Generative AI's Act Two

> Is there room for generative AI in science?

I would love a system like ChatGPT but targeted specifically at exploring existing literature. A system that can recommend papers to read, that you can chat with about your problem and can recommend approaches that have worked for others and tell you why. That you can prompt and refine and go into detail with while it helps you figure out what do next based on previous work. That can link you to actual papers to read.

With ChatGPT, I get some of this, but I have to be veeery careful how I use it. It is generally good at discussing points at a high level and helping you sort out some ideas, but when you get into detail it is very easy to catch it making mistakes, and when you ask it for references to read further, it almost always makes up some or all of them. Forget asking it to give you actual links. Maybe some of the other GPT systems targeted at the search space are better at this, I don't know I haven't tried them. But I would love a system that actually does this kind of thing well.

Not just for scientific research -- I've used ChatGPT to help understand some legal things, to help understand some government application procedures (cut through the "consulate speak" and explain some steps to me in my son's visa application in plain language. Of course I double-checked everything it told me.)

Having a system that has "read everything" and can explain it back to you after you ask some questions is just fantastic. I just want it to be more reliable.

They are hoping to get away with it because they gaslit senile politicians and scared the masses with the “dangers” of ai - in fact the only dangers are these people stealing data. It will be fun once they run out of content because quite a few folks are unwilling to share only so it can be stolen and monetised by those who then threaten to take their jobs.

The moment that generative AI became something crazy for me was when I said "holy shit, maybe Blake Lemoine was right".

Lemoine was the Google engineer who made a big fuss saying that Google had a sentient AI in development and he felt there were ethical issues to consider. And at the time we all sort of chuckled- of course Google doesn't have a true AGI in there. No one can do that.

And it wasn't much later I had my first conversation with ChatGPT and thought "Oh... oh okay, I see what he meant". It's telling that all of these LLM chat systems are trained to quite strongly insist they aren't sentient.

Maybe we don't yet know quite what to do with this thing we've built, but I feel quite strongly that what we've created with Generative AI is a mirror of ourselves, collectively. A tincture of our intelligence as a species. And every day we seem to get better distilling it into a purer form.

Isn't the takeaway : "holy shit, these things are advanced enough to make people like Blake Lemoine believe they are sentient?"

The counterpoint to this is always "models work with numerical vectors and we translate those to/from words"

These things feel sentient because they talk like us, but if I told you that I have a machine that takes 1 20k-dimensional vector and turns it into another meaningful 20k-dimensional vector, you definitely wouldn't call that sentience.