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Jeff Bezos on AI (1998) [video]

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

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI systems are vastly better than humans at a wide variety of tasks. Better at handwriting recognition, better at scheduling, better at playing games, better at speech recognition and transcription, etc.

I am skeptical on many of those. Speech recognition is not even close to human level. Whisper, and whatever Google uses will make a lot of mistakes on audio files that are trivial to any native speaker.

In actual tests it is beyond human level. Humans actually mishear about 1 in 20 words during transcription tests; whisper does better.

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

#102
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ad copy has served a similar purpose but nobody would claim ad copy has (or could) supplant creative writing because of that.

Ad copy is (a form of) creative writing.

OK. Literary writing.

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

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"When" is in the future so I don't get your issue. Unless your point is that we can in principle never hope to understand certain things about it.

When implies that the thing is going to happen. If implies that it might happen. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/if-... The comment is written in such a way that it assumes this is the nature of reality and at some point, we will learn that the human mind is no different from the parlor tricks of LLMs. This is what I was criticizing.

>The comment is written in such a way that it assumes this is the nature of reality and at some point, we will learn that the human mind is no different from the parlor tricks of LLMs.

Again your whole point seems to boil down to simply denying physicalism (unless you have something more subtle in mind about the limits of physical science). It's a valid position to take but not very fruitful for further conversation.

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

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am skeptical on many of those. Speech recognition is not even close to human level. Whisper, and whatever Google uses will make a lot of mistakes on audio files that are trivial to any native speaker.

In actual tests it is beyond human level. Humans actually mishear about 1 in 20 words during transcription tests; whisper does better.

But we don’t solely rely on how well we hear since we have knowledge that allows us to correct for poor hearing based on what is being said rather than forging ahead with a nonsense transcription. Machine transcription is definitely faster and cheaper but the end product isn’t “better,” and anyone who has read it can attest to that.

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

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When implies that the thing is going to happen. If implies that it might happen. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/if-... The comment is written in such a way that it assumes this is the nature of reality and at some point, we will learn that the human mind is no different from the parlor tricks of LLMs. This is what I was criticizing.

> The comment is written in such a way that it assumes this is the nature of reality and at some point, we will learn that the human mind is no different from the parlor tricks of LLMs. Again your whole point seems to boil down to simply denying physicalism (unless you have something more subtle in mind about the limits of physical science). It's a valid position to take but not very fruitful for further conversation…

No, I'm not talking about physicalism at all. I'm talking about reductionism and emergence. Even if it were shown that human thought processes operate at lower levels in ways similar to machines, that does not imply that human beings are equivalent to machines. That is a reductive argument.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/

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

#106
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you had a look at othello gpt? https://thegradient.pub/othello/ It's a nice constrained example of a transformer learning a world model, not just looking up responses. > It's impressive that it knows the difference between "how many are 5 more apples than 10" compared to "how many percent are 5 apples of 10" (I don't know if it does, just assuming). But the first release also tried to reason why the weight of 1…

Very impressive, but is it any more original than classic search engines' old trick of regular expressions to figure out if I mean the currency or weight when I ask "1 pound =" with the contexts USD or kg after "="? Does it understand the input, or are there just enough discussions in the training data to make it look like it is? I'm not convinced it's not the latter. It uses context to figure out we're trying to con…

If you've not looked at it I really recommend othello gpt. That is an experiment explicitly designed to tackle this kind of question, has it just seen enough moves that it knows what should come next?

> Why doesn't it tell me how much air it displaces under what circumstances?

You can ask it and it'll answer.

> If the fix is better training data does that mean it's reasoning or regurgitating?

More training data helps with things you can just bring to the fore, same as a lot of learning. More useful training data though can also help reasoning, which makes sense - deliberate training of people helps improve their logical reasoning capabilities. I know that doesn't guarantee that's what LLMs are doing but humans benefit significantly from both more teaching and better teaching.

> Very impressive, but is it any more original than classic search engines' old trick of regular expressions to figure out if I mean the currency or weight when I ask "1 pound =" with the contexts USD or kg after "="? Does it understand the input, or are there just enough discussions in the training data to make it look like it is?

I'd be interested to know any requirements around this to clearly show the difference. I tried asking what if I filled a balloon at a childrens party with a gas made of atoms that have 1 proton and 100 neutrons: https://chat.openai.com/share/71224df4-5c6c-45f7-88fd-eec316...

(tl;dr: "In the context of a child's birthday party, introducing such a balloon would be a grave mistake.")

It identifies:

* Whether it would float or not and why * That it would be radioactive, and likely types of radiation from it * What that would mean to the balloon * How people would react and the likely consequences of releasing it in a room of children

This is an element that does not exist, in a setting where nothing like this has happened before, with details ranging from types of decay, consequences and human emotional reactions to something like this. Yes, there are real things you can use as a base (e.g. how do people respond to events that kill people), but I feel it's an example of where it's beyond a search engine summary.

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

#107
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…

The parlor tricks are getting better. In terms of practicality you just need to look at AI art. That stuff is good enough to replace the real thing. In terms of actual sentience, understanding I had chatGPT answer questions in the following order: 1. Describe to me what happens when you throw sugar in coffee 2. Describe the same thing in terms of atoms. 3. Is this an example of entropy decreasing? 4. What if the arro…

That's a fun example. Here's one I posted elsewhere about filling a balloon with a gas made of 1 proton and 100 neutrons at a kids party.

https://chat.openai.com/share/71224df4-5c6c-45f7-88fd-eec316...

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

#108
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'…

Computers are already better than humans at a wide variety of tasks. Text generation just happens to now be one of those tasks. But if you look at the prompt -> output -> prompt feedback loop, it's clear that the human submitting the prompts is still doing all the thinking. We're not yet at the point where the AI can prompt itself and improve its output in a logical manner.

You really should take a look at Code Interpretor:

https://www.latent.space/p/code-interpreter#details

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

#109

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.

Great point. It is using cloudflare stream. https://developers.cloudflare.com/stream/viewing-videos/usin... Open to any recomendations for alternative as i too am quite displeased with the state of such things. But still prefer it to YouTube. I believe the media server is set to reqire referer to prevent embeding on alternative origins.

Seems to be https://developers.cloudflare.com/stream/viewing-videos/secu.... Probably can be disabled and replaced with short-lived signed tokens. Though perhaps CloudFlare could have used [more modern iframe restrictions][1].

[1]: https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-csp/#frame-ancestors-navigat...

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

#110
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…

Posting to confirm, having seen back-end sales numbers from (admittedly much smaller) vendors, the correlation between $just_bought_thing and $will_buy_another is very, very high, across pretty much every category I cared to look at.

But surely if you just bought a and like it and intend to buy it again as a gift then you don’t need an advert for Roombas - (and showing you such an advert followed by you buying another Roomba is making the advert look more effective than it was) - and you definitely don’t need an advert for Bissel or Dyson, and you definitely don’t need a dozen adverts for Amazon PLINGBA BEST VACUUM, TYBCHO VACUUM EXPERT, DAOLPTRY VACUUM CLANER etc etc?
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