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The Intelligence Age

ia.samaltman.com

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Re: The Intelligence Age

#111

Post by throwup238 »

lxgr wrote: post #94
Bjorkbat wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cap…

> 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.

Hot take: I think it's fairly obvious the current architecture is not enough BUT it's already or almost at the point where it can be the backbone for a proper AGI/ASI system. Linking human communication and some light language-based reasoning to other AI models that handle the rest of the world model and reasoning, using special tokens to coordinate them.

I think it's just really early and most of this stuff hasn't even been attempted yet. There's tools/function calling which is kind of a proof of concept, and a lot of academic labs researching transformers applied to other fields like robotic control and learning, but no one's put it all together yet.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#112

Post by piombisallow »

swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #105
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…

I think it's not necessarily Google's fault, it's an arms race and they're losing it.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#113

Post by noch »

mlsu wrote: post #97
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.

> "Let's train an LLM that can decode C++ compiler error strings!" > No, let's make better tools.

LLMs exist and they pass the Turing Test, which was something we couldn't have said or even hoped for a few years ago. Additionally, they have an IQ of 90 - 120, depending on which one you are working with.

But LLMs aren't good at all things nor in all ways, and they have strange failure modes. And so what will happen now, and is already happening, is that we'll (re)design programming tools and languages such that they are the kind of thing that LLMs are suited to using well. This will be part of the process of figuring out how LLMs work. There will be a virtuous cycle, and it has begun.

Better tools will increasingly mean, "tools that LLMs are good at using." That's where the puck will be.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#116

Post by Terr_ »

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 ways of doing that

Cynical take: When it comes to helping someone find exactly the right piece of esoteric knowledge needed... There's no profit for that in a search engine, and an LLM reflects word associations rather than facts.

IANAScienceHistorian, but I find myself thinking of how DNA analysis would be different if nobody had found Thermus aquaticus, with it's extra-hardy variant of polymerase, or how the history of stealth aircraft was kicked off when someone realized the implications of Petr Ufimtsev's equations for reflected EM waves. (A work which went--heh--under the radar inside the USSR.)

Re: The Intelligence Age

#117

Post by throwaway314155 »

s3tt3mbr1n1 wrote: post #41
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…

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 impa…

o1 was what got you stirred up? It honestly feels like an incremental change at best to me. I had similar feelings about gpt-3.5, but since then my fears have normalized into a sort of dull, typical (for me) cynicism (so no sleepless nights).

Re: The Intelligence Age

#118

Post by screye »

Question for active professionals during the Moore's law era of computing. Back then, were executives writing such grand proclamations about the future ? In my experience, when things are working, executives are quiet. The outcomes speak for themselves.

Thankfully, we have a recent point of reference. The pioneers of internet & computing's 1st wave transformed civilization. Did they spend years saber rattling about how 'change was coming' ?

Re: The Intelligence Age

#119

Post by ctoth »

swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #105
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…

I don't really understand what this comment about Google has to do with OP's comment. Is this something that even old Google could have done pre-SEOification?

Would Google have been able to read the datasheet? Or just point OP at what they already said they were happy to avoid?

> Without AI this would have been a long long process of brushing up on probability, vector math, manually transcribing the chart.

Sometimes, it feels like stochastic parrots are seizing on a few words from the comment to pattern match it to the closest typical refutation and failing bigly.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#120

Post by psb217 »

hdivider wrote: post #68
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…

100%. If they could learn anything, then shouldn't modern ML systems be able to solve the big mysteries in science -- since we have large datasets there describing the phenomena in various ways? E.g. dark energy, dark matter, matter-antimatter asymmetry, or even outstanding problems in pure mathematics. The intention of this sama post is as you said, it's to build narrative so he can raise his trillion from the Arab…

Well, you could certainly train a big-ass model to mimic the distribution of all that physics data. That doesn't mean the model could, eg, formulate interesting new theories which explain why that distribution has its particular structure.
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