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On being wrong about AI

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Re: On being wrong about AI

#31

Post by altdataseller »

its-summertime wrote: post #20
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.

Technology that isn’t as advanced as AI is already impacting hiring decisions. When you submit your resume, most ATS systems rank you by a score

Re: On being wrong about AI

#32

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: On being wrong about AI

#33

Post by anonymousDan »

fidotron wrote: post #12

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.

Finding ways to make rich people richer will always make solid business sense unfortunately.

Re: On being wrong about AI

#34

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

rsynnott wrote: post #23
its-summertime wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Is it impacting hiring decisions? I mean, probably, sure, for some (generally poorly run) companies, but, when it comes to it, all 15 of the last two recessions have impacted hiring decisions. Companies, and particularly poorly-run companies, jump at shadows all the time.

It's not as if those recessions were partly the result of quant software making poor decisions.

Re: On being wrong about AI

#35

Post by M4v3R »

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.

> Where are the moon bases? Supersonic jets? Asteroid mines? Self driving cars?

First three are purely hardware problems, among other things (like profitability). But asking where are the self driving cars in 2023 is a bit disingenuous. Yes, we don't have Level 5 autonomy accessible by everyone for the general public, but we already have Waymo and other cars already driving on public streets, and we do have Tesla with their FSD that some people are using for 90+% of their daily commutes. So yeah, it took longer then some people anticipated (and will still take a bit longer until these systems are widely deployed, bulletproof and affordable), but we're definitely getting there.

Re: On being wrong about AI

#36

Post by mark_l_watson »

9991 wrote: post #18
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.

I think you misunderstood what I was saying, so I will try to be more clear:

I was describing myself as an observer and participant in different waves of AI tech. I was not admitting to being wrong, rather, just someone who was lucky enough to be a small part of AI.

What I don’t know right now: if AI will help solve difficult societal/energy/medical/scientific problems and propel humanity into a better future (I bet on this outcome) or that the AI-doomers are correct (not my view).

I try to absorb the AI dangers arguments and keep an open mind. Good resources: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-undivided-attenti... and I also think that privacy advocates (see books Surveillance Capitalism, and Privacy is Power) are useful in deciding what we should and shouldn’t do with AI.

Re: On being wrong about AI

#37

Post by DebtDeflation »

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.

This entire space has devolved into a false dichotomy between "the singularity is near" and "Third AI Winter is coming" in the popular press. Meanwhile, I'm getting paid to build domain specific chatbots for large companies and couldn't care less about "AGI".

Re: On being wrong about AI

#38

Post by its-summertime »

> Eliezer himself didn’t believe that staggering advances in AI were going to happen the way they did, by pure scaling of neural networks.

I'd say its more than just scaling, only the smallest forms run on a modern phone, slowly, with caveats.

Its far beyond anything reasonable. I still find it weird that there are probably multiple datacenters worth of compute just generating text.

Re: On being wrong about AI

#39

Post by 098799 »

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.

Why would you need it? All you need is one machine capable enough that it will run it's own alphafold-3 to correctly predict the sequence of an appropriately deadly virus, pay some lab to synthesize it and release it to the atmosphere. Or create a dead man switch to do so, at which point you have to start treating it as north korea, sooner or later it will build the capabilities it needs and release it anyway.

Re: On being wrong about AI

#40

Post by rsynnott »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #34
rsynnott wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it impacting hiring decisions? I mean, probably, sure, for some (generally poorly run) companies, but, when it comes to it, all 15 of the last two recessions have impacted hiring decisions. Companies, and particularly poorly-run companies, jump at shadows all the time.

It's not as if those recessions were partly the result of quant software making poor decisions.

My point is that a surprising number of hiring/layoff decisions are essentially made based on recessions which _never actually happen_. Possibly the most spectacular in recent years was in early 2020, when a bunch of tech companies laid off their recruitment staff in prep for the recession which was surely coming... That didn't generally work out well for them.
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