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AI 2027

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Re: AI 2027

#581

Post by visarga »

m11a wrote: post #532
nikisil80 wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best reply in this entire thread, and I align with your thinking entirely. I also absolutely hate this idea amongst tech-oriented communities that because an AI can do some algebra and program an 8-bit video game quickly and without any mistakes, it's already overtaking humanity. Extrapolating from that idea to some future version of these models, they may be capable of solving grad school level physics problems and…

> that's not what _humanity_ is about I've not spent too long thinking on the following, so I'm prepared for someone to say I'm totally wrong, but: I feel like the services economy can be broadly broken down into: pleasure, progress and chores. Pleasure being poetry/literature, movies, hospitality, etc; progress being the examples you gave like science/engineering, mathematics; and chore being things humans need to c…

I have considered this too. I frame it as problem solving. We are solving problems across all fields, from investing, to designing, construction, sales, entertainment, science, medicine, repair. What do you need when you are solving problems? You need to know the best action you can take in a situation. How is AI going to know all that? Some things are only tacicly known by key people, some things are guarded secrets (how do you make cutting edge chips, or innovative drugs?), some rely on experience that is not written down. Many of those problems have not even been fully explored, they are open field of trial and error.

AI progress depends not just on ideation speed, but on validation speed. And validation in some fields needs to pass through the physical world, which makes it expensive, slow, and rate limited. Hence I don't think AI can reach singularity. That would only be possible if validation was as easy to scale as ideation.

Re: AI 2027

#582

Post by [deleted] »

jplusequalt wrote: post #470
542354234235 wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see it as doomerism, just realism. Looking at the realities of nuclear war shows that it is a world ending holocaust that could happen by accident or by the launch of a single nuclear ICBM by North Korea, and there is almost no chance of de-escalation once a missile is in the air. There is nothing to be done, other than advocate of nuclear arms treaties in my own country, but that has no effect on Russia, Chi…

I think it's a fallacy to equate pessimistic outcomes with "realism" >It is the same with Gen AI. We will either find a way to control an entity that rapidly becomes orders of magnitude more intelligent than us, or we won’t. We will either find a way to prevent the rich and powerful from controlling a Gen AI that can build and operate anything they need, including an army to protect them from everyone without a power…

[deleted]

Re: AI 2027

#583

Post by visarga »

nfc wrote: post #527
visarga wrote: post #431

The story is entertaining, but it has a big fallacy - progress is not a function of compute or model size alone. This kind of mistake is almost magical thinking. What matters most is the training set. During the GPT-3 era there was plenty of organic text to scale into, and compute seemed to be the bottleneck. But we quickly exhausted it, and now we try other ideas - synthetic reasoning chains, or just plain synthetic…

I agree with your point about the validation bottleneck becoming dominant over raw compute and simple model scaling. However, I wonder if we're underestimating the potential headroom for sheer efficiency breakthroughs at our levels of intelligence. Von Neumann for example was incredibly brilliant, yet his brain presumably ran on roughly the same power budget as anyone else's. I mean, did he have to eat mountains of f…

I think you are underestimating the context, we all stand on shoulders of giants. Let's think what would happen if kid Einstein, at the young age of 5, was marooned on an island and recovered 30 years later. Will he have any deep insights to dazzle us with? I don't think he would.

Re: AI 2027

#584

Post by visarga »

the8472 wrote: post #492
visarga wrote: post #431

The story is entertaining, but it has a big fallacy - progress is not a function of compute or model size alone. This kind of mistake is almost magical thinking. What matters most is the training set. During the GPT-3 era there was plenty of organic text to scale into, and compute seemed to be the bottleneck. But we quickly exhausted it, and now we try other ideas - synthetic reasoning chains, or just plain synthetic…

Many tasks are amenable to simulation training and synthetic data. Math proofs, virtual game environments, programming. And we haven't run out of all data. High-quality text data may be exhausted, but we have many many life-years worth of video. Being able to predict visual imagery means building a physical world model. Combine this passive observation with active experimentation in simulated and real environments an…

This is true, a lot of progress can still happen based on simulation and synthetic data. But I am considering the long term game. In the long term we can't substitute simulation to reality. We can't even predict if a 3-body system will eventually eject an object, or if a piece of code will halt for all possible inputs. Physical systems implementing Turing machines are undecidable. Even fluid flows. The core problem is that recursive processes create an knowledge gap, and we can't cross that gap unless we walk the full recursion, there is no way to predict the outcome from outside. The real world is such an undecidable recursive process. AI can still make progress, but not at exponentially speed decoupled from the real world and not in isolation.

