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The AI bullshit singularity

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151–160 of 187 posts

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#151
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe you are vastly underestimating the capabilities of parrots or similarly intelligent birds. At least when my pet parrot manages to fool me into whatever it is he wants to get out of me that time, he does it for his own primal benefit and not because it was programmed to adhere to some strict set of ethic and moral boundaries set by legal requirements and someone else's idea of how people should think and beh…

I don't think that following the primal benefit would be a good estimation for intelligence, despite the fact that such behavior is common for most species. What makes human specie special is the ability of some individuals to create new things that didn't exist before. That's a loose criteria of course, because most individuals just follow educated social constructs for their entire life.

Oh yes I agree on that. I should have specified that I was arguing their ability to reason - which from my own experience these birds do most definitely possess to a surprising extend. They are smart, and they have all day to figure out which buttons to press to get you to do something specific they find funny or other such things.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#152
post #150
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Sorry everyone, my private key got leaked and I had to revoke it, use this public key instead, also buy this crypto" --Really, really Elon Musk Cryptography and human behavior are incompatible.

I mean if you think about it for 5 minutes sure. But look at what bluesky is doing for example around decentralized moderation. It’s not really been an important problem in the global sense to get cryptographic attestations by neural parties for asserting what they have witnessed or analyzed for evidence of falsehoods

I mean, if I control your DNS for a few moments, there are trusted providers that will issue a TLS cert to me. Things like this happen all the time for companies that hopefully have a security officer. Individuals have little hope here.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#153
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe you are vastly underestimating the capabilities of parrots or similarly intelligent birds. At least when my pet parrot manages to fool me into whatever it is he wants to get out of me that time, he does it for his own primal benefit and not because it was programmed to adhere to some strict set of ethic and moral boundaries set by legal requirements and someone else's idea of how people should think and beh…

The smart behaviour of parrots and their speech synthesis are two different phenomenon. Parrots are definitely smart, and parrots can definitely speak, but they can't learn to speak beyond what they are trained to do. It's not like a parrot has ever spontaneously put together a coherent sentence independently. LLMs aren't even that smart. Not even close.

Absolutely, I also replied to the OP's response below that I failed to specify that I was arguing parrots' ability to reason which I do believe exists to a great extend.

Regardless, speech is just another means of communication. In the end it doesn't really matter if I use perfectly articulated Swahili or just scream "aaar" at you for a few seconds as long as I get the cheeseburger with extra cheese I want from you. These parrots, much like children, just push your buttons and are quite good at finding (or negotiating) the right pattern of things to do and sounds to make to get to a certain outcome.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#154

LLMs are being trained on a smaller and smaller percentage of human prose. Right now it seems like code is the best source for the bulk of an LLM's diet, but it's also looking likely that synthetic math text will be even better. The structured reasoning of code and math seems to be what actually makes these big LLMs "smart." Once you've trained a smart LLM, it seems to take a relatively small amount of hand-curated h…

It seems to me like archive.org and the major book publishers are sitting on a gold mine(at least up to 2022), but I haven't seen anyone saying the same, so maybe I just don't know enough about LLM.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#155

Succinctly stated and something that resonates strongly with me. In the last internet revolution (web search), results started high quality because the inputs were high quality - bloggers and others just wanted to document and share knowledge. But over time, many interests (largely commercial) figured out how to game the system with SEO, and quality of search results has decreased as search's incentive structure led…

I don't think it impacts AGI timelines much. Worst case scenario, we just cut off training at 2024 data. But it's not like another ~5 years of internet data is the magic that will get us over the finish line to AGI. We should have enough data already. We will get to AGI with synthetic data (e.g. AlphaGeometry for code, or simulators e.g. RL inside unreal engine), world model from video, algorithm improvements, and 100x more compute.

I'd add that majority of LLM-generated stuff put onto the internet isn't pure junk. It's endowed with human-created context and curation. If someone submits some LLM-created code to Github, it's because it works. A small fraction is pure noise (e.g. state-actors spamming Twitter) but that should remain a minority.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#156
post #27

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 should it be (1/2)*i improvement rate ? It could be 1/i ? I don't understand this argument.

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Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure computes have lots of transistors, but brains have 10s of billions of neurons and only use 12W of power.

If it's smarter than us it's pretty irrelevant whether it takes 12W or 5KW or even 1TW to run. Sure it may stop improving once it's far surpassed Von Neumann-level (at some point nobody knows) due to some physics or unknown information constraints but I don't think that has any practical bearing on much.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#158

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…

Hinton thinks LLMs can "understand" because without understanding it's impossible to predict the next work as effectively as GPT-4. The only way to do that is to understand the meaning in the text. He also says he's given GPT-4 a novel reasoning problem he invented and it successfully answered, which wouldn't be possible without a level of understanding/intelligence (although I'm not sure how he ensured the problem wasn't in its training data).

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#159
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…

You're forgetting that we have mechanisms in place to curate curation and farm attention toward the crap, not toward quality. It will be harder and harder to break the surface tension of this gooey gelatin wrapper we've placed over creative activity.

People will pay money for curation towards quality, probably quite a bit if the rest of the landscape is 99.99% noise. They won't pay much money for curation "toward the crap".

So I'm not nearly as pessimistic.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#160
Consider LLM code generation. It would an ideal domain for simulated data.

For example, a version of popular software is released with new functions. A framework could simulate numerous plausible code snippets that exercise the new release, including edge cases. The code snippets would be amply commented, and proven to work in a test harness.

This method is the opposite of depending upon the internet for training data. And this method is being used to train AI robots, that have no available internet training data.

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