Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Intelligence Age

ia.samaltman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 447 posts

Re: The Intelligence Age

#241

Post by lxgr »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #204
lxgr wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I'm surprised how many people think they can confidently tell whether they're looking at an s-curve or an exponential function based on very limited data points. I don't even doubt that superintelligence is a very real possibility! But it might or might not happen, and if it does, it might or might not be based on deep learning. As a counterexample: The maximum speed of travel for the average person for millenia…

Maybe don't think of it as curves or functions. Just go through an LLM and think about all the things that could be improved. It's a long list once you get into the details. By and large...sota models are: a) trained on crappy data, including questionable RLHF feedback. b) trained with questionable embedding layers. c) trained with questionable loss functions d) trained with questionable optimizers e) trained at ques…

I don't doubt that there's tons of work ahead to even just integrate current-day capabilities of LLMs into our society and economy.

But when talking about future growth potential, I don't think you can get around making assumptions about the shape of the growth function.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#242

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

lxgr wrote: post #110
tikkun wrote: post #25

> We need to act wisely but with conviction. Reminds me of these quotes from Sam on this podcast episode ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfuVSg-VJxE ) * "Prudence without fear" (Sam referencing another quote) * "if you create the descendants of humanity from a place of, deep fear and panic and anxiety, that seems to me you're likely to make some very bad choices or certainly not reflect the best of humanity." * "th…

> * "if you create the descendants of humanity from a place of, deep fear and panic and anxiety, that seems to me you're likely to make some very bad choices or certainly not reflect the best of humanity." This line of reasoning doesn't hold for me, as you could apply it to any technology, including ones actually very likely to destroy human civilization. Sometimes, not building a given thing at all is better than bu…

Indeed. It sounds like the kind of thing the OceanGate Titan sub's CEO would have said. Except all of humanity is on board Sam Altman's submarine.

There's a good reason we get pessimists to design safety-critical systems!

Re: The Intelligence Age

#243

Post by d_burfoot »

OAI's achievements are amazing. But here's a bit of a skeptical take: cheap human-style intelligence won't have a huge impact because such intelligence isn't really a bottleneck today. It's a cliche that the brightest minds of the age are dedicated to selling more ads or shuffling stock ownership around at high velocity. Anyone who's worked at a big tech company knows the enormous ratio of talent to real engineering problems at those companies.

Let's say you have some amazing project that's going to require 100 Phd-years of work to carry out. In the present world that costs something like $1e7. In the post-AI world, that same amount of intelligence will cost $1e3, an enormous reduction in price. That might seem like a huge impact. BUT, if the project was so amazing, why couldn't you raise $1e7 to pursue it? Governments and VCs throw this kind of money around like corn-hole bags. So the number of actually-worthwhile projects that become feasible post-AI might actually be quite small.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#244

Post by falcor84 »

oculty wrote: post #219
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?

One example is of studying robotics. I started with this course on Coursera [0]. It was ok at the start, but got hard for me early on. A big part of the course is of reading the book that they make available for free [1], so I would upload the relevant chunk of chapters into Claude (the whole book was a bit too much for it), and would then just ask it to explain each topic to me, whereby I'd ask additional questions, and then when, I felt I got it, ask it to check my understanding (which it does quite well, saying "sort of, but note that..." in many appropriate circumstances).

As another specific example, in that book and in others, I sometimes struggle with the math, so I would ask Claude to give me the sympy code for the relevant mathematical derivation, and being able to actually see those expressions change in a python notebook really helps my understanding. I'm really impressed with how it usually does well on the first try, even with relatively complex stuff, like expressions involving symbolic matrix exponentiation. Being able to pause on any topic like this, and have the LLM help me dive into it in the way that works best for me, has been amazing, and getting as much time from a knowledgeable human tutor would have probably cost me 1,000x as much.

[0] https://coursera.org/specializations/modernrobotics

[1] http://hades.mech.northwestern.edu/images/7/7f/MR.pdf

Re: The Intelligence Age

#245

Post by xbar »

Nothing in Sam Altman's mind will lead to the improvement of the human condition.

We have a capitalist arguing for support of further investment in his capital expenditures in the form of planet-ending heat and monopoly power, promising to pay for it with intelligence more rapidly delivered.

No, thanks.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#246

Post by mandibles »

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…

> figure out how to actually provide healthcare to people who meed it

But what if the proposed solution costs lots of people their jobs?

Re: The Intelligence Age

#247

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

> But stuff like this makes me very skeptical of the people who are making and selling AI.

What is there to be skeptical of? OpenAI made their current product using a 10G$ investment plus a few they are not disclosing, and now they will start to do it at scale.

Perfectly normal stuff.

By the way, what's the World's GDP again?

Re: The Intelligence Age

#248

Post by bostik »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #236
whamlastxmas wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I wonder how that cost would compare to putting your solar and data center in space? (with non stop solar pointed at the sun) I wonder if cooling is easier or harder in space?

Harder. Vacuum is an excellent thermal insulator.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#250

Post by novaRom »

jerb wrote: post #238

I want to be wildly optimistic too, but I still see no evidence LLMs generate new knowledge. They always hew in-distribution. Please correct me if I’m wrong

They are really helpful to answer concrete questions, basically a replacement of manual web search and filtering, getting just exactly answers I was looking for. For example, one of my dialogue with chatgpt 4o was about boosting plant growth in a fish tank - you certainly can find a lot of web sites about it, but I simply described my aquatic environment and asked for a recipe - and the answers sound and well supported, a post dialogue double check of the sources help
Post reply on HN