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I Am Tired of AI

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Re: I Am Tired of AI

#911

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The war would be about world domination. There can at most one such country. The same reason why a nuclear war between US and SU could have happened.

Soviet Union didn't do so much business with the U.S., they are a country of thugs that think violence is the only way to get their way. China is very different. Their economy is very much dependent on trade with the U.S. and they know that trying to have "world domination" would also crash their economy completely. China would much rather engage in economic warfare than military.

The most likely reason for war would be to prevent the other country from achieving world domination by means other than war. John von Neumann (who knew a thing or two about game theory) recommended to attack the Soviet Union to prevent it from becoming a nuclear superpower. There is little doubt it would have worked. The powers between the US and China are more balanced now, but the stakes are also higher. A superintelligent weapon would be more powerful than a large amount of nuclear warheads.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#912

I'm tired of LLMs. Enough billions of dollars have been spent on LLMs that a reasonably good picture of what they can and can't do has emerged. They're really good at some things, terrible at others, and prone to doing something totally wrong some fraction of the time. That last limits their usefulness. They can't safely be in charge of anything important. If someone doesn't soon figure out how to get a confidence me…

It’s probably generally irrelevant what they can do today, or what you’ve seen so far. This is conceptually essentially Moore’s law, but about every 5.5 months. That’s the only thing that matters at this stage. I watched everyone make the same arguments about the general Internet, and then the Web, then mobile, then Bitcoin. It’s just a toy. It’s not that useful. Is this supposed to be the revolution? It uses too muc…

>> Looking at early telegraphs doesn’t predict the iPhone, etc.

The problem with this line of argument is that LLMs are not new technology, rather they are the latest evolution of statistical language modelling, a technology that we've had at least since Shannon's time [1]. We are way, way past the telegraph era, and well into the age of large telephony switches handling millions of calls a second.

Does that mean we've reached the end of the curve? Personally, I have no idea, but if you're going to argue we're at the beginning of things, that's just not right.

________________

[1] In "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", where he introduces what we today know as information theory, Shannon gives as an example of an application a process that generates a string of words in natural English according to the probability of the next letter in a word, or the next word in a sentence. See Section 3 "The Series of Approximations to English":

https://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shanno...

Note: Published 1948.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#913

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You’re certainly able to sus out everything about my worldview, knowledge level and intentions from my one-sentence comment. The only thing that LLMs are at risk of subverting is the livelihood of millions of people. AI is a capital intensifier, so the rich will get richer as it sees more uptake. About copyright - yeah, I’m quite concerned for my friends who are writers and artists. > You'll get left behind with thes…

[flagged]

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#914

I'm tired of LLMs. Enough billions of dollars have been spent on LLMs that a reasonably good picture of what they can and can't do has emerged. They're really good at some things, terrible at others, and prone to doing something totally wrong some fraction of the time. That last limits their usefulness. They can't safely be in charge of anything important. If someone doesn't soon figure out how to get a confidence me…

"They're really good at some things, terrible at others, and prone to doing something totally wrong some fraction of the time." I agree 100% with this sentiment, but, it also is a decent description of individual humans. This is what processes and control systems/controls are for. These are evolving at a slower pace than the LLMs themselves at the moment so we're looking to the LLM to be its own control. I don't thin…

>> I agree 100% with this sentiment, but, it also is a decent description of individual humans.

Why would that be a good thing? The big thing with computers is that they are reliable in ways that humans simply can't ever be. Why is it suddenly a success to make them just as unreliable as humans?

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#915
post #14

Computers were supposed to be these amazing machines that are super precise. You tell it to do a thing, it does it. Nowadays, it seems we're happy with computers apparently going RNG mode on everything. 2+2 can now be 5, depending on the AI model in question, the day, and the temperature...

I think about it differently. Before computers had to be given extremely precise and completely unambiguous instructions, now they can handle some ambiguity as well. You still have the precise output if you want it, it didn’t go away. Btw I’m also tired of AI, but this is one thing that’s not so bad Edit: before someone mentions fuzzy logic, I’m not talking about the input of a function being fuzzy, I’m talking about…

> You still have the precise output if you want it, it didn’t go away.

