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Jeff Bezos on AI (1998) [video]

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Jeff Bezos on AI (1998) [video]

#21

Post by bentcorner »

ibarearer wrote: post #6
mholt wrote: post #5

The common sentiment around AI in the 90s and early 2000s was that it didn't work; it had its hype, it had its heyday, but it seemed like a dead-end for the most part. The Perceptron was merely a linear function approximator. And the Multi-layer Perceptron was a little more capable, but the many orders of magnitude it would have to scale up in order to be convincing just wasn't feasible back then (it finally was in t…

I hate this sentiment. We might learn that human thought and reasoning are parlor tricks too once we understand them better. Anything we start to understand loses its mystery

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

I know nothing about AI but it seems like we're approaching it from the other end - the human mind seems like magic and when we approximate it using technology it feels like we'll reach a moment of "that's all it is?" and refuse to believe we actually did it because we doubt ourselves.

Along the same lines, if achieving equal human rights for all humans were a trip to the corner store, the fight for AI rights is going to be like Mount Everest.

Re: Jeff Bezos on AI (1998) [video]

#22

Post by array-species »

KirillPanov wrote: post #16
mholt wrote: post #5

The common sentiment around AI in the 90s and early 2000s was that it didn't work; it had its hype, it had its heyday, but it seemed like a dead-end for the most part. The Perceptron was merely a linear function approximator. And the Multi-layer Perceptron was a little more capable, but the many orders of magnitude it would have to scale up in order to be convincing just wasn't feasible back then (it finally was in t…

This is why they've called it AI winter the past three times. It's a season. Like the seasons, the cycle repeats.

This time it's nuclear winter.

Examples: Graphics User Interface. The iPhone seated mobile compute as a permanent fixture, it and Android bringing internet and computing to billions of humans for the first time. Not just the wealthy industrials. Or IBM DB2 for SQL. Or Ford's Model T. Or the Gutenberg. None of these were the first first. Maybe even on the n-th iteration 2 decades after coming out of DARPA or global university research, something is just ready for commercialized prime time.

Computing was solved by Lady Ada and Babbage. It's all electrical engineering, software, fabrication, productization, mfg, displays, sensors etc. after that.

Semiconductor was a big deal in making it happen. But that's almost besides the point of the theory of compute if it can be solved in other novel ways using alternative material science.

Re: Jeff Bezos on AI (1998) [video]

#23

Post by brrrrrm »

I notice that a lot of really successful people speak quite quickly early in their careers. It's almost as if their own voices can't keep up with the excitement they have about their product/idea and they haven't quite honed in the outward presentation of it.

Re: Jeff Bezos on AI (1998) [video]

#24

Post by echelon »

mholt wrote: post #5

The common sentiment around AI in the 90s and early 2000s was that it didn't work; it had its hype, it had its heyday, but it seemed like a dead-end for the most part. The Perceptron was merely a linear function approximator. And the Multi-layer Perceptron was a little more capable, but the many orders of magnitude it would have to scale up in order to be convincing just wasn't feasible back then (it finally was in t…

You say all that. Meanwhile teenagers are finding love on character.ai.

Re: Jeff Bezos on AI (1998) [video]

#25

Post by amarshall »

Article has no body for me. Site appears to use an iframe whose src expects the Referer header to be sent, but I have `network.http.referer.XOriginPolicy = 1`set in FF about:config to reduce cross-origin leakage, so no Referer is sent.

Re: Jeff Bezos on AI (1998) [video]

#26

Post by flatline »

mholt wrote: post #5

The common sentiment around AI in the 90s and early 2000s was that it didn't work; it had its hype, it had its heyday, but it seemed like a dead-end for the most part. The Perceptron was merely a linear function approximator. And the Multi-layer Perceptron was a little more capable, but the many orders of magnitude it would have to scale up in order to be convincing just wasn't feasible back then (it finally was in t…

There is a famous Dijkstra quote, “The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”

Do the intrinsic properties of the system really matter at the end of the day if it performs as well as we do at some task? Heck they’ve been doing many things better for decades, but those are the types of tasks we take it for granted that a machine should be able to do. Solve differential equations. Play chess. But now computers are doing “human” tasks competently. Writing creative fiction. Generating graphical art.

