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There is no hard takeoff

geohot.github.io

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Re: There is no hard takeoff

#111

Post by ehnto »

micheljansen wrote: post #34

This article reminds me a bit about a core theme in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, which I'm coincidentally reading (mild spoiler warning). The science of psychohistory that is used to predict the future and create the Seldon Plan, only works if the future is allowed to unfold uninformed by psychohistory itself. That's why the Foundation was founded without any psychologists or knowledge of the Seldon plan. Seldon…

That's a great way of framing it. It's my expectation that we will ruin the internet as a useful training corpus by flooding it with generated articles, and we will end up with a pre-AI date we use to filter incoming data in order to avoid them.

I wouldn't be surprised if filtering regular, pre LLM bot spam was already a massive hurdle when collating data for ChatGPT.

Re: There is no hard takeoff

#112

Post by worrycue »

chasd00 wrote: post #14
smcl wrote: post #7

> Back in 2014, Elon Musk referred to AI as summoning the demon. And it wasn’t hard to see that view. Soon, Go agents would beat top humans learning from self play. By the end of 2017, the same algorithm mastered Chess and Shogi. By 2020, it didn’t even need tons of calls to the simulator, and could play Atari too. > AI looked scary. It looked like it was one FOOM away from self playing and becoming superhuman at the…

> really burst into the mainstream recently. I think what made the LLMs so popular in the mainstream was anyone could go experience it themselves in a familiar, low barrier to entry way with a simple chat prompt.

IMHO LLMs are so popular because they sound very confident. That’s great marketing in itself. Unfortunately it’s only marketing.

Re: There is no hard takeoff

#113

Post by smcl »

chasd00 wrote: post #14
smcl wrote: post #7

> Back in 2014, Elon Musk referred to AI as summoning the demon. And it wasn’t hard to see that view. Soon, Go agents would beat top humans learning from self play. By the end of 2017, the same algorithm mastered Chess and Shogi. By 2020, it didn’t even need tons of calls to the simulator, and could play Atari too. > AI looked scary. It looked like it was one FOOM away from self playing and becoming superhuman at the…

> really burst into the mainstream recently. I think what made the LLMs so popular in the mainstream was anyone could go experience it themselves in a familiar, low barrier to entry way with a simple chat prompt.

Yeah you're right - I think "AI" as a concept for your average person was quite abstract and hard to wrap their head around, to get some kind of idea of the kind of things it can or cannot do. So having something tangible they can be a bit more hands-on with gives them a better idea of what it does.

Re: There is no hard takeoff

#114

Post by AbrahamParangi »

Wild to me that people will take seriously people like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nick Bostrom who are both "idea guys" who have accomplished exactly nothing in the field of AI. Their strength is in the world of discourse, not in the material world.

Meanwhile, George Hotz, an engineer and a technologist - a guy who actually works with and understands technology, but isn't an acclaimed harry potter fanfiction writer or a stand up comedian - is derided because his arguments are dramatically less sexy, harder to appreciate why they might be right.

People, please do not listen to people who sound great but have no credible claim to be an expert on something. There is a difference between an idea that sounds good and an idea that is good.

Re: There is no hard takeoff

#116

Post by anileated »

epiccoleman wrote: post #41
anileated wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To see how “AI” can be dangerous just look how social media bubble/recommendation algorithms would radicalize people, even with much cruder ML. People tend to miss that it’s not about some model starting to “think” and act all sci-fi evil, just us humans applying powerful tech in irresponsible ways that we either don’t bother to assess due to lack of awareness or assess positively due to a conflict of interest (money…

Right. This has been my take since ChatGPT hit the scene. I'm not really afraid of Skynet or AM. What worries me is that AI will accelerate the enshittification of everything as it gets baked into everything. Think of the experience of trying to get any kind of help from a giant company with call centers. You have some legitimate problem or grievance. Any thinking person would agree that a resolution is in order. But…

I’m less about enshittification or literal Skynet and more about casually and indirectly causing a major destabilization with some seemingly mundane application of fancy tech that devs didn’t bother to think through about the implications of, or were so amazed they could do something they didn’t think about whether they should.

Re: There is no hard takeoff

#117

Post by baby »

KnobbleMcKnees wrote: post #77
scaramanga wrote: post #40

Am I the only one who sees a jumbled stream of barely coherent semi-thoughts and word salad?

My problem with this isn't even that it's a bunch of strung together ideas without a clear narrative or conclusion; enough practice at this combined with actual deep field knowledge results in works like Godel, Escher, Bach . My problem is that GHotz is a shitty writer, has puddle deep knowledge of anything that isn't iPhone firmware, and watching him play at being a freelance tech journo and produce this kind of hol…

I find him very entertaining to listen to, and I often end up agreeing with him, but he’s definitely not the most “coherent” individual out there (like jobs/woz/carmack/pg/etc.)

At the same time, he’s out there talking and writing, I’m sure if he continues he’ll get good. Nobody’s born a good writer and you only become one by writing a lot.

Re: There is no hard takeoff

#118

Post by adrianN »

bilsbie wrote: post #9

This makes good points. And it articulates an idea I’ve been having trouble getting down. What if increasing intelligence is an exponential problem and the reason humans all have somewhat similar intelligence isn’t that we peaked at some level but that even vast additional intelligence just doesn’t get much more traction against the universe of problems. Eg doubling your compute doesn’t get you many more cities in th…

It is likely that even vastly more intelligence doesn't increase the number of children you raise to childbearing age in a hunter-gatherer or subsistence farming society. That says very little about vastly more intelligence in a modern industrial society (that only really existed for like ten generations so far).

Re: There is no hard takeoff

#119

Post by gitfan86 »

defrost wrote: post #75
gitfan86 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common mistake in predicting the future. Like in the 90s, seeing that oil reserves are getting harder to find and assuming that humans will run out of oil in 50 years. Trends don't exist in a vacuum. Especially in regards to technology. AI doomers are expecting everything to stay the same except capabilities of bots, especially to do bad.

Another common mistake is strawmanning history. > assuming that humans will run out of oil in 50 years. That was never a tenet of peak oil, which still stands - the claim was that at a certain point extraction costs per barrel will climb and continue to climb making fossil fuels increasingly expensive. The claim was not that oil will run out, the claim was that only the very rich and nation states will be able to aff…

Obviously, I'm not sure how anyone could have read my comment and thought I was claiming the people were claiming that every single drop of oil on the planet had been extracted and used within 50 years.

Re: There is no hard takeoff

#120

Post by davidhunter »

Yes, predicting the stock market does involve predicting what other market participants (and hedge fund bros) are going to do.

But, to predict what other market participants (and hedge fund bros) are going to do, you need to predict any world dynamic that will have an eventual effect on stock pricing.

The most successful quantitative funds (RenTech, 2sigma etc) consistently make billions of dollars in cash each year because they have collected the data sets that allow them to do this better than others. But they are still a long long long way off from having a true world model.

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