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The Intelligence Age

ia.samaltman.com

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Re: The Intelligence Age

#151

Post by danielmarkbruce »

acchow wrote: post #87
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.

Almost certainly true, and all the people crapping all over his description should really take a step back and consider that. He isn't out on some island all by himself here.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#152

Post by lxgr »

devonbleak wrote: post #148
lxgr wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're assuming health insurers will give a shit about phone robots/agents' hold times.

Individually, "I'm unable to reach anyone" is much easier to chalk off to "maybe I just wasn't patient enough, so this is partially on me".

But if you can provide statistics that a given health insurer is practically not answering 90% or so of their calls (because they time out at the phone level), that's probably not something they can ignore in the long term.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#153

Post by mewpmewp2 »

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…

Even if AGI was reached, turning around the current system could still take years.

So it is easier to start from the edges, even for AGI.

AGI would still need unfathomable processing power in order to predict which system would work to everyone's needs.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#154

Post by reducesuffering »

"Currently, we don't have a solution for steering or controlling a potentially superintelligent AI, and preventing it from going rogue." -OpenAI

"Why You Should Fear Machine Intelligence

Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity." - Sam Altman

https://openai.com/index/introducing-superalignment/

https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1

Re: The Intelligence Age

#155

Post by bane »

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…

> speculate on what it would enable make it honestly sound kind of unimaginative

There seems to be a weird mental block where it seems inconceivable to consider that we humans might be able to create an intelligence that exceeds ours -- despite plenty of evidence that we have in specific cases. There's an understated desire that whatever we build we serve us and thus must forever be "lesser".

If dogs are Intelligence Level .3, we describe ourselves as Intelligence Level 1.0, and even if we create an artificial intelligence that's a clear 1.1 it must be a .5 in self-agency.

I have yet to read anybody considering, on a very deep level, what Intelligence 2.0, 10.0, 100.0 and so on might be. You get the occasional pop speculation like the "Culture" series or the movie "Her". Most of the time you just get 1.0 (but faster), or 1.0 (but many).

A 10.0 would simply replace the entire healthcare system with something else, not just be a chatbot. Imagine the inanity of your 1.0 chatbot talking to the insurance company's 1.0 chatbot? What's the point of this stupidity?

A 100.0 would probably just get to the root cause and cure disease, then establish a social order that figures out what to do with all these pesky immortals.

Maybe we do end up in "the Culture" after all.

afterthought: "The Golden Oecumene" series by John C. Wright seems to really attempt to explore a post 1.0 AI world that's not yet post-scarcity. The antagonist in the series is another >1.0 super intelligence capable of taking on Earth's own superintelligences.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#156

Post by danielmarkbruce »

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…

Come on now. This description is basically the universal approximation theorem. He isn't just making stuff up. You can take issue with the theorem and have a debate around it, but he isn't just wildly off base making stuff up here.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#157

Post by zibzob »

tptacek wrote: post #136
zibzob wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The subtext of observations like those are that wealthy aristocrats in the age of full lamplighter employment would be better off materially working as a Walmart checkers today, and there's some truth to that, but the implication that Walmart checkers today will be better off when computers eat their jobs does not follow inexorably from history (the idea that it does is "Whig history"; the past sucked except in servi…

Okay, I see what you mean now.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#158

Post by tlb »

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…

So, treat us to some more imaginative speculation.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#159

Post by pixl97 »

abeppu wrote: post #143
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…

And this gets at why the availability of AI doesn't necessarily lead to prosperity and abundance. If you have to subscribe to an AI medical care and benefits advocate, and your insurer buys an AI service to automate the generation of reasons to deny your claims, and you see your doctor for 5 minutes at a time during which they push you towards a drug recommended by an AI Prescriber Assistant app provided by the pharm…

Complexity breeds complexity.

When bacteria developed more complex ways to fight off viruses, viruses developed more complex ways of infecting bacteria. Now a few billion years later we have insanely complex multicellular life because of it.

If AI can manage complexity better it can create complexity better and us lowly humans will all be screwed by that.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#160

Post by mewpmewp2 »

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 system is so great and complex that envisioning a perfect system would take unfathomable amount of processing capability.

This is not something that you can just throw intelligence at to solve. Even AGI has to start from the edges with iterative trial and error process.

AGI will probably try to create the best model of the World it can to simulate different actions performed on it to then take real life changes, but of course it would still take time since and it is impossible even for AGI to do a perfect simulation unless it was able to hack the universe and physics as we know it, simulate the healthcare on quantum level and bruteforce the most optimal solution.

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