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

411–420 of 447 posts

Re: The Intelligence Age

#411

Post by j_timberlake »

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…

Imagine a king ruled the entire world, and he didn't have any limits to his power.

Would he treat everyone to eternal feasting? Or would he blow up his enemies and pick favorites among the remaining people?

It's not hard to answer this question.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#412

Post by j_timberlake »

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…

As if a tech CEO would ever speak the truth like that.

If he admits that AI is going to wreck the job market, that would make the relevant politicians wary.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#413

Post by richardw »

onemoresoop wrote: post #406
richardw wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Interc…

>Besides the argument isn’t AGI vs everyone, it’s a country with AGI vs anyone else. I’d take that bet. You never entertained the idea that AGI could be a destructive force and instead of a country with AGI you could have a country that devoured its people?

My base case is we can’t control it. I was responding to people who seem to underestimate superintelligence, so referring to “the argument”. If AGI goes postal, everyone is at risk. If it doesn’t, the side with it wins. The odds of it only harming the country that has it, seems extremely slim.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#414

Post by zero-sharp »

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…

We've been quick to adopt the technology without identifying or considering its future costs. If a chatbot can generate code that works with minor tweaking, does that warrant laying off one or many programmers? If an AI tutor can provide most of the information a student needs, does that mean we no longer need human instructors? It's become common to shit talk teachers, but I think education is more than just "delivering facts." So the observation is this: in some very narrow areas, AI will be highly competitive while significantly cutting costs. What I worry about is all of the intangibles & unquantified tasks that people perform that will be lost if we go in the direction of replacing people in the name of profit. And I know that some people here will argue that this hasn't had effects on layoffs...

So you mention how it's not the AI's fault, nor is it the fault of the people. But we have this corporate structure where it's easy to implement a change that may be detrimental in the future and that's difficult to reverse. I think that's definitely a fault of people.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#415

Post by ansk »

jmmcd wrote: post #376
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.

I think that while researchers would agree that the empirical success of deep learning has been remarkable, they would still agree that the language used here -- "an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data (or really, the underlying “rules” that produce any distribution of data)" -- is an overly strong characterization, to the point that it is no longer accurate. A hash function is a good example of a generating process which NN + SGD will not learn with any degree of generalization. If you trained GPT4 on an infinite dataset of strings and their corresponding hashes, it would simply saturate its 100 billion+ parameters with something akin to a compressed lookup table of input/output pairs, despite the true generating process being a program that could be expressed in less than a kilobyte. On unseen data, it would be no better than a uniform prior over hashes. Anyways, my point is that people knowledgable in the field would have far more tempered takes on the practical limits of deep learning, and would reserve the absolute framing used here for claims that have been proven formally.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#416

Post by iteratethis »

I'm skeptical about the prosperity claim. If the entire planet has access to affordable/cheap and very capable AI, this still leaves two problems.

Since the access itself is not differentiating, it's going to be the most educated benefiting the most. Already today few people can use the o1 model because they can't dream up a PhD level question nor understand its answers.

More importantly, access to AI does not mean access to assets. Me, a total nobody, can use AI to design the world's best car. But that does nothing because I don't have money or land. Anybody can query AI for that car but only asset owners can actually implement the idea and extract value. Those asset owners could use AI to bring widespread prosperity to all of mankind, but we know they won't.

We don't need more material prosperity, we need social prosperity. Family formation, the restoration of community life, economic security. Not "more stuff".

Re: The Intelligence Age

#417

Post by CatWChainsaw »

tim333 wrote: post #402
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…

I find that if you are imaginative or even realistic people just think you are nuts. The reality is we will probably merge with AI and become immortal.

Was that meant to be imaginative, or realistic.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#418

Post by inquisitorG »

screye wrote: post #118

Question for active professionals during the Moore's law era of computing. Back then, were executives writing such grand proclamations about the future ? In my experience, when things are working, executives are quiet. The outcomes speak for themselves. Thankfully, we have a recent point of reference. The pioneers of internet & computing's 1st wave transformed civilization. Did they spend years saber rattling about h…

Bill Joy - Why The Future Doesn't Need Us - 4/1/2000

https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/

Basically, the same article but much more negative.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#419

Post by ForHackernews »

richardw wrote: post #413
onemoresoop wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Besides the argument isn’t AGI vs everyone, it’s a country with AGI vs anyone else. I’d take that bet. You never entertained the idea that AGI could be a destructive force and instead of a country with AGI you could have a country that devoured its people?

My base case is we can’t control it. I was responding to people who seem to underestimate superintelligence, so referring to “the argument”. If AGI goes postal, everyone is at risk. If it doesn’t, the side with it wins. The odds of it only harming the country that has it, seems extremely slim.

If superintelligence is all it takes, why do you think to date no unscrupulous Nobel laureate has taken over the world and enslaved the rest of humanity?

Re: The Intelligence Age

#420

Post by CatWChainsaw »

saurabhchalke wrote: post #318
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…

Why can't we just go with Occam's razor, and assume that they really believe in their mission of providing access to frontier AI as freely to the world as possible?

When someone says something, but their actions or commitment don't align with what they said, they were lying. Always place more weight on what it takes more effort to do: spout a bunch of hot air, or put your money where your mouth is?

Occam's Razor, duh.

Post reply on HN