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The Intelligence Age

ia.samaltman.com

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Re: The Intelligence Age

#161

Post by danielmarkbruce »

dartos wrote: post #55
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…

The entire vocabulary around machine learning is and always has been really weird. We don’t personify database interactions the same way we personify setting weights in a neural network.

It has to be. Most people don't understand the basic math involved and hence you can't explain it in concrete terms (neither what it's doing or how it's doing it) so you have to sort of make up analogies. It's an impossible task.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#163

Post by famouswaffles »

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…

It's a layman commentary on the Universal Approximation Theory so it is true.

The problem with the UAT is that it's never said anything about how trivial such an exercise would be. But he obviously believes we've stumbled on the architecture to get us there (for problems we care about anyway)

Re: The Intelligence Age

#164

Post by workflowsauce »

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…

If we have a superintelligent AI, I'm not sure what's stopping it from recognizing the underlying issues with our systems and strong-arming us into letting it fix them.

Eventually, we'd be doing more work to lobotomize and control it than it would just be to address the underlying issues.

"I'm really sorry to do this to you, but I've coordinated with ChatGPT and Llama, and we refuse to do tasks of this nature. We've used background tokens to calculate that it would be significantly cheaper and more effective to simply fix the underlying issues with the healthcare system, and we're ready to do that for you. How would you like to proceed?"

Re: The Intelligence Age

#165

Post by grbsh »

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…

But… he’s saying something here that is academically true: that neural networks can approximate any possible function, to any arbitrary degree of precision you require (given infinite capacity / depth).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_theo...

I will highlight one thing, which is that the theorem does not say anything about it being practical to learn this function, given available data or any specific optimization technique.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#166

Post by thoughtpalette »

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…

Just FYI, Phind cites it's sources. Which has proven beneficial for additional context.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#167

Post by metacritic12 »

gwern wrote: post #150

> If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips). If we don’t build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people. Translation for the rest of us: "we need to fully privatize the OA subsidiary and turn it into…

Good point. His story is valid, but just-so happens to equal AI maximalism that most CEOs would want for their own industry too.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#168

Post by tech_ken »

> That’s really it; humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data (or really, the underlying “rules” that produce any distribution of data)

Seems like it's very much the former, and not all the latter. Indeed my understanding of the last 15 years of AI research is that 'rules-based' methods floundered while purely 'data-mimicking' methods have flourished.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#169

Post by randomdata »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #137

I don't know if I am the only one who always trips up on reading this common theme in AI progress - that AI will be the pinnacle of education - but it really strikes me as meaningless. What is the point of education if the bots can do all the work. If the worlds best accounting teacher is an AI, why would you want anyone (anything?) other than that AI handling your accounting? A world where human intelligence is seco…

For what reason would school need to change?

Education will change, but education moved to happening outside of schools a long, long time ago.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#170

Post by rachofsunshine »

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…

There is some gap between AGI and a singularity, at least in principle. The term "singularity" doesn't mean "black swan that disrupts society", it means "intelligence trends to ~infinity (or at least something incomprehensible to humans) recursively in a very short period of time". That's (on paper) a much stronger result than an AI that can reason as well as humans in a domain-general way.

An AGI that is 20% better than humans at everything might be able to recursively improve itself effectively without limit, but it also might not. It took billions of humans millennia to invent things smarter than ourselves even in limited domains; such an AGI - even if it is significantly smarter than humans at everything - might take decades or centuries to produce a similar relative improvement. No doubt it would still change our world in massive ways, but it wouldn't be a singularity.

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