Did AI write this?
"This age is characterized by society's increasingly advanced capabilities, driven not by genetic changes but by societal infrastructure becoming smarter and more efficient over time."
The Intelligence Age
171–180 of 447 posts
Re: The Intelligence Age
#172"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 emperor truly has no clothes here. Six months ago, he probably could have gotten away with saying this and there would have likely have been enough people who were still impressed enough with the trajectory of LLMs to back him on it. But these days, most of us have encountered the all-too-common failure mode where the LLM shows its hand, that it doesn't truly understand anything, and that it's just _very very goo…
1. What failure mode do LLMs have that proves they don't understand anything at all ? And why can't i prove the same with humans (who have an abundance of failure modes)
2. You genuinely think that a system whose goal is to predict the data it's given and continues to improve is limited in what it can learn ? Of all the shortcomings of the Transformer architecture, its objective function is not one of them.
Re: The Intelligence Age
#173> 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…
It's amazing how he can imagine wars being fought over AI but not wars being fought over resources needed to "build enough infrastructure."
Re: The Intelligence Age
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Bruteforce trial and error to change something like healthcare would still take years even with superintelligence.
What it can do is create the best simulation and a model representation and bruteforce on top of that and then take actions, but the model will still be far from perfect and it likely just will help do a bit wiser or optimal decisions, that are like 10 percent efficiency gain here, 20 percent there, etc. And it will take years to see results.
Re: The Intelligence Age
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
We also personify synapses and axons in human brain tissue, though. My point is, while I agree with your first sentence to a degree, we shouldn’t judge the whole solely by its elementary parts. Clearly an LLM exhibits very different behavior from a conventional database.
LLMs exhibit very similar behavior to a search algorithm.
Text query in -> relevant text out.
I don’t say that search algorithms “learn” or “think” outside of ML.
Re: The Intelligence Age
#176“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…
It's a lot more comforting to work on AI (or any tech for that matter) if you believe or force yourself to believe it will be used for good. OpenAI's for-profit and gatekeeping approach is unlikely to be the path to the prosperity Sam Altman envisions.
Re: The Intelligence Age
#177Has Sam Altman ever talked about ways that he personally uses ChatGPT. Does he at all? does he have an all-smart watch? Is he dreaming of producing a perfect replicant like this guy in Blade Runner 2049... cause with his pathos and present position, he may be among these peoples who can allow himself to do so. This is all so vague he says, i mean, we have all read enough cyberpunk to write the same essay. But I don't know if he actually builds with this tool, cause the way I see it he probably has very little time to actually use it. So why so confident whether its deep learning that worked. I say Euler's graph theory worked more than anything else, and Chomsky's understanding of grammars, so what?
Maybe we will attend superintelligence in 1000 years, maybe not. Maybe Jesus comes back or Krishna reincarnates on earth, who knows. But it is a long way ahead, and it did not start with Sam, and is really not going to end with ChatGPT.
Re: The Intelligence Age
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> The entire vocabulary around machine learning is and always has been really weird. I would argue it took a staggeringly weird turn around 2022/23. Machine learning has been around for a long time and only recently since OpenAI and it's slavish desire to harness true AI (which thanks to their horseshit now has to be called AGI) and Sam Altman in particular's delusional ramblings upon the topic that he clearly barely…
I don’t think it was just post 2022.
“Neural networks” “learned” data by being “trained” since they were first described in the late 1900s.
The same language was used in Ian Goodfellow’s (excellent) 2012 text book “Deep Learning”
Re: The Intelligence Age
#179> 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…
I read this as: "we need to ramp up nuclear energy".
Re: The Intelligence Age
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And ultimately, fusion doesn't solve the hardest problem with energy today which is cost.
Solar already provides unlimited clean energy, and it took decades of development for the cost to drop to a competitive rate.
Even if we had a functioning fusion plant tomorrow, it will likely cost WAY more per kWh and require decades of iteration and improvement to become economically feasible.