Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Do AI companies work?

benn.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 457 posts

Re: Do AI companies work?

#441

Post by AI_beffr »

jfengel wrote: post #25
AI_beffr wrote: post #6

the hype will never die. all the smartest people in industry and government believe that there is a very high probability that this technology is near the edge of starting the AGI landslide. you dont need AGI to start the AGI landslide, you just need AI tools that are smart enough to automate the process of discovering and building the first AGI models. every conceivable heuristic indicates that we are near the edge.…

I am not among those smartest, so take my opinion with a mountain of salt. But I'm just not convinced that this is going in the direction of AGI. The recent advances are truly jaw dropping. It absolutely merits being investigated to the hilt. There is a very good chance that it will end up being a net profit. But intuitively they don't feel to me like they're getting more human. If anything I feel like the recent rou…

itll be super cool huh? no, it wont be super cool. AGI will cause the total and complete destabilization of the world and with almost mathematical certainty it can be said that it will lead to a global war. a war fueled by AGI is the last war humans will ever witness. AGI is something that everyone should be very afraid of. unfortunately, the only experience that most people have with AI is watching star trek, playing halo, and consuming other media that depict sentient machines in a benign and very positive light. dont be fooled. the machines will not be your friends. its an outcome that must be avoided at all costs.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#442

Post by AI_beffr »

mvdtnz wrote: post #76
AI_beffr wrote: post #6

the hype will never die. all the smartest people in industry and government believe that there is a very high probability that this technology is near the edge of starting the AGI landslide. you dont need AGI to start the AGI landslide, you just need AI tools that are smart enough to automate the process of discovering and building the first AGI models. every conceivable heuristic indicates that we are near the edge.…

I can't believe I'm reading this kind of stuff about crappy chat bots. The world has lost its mind.

if you think the latest models are crappy chatbots then you are truly and idiot

Re: Do AI companies work?

#443

Post by ang_cire »

Spacecosmonaut wrote: post #420
ang_cire wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today I carved a front panel for my cyberdeck project out of a composite wood board. I hand-drafted everything, and planned out the wiring (though I won't be onto the soldering phase for a while now). It felt good . I don't think having a 3d printer + AI designing my cyberdeck would feel the same.

Take a look at Nick Bostrom's new book

> AI Creation and the Cosmic Host

> Human civilization is most likely not alone in the cosmos but is instead encompassed within a cosmic host...

Nah, I'm good. I don't need some guy philosophizing about AI being our pathway to join a galactic super-civilization.

When AI is actually doing something useful for humanity, call me back.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#444

Post by AI_beffr »

jfengel wrote: post #142
snapcaster wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you criticize the turing test as being meaningless before it was easily passed by LLMs? if not i don't see how you can avoid updating on "this is getting more human" or at least "this is getting closer to intelligence" to avoid the human-bias

I never gave much thought to the Turing test one way or the other. It never struck me as especially informative. I've always been more interested in the non-verbal aspects of human intelligence. I believe that "true AGI", whatever that is, is likely to be able to mimic sentient but non-verbal species. I'd like to see an AGI do what a dog or cat does. LLMs are quite astonishing at mimicking something humans specifical…

> I never gave much thought to the Turing test one way or the other

then how are you qualified to even discuss this? shouldn't you have to have actually had a thought about something before you pretend to know something about it? i mean its pretty clear from your comment that you havent thought about AI for more than a year or two

Re: Do AI companies work?

#445

Post by roenxi »

jcgrillo wrote: post #421
roenxi wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you figure? https://epochai.org/blog/training-compute-of-frontier-ai-mod... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/test-scores-ai-capabiliti... We're still seeing exponential upswing in compute and we appear to already be probing around human capacity in the models. Past experience suggests that once AIs are within spitting distance of human ability they will exceed what a human mind can do in short order. These…

I'm not sure what the amount of computer time spent on training the models has to do with anything, the article states it "is the best predictor of broad AI capabilities we have" without attempting to defend the claim. The "humies" (to use a dated term) benchmarks are interesting but clearly not super indicative of real world performance--one merely has to interact with one of these LLMs to find their (often severe)…

> I'm not sure what the amount of computer time spent on training the models has to do with anything

Fair enough. What do you think is driving the uptick of AI performance and why don't you think it will be correlated with the amount of compute invested?