Re: AI 2027

#585

Post by meowface »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #320
superconduct123 wrote: post #115

Why are the biggest AI predictions always made by people who aren't deep in the tech side of it? Or actually trying to use the models day-to-day...

I use the models daily and agree with Scott.

You are an SSCite though and therefore are biased.

(That said, I agree with you. But I know I myself am biased to agree with Scott.)

Re: AI 2027

#586

Post by afpx »

fmap wrote: post #366
stego-tech wrote: post #279

It’s good science fiction, I’ll give it that. I think getting lost in the weeds over technicalities ignores the crux of the narrative: even if this doesn’t lead to AGI, at the very least it’s likely the final “warning shot” we’ll get before it’s suddenly and irreversibly here. The problems it raises - alignment, geopolitics, lack of societal safeguards - are all real, and happening now (just replace “AGI” with “corpo…

> even if this doesn’t lead to AGI, at the very least it’s likely the final “warning shot” we’ll get before it’s suddenly and irreversibly here. I agree that it's good science fiction, but this is still taking it too seriously. All of these "projections" are generalizing from fictional evidence - to borrow a term that's popular in communities that push these ideas. Long before we had deep learning there were people l…

If you gather up a couple million of the smartest people on earth along with a few trillion dollars, and you add in super ambitious people eager to be culturally deified, you significantly increase the chance for breakthroughs. It's all probabiliities, though. But, right now there's no better game to bet on.

Re: AI 2027

#587

Post by DennisP »

Vegenoid wrote: post #562
DennisP wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming the task remains just generating tokens, what sort of reasoning or planning would say is the threshold, before it's no longer "just a form of next token prediction?"

This is an interesting question, but it seems at least possible that as long as the fundamental operation is simply "generate tokens", that it can't go beyond being just a form of next-token prediction. I don't think people were thinking of human thought as a stream of tokens until LLMs came along. This isn't a very well-formed idea, but we may require an AI for which "generating tokens" is just one subsystem of a la…

But that means any AI that just talks to you can't be AI by definition. No matter how decisively the AI passes the Turing test, it doesn't matter. It could converse with the top expert in any field as an equal, solve any problem you ask it to solve in math or physics, write stunningly original philosophy papers, or gather evidence from a variety of sources, evaluate them, and reach defensible conclusions. It's all just generating tokens.

Historically, a computer with these sorts of capabilities has always been considered true AI, going back to Alan Turing. Also of course including all sorts of science fiction, from recent movies like Her to older examples like Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.

Re: AI 2027

#588

Post by zvorygin »

akra wrote: post #565
visarga wrote: post #431

The story is entertaining, but it has a big fallacy - progress is not a function of compute or model size alone. This kind of mistake is almost magical thinking. What matters most is the training set. During the GPT-3 era there was plenty of organic text to scale into, and compute seemed to be the bottleneck. But we quickly exhausted it, and now we try other ideas - synthetic reasoning chains, or just plain synthetic…

This is what I think as well. Unfortunately for the AI proponents they already made an example of the software industry. Its on news reports in the US and globally; most people are no longer recommending to get into the industry, etc. Software for better or worse has made an example for other industries as to what "not to do" both w.r.t data (online and option), and culture (e.g. open source, open tests, etc). Anecdo…

History unfolds without anyone at the helm. It just happens, like a pachinko ball falling down the board. Global economic structures will push the development of AI and they're extremely hard to overwhelm.

Re: AI 2027

#589

Post by silexia »

The accelerated path described here is exactly what would happen. Humans will likely be wiped out in the next few years by our own creation.

Re: AI 2027

#590

Post by z7 »

DennisP wrote: post #587
Vegenoid wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting question, but it seems at least possible that as long as the fundamental operation is simply "generate tokens", that it can't go beyond being just a form of next-token prediction. I don't think people were thinking of human thought as a stream of tokens until LLMs came along. This isn't a very well-formed idea, but we may require an AI for which "generating tokens" is just one subsystem of a la…

But that means any AI that just talks to you can't be AI by definition. No matter how decisively the AI passes the Turing test, it doesn't matter. It could converse with the top expert in any field as an equal, solve any problem you ask it to solve in math or physics, write stunningly original philosophy papers, or gather evidence from a variety of sources, evaluate them, and reach defensible conclusions. It's all ju…

It's just predicting tokens:

https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1jl5qfs/its_ju...

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