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The Intelligence Age

ia.samaltman.com

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101–110 of 447 posts

Re: The Intelligence Age

#101

Post by lispisok »

ljlolel wrote: post #6

“Many of the jobs we do today would have looked like trifling wastes of time to people a few hundred years ago, but nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter. If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable. And if we could fast-forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity all around us would feel just as unimaginable.” Loving t…

I got a kick out of that. Spoken like a man who doesnt have to concern himself with the price of housing or any other necessity as we watch this strange short lived phenomena called the middle class disappear and we're back to the haves and have-nots.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#102

Post by dcchambers »

7thaccount wrote: post #64
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…

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

Perhaps ironically, Sam Altman is also big into Fusion. (https://www.helionenergy.com/)

I guess it makes sense, for deep-learning/LLMs to "scale to infinity" you basically need infinite amounts of power.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#103

Post by bongodongobob »

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…

Oh, right, like completely changing the way the entire medical field in the US works is easier than having an LLM help make some phone calls and read some emails. What are you even saying? Have you ever dealt with systems so large one person can't understand it? It's much much easier to write a quick hack and be on your way then to rebuild the whole damn thing. Also, it seems like you're implying that you're not impressed with LLMs because they can't rebuild our medical system. Good grief.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#104

Post by dbspin »

carapace wrote: post #28

"What is good?" or in other words "What are people for?" is a question that cannot be answered by intelligence no matter how great, because the complexity of the question is a function of the intelligence of the asking entity and it's always greater than the intelligence of the asking entity (human or transhuman cyborg or whatever.) AI is a side-show. Intelligence is ambient in living tissue, so we already have as mu…

Existential horror of this whole conversation aside, this is a beautifully written comment. I'd read your novel, but you don't seem to have one, so I'll have to settle for following you on Mastodon.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#105

Post by swagasaurus-rex »

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…

While I agree these LLMs are getting pretty good, I think google shares fault for making it so hard to find information on the internet.

You have to scroll past 4 sponsored links to get to their algorithm results, which themselves have been gamed by SEO and content farms. As far as I can tell, google has no plans to limit AI generated botfarm search results.

LLMs now seem to get you an answer more quickly than google. LLMs don’t cite their sources, so IMO they can’t fully replace google for me yet.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#106

Post by hackinthebochs »

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…

How do you distinguish the path to fancier autocomplete from the path towards AGI? Why think we're on the former rather than the latter?

Re: The Intelligence Age

#107

Post by yoyohello13 »

leetharris wrote: post #18

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…

I wish I could upvote this more than once. I feel like every conversation about AI changing society comes from rich founders telling Joe banker to "Just start a company. AI will make it easy."

The reality is, this transition is going to be painful for the average person.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#108

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

sdenton4 wrote: post #52
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fusion power is just eight minutes away...

Sure, but large scale solar probably isn't globally practical without a world grid.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#109

Post by mcpar-land »

> Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs – fixing the climate

This is so rich coming from a tech field that's on track to match the energy consumption of a small country. (And no, AI is not going to offset this by 'finding innovative solutions to climate change' or whatever)

Re: The Intelligence Age

#110

Post by lxgr »

tikkun wrote: post #25

> We need to act wisely but with conviction. Reminds me of these quotes from Sam on this podcast episode ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfuVSg-VJxE ) * "Prudence without fear" (Sam referencing another quote) * "if you create the descendants of humanity from a place of, deep fear and panic and anxiety, that seems to me you're likely to make some very bad choices or certainly not reflect the best of humanity." * "th…

> * "if you create the descendants of humanity from a place of, deep fear and panic and anxiety, that seems to me you're likely to make some very bad choices or certainly not reflect the best of humanity."

This line of reasoning doesn't hold for me, as you could apply it to any technology, including ones actually very likely to destroy human civilization.

Sometimes, not building a given thing at all is better than building it with even the best intentions.

I'm personally not sure on which side AI falls, but denying that such things exist at all seems intellectually dishonest.

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