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The Intelligence Age

ia.samaltman.com

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Re: The Intelligence Age

#81

Post by famouswaffles »

lispisok wrote: post #48
famouswaffles wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I never said I thought increase in ability was linear either. We're encroaching on phenomena that's genuinely hard to describe/put a number on but GPT-3 is worlds apart of 2 and it feels like 4 is easily ten times better than the OG 3. I can say Improvement lags behind compute somewhat but that’s really it.

That said, it's ultimately up to the people footing the bill isn't it ?

Re: The Intelligence Age

#82

Post by jasonwcfan »

Bjorkbat wrote: post #60

A complete tangent, but I think a big reason why I'm kind of dismissive of AI is because people who speculate on what it would enable make it honestly sound kind of unimaginative. > AI models will soon serve as autonomous personal assistants who carry out specific tasks on our behalf like coordinating medical care on your behalf. I get it, coordinating medical care is exhausting, but it's kind of amusing that rather…

Yeah the ways AI models have learned to interact with the world are all hilariously skeuomorphic given their capabilities. A model that runs on silicon has to learn English and Python in order to communicate with other models that also run on silicon. And to perceive the world they have to rely on images rendered in the limited wavelengths visible to the human eye.

But I much prefer this approach over allowing models to develop their own hyper-optimized information exchange protocols that are are black box to humans, and I hope things stay this way forever.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#83

Post by simianparrot »

arthurcolle wrote: post #70
7thaccount wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because we all know "a decade" means maybe never. They've said the same thing about fusion for 5 decades.

https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-national-laboratory-make...

And it's still a decade away

Re: The Intelligence Age

#84

Post by peterb0yd »

CptFribble wrote: post #16

To paraphrase Goggins, "Who's gonna carry the cabbage?" While it's true there are a lot of jobs obsoleted by technological progress, the vision of personal AI teams creating a new age of prosperity only makes sense for knowledge workers. Sure, a field worker picking cabbage could also have an AI team to coordinate medical care. But in this brilliant future, are the lowest members of society suddenly well-paid? The st…

Shhh... you're not supposed to say anything about this!

We need to sell the idea of abundance for everyone so investors and employees will feel good about dedicating their livelihood to our organization!

Re: The Intelligence Age

#85

Post by joshmarlow »

brotchie wrote: post #67

For somebody who likes building things and has many side projects Claude and ChatGPT have been huge productivity multipliers. For example, I’m designing and 3D printing custom LED diffuser channels from TPU filament. My first attempt was terrible, because I didn’t have an intuition for how light propagates through a material. After a bit of chatting with ChatGPT, I had an understanding and some direction of where to…

This dovetails with something I've been thinking lately; the foundation of civilization is standing on the shoulders of giants (ie, I might make small contributions but I didn't invent compilers, CPUs, mining, agriculture, etc).

Progress in large part is figuring out better ways of doing that (language, written language, printing press, internet access, etc).

When you look at things that way - LLMs start to seem deeply ground-breaking (assuming we work out the confabulation kinks).

EDIT: fixed grammar/typos. Maybe I should have had an LLM proof-read this...

Re: The Intelligence Age

#86

Post by idle_zealot »

Bjorkbat wrote: post #60

A complete tangent, but I think a big reason why I'm kind of dismissive of AI is because people who speculate on what it would enable make it honestly sound kind of unimaginative. > AI models will soon serve as autonomous personal assistants who carry out specific tasks on our behalf like coordinating medical care on your behalf. I get it, coordinating medical care is exhausting, but it's kind of amusing that rather…

It is pretty comical. "We invented digital superintelligence so it can wait on the phone to talk to your healthcare provider".

If we had digital superintelligence then surely it could figure out how to actually provide healthcare to people who meed it, and innovate in treatments. An AGI is a singularity event, in the sense that the transformation it would affect on the state of technology and our lives is rapid and unpredictable. I doubt that our society's hundred-ish year old systems would survive such change, and if they did they would be anachronistic and depressing.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#87

Post by acchow »

rossdavidh wrote: post #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 con…

I believe “learn any distribution of data” is his attempt at describing the Universal Approximation Theorem to the laymen.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#88

Post by bbor »

breck wrote: post #19

It looks like this is a new subdomain that has never been used before today: https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://ia.samal... Surprisingly complicated HTML source code for a simple blog post. Here it is as: Plain HTML: https://hub.scroll.pub/sama/index.html Text: https://hub.scroll.pub/sama/index.txt Scroll: https://hub.scroll.pub/sama/index.scroll

Wow, great catch. Something tells me he rolled this himself. Clearly he's trying to coin a term for personal legacy reasons, and I say godspeed. Holocene is a little vague, the information age is too entrenched to get anyone's attention, a/the singular age / the singularity are way too deeply associated with the doomer community, and the cybernetic age (a term coined for academia!) is too associated with playful science fiction.

I'm personally rooting for cognitive being the word of the next few decades, but that's just a shout from the sidelines. Only time will tell what humanity latches on to, but I wouldn't be surprised if this blog post/subdomain was referenced in a Wikipedia page's Etymology section in 10-15 years...

Although this blog post & discussion has my anxiety at an 8, something's oddly comforting about the thought of Sam Altman fiddling with tailwind classes to get his profound aesthetic just-right. Something undeniably relatable and human. Hate the man all you want (I do!), but he's clearly acting in some sort of good faith.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#89

Post by ocean2 »

sharkjacobs wrote: post #58

> It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!) "a few thousand days" is such a funny and fascinating way to say "about a decade" Superficially, reframing it as "days" not "years" is a classic marketing psychology trick, i.e. 99 cents versus a dollar, but I think the more interesting thing is just the way it defamiliarizes the span. A decade means something, but "a few thousand days" f…

The Stellarator design has proven to be stable and to produce net positive energy. We are actually only $20B away from having a fully functional nuclear fusion reactor.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#90

Post by lxgr »

codingwagie wrote: post #59
lxgr wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "c…

The model's arent there yet. I am confused how people cannot extrapolate into the future and understand that the models will improve

And I'm surprised how many people think they can confidently tell whether they're looking at an s-curve or an exponential function based on very limited data points. I don't even doubt that superintelligence is a very real possibility! But it might or might not happen, and if it does, it might or might not be based on deep learning.

As a counterexample: The maximum speed of travel for the average person for millenia used to be as fast as they could run, then it was as fast as the fastest horse can run, and then within a century it has accelerated to almost the speed of sound – at which it has plateaued.

Looking purely at the decades of acceleration, you might have very well concluded from the data that we'd be making significant headway towards getting within double-digit percentages of the speed of light at this point.

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