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The Intelligence Age

ia.samaltman.com

181–190 of 447 posts

Re: The Intelligence Age

#181
post #55

Earlier 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.

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.

Yeah, maybe it’s just unfortunate that “learn” and “think” are such fuzzy subjects.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#182

"What is good?" or in other words "What are people for?" is a question that cannot be answered by intelligence no matter how great, because the complexity of the question is a function of the intelligence of the asking entity and it's always greater than the intelligence of the asking entity (human or transhuman cyborg or whatever.) AI is a side-show. Intelligence is ambient in living tissue, so we already have as mu…

> "What are people for?" is a question that cannot be answered by intelligence no matter how great

It absolutely can be answered, but only the the intender. Who is and who was and who is to come. Or, if you side with the "Nietzche is right" side of the conversation "who will be or who may have come to be today or who recently came to be again". The former is eucatastrophic, the latter is dystopic.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because we all know "a decade" means maybe never. They've said the same thing about fusion for 5 decades.

Perhaps ironically, Sam Altman is also big into Fusion. ( https://www.helionenergy.com/ ) I guess it makes sense, for deep-learning/LLMs to "scale to infinity" you basically need infinite amounts of power.

cant we use OA intelligence to figure out how to do more with less rather yhan "stupidly" accelerate the climate crisis?

the climate crisis + AI is the nightmare

Re: The Intelligence Age

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because we all know "a decade" means maybe never. They've said the same thing about fusion for 5 decades.

https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-national-laboratory-make...

Inertial confinement most likely can't be reasonably commoditized into generating electricity. Also, I may be wrong, but I think on the wave of that hype I read that the number they used was an incomplete one. Basically they reframed the conditions of the problem to get more favorable number for advertisement. NIF research will most likely be limited to the nuclear bomb research and simulations.

But even if NIF had a reasonable path to energy generation in say 20-30 years, it still won't matter much, just like ITER probably won't. Solar will be way more cheap and widespread, it's costs are still dropping down ahead of all predictions, govt. or commercial. Fusion may just be a pure science project in the end, for a long time.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because we all know "a decade" means maybe never. They've said the same thing about fusion for 5 decades.

Perhaps ironically, Sam Altman is also big into Fusion. ( https://www.helionenergy.com/ ) I guess it makes sense, for deep-learning/LLMs to "scale to infinity" you basically need infinite amounts of power.

And perhaps AI can help some of the problems in building a fusion reactor.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#186
The Age of Inhumanity... AI mimicry of human patterns devalues our very humanity. Without wise leadership, which we clearly lack, this upcoming Age will be profoundly unstable.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#187

> 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…

People tend to overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in a few thousand days

Re: The Intelligence Age

#188
post #23

> 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. This seems to be the key of the piece to me. It's his manifesto for raising money for the infra…

I don't see how the current state of AI tech is not for the ultra-rich. It's hundreds of billions of dollars worth of investment from who? Corporations and those who own the most shares of those corporations(the rich).

Billionaires could make so much change happen but instead they are building bunkers and riding giant dicks into space while simultanously touting that they are looking out for humanity.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#189
Somehow I read through this without actually looking at the domain name of the page. I thought to my self "Wow, this person is living in a fantasy world." Then I saw the authors name. I think I'll stand by my initial impression.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#190
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.

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.…

Many of the urgent problems in US healthcare are man-made and economic/organizational, not scientific, in nature.

This is actually one of the areas where I'm pretty optimistic about LLMs (at least if used defensively against, not aggressively by, sprawling bureaucracies).

LLMs can be the email-to-dozens-of-hours-on-the-phone-for-personal-reasons adapter anyone other than billionaires and company execs could only dream of until now.

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