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The Intelligence Age

ia.samaltman.com

381–390 of 447 posts

Re: The Intelligence Age

#381
post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>resources needed to "build enough infrastructure." Strarship will put into orbit 100tons at $10M or so. I.e. And wars willn't be fought over AI. Wars will be fought using AI. Humans will have no chance in controlling millions of their own and responding to the actions of the millions of the enemy's simultaneously active automated high-precision munitions of all kinds, and that picture leads to a new, non-nuclear thi…

Heat doesn't radiate like that in space. This topic comes up on HN often enough.

There isn't anything to carry the heat away because space is, by definition, empty. The energy has to be carried away by something. Cooling space stations is a legit real problem.

The only thing space gets you is somewhat better solar efficiency, but we aren't lacking of land to build solar panels on here on earth.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#383
post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>resources needed to "build enough infrastructure." Strarship will put into orbit 100tons at $10M or so. I.e. And wars willn't be fought over AI. Wars will be fought using AI. Humans will have no chance in controlling millions of their own and responding to the actions of the millions of the enemy's simultaneously active automated high-precision munitions of all kinds, and that picture leads to a new, non-nuclear thi…

Heat doesn't radiate like that in space. This topic comes up on HN often enough. There isn't anything to carry the heat away because space is, by definition, empty. The energy has to be carried away by something. Cooling space stations is a legit real problem. The only thing space gets you is somewhat better solar efficiency, but we aren't lacking of land to build solar panels on here on earth.

>Heat doesn't radiate like that in space.

What do you mean? I stated black body radiation numbers.

>There isn't anything to carry the heat away because space is, by definition, empty.

Heat radiation. Which is what Sun for example does in that empty space.

>Cooling space stations is a legit real problem.

Please, numbers. Otherwise it is just some hand-waving.

>The only thing space gets you is somewhat better solar efficiency, but we aren't lacking of land to build solar panels on here on earth.

Space gets you away from regulations, corrupt bureaucrats, and the threat of war/terrorism/etc. for example. At $100/Kg building in space looks to be just cheaper. And space allows to have solar and datacenter in the same unit, while on Earth you have to deliver your electricity from a solar farm somewhere to the datacenter. There is a reason Oracle started to talk nuclear in the datacenter. And between nuclear in the datacenter on Earth and solar+datacenter in space at $100/Kg i think the space scenario would be simpler and cheaper.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Telegraph, radio, phones, cars didn't guarantee success. Those things can't outthink you. Somewhat extreme case: let's say Israel saw that Iran was days away from getting AGI. It would instantly throw every nuke it had at Iran. Now, scale that up to the global superpowers and near-superpowers. I wouldn't want to put money on what e.g. the U.S. would do if China was days away from AGI. There are a lot of options below…

Is there any evidence that the "smarter" side wins wars? I'd put money on the faction with more soldiers and industry over more "intelligence" every single time.

How many divisions does ChatGPT have?

Re: The Intelligence Age

#385
post #325

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.

Or we are just the biological bootloader for further evolution of binary signalling.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telegraph, radio, phones, cars didn't guarantee success. Those things can't outthink you. Somewhat extreme case: let's say Israel saw that Iran was days away from getting AGI. It would instantly throw every nuke it had at Iran. Now, scale that up to the global superpowers and near-superpowers. I wouldn't want to put money on what e.g. the U.S. would do if China was days away from AGI. There are a lot of options below…

Is there any evidence that the "smarter" side wins wars? I'd put money on the faction with more soldiers and industry over more "intelligence" every single time. How many divisions does ChatGPT have?

This is and will be increasingly a digital world. This is just an extrapolation question.

It’s repeatedly demonstrated that much of the voting public can be led by the nose to any desired conclusion. Therefore, influence via digital means, across all media. Satellite and all other digital sensing and tracking. Build a few million robots. Nukes. Control over the financial infrastructure. All vaguely smart cars. Intercept, alter or prevent any digital communication. The enemy wouldn’t be able to trust any message or video. An army without sensing, command and control, isn’t.

Besides the argument isn’t AGI vs everyone, it’s a country with AGI vs anyone else. I’d take that bet.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#387
post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh ok. I thought we were talking about the article (or at least claims that are just as bold):

"Deep learning works, and we will solve the remaining problems."

"It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!)"

Re: The Intelligence Age

#388
post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> He's really good at raising gargantuan amounts of money

As far as what he does for others, that seems to be his entire job from what I can tell. Just going by what he visibly does.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#389
post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh ok. I thought we were talking about the article (or at least claims that are just as bold): "Deep learning works, and we will solve the remaining problems." "It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!)"

It was more in reply to "people in the AI community have"... Which some of them have but the Moravec type stuff has been quite accurate.

Technically a few thousand days covers quite a range. 20 thousand is 55 years.

On the Kurzweil graph, extrapolating hardware progress from 1900 through 2000, superintelligence seems to be roughly 2035, depending on how you define things. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Kurzweils-8-71-chart-of-...

Re: The Intelligence Age

#390
post #97

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…

The biggest productivity gain I've seen in my programming life has not been from Claude or ChatGPT. It's from the Rust compiler. A good compiler that catches errors at compile time instead of runtime, that makes writing tests and pulling down dependencies easy, that makes documentation easy. Good old fashioned tooling. "Let's train an LLM that can decode C++ compiler error strings!" No, let's make better tools.

> A good compiler that catches errors at compile time instead of runtime, that makes writing tests and pulling down dependencies easy, that makes documentation easy.

For a week I was fumbling through a ream of type and API errors from a Rust codebase I was hired to work on, migrate to new libraries, debug and update dependencies, etc.

I found myself thinking: The Rust compiler is giving me these very long logs of well described errors that are nonetheless obscure to me. If the compiler knows the errors, why doesn't it simply fix them and report the fixes for me to test?

This is what LLMs are for, and will soon do well by default: The compiler knows the errors. It should then fix them and let me decide which diffs I want to keep.

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