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The Intelligence Age

ia.samaltman.com

41–50 of 447 posts

Re: The Intelligence Age

#41

I like Sam's philosophy on this and I generally agree with him. However, I do not like how all the wealthy AI people are hand-waving the massive labor market shift in the coming years. > As one example, we expect that this technology can cause a significant change in labor markets (good and bad) in the coming years, but most jobs will change more slowly than most people think, and I have no fear that we’ll run out of…

For this reason I read Andrew Yang’s “The War on Normal People”. Besides UBI and “social credits”, I don’t see him offer that many other solutions to this problem. UBI also still needs to be proven as far as I’m aware.

When o1 was released, I ran an internal eval and saw it plainly outperforming our highly educated colleagues. I had goosebumps, and haven’t been able to sleep well for days. This will dramatically impact society in 2-5 years.

Do you know of any relevant material related to this?

Re: The Intelligence Age

#43
post #23

> If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips). If we don’t build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people. This seems to be the key of the piece to me. It's his manifesto for raising money for the infra…

To be brutally frank we should focus on energy, as we definitely need way more of that (with less carbon) even if LLMs don't improve any more.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#44
"humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data (or really, the underlying “rules” that produce any distribution of data)..."

This statement is manifestly untrue. Neural networks are useful, many hidden layers is useful, all of these architectures are useful, but the idea that they can learn anything, is based less on empirical results and more on what Sam Altman needs to convince people of to get this capital investments.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#45

I like Sam's philosophy on this and I generally agree with him. However, I do not like how all the wealthy AI people are hand-waving the massive labor market shift in the coming years. > As one example, we expect that this technology can cause a significant change in labor markets (good and bad) in the coming years, but most jobs will change more slowly than most people think, and I have no fear that we’ll run out of…

We're going to need to link the two. Those wealthy enough to not care, we're going to have to organize and make them care. Ideally we can find a way to do it nonviolently.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy for him to say: AI is almost guaranteed to hand a massive W to capital and L to labor. He is holding a title to rule over hell in one hand and promising to lead us to heaven with the other.

Actually not sure about this, with the leverage of AI, its easier than ever to start a company

Who's going to work at all these companies then? Unless every single profession suddenly only requires 1 person to do the entire thing with no management, coordination or hierarchies, a lot of people will be labor not capital.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#48

> Deep learning works, and we will solve the remaining problems. We can say a lot of things about what may happen next, but the main one is that AI is going to get better with scale I'm not an AI skeptic at all, I use llms all the time, and find them very useful. But stuff like this makes me very skeptical of the people who are making and selling AI. It seems like there was a really sweet spot wrt the capabilities AI…

Scaling Improvement has never been Linear though. Every next gen model so far has required at least an order of magnitude increase in compute, sometimes several more. So it's not a new revelation and these companies are aware of that. Microsoft for instance is building a 100B data center for a future next generation model releasing in 2028. If models genuinely keep making similar leaps each generation then we're stil…

So at what point do the linear increases in capability not justify the exponential compute and data requirements, or when do we run out of resources to throw at it?

Re: The Intelligence Age

#49

“This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there.” I am a believer that people like sam are not lying. Anyone using these models daily probably believes the same. The o1 model, if prompted correctly, can architect a code base in a way that my decade+ of…

I'm using these models daily, and I don't believe that they're a direct path to superintelligence (unless you'd consider something like the printing press to have been a direct path to, say, the integrated circuit or the Internet).

> Prompted incorrectly, it looks incompetent. The abilities of the future are already here, you just need to know how to use the models.

Something purportedly intelligent shouldn't need "correct usage", as it should arguably be able to infer and clarify all ambiguities itself, no?

Re: The Intelligence Age

#50

> Deep learning works, and we will solve the remaining problems. We can say a lot of things about what may happen next, but the main one is that AI is going to get better with scale I'm not an AI skeptic at all, I use llms all the time, and find them very useful. But stuff like this makes me very skeptical of the people who are making and selling AI. It seems like there was a really sweet spot wrt the capabilities AI…

The question is: For a given problem in machine intelligence, what's the expected time-horizon for a 'good' solution?

Over the last, say, five years, a pile of 50+ year problems have been toppled by the deep learning + data + compute combo. This includes language modeling (divorced from reasoning), image generation, audio generation, audio separation, image segmentation, protein folding, and so on.

(Audio separation is particularly close to my heart; the 'cocktail party problem' has been a challenge in audio processing for 100+ years, and we now have great unsupervised separation algorithms (MixIT), which hardly anyone knows about. That's an indicator of how much great stuff is happening right now.)

So, when we look at some of our known 'big' problems in AI/ML, we ask, 'what's the horizon for figuring this out?' Let's look at reasoning...

We know how to do 'reasoning' with GOFAI, and we've got interesting grafts of LLMs+GOFAI for some specific problems (like the game of Diplomacy, or some of the math olympiad solvers).

"LLMs which can reason" is a problem which has only been open for a year or two tops, and which we're already seeing some interesting progress on. Either there's something special about the problem which will make it take another 50+ years to solve, or there's nothing special about it and people will cook up good and increasingly convenient solutions over the next five years or so. (Perhaps a middle ground is 'it works but takes so much compute that we have to wait for new materials science for chip making to catch up.')

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