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The AI bullshit singularity

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131–140 of 187 posts

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#131
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike the low background radiation steel, high quality content will still continue to be created. Arguably even at a faster rate with these powerful tools. The proportion will drop ofcourse but that only means curation will become king. With search this curation was difficult, because the value was so low you could only do it profitably if it was completely automatic, and that was difficult. An optimistic take would…

>LLMs will make curation so much more valuable, that it will be done much better. Won't that also mean a return to a world of gatekeepers?

That gatekeepers will be the ones deploying the ML systems.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#132

I think that people's believe in LLM is intelligence is closely tied to mistaken association between intelligence and the ability to speak. Parrots can speak, but they cannot reason. Moreover, evolutionary, birds learned to mimic the speech to fool other species. To fool in such way that other species would think that parrots are of the same specie. We, the humans, are smart enough to recognise that even though parro…

>Parrots can speak, but they cannot reason.

Relatively advanced problem solving abilities are well documented in some species of birds, such as crows.

>LLMs are much more advanced things than parrots

Hardly. Parrots are able to fly, find food, find mates, interact with other parrots and lots of other things than no LLM is even close to being able to do.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#133

I always found the idea of infinitely self improving AI to be suspect. Let’s say we have a super smart AI with intelligence 1, and it uses all that to improve itself by 0.5. Then that new 1.5 uses itself to improve by 0.25. Then 0.125, etc etc. obviously it’s always increasing, but it’s not going to have the runaway effect people think.

There are many dimensions where improvements are happening - speed increase, size reduction, precision, context length, using external computation (function calling), using formal systems, hybrid setups, multi-modality etc. If you look at short history of what's happening - we're not seeing below 50% improvements over those relatively short periods of time. We had gpt1 just five and a half years ago. We now have open…

Sure, but it seems that with a fixed amount of hardware or operations there is some sort of efficient frontier across all the axes (speed, generalization, capacity, whatever), so there should logically be a point with diminishing returns and a maximum performance.

Like there is only so much you can do with a single punch card.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#134

As AI advances, there will be AI and algorithms that will check LLMs and their output, sort of LLMs' verifier. It is foolish to think that LLMs won't improve to the point where there are almost no or very low hallucinations and false information. We are just at the beginning of LLMs and generative AI.

How do you automatically verify that an LLM isn't hallucinating?

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#135

I always found the idea of infinitely self improving AI to be suspect. Let’s say we have a super smart AI with intelligence 1, and it uses all that to improve itself by 0.5. Then that new 1.5 uses itself to improve by 0.25. Then 0.125, etc etc. obviously it’s always increasing, but it’s not going to have the runaway effect people think.

Do you have some reason to think that will happen?

Yeah you could imagine that with a fixed amount of resources that implies a maximum “computational intelligence”. Right now we aren’t close to that limit. But if we get better algorithms, there’s going to be fewer gains as we get towards a finite ceiling.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#136
This is a weird thread. I feel like there are many people who have no clue what they are talking about other than a few buzzwords, and make huge generalizations about AI or intelligence in general to _will their opinion into reality_. These statements are biased by either fear of loosing their job or fear of loosing on some investments on AI.

Obviously, the enshittification threat as the author points out is significant. It will be interesting problem to deal with in the future, but until then I feel like no one knows when or what that will look like.

At this rate, no one can predict what AI will bring us 6 months in the future even!

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#137
post #101

I always found the idea of infinitely self improving AI to be suspect. Let’s say we have a super smart AI with intelligence 1, and it uses all that to improve itself by 0.5. Then that new 1.5 uses itself to improve by 0.25. Then 0.125, etc etc. obviously it’s always increasing, but it’s not going to have the runaway effect people think.

Why would the rate of improvement follow your imagined formula? If people are worried about a runaway effect, why would you think you can dismiss their concerns by constructing a very specific scaling function that will not result in a runaway effect?

The more general point is people are asymptomatic growth and assume a never ending exponential, when in reality it’s probably something with a carrying capacity

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#139

I think that people's believe in LLM is intelligence is closely tied to mistaken association between intelligence and the ability to speak. Parrots can speak, but they cannot reason. Moreover, evolutionary, birds learned to mimic the speech to fool other species. To fool in such way that other species would think that parrots are of the same specie. We, the humans, are smart enough to recognise that even though parro…

>Parrots can speak, but they cannot reason. Relatively advanced problem solving abilities are well documented in some species of birds, such as crows. >LLMs are much more advanced things than parrots Hardly. Parrots are able to fly, find food, find mates, interact with other parrots and lots of other things than no LLM is even close to being able to do.

I was hoping that it would be clear from the context, that LLMs are more advanced than birds in just the ability to synthesise the speech close to human speech in its complexity.

Sorry, I didn't mean to offend the parrots. I like parrots too! :)

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many dimensions where improvements are happening - speed increase, size reduction, precision, context length, using external computation (function calling), using formal systems, hybrid setups, multi-modality etc. If you look at short history of what's happening - we're not seeing below 50% improvements over those relatively short periods of time. We had gpt1 just five and a half years ago. We now have open…

Sure, but it seems that with a fixed amount of hardware or operations there is some sort of efficient frontier across all the axes (speed, generalization, capacity, whatever), so there should logically be a point with diminishing returns and a maximum performance. Like there is only so much you can do with a single punch card.

Yes, there are physical limits but they are so far off from human pov that they don't matter much.

For example information communication rate that humans can perform (read or write) compared to what computers can do.

Same with information storage, retrieval, precision, computation rate etc.

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