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The Intelligence Age

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Re: The Intelligence Age

#91

Post by acchow »

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…

> Related btw to using AI for code.

And executing code. At some point in the not-so-distant past, a function call was just a jump. And then it turned into a string hash-then-lookup, then spinning up a VM, and now interpreting language? We’re definitely in a new chips age, if anything.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#92

Post by mise_en_place »

There is still too much variance in the utility of LLMs. Hopefully, the uncertainty around utility will decrease while some concrete ranked score metric increases. Until that point, the variance is preventing the maximization of utility of LLMs, and by extension, agentic AI.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#93

Post by abletonlive »

myaccountonhn wrote: post #61
abletonlive wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Nobody expected China to produce as much solar power as it does now. What makes you think we know how much renewable energy we will produce in 2040?

The growth in renewables can not meet their demands, fusion is a moonshot that probably will not happen, nuclear takes too long to build. Where will the energy come from if not fossil fuels?

They (microsoft) are literally bringing a nuclear power plant online for this.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#94

Post by lxgr »

Bjorkbat wrote: post #78
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…

As much of a curmudgeon as I am on AI I do sincerely believe that one area that it's effective at is going from absolute beginner to decent understanding on something completely new and foreign. Recently I've been somewhat curious about Skia, the graphics library that Google uses. A while back I fielded a few questions about Skia to Claude. Nothing crazy, just questions on how to draw a few primitive shapes, but I fe…

It is indeed incredibly useful for getting from zero to an undergrad level of understanding of most subjects. In my personal experience, it's also been largely useless beyond that.

That's not to diminish the potential impact of having an almost-free grad-student-level tutor available 24/7! Even if AI stops improving here, this alone will have a huge impact on future science (there being more trained people around capable of helping solve hard problems and all).

But we're also definitely some way away from AIs doing their own research, and I'm not sure if scaling the current architecture alone will get us there.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#95

Post by visarga »

joshmarlow wrote: post #85
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 deep…

> the foundation of civilization is standing on the shoulders of giants. Progress in large part is figuring out better way of doing that

It's so much easier to imitate than to invent something truly novel and useful. Let's do a bit of napkin math. A human lifetime is about 500M words. GPT-4 used up about 30,000 human lifetimes of language. But cultural evolution took 200K years and 120B people to get here, about 4 million times the size of GPT-4's training set.

That is of course hand wavy, but it shows progress is a million times harder than imitation. We really are standing on the shoulders of giants, or a very long chain of people. If we forgot all the knowledge preserved by language it would take us the same effort to recover as the first time around.

I think all progress comes from search - search for experience (data), and search for understanding (data compression). This feeds on itself, but is coupled with the search space - the real world. And the world is not eager to tell us all its secrets. AI will only advance as fast as it can search, it's not a matter of pure scaling of computation, we need to scale interaction and validation as well.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#96

Post by ctoth »

Etheryte wrote: post #27
kazcaptain wrote: post #10

The most interesting bit I find is the time period mentioned until super-intelligence: “thousands of days (!)” aka 6-9 years or more? With the current hype wave it feels like we’re almost there but this piece makes me think we’re not.

If anything, I would say that that's a very optimistic take. The hype train is strong, but that's largely what it is once you look at the details. What we have right now is impressive, but no one has shown anything close to a possible path from where we are right now to AGI. The things we can do right now are fancy, but they're fancy in the same way good autocomplete is fancy. To me, it feels like a local maxima, but…

> What we have right now is impressive, but no one has shown anything close to a possible path from where we are right now to AGI[0].

[0]: From GPT-4 to AGI: Counting the OOMs https://situational-awareness.ai/from-gpt-4-to-agi/

Re: The Intelligence Age

#97

Post by mlsu »

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…

The biggest productivity gain I've seen in my programming life has not been from Claude or ChatGPT. It's from the Rust compiler. A good compiler that catches errors at compile time instead of runtime, that makes writing tests and pulling down dependencies easy, that makes documentation easy.

Good old fashioned tooling.

"Let's train an LLM that can decode C++ compiler error strings!"

No, let's make better tools.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#98

Post by lxgr »

idle_zealot wrote: post #86
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 u…

I'm a bit more optimistic in that it might just be able to effect that change through brute force: Scaling a call center is more expensive than scaling phone robots/agents.

You could counter that health insurers will just start staffing their call centers with their own robot army, but I suspect that the occasional incredibly expensive hallucination will put an end to that at least in the medium term.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#99

Post by idle_zealot »

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…

The thing is: robotics is knowledge work. Supposing a scenario in which AI makes advancing fields of engineering and science much more rapid, it will be leveraged to build and cheapen robotic labor. There would be a gap period where AI is smart but unable to perform labor without humans, which could be ugly, and then we reach effective post-scarcity and post-humans-being-useful. Where we go from there could be heaven or hell depending on who's in charge.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#100

Post by vasco »

highfrequency wrote: post #76
sharkjacobs wrote: post #20

> 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…

Progress might be logarithmic in compute, but compute (transistors/sqinch and transistors/$) is growing exponentially with time. Despite what skeptics have been saying for decades, Moore's Law is alive and well - and we haven't even figured out how to stack wafers in 3 dimensions yet!

We haven't? https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/technologies/3d-v...
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