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The Intelligence Age

ia.samaltman.com

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Re: The Intelligence Age

#371

Post by barrell »

jprete wrote: post #358
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…

I've come to similar/related conclusions, but I don't understand how you could recognize all of this and still be pro-AI.

Not OP, but I also am in the same boat as him, and my logic is:

1. AI accelerating inequality does not mean that it won't have it's benefits

2. Being anti-AI will not stop it from happening. For better or for worse this train has left the station

3. I don't think that this will happen on the timescale that people talk about (not even sure if it will happen in our lifetimes). I don't mean it in the way I'll be dead so not my problem so much as that I think society will have a lot more time to adapt then the CEOs of the major AI labs like to claim.

It's along the same lines of being a nuclear energy engineer, and thinking that nuclear bombs accelerate war and suffering. You can dream and plan and hope for a future with unlimited clean energy, but still realize the injustice brought about by nuclear weapons.

You can have noble goals and do good with the tools at your disposal, and still recognize the harm that those tools have upon society. It can even be a source of motivation to leverage the tools to their fullest potential, to make their benefit worth all of the cost.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#372

Post by bloppe »

vundercind wrote: post #346
bbor wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is Sam Altman generally considered good at his job? OpenAI hasn't really come up with any groundbreaking breakthroughs (transformers came from Google and diffusion came from academia) and they definitely do not make a profit or have any concrete plan to become profitable. He's really good at raising gargantuan amounts of money, but that's not enough to be considered a good founder.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#373

Post by oculty »

falcor84 wrote: post #244
oculty wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

got it, very nice usecase! Think I might also try it with an online class!

Re: The Intelligence Age

#374

Post by moffkalast »

Terr_ wrote: post #325
throw310822 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 150T synapses running in full analog precision Analog systems are not known for being very precise- they're noisy, signals get corrupted easily- and that's why we prefer digital ones. As soon as we had the technology, we switched everything we could- audio and video recording, telephone calls, photography, to a digital medium. This makes me wonder if the seemingly extraordinary efficiency of artificial neural netwo…

With respect to brain activity, how do we know its really noise, and not just layers of meaning--or at least purpose--which we don't yet understand? If straightforward binary signaling was so universally superior, I think the worldwide network of over a quintillion ruthlessly self-replicating nanobots would be using a much more heavily after the last billion years.

Electrical analog systems are since there's 1001 ways to create or conduct away electricity that adds noise, chemical ones might not suffer nearly as much too.

There's also an interesting bit I've observed with LLMs, quantization in range of 4-8 bits doesn't reduce performance as much as it mainly reduces consistency. If you generate an answer a bunch of times and take the average you'll end up with roughly the same result as an fp16/32 would do every time. In nature, being inconsistent is usually weighed negatively with death... so that's probably why it hasn't caught on even if it is more efficient. Or this is enough of a different abstraction that we can't draw parallels anyway.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#375

Post by unraveller »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #137

I don't know if I am the only one who always trips up on reading this common theme in AI progress - that AI will be the pinnacle of education - but it really strikes me as meaningless. What is the point of education if the bots can do all the work. If the worlds best accounting teacher is an AI, why would you want anyone (anything?) other than that AI handling your accounting? A world where human intelligence is seco…

That's a good argument against a full accounting education but not against education itself, it's okay to drop legacy things like calligraphy class from curriculum.

We are never going to automate ALL the work humanity does, that's as meaningless as both parties outsourcing their marriage to someone else. We still need to be well-rounded individuals to audit and direct machines (and ourselves) to make breakthroughs where we see fit.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#376

Post by jmmcd »

ansk wrote: post #230

> humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data (or really, the underlying “rules” that produce any distribution of data) He's hand-waving around the idea presented in the Universal Approximation Theorem, but he's mangled it to the point of falsehood by conflating representation and learning. Just because we can parameterize an arbitrarily flexible class of distributions doe…

Yes, he's handwaving in this general area, but no, he's not really relying on the UAT. If you talked to most NN people 2 decades ago and asked about this, they might well answer in terms of the UAT. But nowadays, most people, including here Altman, would answer in terms of practical experience of success in learning a surprisingly diverse array of distributions using a single architecture.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#377

Post by tim333 »

charlie0 wrote: post #277
moffkalast wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As large as the absolute largest models are today, they are still microscopic compared to our brains. A 1.7T param model would only store an actual total of about 850 GB if fully saturated (4 bits of information per weight estimated for bf16 transformers), a lot less than a human brain with 150T synapses running in full analog precision. We need to scale the current gen of models at least another 10-100x to even reac…

Comparing a human brain in these terms makes it incredibly obvious how inefficient the human brain actually is. A 1.7T model can answer questions about practically anything. You say a human brain has 150T params. So what? It struggles to give masterful answers in even 1 domain, let alone dozens/hundreds. We need to stop comparing parameters and synapses as if they actually matter, because AFAIK, they really don't.

In terms of energy use the human brain is way more efficient than LLMs. It's a completely different hardware model - the brain may have trillions of synapses but they only fire occasionally. I agree you have to compare more on the results than number of synapses etc.

It's something that gives me pause on the idea that we have to build many GW of power stations. It may be possible to get much more energy efficient AI via better algorithms.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#378

Post by tim333 »

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?

The AI predictions based on Moore's law type reasoning by Kurzweil, Moravec etc have been pretty accurate and not subject to the it's always 10 years ahead thing.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#379

Post by tim333 »

KerrAvon wrote: post #331
p1esk wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is GPT-4 not a “big thing in AI”?

It's extremely spicy autocomplete and it burns astonishing amounts of natural resources to reach even that lofty peak

I have little doubt that even when we have superintelligent AI solving science and such problems way beyond humans it will still be dismissed as extra spicy autocomplete.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#380

Post by xzjis »

Sam Altman's speech is hollow, lacking substance and political reflection. He talks about "prosperity," but does not address its fair distribution. For example, our current global agriculture produces enough food for all of humanity, but that does not prevent people from starving, partly because we waste food, but also because we inefficiently feed non-human animals with this food, and then eat the animals. Artificial intelligence can, in the same way, result in increased inequalities, despite supposedly growing "prosperity." If we continue within a neoliberal capitalist system, which is the current trajectory in most countries, especially in the United States, the fruits of the labor of robots, artificial intelligences, and consequently the increase in labor productivity, will end up almost entirely in the pockets of a minority of shareholders, rather than benefiting all of humanity, as is already the case. We already have charts showing that productivity growth outpaces median wage growth, which indicates that wealth is concentrating in the hands of a minority, which overall harms our society. In a nutshell, his speech seems more like a fundraising pitch to convince shareholders than the speech of someone reflecting on artificial intelligence as a means of human emancipation.
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