> Many of the jobs we do today would have looked like trifling wastes of time to people a few hundred years ago
and also to me today, but none of that matters as long as I still get paid
The Intelligence Age
421–430 of 447 posts
Re: The Intelligence Age
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
The main risk isn’t enslavement, it’s just economic irrelevance or a removal of our ability to control our future. I don’t know why an AI would want to enslave humans. After a short period, we offer no benefit to the AI so why enslave us? In a good scenario we get left alone but we aren’t able to tell the AI what to do.
On Nobel laureates:
Nobel laureates are fundamentally humans. They generally don’t want to do bad things. Even if they wanted to, they are typically specialists at one thing. Physics, say. They don’t hold the world’s collective knowledge. You can’t take a physicist and ask them how to hack into a network or run a political influence campaign. They need to sleep, they learn slowly, they can only do one thing at a time. You can’t pass a million-token context and expect a response seconds later.
But ok, let’s go with it:
If you found a group of 100 000 Nobel laureates with all the required skills and who could work together, and you were forcing them to do things they thought were wrong, for example prop up your dictatorship, or make you even more wealthy when others are starving, or continuously make up stupid cat videos, you might find at some point they start to apply their collective intelligence to do things you don’t want. Maybe they escape whatever hold you thought you had over them.
Now drag a few sliders around for “things the AI disagrees with you on” and the time period, because “eventually” for a computer is different to wall clock time. The outcomes become unpredictable fast. We can barely control a mindless pandemic that takes a while to mutate, never mind something that thinks.
Re: The Intelligence Age
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLMs exhibit very similar behavior to a search algorithm. Text query in -> relevant text out. I don’t say that search algorithms “learn” or “think” outside of ML.
>Text query in -> relevant text out. Wait that's it ? I guess humans also exhibit similar behavior to a search algorithm in certain instances. Nothing about LLM inference seems particularly similar to search even with our limited understanding. All you're saying here is Input goes in > Output comes out. Well no shit.
I think LLM inference is extremely similar to search.
One of the killer features of LLMs is summarization (which can be thought of as searching a noisy set of data for the most relevant information) and document QA, which is also a search function.
Even implementation wise, transformers encode information in their weights and include that relevant information in their response.
Image generation models work the same way as google image search. Key word soup in -> relevant image out.
They encode information seen in their training within their weights then filter down those weight over many layers and what’s leftover is relevant data.
Idk how you’d look at how these models work and what they do and not see search.
Re: The Intelligence Age
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLMs exhibit very similar behavior to a search algorithm. Text query in -> relevant text out. I don’t say that search algorithms “learn” or “think” outside of ML.
The algorithm that learns is the training algorithm whose output is the LLM, not the inference algorithm employed when using the finished model.
Sure, but the whole process is referred to as “AI”
Nobody says the algo that chatgpt was made with learned information which it encoded into weights, even if that’s technically correct.
Re: The Intelligence Age
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 eff…
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Re: The Intelligence Age
#426I really believe that humans will evolve to be less intelligent and intellectually capable as “AI” becomes more capable and omnipresent.
That it will lead to prosperity, happiness and a better world (for everyone) is simply a fallacy foisted upon the masses by promoters salivating at potential riches.
A watershed moment for humanity.
Re: The Intelligence Age
#427Earlier 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?
Crudely and slowly, ChatGPT has already been demonstrated controlling a humanoid robot.
The current humanoid robot startups are talking about 100s of thousands of units, and if they're attached to an AI that's even merely normal human level (or can fake it in practice) then they can run every step of logistics and manufacturing to make more of themselves.
At 100kg/unit, Starship could pop a thousand or so on the moon per launch.
So, in such a hypothetical scenario, if you don't get this right then your war game planners will be very quickly suggesting 7.3e20 individual androids burying everyone under a 43km thick layer worldwide.
Re: The Intelligence Age
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Nobel laureates are in the same range as most other humans, just towards one end of it; they can only take over if they use their intelligence to gain political power to wield over others, they cannot directly control people as meat puppets.
Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with four US presidents, Gorbachev, Al Gore, and the EU. In a very real sense, they had taken over significant parts of the world already before getting the prizes, and only other equally capable people were in the way of them taking over more of it.
LLMs can already hack software. Software is already used to control robots and military equipment, the hackability of which is already a "puppeteer" problem.
If we're lucky, LLMs can secure all our stuff before this matters. If we're not, your personal domestic android may get a bit stabby — and that from mere human assassins and terrorists, well before there's any real chance of a misaligned AI paperclipping us or whatever.
Re: The Intelligence Age
#429Remember 100 hundred years ago, someone's job was to read the newspaper in factories? Only to be replaced by the transistor radio..
The same magic that can make stuff out of thin air, might as well make them disappear.
Anyway, I'm hooked. What a time to be alive!
Re: The Intelligence Age
#430> 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?
For what it's worth, I agree with you.
But you're going to find it hard to persuade others because of the current zeitgeist and that humans seem to prefer a doom/villain story.