The way these guys bend over backwards to evade an honest conversation about capitalism and power is very entertaining.
The Intelligence Age
121–130 of 447 posts
Re: The Intelligence Age
#122A different perspective from sama.
(More doomer, less utopian as this)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/07/25/sam-altma...
Re: The Intelligence Age
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
tremendously bigly
Re: The Intelligence Age
#124> 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.
Not really, unfortunately. The progress has been heartening, don't get me wrong, but it's more like $20B away from getting to the first steps of solving the next set of problems on the road to a fully functional fusion generator.
Those are fairly substantial. It's past time to stop being cynical about "ten more years every ten years", but it's also way too soon to declare victory.
Re: The Intelligence Age
#125I like ChatGPT 4o just fine, but the whole lamplighter bit is a bit Whig-history, right? The lamplighters were better off in the long run. We might not be. You can't just blow the problems off.
Why were lamplighters better off in the long run, is "lamplighter" a term that means more than just somebody who goes around lighting the streetlamps at night? Honestly that seems like a pretty decent job even today, if we still needed it to be done.
Re: The Intelligence Age
#126The 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…
The thing is that it looks like, or perhaps I should say it's "understood" at this point, that transformer's abilities scale pretty much linearly with compute (there is also some evidence they scale exponentially with parameter count, but just some evidence).
Right now there is insane amounts of money being thrown at AI because progress is matching projections. There doesn't seem to be a leveling off or diminishing returns taking place. And that's just compute, we could probably freeze compute and still make insane progress just because optimizations have so much momentum right now too.
Re: The Intelligence Age
#127It 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 scie…
> Clearly he's trying to coin a term
You are right. I overlooked the simplicity of the headline. Thanks for calling attention to that.
> Something tells me he rolled this himself.
This would be cool.
> I'm personally rooting for cognitive being the word of the next few decades
I like that one too.
> he's clearly acting in some sort of good faith.
He's always been one to think and write for himself. Huge respect for him. Even though it needles me every moment that they still call themselves "Open"AI, I have so much respect for the guy, especially because PG basically told the world he was the next Michael Jordan of startups, and he actually went and fulfilled that. Not many people have it in them to live up to hype like that (Lebron being the only other one I can think of OOTOMH)
Re: The Intelligence Age
#128I 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…
my bet is that it's a repeat of the French revolution
with the billionaire AI moguls taking the role of the french kings
and the data centres taking the role of the palaces
Re: The Intelligence Age
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tha…
What's critically missing in the current architectures, in my view, is models that are able to "keep learning" (in a way beyond just providing a summary of the previous conversation, which grants surface-level insights at most).
If we keep the current iteration cycle (retrain an LLM every couple of months, incorporating the current "status quo", including all of its previous conversations), we might get somewhat interesting results, but even the least motivated grad student has an iteration cycle orders of magnitude faster than that.
Re: The Intelligence Age
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
tremendously bigly
Meta. Made me laugh.