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On being wrong about AI

scottaaronson.blog

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Re: On being wrong about AI

#11

Post by bayindirh »

blueflow wrote: post #3

> civilization-altering trajectory On which planet? Because i don't see any of it. AI should have made my console monkey job obsolete, by yesterday.

Don't forget that many of us normalized scraping others' work, getting rid of the license, generating stuff based on these works and labeling them originals or "new", thinking that generative models are pulling these things out of thin air.

Also, same people learnt to get angry on anyone who points out that there's most probably a license violation happened during the process, and these angry people believe that everything is fair use (if you're powerful enough).

Re: On being wrong about AI

#12

Post by fidotron »

It has become clear that the defining route to riches this century is to persuade the already powerful of a huge threat to the status quo, then claim that you offer the way to control it, and ideally turn it into a mechanism for further entrenching established interests.

It may have always been this way and I am just getting old.

Re: On being wrong about AI

#13

Post by FeepingCreature »

pharmakom wrote: post #6

The latest LLMs are remarkable, but I think the AI Doomer claims are still a reach. My prediction is that the current AI boom will fizzle out into a handful of useful products and a lot of smoke from VC cash. Where are the moon bases? Supersonic jets? Asteroid mines? Self driving cars? We’ve gotten over excited so many times in the past.

To be fair, none of those are ultimately a matter of "can't" so much as "don't really want to." When we got a billionaire who wanted serious space colonization, we got SpaceX, which is currently working on a moon lander that qualifies as a base in its own right. And of course, we had supersonic jets, there just wasn't enough demand. People want cheap flights more than super-fast flights.

We often get excited about these things, but society usually doesn't. That may be one way in which the current AI boom is different.

Re: On being wrong about AI

#14

Post by bayindirh »

pharmakom wrote: post #6

The latest LLMs are remarkable, but I think the AI Doomer claims are still a reach. My prediction is that the current AI boom will fizzle out into a handful of useful products and a lot of smoke from VC cash. Where are the moon bases? Supersonic jets? Asteroid mines? Self driving cars? We’ve gotten over excited so many times in the past.

They take too long to build and require that thing called engineering which requires blood sweat and tears.

On the other hand, you can scrape the internet, build a model, semi-rig a couple of demos, hype the product and earn money.

Don't forget, it's all about money. Product is just a means to get money.

Building good things and earning good money as a byproduct is a thing of the old. Boomer stuff. Modern people don't do that anymore. It's not efficient, capitalist and quick enough.

Re: On being wrong about AI

#15

Post by MrScruff »

I think a lot of his defence here is "No-one could have known exactly what was going to happen and no-one knows what will happen next."

This is obviously true - predicting the future is hard. It doesn't however explain giving a timeline of thousands of years, which is a ridiculously long time for anything you believe to be technically feasible.

Re: On being wrong about AI

#17

Post by rsynnott »

pharmakom wrote: post #6

The latest LLMs are remarkable, but I think the AI Doomer claims are still a reach. My prediction is that the current AI boom will fizzle out into a handful of useful products and a lot of smoke from VC cash. Where are the moon bases? Supersonic jets? Asteroid mines? Self driving cars? We’ve gotten over excited so many times in the past.

> Self driving cars?

This one in particular, I find fascinating, because we've literally just _had_ a hype cycle over it (I remember people telling me they'd be here any day now a decade ago), and now we're onto another AI hype cycle, almost immediately. Which comes first, AGI, or the self-driving car? :)

(I think your other examples are qualitatively different; moon bases, supersonic (passenger) jets and asteroid mining are clearly possible, but impractical for economic reasons; no-one is willing to _pay_ for them. Plenty of people are willing to pay for both self-driving cars and AGI, but there is just no clear route to achieving either.)

Re: On being wrong about AI

#18

Post by 9991 »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #10

Scott shouldn’t be hard on himself at all for opinions stated 15 years ago. Even over short time spans of a few years, I change my perspective quite a bit. In the 1980s I was lucky enough to stumble into the opportunity of serving on a DARPA neural networks tools panel for a year and getting lucky applying a simple backprop model to a show-stopper problem for a bomb detector my company designed and built for the FAA.…

Your take is that you’re wrong a lot, so it’s OK others to be wrong? If the stakes are high, we should be learning how to not make mistakes rather than how to make excuses after the fact.

Re: On being wrong about AI

#19

Post by sigmoid10 »

This article is absolutely pointless. The statement was from 2009. Back then, neither side had any real evidence in favour of their argument. Deep learning and AI were still purely academic experiments, with zero practicality. And it had been like this for half a century. Back then, even the best models couldn't tell cats from dogs. Today every high schooler with a laptop can solve that problem thanks to abundant hardware and libraries. So both sides were just making up random numbers. This should be a lesson about people, despite their expertise, talking out of their ass instead of reminiscing famous quotes like "horses are better than cars." That statement is also funnily wrong in today's world, but at the time (i.e. without gas stations and roads and infrastructure everywhere), it too was rather reasonable.

Re: On being wrong about AI

#20

Post by its-summertime »

blueflow wrote: post #3

> civilization-altering trajectory On which planet? Because i don't see any of it. AI should have made my console monkey job obsolete, by yesterday.

Is it impacting hiring decisions? Changes in government policy? etc. If not already, how about in the next 5 years? A majority of the use-cases are not going to be publicly attributed to AI, that however does not mean it isn't having an effect.
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