We don’t have a good working definition or metric for intelligence. Surely it is not a monolithic property. Animals exhibit many traits we associate with intelligence. Some of the stuff GPT 3+ generates sounds pretty intelligent. It is the type of things an intelligence may have produced, because it was trained to do just that. If we look at intelligence as a cluster of traits, or behaviors, I think we are surrounded by intelligence - human, artificial, or otherwise. Doesn’t have to be an AGI to fall in that category. It doesn’t even have to be particularly impressive.

Re: Jeff Bezos on AI (1998) [video]

#27

Post by TheCoreh »

mvdtnz wrote: post #7
foob wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hey, you just bought a vacuum cleaner? I know what you would really like! MORE VACUUMS! This is a common refrain, but I would be amazed if it weren't backed up by data and I anecdotally fit into the mold. If I buy a product that I really like, then I'm likely to buy it again to give as a gift to friends. If I buy something like a a vacuum and I don't like it, then I'm likely to buy a different model that better fits…

You'd buy a vacuum cleaner as a gift for a friend? I find that incredibly hard to believe but if it's true, it's very strange behaviour.

I've done it before: shortly after I bought a robot vacuum; I gave the exact same model as a birthday gift

Re: Jeff Bezos on AI (1998) [video]

#28

Post by 59nadir »

Baeocystin wrote: post #20
mvdtnz wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd buy a vacuum cleaner as a gift for a friend? I find that incredibly hard to believe but if it's true, it's very strange behaviour.

Several years back a bunch of us pet-owning friends wound up round-robin gifting the same model SpotBot carpet cleaner to each other, because it was something we all agreed made our lives better. Nothing weird about it at all.

The fact that you had to preface this with you and your friends being pet owners kind of does make it a special case. You being suggested this vacuum cleaner by Amazon after buying it also doesn't do anything for you in this scenario because you bought the same one for your friends, so the recommendation wasn't needed. I think people are losing sight of the original argument which is that Amazon's recommendations can sometimes overemphasize recent purchases with very little context around what the items are.

Re: Jeff Bezos on AI (1998) [video]

#29

Post by tsunamifury »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #14
mholt wrote: post #5

The common sentiment around AI in the 90s and early 2000s was that it didn't work; it had its hype, it had its heyday, but it seemed like a dead-end for the most part. The Perceptron was merely a linear function approximator. And the Multi-layer Perceptron was a little more capable, but the many orders of magnitude it would have to scale up in order to be convincing just wasn't feasible back then (it finally was in t…

> That's what ultimately depresses me about AI. It's still just a parlor trick. We haven't actually taught computers to think, to reason, to be innovative. And what do you feel when we make these parlor tricks more capable than us at the majority of tasks? And what do you feel when we understand it well enough to realize we're the same type of parlor tricks? To me it seems like you're most interested in a magic 'aha'…

He will go on saying it’s a trick. It’s a form of denial I’m seeing everywhere now when faced with something so genuinely terrifying or identity challenging you can’t process it.

Re: Jeff Bezos on AI (1998) [video]

#30

Post by tsunamifury »

KirillPanov wrote: post #16
mholt wrote: post #5

The common sentiment around AI in the 90s and early 2000s was that it didn't work; it had its hype, it had its heyday, but it seemed like a dead-end for the most part. The Perceptron was merely a linear function approximator. And the Multi-layer Perceptron was a little more capable, but the many orders of magnitude it would have to scale up in order to be convincing just wasn't feasible back then (it finally was in t…

This is why they've called it AI winter the past three times. It's a season. Like the seasons, the cycle repeats.

What a tired and lame take.

100m people used this latest iteration. It’s hardly a winter.

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