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The Intelligence Age

ia.samaltman.com

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Re: The Intelligence Age

#211

Post by whamlastxmas »

mjamesaustin wrote: post #180
samatman wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would wonder if solar plus the absolute massive battery reserves you’d need for a data center ten times bigger than the current worlds largest would still be cost effective versus a single fusion reactor

Re: The Intelligence Age

#212

Post by bredren »

Dig1t wrote: post #179
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…

I read this as: "we need to ramp up nuclear energy".

Coincides with this news: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-20/microsoft...

Re: The Intelligence Age

#213

Post by whamlastxmas »

lordnacho wrote: post #193
falcor84 wrote: post #141

> Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need. This is one of those few cases where I'm actually more bullish than Altman. I don't need to wait for my kids to have it, but rather I personally am already using this daily. My regular thing is to upload a book/article(s) into the context of a Claude project and then chat w…

One thing I was thinking about was live translation. We gotta be near the stage where I can take earbuds with me to Spain and hear what the locals are saying in English? There's already apps that are pretty good at "talk to it and it hears the words, prints them, and prints the translation", so it would seem to be close?

Given the advanced voice model that still isn’t widely released, the technology is there, even if the implementation isn’t yet.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#214

Post by bredren »

famouswaffles wrote: post #38
sharkjacobs wrote: post #20

> Deep learning works, and we will solve the remaining problems. We can say a lot of things about what may happen next, but the main one is that AI is going to get better with scale I'm not an AI skeptic at all, I use llms all the time, and find them very useful. But stuff like this makes me very skeptical of the people who are making and selling AI. It seems like there was a really sweet spot wrt the capabilities AI…

Scaling Improvement has never been Linear though. Every next gen model so far has required at least an order of magnitude increase in compute, sometimes several more. So it's not a new revelation and these companies are aware of that. Microsoft for instance is building a 100B data center for a future next generation model releasing in 2028. If models genuinely keep making similar leaps each generation then we're stil…

Microsoft seems concerned enough to greatly increase its size:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-20/microsoft...

Re: The Intelligence Age

#216

Post by crabmusket »

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…

Another example from my work: we have to work with lots of datasheets provided by component manufacturers. It's a lot of manual labour. We are investigating whether we can use AI to parse the PDFs and extract structured data. This is a technical solution to a social problem: that manufacturers have no incentive to produce machine-readable datasheets, even though the data is certainly machine readable at some stage before it ends up in the PDF we get. It irritates me that we're using highly complex technology to solve a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#217

Post by whamlastxmas »

workflowsauce wrote: post #164
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…

Capitol is ultimately protected with violence, so violence is what would stop AI from encroaching on things that make people trillions of dollars.

Capitalism unendingly lets people die if the alternative is losing money

Re: The Intelligence Age

#218

Post by zero-sharp »

jagrsw wrote: post #197
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even "we will solve the remaining problems" is... perhaps unduly optimistic. At a minimum, we could ask for the evidence.

I'm not here to defend sama, but certain things cannot be proven until they arrive - they can only be extrapolated from existing observations and theoretical limits. Imagine the Uranium Committee of early 40's, where Szilard and others were babbling about 10kg of some magical metal exploding briefly with the power of a sun, with the best evidence being some funky trail in an alcohol vapor chamber. Maybe sama is right…

I'm sure you know that people in the AI community have been predicting big things ever since, I don't know, the 1970s? It's only 10 years away again. This time it's for real, right?

Re: The Intelligence Age

#219

Post by oculty »

falcor84 wrote: post #141

> Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need. This is one of those few cases where I'm actually more bullish than Altman. I don't need to wait for my kids to have it, but rather I personally am already using this daily. My regular thing is to upload a book/article(s) into the context of a Claude project and then chat w…

That sounds really useful. Can you give an example of what kind of content your are uploading and how the tutoring looks like?

Re: The Intelligence Age

#220

Post by codingwagie »

uludag wrote: post #194
codingwagie wrote: post #32

“This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there.” I am a believer that people like sam are not lying. Anyone using these models daily probably believes the same. The o1 model, if prompted correctly, can architect a code base in a way that my decade+ of…

Interesting observation. My experience with o1 has been much more mundane. Sometimes I get the response I wanted, sometime it hallucinates, often times it writes buggy code. I've been experiencing this since ChatGPT was first released.

I actually originally wrote off the o1 model. Another thing I have found it's good at is finding bugs in a ton of code. Give it ten coding files, and a stack trace, it can find the bug.
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