same, but cannot empirically prove it and some people speculate that others might lack it…

All this assumes that "it" is a dichotomy: either something has "it" or they do not. But it seems pretty clear to me that "it" must be a continuum even in humans because it is very hard to draw a sharp line between a fertilized egg and an adult where a human comes to have "it". (This is the reason that some people conclude that fertilization must be that line, because there are very few other viable candidates.)

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#134

Post by gWPVhyxPHqvk » Tue, Aug 01, 2023, 4:24 PM UTC

hodgesrm wrote: post #120

c_crank wrote: post #113

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…

> "Reduce US car accidents by 50%"

That's not something that needs AI at all. That's a political problem, and the solutions are not ones that Americans like.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#135

Post by suoduandao3 » Tue, Aug 01, 2023, 4:28 PM UTC

balnaphone wrote: post #80

Am I misreading this? > How tall was the president when JFK was born? I infer that "JFK" is being referred to as "the president", regardless of what stage of life he's at. Therefore the correct answer would be the length of his body as a newborn, with nothing to do with who was the president at the moment of his birth. For example, given the headline: "Was the president strong at writing essays when JFK was a high sc…

The fact JFK is being referred to as JFK in the same sentence as 'the president' is being referred to - rather than 'how tall was the president when he was born' or 'how tall was JFK when he was born' indicates they refer to different people. Therefore, 'the president' would most likely refer to whomever was the US president when JFK was born, though if the article referred to the president of some other organization before referring to JFK itt might not be the case.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#136

Post by gen220 » Tue, Aug 01, 2023, 4:30 PM UTC

hodgesrm wrote: post #120

c_crank wrote: post #113

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…

FSD frees up a massive chunk of attention-hours per human in the US, attention-hours that you would presumably spend hooked into ads on various entertainment platforms that ultimately drip into Big Tech's money funnel. Incentives explain the goal.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#137

Post by somewhereoutth » Tue, Aug 01, 2023, 4:33 PM UTC

roenxi wrote: 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…

Except that human + computer beats either on their own, known as Centaur Chess.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#138

Post by hackinthebochs » Tue, Aug 01, 2023, 4:35 PM UTC

curiousllama wrote: post #63

Andrex wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Combine an LLM with long-term memory formation/recollection and a protracted (~18 year?) incubation period where it interacts with the outside world, and... the line between AI and consciousness would be pretty blurry at that point.

> the line between AI and consciousness would be pretty blurry at that point This is like saying the difference between Cillian Murphy and Oppenheimer is pretty blurry because, look, we can watch Murphy do do all the same things Oppenheimer did! For some reason with "AI" we get all mystical and act like imitation = the real thing. Just because I can convince you I'm a doctor doesn't make me one

No, the mysticism is from those who think we need something more than the correct sort of information dynamics to have consciousness/sentience/intelligence.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#139

Post by throwaway22032 » Tue, Aug 01, 2023, 4:35 PM UTC

ChatGTP wrote: post #38

jiggawatts wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where on the S-shaped curve are we? No-one knows. We can however make educated guesses based on: - Extrapolating the last couple of years of progress. - Scientific studies of LLM quality scaling in proportion to input data size, parameter count, and total training compute ops. - How much more training data is available. - Reasonable budgets, especially the cost-efficiency of inference , which appears to be more lim…

It really stands to reason that at some point these systems will just be "too smart" and we won't find any value in something that much more intelligent. It's like a 4 year old trying to understand a seasoned professor explaining some concept, we just won't get it. Imagine a hypothetical scenario where some ultra-intelligent beings delivered a book with all the answers humans ever wanted, but we needed an IQ of 500 t…

That's why alignment is such a huge issue - the immediately obvious and tempting way to "solve" that problem is to give the machines control.

The child-parent analogy stretches to describe it. A young child has an extremely fuzzy picture about what is going on - how did this house get here, why is there food in the fridge, why is the food wrapped in this clear thing, why does Dad disappear for a few hours every day, etc. At a young enough age they're not even thinking about it.

Yet it all happens anyway and the child is provided for. Even in the best case of perfectly aligned AI, that's our future if we allow it to happen (I hope we don't...)

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#140

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, Aug 01, 2023, 4:38 PM UTC

c_crank wrote: post #101

mercurialsolo wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While life is typically associated with biological systems, intelligence doesn't necessarily need proof of life. A hive, swarm or network can be intelligent as long as it shows self-awareness and has agency.

I'm not disputing that. I just think that intelligence or 'sapience' is not something that requires reverence on our part.

What is then, if anything? Definitely not "being a biological system" - that seems much more boring than intelligence, and the line between "biological" and "non-biological" is somewhat arbitrary and increasingly blurry anyway.