For now. Given that most new devices seem to be fully hostile to the concept of general purpose computing (see phones, VR devices, TVs, etc), I wonder how long it will be before many of the computers that are sold are even more locked down than Chromebooks - just a few prompts for interacting with a preinstalled LLM.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#916
post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were news reports that Russia spent less than a million dollars on a massive propaganda campaign targeting U.S elections and the American population in general. Do you think it would be possible before internet, before AI? Bad actors, poorly written/sourced information, sensationalism etc have always existed. It is nothing new. What is new is the scale, speed and cost of making and spreading poor quality stuff…

How can I wreck havoc with a few hours, a laptop, and an internet connection? It takes a bit more than that.

Some woman’s cat was hiding in her basement. She automatically assumed her Haitian neighbors stole her cat and made some comment about it, which landed on Facebook, which got morphed into “immigrants eating pets” story, JD Vance picked it up, Trump mentioned it in a national debate watched by 65 million people. All of this happened in a few days. This resulted in violence in Springfield.

If you can place a rumor or lie in front of the right person/people to amplify, it will be amplified. It will spread like wildfire, and by the time it is fact checked, it will have done at least some damage.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#917

I'm tired of LLMs. Enough billions of dollars have been spent on LLMs that a reasonably good picture of what they can and can't do has emerged. They're really good at some things, terrible at others, and prone to doing something totally wrong some fraction of the time. That last limits their usefulness. They can't safely be in charge of anything important. If someone doesn't soon figure out how to get a confidence me…

LLMs have been improving exponentially for a few years. let's at least wait until exponential improvements slow down to make a judgement about their potential

I don’t think you should expect exponential growth towards greater correctness past good enough for any given domain of knowledge it is able to mirror. It is reliant on human generated material, and so rate limited by the number of humans able to generate the quality increase you need - which decreases in availability as you expect higher quality. I also don’t believe greater correctness for any given thing is an open ended question that allows for experientially exponential improvements.

Though maybe you are just using exponential figuratively in place of meaning rapid and significant development and investment.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#918
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of silliness is this? AI generated crap is one thing. But human generated crap is there - just because human wrote something it is not making it good. Had a friend who thought that if it is written in a book it is for sure true. Well NO! There was exactly the same sentiment with stuff on the internet and it is still the same sentiment about Wikipedia that “it is just some kids writing bs, get a paper book o…

> nothing is going substitute critical thinking and putting in effort to separate wheat from the chaff. The problem is that wheat:chaff ratio used to be 1:100, and soon it's going to become 1:100 million. I think you're severely underestimating the amount of effort it's going to take to find real information in the sea of AI generated content.

Just like people were able to find real information on topics like: "tobacco is not that bad, it is just nice like coffee" and "fat is bad for you, here have some sugar", "alcohol is fun, having beer is nice"?

Fundamentally AI changes nothing for masses and for individuals alike and there was nothing you could "just trust" because it was written on a website or in a book. That is why I call it silly.

It also doesn't make it easier or harder for people in power that have vast resources to plant what they want - they have money and power and will do so anyway.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#919

I'm tired of LLMs. Enough billions of dollars have been spent on LLMs that a reasonably good picture of what they can and can't do has emerged. They're really good at some things, terrible at others, and prone to doing something totally wrong some fraction of the time. That last limits their usefulness. They can't safely be in charge of anything important. If someone doesn't soon figure out how to get a confidence me…

I love how people are like "there's no use case" and there's already products on shelves. I see AI art everywhere, AI writing, customer support - already happened. You guys are naysaying something that already happened people already replaced jobs with LLMs and already profit due to AI. There are already startups with users where you provide a OPENAI_API_KEY, or customers where you provide theirs. If you can't see ho…

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Re: I Am Tired of AI

#920

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sincerely worry about a future when most people act in this same manner. You have - for now - sufficient experience and understanding to be able to review the AI's code and decide if it was doing what you wanted it to. But what about when you've spent months just blindly accepting" what the AI tells you? Are you going to be familiar enough with the project anymore to catch its little mistakes? Or worse, what about…

If we keep at this LLM-does-all-out-hard-work for us, we’re going to end up with some kind of Warhammer 40k tech-priest-blessing-the-magic-machines level of understanding, where nobody actually understands anything, and we’re technologically stunted, but hey at least we don’t have the warp to contend with and some shareholders got rich at our expense.

Unless it's all a ploy by Tzeentch to prepare the ground for the coming of the Chaos Gods.
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