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

The Gentle Singularity

blog.samaltman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 557 posts

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#121

Post by IAmGraydon »

orionsbelt wrote: post #113
ryandv wrote: post #87

> We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be. Not sure if wishful thinking trying to LARP-manifest this future into being, or just more unfalsifiable thinking where we can always be said to be past the event horizon and near to the singularity, given sufficiently underwhelming…

It all sounds probably correct to me. Of course, progress could stall out, but we appear to have sufficient compute to do anything a human brain can do, and in areas, AIs are already far better than humans. With the amount of brain power working in, and capital pouring into, this area, including work on improving algorithms, I think this essay is fundamentally correct that the takeoff has started.

> in areas, AIs are already far better than humans.

You could say the same thing about a CPU from 40 years ago - they can do math far better than humans. The problem is that there are some very simple problems that LLMs can’t seem to reliably solve that a child easily could, and this shows that there likely isn’t actual intelligence going on under the hood.

I think LLMs are more like human simulators rather than actual intelligent agents. In other words, they can’t know or extrapolate more knowledge than the source material gives them, meaning they could never become more intelligent than humans. They’re like a very efficient search engine of existing human knowledge.

Can anyone give me an example of any true breakthrough that was generated by an LLM?

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#122

Post by Davidzheng »

ryandv wrote: post #87

> We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be. Not sure if wishful thinking trying to LARP-manifest this future into being, or just more unfalsifiable thinking where we can always be said to be past the event horizon and near to the singularity, given sufficiently underwhelming…

We're definitely past the EH. I doubt even if we realize real risk is extremely high we could stop the rain due to economic pressures

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#123

Post by anothermathbozo »

nyc_data_geek1 wrote: post #106
ryandv wrote: post #87

> We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be. Not sure if wishful thinking trying to LARP-manifest this future into being, or just more unfalsifiable thinking where we can always be said to be past the event horizon and near to the singularity, given sufficiently underwhelming…

He is purely a hype man, and many people are too gullible/invested/dumb to see it, call him on it, or care.

What difference does that make at this stage of things?

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#125

Post by Davidzheng »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #121
orionsbelt wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It all sounds probably correct to me. Of course, progress could stall out, but we appear to have sufficient compute to do anything a human brain can do, and in areas, AIs are already far better than humans. With the amount of brain power working in, and capital pouring into, this area, including work on improving algorithms, I think this essay is fundamentally correct that the takeoff has started.

> in areas, AIs are already far better than humans. You could say the same thing about a CPU from 40 years ago - they can do math far better than humans. The problem is that there are some very simple problems that LLMs can’t seem to reliably solve that a child easily could, and this shows that there likely isn’t actual intelligence going on under the hood. I think LLMs are more like human simulators rather than actu…

They could become better at humans bc there's a RL training loop? I don't understand how this isn't directly clear. Even raining purely on human data it's possible to be mildly superhuman (see experiments of chess AI trained on human data only) but once you have verifiable tasks and RL loop the human data is just Kickstarter

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#126

Post by Davidzheng »

paxys wrote: post #96

We've somehow had a calm few months in the industry without the daily hyperbole on AGI, superintelligence and the upcoming singularity. After the string of underwhelming incremental updates from all the top LLM publishers I guess they need to start the hype cycle again.

Underwhelming?! We're probably a year out of AI-led pure math research and full AI SWEs. I think people forget what it was like 1-2 years ago somehow

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#127

Post by Davidzheng »

minimaxir wrote: post #14

> A lot more people will be able to create software, and art. But the world wants a lot more of both, and experts will probably still be much better than novices, as long as they embrace the new tools. This isn't correct: people want good software and good art, and the current trajectory of how LLMs are used on average in the real world unfortunately run counter to that. This post doesn't offer any forecasts on the h…

Also not clear that experts will be better at novices necessarily if the AI is massively better than both

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#128

Post by Workaccount2 »

minimaxir wrote: post #14

> A lot more people will be able to create software, and art. But the world wants a lot more of both, and experts will probably still be much better than novices, as long as they embrace the new tools. This isn't correct: people want good software and good art, and the current trajectory of how LLMs are used on average in the real world unfortunately run counter to that. This post doesn't offer any forecasts on the h…

>and the current trajectory of how LLMs are used on average in the real world unfortunately run counter to that. This post doesn't offer any forecasts on the hallucination issues of LLMs.

You are getting confused here...

LLMs are terrible at doing software engineering jobs. They fall on their face trying to work in sprawling codebases.

However, they are excellent at writing small bespoke programs on behalf of regular people.

Becky doesn't need ChatGPT to one-shot Excel.exe to keep track of the things she sells at the craft fair that afternoon.

This is a huge blind-spot I keep seeing people miss. LLM "programmers" are way way more useful to regular people than they are to career programmers.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#130

Post by roywiggins »

minimaxir wrote: post #82
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is watt-hours the right unit of measurement here? That's how electricity is most commonly priced. What else would you want?

It's more that every time the topic has come up, it's reported in watts and I'm not sure if there's a nuance I'm missing. It's entirely possible those reports have been in watt-hours though and using watts for shorthand. I still find the Technology Connections video counterintuitive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOK5xkFijPc

Watt-hours are what matter. If you want to boil a kettle, you need to use a certain minimum amount of watt-hours to do it, which corresponds to, say, burning a certain amount of propane. If you care about how many times you can boil a kettle on a bottle of propane, you care about the watt-hours expended. If you had perfect insulation you could boil a kettle by applying barely any watts for a long enough time and it would take the same amount of propane.

There are situations where Watts per se matter, eg if you build a datacenters in an area that doesn't have enough spare electricity capacity to generate enough watts to cover you, and you'd end up browning out the grid. Or you have a faulty burner and can't pump enough watts into your water to boil it before the heat leaks out, no matter how long you run it.

Post reply on HN