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The Intelligence Age

ia.samaltman.com

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Re: The Intelligence Age

#341

Post by throwthrowuknow »

goldfeld wrote: post #232
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 see how AI is used today and extrapolate. A lot. Everything in tech is extrapolation with the march of capital. It takes one to know one; rather it takes a smart ass to wield a smart tool. So the smart get smarter. Is it a separate phenomenon, in the big picture, from the rich getting richer, from the monopolies over means of production? Not sure, but I see as well that the dumb will surely get dumber; that "intell…

The people who only use the end products will be less skillful the same way people today are less skillful at cooking, sewing, carpentry, animal husbandry, etc. because they avail themselves of modern services made possible by technology. If you are utilizing AI to its fullest you won’t be less skillful but you will have to trade your current set of skills for another. The enlightenment you’re feeling is the same you have when you’re promoted to management and don’t have time to get your hands dirty.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#342

Post by rossdavidh »

grbsh wrote: post #165
rossdavidh wrote: post #44

"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…

But… he’s saying something here that is academically true: that neural networks can approximate any possible function, to any arbitrary degree of precision you require (given infinite capacity / depth). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_theo... I will highlight one thing, which is that the theorem does not say anything about it being practical to learn this function, given available data or any…

'the underlying “rules” that produce any distribution of data...' is clearly meant to convince the reader that it can produce something we would describe as a "rule", that is, a coherent and comprehensible regulating principle. This isn't just because he isn't being precise enough; he quite clearly wants the reader to understand this as neural networks being able to create a mental model of anything, in a manner similar to how a biological neural network would.

It doesn't, it can't, and it won't in our lifetimes.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#343

Post by famouswaffles »

skydhash wrote: post #329
famouswaffles wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> What failure mode do LLMs have that proves they don't understand anything at all ? Try to get it to write something in a programming language not commonly used on the internet, say Forth or Brainfuck, with only the specifications of said languages. Humans are able to grasp the law of reality through a model and use it to act upon the real world. > You genuinely think that a system whose goal is to predict the data…

>Try to get it to write something in a programming language not commonly used on the internet, say Forth or Brainfuck, with only the specifications of said languages. Humans are able to grasp the law of reality through a model and use it to act upon the real world.

My Experience with this has been SOTA LLMs generating sensible code at rates much greater than random chance even if it may not be as good as i'd like. I don't see how that is evidence LLMs don't understand anything at all especially since there are probably humans who would write less workable code.

>Not GP, but Image generators have ingested more images that I've seen in my life and still can't grasp basic things like perspective or anatomy.

The human brain didn't poof from thin air. It's the result of billions of years of evolution tuning it for real world navigation and vision amongst other things. You are not a blank slate. All Modern NNs are much more blank slate than the brain has been for at least millions of years.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#344

Post by bryanrasmussen »

joshmarlow wrote: post #85
brotchie wrote: post #67

For somebody who likes building things and has many side projects Claude and ChatGPT have been huge productivity multipliers. For example, I’m designing and 3D printing custom LED diffuser channels from TPU filament. My first attempt was terrible, because I didn’t have an intuition for how light propagates through a material. After a bit of chatting with ChatGPT, I had an understanding and some direction of where to…

This dovetails with something I've been thinking lately; the foundation of civilization is standing on the shoulders of giants (ie, I might make small contributions but I didn't invent compilers, CPUs, mining, agriculture, etc). Progress in large part is figuring out better ways of doing that (language, written language, printing press, internet access, etc). When you look at things that way - LLMs start to seem deep…

>When you look at things that way - LLMs start to seem deeply ground-breaking (assuming we work out the confabulation kinks).

even if you don't work out the confabulation kinks, given what was said by the first post, it still seems groundbreaking enough.

Although I can't figure out why every time I do anything with LLMs it's not worth it, I guess because I am using it for things I am an expert in, it doesn't help.

Actually maybe it's like the article Suggestions from Idiots - https://medium.com/luminasticity/suggestions-from-idiots-6b0... - suggesting distracting instead of diverting is not helpful when diverting is the better word in context, but for someone who doesn't know what word to use in the context or uses diverting when it is not the best word the suggestion is useful.

If that's the case what he got out of Claude is probably not that great, but it is passable, just like the word distraction instead of diverting in the right context is still passable, or when I get back a time conversion function from CoPilot that fits all but a few edge cases, it's just fine as long as the edge case never hits it, then it sucks - maybe there's some edge cases where his LED diffusers won't work quite as well as they could if written by an expert.

Then again it might be that since what he is doing is analog edge cases and tolerance for failure is such that when it does fail it is not as problematic as when a bit of code fails because the computer dealing with the output is not as forgiving as the human eye and brain.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#345

Post by 8note »

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'd expect "we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible" to be either exposing model weights, or making the training sets public.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#346

Post by vundercind »

bbor wrote: post #338
vundercind wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s misunderstanding the guy’s whole deal to expect truth or reality to be major factors in his writing. “Sell, sell, sell!” is the goal above all else. Sell whatever he’s invested in today. Sell himself. Sell!

You’re honestly convinced that he’s faking this level of futurism? I’m happy to see people call him wrong, maybe even defend him on a few point, but calling him dishonest on this central point seems irrational. Ditto for someone I personally have absolutely 0 respect for: Elon Musk. They are both honestly convinced that AI is incredibly important in the short-medium term, IMO - they just want to own the fix and be th…

He might find the hype cycle itself entertaining and engaging, but I doubt he’s taking it seriously. I think he’d be worse at his job if he did.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#347

Post by gwern »

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…

A general reply to all of the comments thus far: you are completely missing the point here. OP is not a meaningful forecast, and it's not about nuclear power or any of that. It's about laying the groundwork for the privatization and establishing rhetorical grounds for how the privatization of OA is consistent with the OA nonprofit's legally-required mission and fiduciary duties. Altman is not writing to anyone here, he is, among others, writing to the OA nonprofit board and to the judge next year.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#348

Post by 8note »

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…

Is the scientist's analysis the blocking part of innovating in medicine and healthcare? I would have though the main problem is experiment time to actually get useful results back, and even approval to attempt the experiment.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#349

Post by highfrequency »

Nimitz14 wrote: post #270
highfrequency wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Progress might be logarithmic in compute, but compute (transistors/sqinch and transistors/$) is growing exponentially with time. Despite what skeptics have been saying for decades, Moore's Law is alive and well - and we haven't even figured out how to stack wafers in 3 dimensions yet!

Oh wow! Could you please share what processors are exponentially faster than those of 10 years ago? I'm not seeing any here: https://www.cpubenchmark.net

Macbook Airs have 20 billion+ transistors, compared to 50 million on the Pentium 4 in the early 2000s. Moore's law is about transistor density, not processor speed, which is gated by thermal limits.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#350

Post by kylehotchkiss »

w10-1 wrote: post #274

> a defining characteristic of the Intelligence Age will be massive prosperity That's the sales pitch, that this will benefit all. I'm very pro-AI, but here's the only prediction for the future I would ever make: AI will accelerate, not minimize, inequality and thus injustice, because it removes the organizational limits previously imposed by bureaucracy/coordination costs of humans. It's not AI's fault. It's not bec…

This was very thoughtful. I agree with you, the benefits to the majority of the world from this tech is minimal. Universal childhood education is a fever dream. The amount money being poured into AI could probably increase actual human knowledge and critical thinking substantially had it be directed there instead. Not to say we shouldn't continue to invent AI! LLMs have been an interesting tool to use. But the ego behind the founders in this tech is so cringe. Get out of the bay, go travel to somewhere you need to actually get a visa for, and maybe tone down the proclamations a notch.
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