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There is no hard takeoff

geohot.github.io

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Re: There is no hard takeoff

#181

Post by mkl »

cubefox wrote: post #150
mkl wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment doesn't really help. Nothing there seems to explain the term "FOOM". More searching suggests it doesn't actually stand for anything and shouldn't be capitalised: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/foom#Noun . (Though ChatGPT seems happy to make up definitions: https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/12bisxu/what_d... )

FOOM is a different term for hard takeoff: > RSI [recursive self-improvement] is the biggest, most interesting, hardest-to-analyze, sharpest break-with-the-past contributing to the notion of a "hard takeoff" aka "AI go FOOM", but it's nowhere near being the only such factor. The advent of human intelligence was a discontinuity with the past even without RSI... https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tjH8XPxAnr6JRbh7k/hard-ta…

Yes but those both incorrectly imply it's an acronym yet don't expand it, just furthering the mystery.

Re: There is no hard takeoff

#182

Post by pcthrowaway »

ChatGTP wrote: post #98
bob1029 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the amount of computation available today in a PC could be enough to do things (good and bad) way beyond human ability. I am in the camp that this is possible and that humans have achieved it already. I believe things are going to get very weird when these techniques become mainstream. The GPU-cluster-bound algorithms are just a tiny stepping stone. Do we start taking computers away from people? What do we do about…

I’d say your going to get “AI” rammed so far down your throat it might as well come out of your ass before anyone is going to let their puters be taken away.

Maybe our desktops and laptops get taken away, and they leave us with our smartphones (which are locked down for our safety).

90% of people wouldn't give a shit as long as they have their smartphones

Re: There is no hard takeoff

#183

Post by cubefox »

mkl wrote: post #181
cubefox wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FOOM is a different term for hard takeoff: > RSI [recursive self-improvement] is the biggest, most interesting, hardest-to-analyze, sharpest break-with-the-past contributing to the notion of a "hard takeoff" aka "AI go FOOM", but it's nowhere near being the only such factor. The advent of human intelligence was a discontinuity with the past even without RSI... https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tjH8XPxAnr6JRbh7k/hard-ta…

Yes but those both incorrectly imply it's an acronym yet don't expand it, just furthering the mystery.

Yeah, I think the term should be retired. Hard takeoff or fast takeoff is much more descriptive.

Re: There is no hard takeoff

#184

Post by ChatGTP »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #182
ChatGTP wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d say your going to get “AI” rammed so far down your throat it might as well come out of your ass before anyone is going to let their puters be taken away.

Maybe our desktops and laptops get taken away, and they leave us with our smartphones (which are locked down for our safety). 90% of people wouldn't give a shit as long as they have their smartphones

It's true

Re: There is no hard takeoff

#185

Post by tacker2000 »

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…

The funny thing is that probably the old wall street saying of “past performance is not applicable to future results” holds true even in this domain.

Re: There is no hard takeoff

#186

Post by defrost »

gitfan86 wrote: post #119
defrost wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Obviously?

I've been in the energy and minerals exploration game for a few decades and I've seen all manner of odd things said with a straight face by all kinds of people.

While I have no a priori knowledge about yourself specifically, I have seen people regularly dismiss notions that minerals and energy get increasingly hard to find and will cost increasingly more to extract.

Peak oil is a specific discussion about oil resources and one that is often dismissed as (not the statement you made) "rubbish, we were supposed to run out, that never happened" etc.

The claim in the nineties was that given demand for oil was ever increasing there would come a time when no ordinary individual would be able to afford oil .. and we do appear to be on that trajectory in the world, even if certain demographics are sheilded from that reality.

Your GP comment misframed that and described that as a common mistake mistake in predicting the future.

Re: There is no hard takeoff

#187

Post by WithinReason »

rini17 wrote: post #3
WithinReason wrote: post #2

The main issue with this argument that current AI models are extremely inefficient. Models evaluate all weights on every pass, LLMs recall their entirety of knowledge just to output a part of a word and then do it all again. Often a hand crafted algorithm can achieve what a neural network can in a small fraction of compute. There is likely a 1e4x-1e6x compute gap that can be achieved with the right algorithm, maybe e…

Before the first AI winter there was incredible effort in leveraging symbolical approach. It did deliver many useful things but far from hype. For example we still have no self-repairing systems, only specific fault-tolerant algoritms but by and large software is as fragile as ever. You can't avoid considering everything when trying to deal with unexpected data/issue. Only in hidsight you can then say "wow that was s…

A calculator can compute the 5th root of 1692662195786551 much more efficiently than a person

Re: There is no hard takeoff

#188

Post by gitfan86 »

defrost wrote: post #186
gitfan86 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Obviously? I've been in the energy and minerals exploration game for a few decades and I've seen all manner of odd things said with a straight face by all kinds of people. While I have no a priori knowledge about yourself specifically, I have seen people regularly dismiss notions that minerals and energy get increasingly hard to find and will cost increasingly more to extract. Peak oil is a specific discussion about…

Peak oil is only relevant in a world where there is no alternative cheap energy source.

The average poor person doesn't care if oil costs $500/gallon if they have access to very cheap electricity and very cheap and good electric transportation.

Re: There is no hard takeoff

#189

Post by andrewjl »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #26
anileated wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, humans are the ones who think and have agency.

Agency? Sounds like a problem that can be phrased as a text completion task to me! ChatGPT can already emulate beings with agency, see LangChain. It's just very bad at it. It's gonna get better.

> ChatGPT can already emulate beings with agency, see LangChain. It's just very bad at it. It's gonna get better.

What's an example that isn't a rote process?

Re: There is no hard takeoff

#190

Post by Gartent »

AbrahamParangi wrote: post #180
reducesuffering wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not wait until their debate on Aug. 15th? It's going to be a disaster for Geohot as he realizes Eliezer has been "mind-mazing" this problem for 20 years, and comes to realize the barrel of the gun we're all facing... Otherwise, in your appeal to technological authority, surely you'd rather listen to Yoshua Bengio and Geoff Hinton's perspectives rather than TFA's ramblings... right?

This is what I'm talking about! There's a distinction between being right and seeming right that we need to be aware of! "In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice" Eliezer is probably going to seem convincing, he's a great writer and a reasonably eloquent speaker - his audience is humans. Goerge Hotz's competence is machines, and he's exceptional at interfacing with them. Yes, I trust the less elo…

Eliezer is a wackjob. I'm pretty sure Kiwi Farms links are banned on this site but you should check out his thread. Or r/sneerclub.

Recently, an actual AI researcher posted on his site an extremely detailed response to his claims to which he responded "this is kind of long".

That said I don't know who Hotz is or if he's more competent

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