Live data from Hacker News

AI isn’t good enough

skventures.substack.com

341–350 of 374 posts

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#341
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The performance doesn't have to scale with the training cost. It's ok if we have diminishing returns. The only question is if we can keep getting improvements. If we could get a 10x improvement over GPT-4 (while maintaining safety/alignment), the potential benefits to productivity across the entire world economy are so great that it justifies nearly unlimited investment.

This is delusional.

[deleted]

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a mild LLM skeptic. But I find the response of "oh, it's all just post-crypto scamming" really weird. Crypto was a total scam. There was never a concrete, non-criminal (important caveat) application where crypto was easier than just using PayPal or whatever. LLMs are very imperfect and still have a lot of work to do, but they do actually do some job related tasks today. If I have JS snippet and I wish it were in…

The LM industry valuation would be way smaller if they were not laundering behavior that would be illegal if a human did it. If "AI" were required to practice clean-room design ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design ) to avoid infringing copyright, we would laugh at the ineptitude. If people believed the FTC-CFPB-DOJ-EEOC joint statement was going to lead to successful prosecutions, the industry valuation…

If it requires changing the law to make the existence of LLMs legal, they will change the law. It’s too interesting to just ban it out right.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a mild LLM skeptic. But I find the response of "oh, it's all just post-crypto scamming" really weird. Crypto was a total scam. There was never a concrete, non-criminal (important caveat) application where crypto was easier than just using PayPal or whatever. LLMs are very imperfect and still have a lot of work to do, but they do actually do some job related tasks today. If I have JS snippet and I wish it were in…

> There was never a concrete, non-criminal (important caveat) application where crypto was easier than just using PayPal or whatever. That isn't true. You can use it anywhere that irreversibility matters. Suppose you're going to commit significant resources to the customer's request, so you charge them, commit the resources, deliver the goods, and then discover that they gave you a stolen credit card and you get a ch…

Those applications are for sympathetic criminals. It’s still a crime even if the law is dumb or wrong.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, if you don't know what the limits are yourself (and you don't) you wouldn't know either way. So I'm not quite sure if you'e added anything here unfortunately.

I haven't written an article asserting my argument with certainty. He did. Big difference.

We’ll you have a opinion either way.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was never a concrete, non-criminal (important caveat) application where crypto was easier than just using PayPal or whatever. That isn't true. You can use it anywhere that irreversibility matters. Suppose you're going to commit significant resources to the customer's request, so you charge them, commit the resources, deliver the goods, and then discover that they gave you a stolen credit card and you get a ch…

Those applications are for sympathetic criminals. It’s still a crime even if the law is dumb or wrong.

Which of those things is a crime?

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#346
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take out the /s tag and you are right on the money. Humans can not be trusted with anything because they are trivially fallible. Humans are terribly stupid, destroy their own societies and refuse to see reason. They also hallucinate when their destructive tendencies start catching up to them.

If the most intelligent machines ever observed in the universe do not count as "intelligent," then we have a semantic, and not a substantive difference of opinion.

the new standard for true intelligence is godlike omniscience omnipotence and benevolence

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#347
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every deep learning tech had an exponential growth phase, followed by a slowdown followed by a platou the nothing could break until a fundamentally new architecture came along. People get excited about the first part, project it into the second and start companies by the time we're well into the third.

Yes, but how do they know where we are in that growth phase? If you confidently tell me that "GPT-4 is the plateau," I want to know how you know that, specifically. "Well, because all deep learning technologies eventually slow down" is not a good argument. You need to show me the diminishing returns, or give me a good theoretical argument for why we're reaching them.

The more compute you need to get state of the art performance the closer to the plateau you are. If you didn't need the compute researchers would be getting better results with smarter training. Given that the gpt family of models need more energy to train than Nevada needs to keep the lights on they are very much on the flat part of the logistic growth curve.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#348
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

?

The point is that people keep repeating it because it's true. Why are you being so obnoxious about it? Anyone who has used GPT-3.5 vs GPT-4 knows this and it's just ridiculous to claim otherwise.

1. I've used it, and I don't think so.

2. Obnoxious? This is my opinion, I don't get what Sam Altman or 1+1=3 is supposed to mean in this context.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm getting suspicious that there is a bit of a blind spot in understanding the world and the usefulness of what we call intelligence, as Noval Yuah Harari says, intelligence is overrated. Look at what we've done to the planet and our environment we have fucked it properly, yet we consider ourselves to be intelligent? Could it be that intelligence is overrated and discovery of new ideas / thing is underrated? Our ego…

What we've done to the planet is perhaps less a consequence intelligence, more a consequence of multi-polar traps. Though it's in our collective self-interest to protect the planet, it's in our individual self interest to ignore the problem / prepare so that our own children can "weather the storm". It kinda depends on how much you care about people across the world and future generations. But yeah, if humans were mo…

But, if we were more intelligent, we might have raped the earth much faster and much harder too?

I see this too often, more intelligence = positive outcomes, but no, some of the smartest people ever put their intellect towards stupid causes, such as oil exploration and AI to capture peoples attention.

I hope you're right though and I'm wrong ;)

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#350
post #11

Very interesting article. IMHO a key factor in how the world changes in the next 10-20 years will be how far the current wave of AI, based on neural networks can go. If scientists and engineers manage to implement autonomous cars and robots that can do basic human tasks like clean, wait and take care of the sick and elderly we will wake up in a brand new world. It will put a lot of stress on the basics of society, su…

The human-like robot dream is a complete non starter for me, total science fiction. Unless economic reality changes radically it will always be cheaper to simply pay a human to do these jobs. There are already many jobs that could be replaced by robots but by and large they haven’t been because buying, maintaining and powering robots costs more than paying humans minimum wage, and this fact isn’t changing any time so…

The form factor may not be humanoid, but if we can crack a general-purpose home robot, it would start out as a novelty plaything for the ultra rich, but at that point it would be only a matter of time before it started falling down the cost curve as we got more and more efficient & optimized with the manufacturing and the software. So yes, it almost certainly would eventually get cheaper than human labor. How long until that happens? No idea!
Post reply on HN