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The Intelligence Age

ia.samaltman.com

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Re: The Intelligence Age

#281

Post by willturman »

benlivengood wrote: post #252
d_burfoot wrote: post #243

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…

Capital follows the most profitable investments. It's why "green" technology took so long to develop (we probably could have had efficient solar panels in the 60s, but oil was super cheap and more importantly very profitable). Dropping the cost of a $1e7 problem to even $1e6 probably makes it very profitable.

Capital has also employed anti-competitive actions to stifle, prevent, and kneecap "green" technology for the last century.

The death of passenger rail and the stifling of the electric car for 30 years come to mind.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#282

Post by svnt »

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…

> 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.

The mostly-open goal of every VC-funded startup is to become a monopoly. If a strong enough monopoly in AI hardware were to exist, then the issues he describes could become a problem.

Otherwise, what he is describing is just the ad absurdum of how capitalism works. Phrased differently it sounds like:

“If this extremely powerful and profitable product that depends on other products gets built, then if no one else builds the also profitable substrate that it operates on, terrible things will happen!”

Or again slightly differently: “We need to be able to compete with our suppliers because our core business model might not be defensible unless we can also win in their space.”

Re: The Intelligence Age

#283

Post by charlie0 »

In a world of infinite leverage, those who can leverage will far outrun those who cannot leverage or do so poorly. The world is also getting flatter, so you will see massive clusters of people near the bottom, with a very long fat tail of people far away at the top. My only hope is that the floor is raised for everyone, so we're not living in a dystopia like Elysium.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#284

Post by falcor84 »

saati wrote: post #257
falcor84 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

How do you know the answers are actually useful and not just hallucinations?

It's not an oracle, and does get things wrong occasionally, but if anything, having to check its responses actually helps me confirm that I'm learning.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#285

Post by tensor »

sharkjacobs wrote: post #22
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…

> we will solve the remaining problems This is the part that really gets me. This is a thing that you say to your team, and a thing you say to your investors, but this isn't a thing that you can actually believe with certainty is it?

With enough time it seems a reasonable assertion, but the key part is how much time. It feels like he thinks "any day now" where I think it'll be much longer. This all of course assumes that "the remaining problems" means to achieve human-like intelligence, which is perhaps the wrong problem to be solving in the first place. I'd rather have AI systems that don't have human flaws.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#286

Post by svnt »

api wrote: post #195
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…

> put AI into the hands of as many people as possible ... by establishing regulatory moats to prevent competition and limit or outlaw actually-open AI?

He didn’t say that other people need to put it into the hands of as many people as possible, only that his company does.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#287

Post by p1esk »

zero-sharp wrote: post #218
jagrsw wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Is GPT-4 not a “big thing in AI”?

Re: The Intelligence Age

#289

Post by KETHERCORTEX »

peppermill wrote: post #173
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…

It's amazing how he can imagine wars being fought over AI but not wars being fought over resources needed to "build enough infrastructure."

> he can imagine wars being fought over AI

I wonder how did he come to such a prediction. When was the last time we had a war over advanced tech? Armies didn't fight over telegraph, radio, phones and cars.

A war to get AI would also be foolish. A few hundred bombs from your adversaries and AI won't have electricity to function.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#290

Post by jagrsw »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #275
jagrsw wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right. Certain things cannot be proven until they arrive. Maybe sama is right, maybe not. But his certainty is misleading.

I agree. He's probably been conditioned by experience to speak with confidence until proven wrong ("strong opinions, weakly held"), but I don't like it either. Oh... the lost art of saying, "In my opinion."
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