The limitations business looks like a red herring. Being flawed and limited doesn't even disqualify an AI from being super-intelligent (whatever that might mean). Humans are remarkably flawed and limited, it takes a lot of setup to get them to a point where they can behave intelligently.

> EDIT: re: the computer time metric, by the same token shouldn't block chains have changed the world by now if computer time is the predictor of success?

That seems like it would be a defensible claim if you wanted to make it. One of the trends I keep an eye on is that log(price) is similar to the trend in log(hash rate) for Bitcoin. I don't think it is relevant though because Bitcoin isn't an AI system.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#446

Post by chillfox »

rty32 wrote: post #168
chillfox wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I live the ridesharing/delivering startups didn't bring goodies, they just made everything worse. They destroyed the Taxi industry, I used to be able to just walk out to the taxi rank and get in the first taxi, but not anymore. Now I have to organize it on an app or with a phone call to a robot, then wait for the car to arrive, and finally I have to find the car among all the others that other people called. Fo…

"walk out to the taxi rank" I assume you are talking about airports. Guess what, they still exist in many places. And on the other hand, for US, other than a few big cities, the "normal" taxi experience is that you call a number and maybe a taxi shows up in half an hour. With Uber, that becomes 10 minutes or less, with live map updates. Give me that and I'll be happy to forget about Uber.

No, I mean when out for dinner or drinks.

There used to be several taxi ranks on the streets with restaurants/bars/nightclubs, now there are none.

The airport is the only place left that still has a taxi rank, and it doesn't even have taxies all the time anymore.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#447

Post by hyperG »

akomtu wrote: post #165
mdavidn wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that not the human experience? I have no “agency” over the next thought to pop into my head. I “feel” like I can choose where to focus attention, but that too is a predictable outcome arising from the integration of my embryology, memories, and recently reinforced behaviors. “I” am merely an observer of my own mental state. But that is an uncomfortable idea for most people.

If this was true, you could lay back relaxed and watch where your brain takes you. But we experience life as a never ending stream of choices, usually between what's easy and what's right, and pursuing the right choice takes a constant effort. We are presented with problems and have to figure out solutions on our own, with no guarantees of success. This "I'm just an observer" idea may be true at some higher level, if…

Sapolsky wrote a 500 page rebuttal to this idea in Determined.

It is quite a convincing book and maybe even a dangerous book in a sense.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#448

Post by hsjdhdvsk »

Mashimo wrote: post #327
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes. Numbers / math is pretty much instant hallucination. Programming is codified applied mathematics and involves numbers in all but the most trivial programs. > LLMs are pretty human-like in their mental abilities. LLM's are algorithms. Algorithms do not have "mental abilities", people do. Anthropomorphizing algorithms only serves to impair objective analysis of when they are, or are not, applicable. > In the pro…

> Programming is codified applied mathematics and involves numbers in all but the most trivial programs. I don't understand that. Can you expand on it? When does the AI or the programmer need to do math calculations?

Everything a computer does is math...

Re: Do AI companies work?

#449

Post by Mashimo »

hsjdhdvsk wrote: post #448
Mashimo wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Programming is codified applied mathematics and involves numbers in all but the most trivial programs. I don't understand that. Can you expand on it? When does the AI or the programmer need to do math calculations?

Everything a computer does is math...

Yes, but the programmer or the AI don't need to do the calculations in order to program.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#450

Post by bhouston »

LtWorf wrote: post #439
insane_dreamer wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An M3 vs an Intel Macbook from 10 years ago is a shockingly large leap forward (I say this as someone who has both).

An intel macbook from 10 years ago wasn't really the peak of computing 10 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
Post reply on HN