Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?

fikisipi.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 70 posts

Re: Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?

#21

Post by juliendorra »

scandox wrote: post #14

The tone of Aschenbrenner's paper is odd. It's somewhere between his wet dreams and his nightmares. In fairness he seems to be aware of that but it's like someone grinning reflexively while they tell you bad news. He's convinced and it's going to be terrible and it's going to be important and he's going to be part of it. I guess for sure in 5 years it will be much clearer.

Is it a form of apocalyptic glee? It’s quite common from some Trotskyist movements to rapture believers to conspiracy theorists… In a way it recenter the world around one single explanation/core and give a sense of, if not agency at all, cognitive control over that complexity and unknowns

Re: Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?

#22

Post by I_ »

ganzuul wrote: post #9
passwordoops wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one can predict what innovations will come. So a more accurate answer would be "I don't know, but not likely soon". But it should be pretty clear by now that the current driver of AGI talk (LLMs, possibly by extension, NNs) is not going to get us there. It might be a component of some future AGI, but not the basis

Isn't Leonardo DaVinci famous for doing just that?

Famous for doing just what?

Re: Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?

#24

Post by boyka »

kubb wrote: post #12

It’s pretty bizarre how SV decision makers have shifted from talking about ML to LLMs to straight up Artificial Intelligence. I think one of the reasons is that LLMs are very good at what the execs do every day for a living and because of that, use as a way of assessing each other’s mental capacity: producing coherent-sounding speech (1). Now that the LLM can do what any VP has dedicated their entire life to masterin…

SV?

Re: Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?

#25

Post by NiloCK »

boyka wrote: post #24
kubb wrote: post #12

It’s pretty bizarre how SV decision makers have shifted from talking about ML to LLMs to straight up Artificial Intelligence. I think one of the reasons is that LLMs are very good at what the execs do every day for a living and because of that, use as a way of assessing each other’s mental capacity: producing coherent-sounding speech (1). Now that the LLM can do what any VP has dedicated their entire life to masterin…

SV?

Silicon Valley

Re: Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?

#26

Post by seydor »

We must thank the author for the content-free article, so each of us can freely ramble on tangents, as if we are looking at an abstract art piece.

My beef is with the Dwarkesh Patel podcast. While he has some very good interviews (Carl Shulman, or even Zuckerberg) he seems to have a lot of rambling-on conversstion by very young employees of AI startups (openAI). I don't get value from those because they don't really say anything other than patting each other's back about how awesome they are for having been hired by their companies. I think he should focus on people with actual contribution to the science who have meaningful things to say

Re: Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?

#27

Post by inglor_cz »

ganzuul wrote: post #3

Asked the smartest person I know and got a prediction of AGI in 1 to 2 centuries. This is basically a self-assessed IQ test.

"got a prediction of AGI in 1 to 2 centuries"

Predictions at this time scale are bullshit, at least in modern technological civilization. It would have been different in the Stone Age, but we don't live in the Stone Age, when things barely changed for millennia.

For some perspective:

100 years ago, radio was barely a thing, airplanes were made of wood and canvas, Africa was thinly populated, antibiotics didn't exist, semiconductors weren't useful yet and the British Empire reached its largest extent ever.

200 years ago, railway wasn't a thing, electric telegraphy wasn't a thing, germ theory wasn't a thing, photography wasn't a thing, most parts of Europe were still feudal, Oregon and California were still Amerindian country, the US was an unimportant country on the fringe of the developed world, and official science of the day denied the very existence of meteors as space rocks, because only dumb hicks would believe in rocks falling from the sky, ya know?

Don't tell me that people back then could make accurate predictions about the technological level of 2024. Neither can your smartest person, even though I don't doubt their smarts. Making long-term predictions is about as reliable as making long-term weather forecasts. (Not climate. Weather.)

Re: Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?

#28

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

scandox wrote: post #14

The tone of Aschenbrenner's paper is odd. It's somewhere between his wet dreams and his nightmares. In fairness he seems to be aware of that but it's like someone grinning reflexively while they tell you bad news. He's convinced and it's going to be terrible and it's going to be important and he's going to be part of it. I guess for sure in 5 years it will be much clearer.

I'm familiar with this tone from my LessWrong lurker days. It comes from wrestling with the idea that there is no scalable way to actually stop AGI from coming about, so you just have to grit your teeth and hope for the best.

Re: Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?

#29

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

NhanH wrote: post #15

My question after reading the paper is: if he believe with conviction everything he wrote, why did he recently become an investor instead of either working in policy or working on the tech itself? If the tech is going to transform humanity into a new economic paradigm and give the country controlling it a decisive advantage to be the sole superpower, being an investor is either futile or meaningless. Even doing nothi…

Doesn't he say right at the start that basically nobody is pricing this stuff in right? Becoming an investor makes a ton of sense if you earnestly believe that.

Re: Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?

#30

Post by quonn »

So if we supposedly already have passed the point where LLMs are at the level of high schoolers, how comes that almost no tasks or jobs that high-schoolers are capable of doing have been replaced by LLMs?

Neither will more advanced work be replaced by 2027. End of story.

Post reply on HN