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The Gentle Singularity

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: The Gentle Singularity

#161

Post by blabus »

woah wrote: post #134
afavour wrote: post #13

> It’s hard to even imagine today what we will have discovered by 2035; maybe we will go from solving high-energy physics one year to beginning space colonization the next year I heard similar things in my college dorm, amid all the hazy smoke. It’s very difficult to take this stuff seriously. It’s like the initial hype around self driving cars wound up by 1000x. Because we got from 1 to 100 of course we’ll get from…

> It’s like the initial hype around self driving cars Wait... Self driving cars actually happened. Seems like the hype was true, but 5 years later than expected and now people just think it's normal so they feel the hype was overblown.

The progress thus far has been very impressive but the ultimate product the average person imagines as a "self-driving car", one where you can literally devote zero attention and do something else entirely while being driven around (and that handles effectively any edge case), is still quite a ways off.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#162

Post by sponnath »

Davidzheng wrote: post #126
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

We are now many years into full AI SWEs will become a reality in 12 months.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#163

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

lantry wrote: post #160
michaelbarton wrote: post #158

Regarding a super intelligence creating new cures: a million plus people die from malaria and AIDS combined each year. We have effective treatments for both, yet the USAID was recently shut down. I enjoy technology but less and less so each year, because it increasingly feels like there’s some kind of disconnect with the real world that’s hard to put my finger on

exactly. AI won't change the underlying incentives. We can't solve the problem of "alignment" between humans, so how can we ever solve it for AI? > Scientific progress is the biggest driver of overall progress; it’s hugely exciting to think about how much more we could have. Does he mean "how much more we could have if our federal government wasn't actively destroying our science institutions"?

One could imagine scientific institutions that are less vulnerable to the whims of government. As loathe as I am to defend an Altman point, AI could play a role in making them possible.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#164

Post by nharada »

deadbabe wrote: post #154
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…

How many watts does a human brain need to produce a response to a query?

I think you should include the entire body for your comparison, not just the brain. We're not just measuring the GPUs, we're measuring the datacenter.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#165

Post by bruce511 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #97
GarnetFloride wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what they said about electricity when nuclear power plants were proposed. What's your electricity bill like today?

The primary operating cost of traditional power plants is fuel, i.e. coal and natural gas. The fuel cost for nuclear power plants is negligible because the energy content is higher by more than a factor of a million. So if you build enough nuclear plants to power the grid, charging per kWh for the electricity is pointless because the marginal cost of the fuel is so low. Meanwhile the construction cost should be on pa…

Your point is not wrong, but I'd clarify a couple things;

The primary cost of a traditional plant is fuel. However a nuclear plant needs a tad more (qualified) oversight than a coal plant.

In the same way that the navy has specialists for running nuclear propulsion systems versus crew needed for diesel engines. Not surprisingly nuclear engines cost "more than fuel".

That cost may end up being insignificant in the long run, but cost is not zero. And shortages of staff would matter (like it does with ATC at the moment.)

Construction cost should be much lower than it is, but I don't think it'll be as cheap as say coal or diesel. The nature of the fuel would always require some extras, if only because the penalty-for-failure is so high. There's a difference between a coal-plant catastrophe and Chernobyl.

So there are costs gor running nuclear, I don't think it necessarily gets "too cheap to measure".

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#166

Post by zeofig »

km3r wrote: post #147
paxys wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No we'll totally have flying cars and cure cancer and live life in an AR/VR multiverse and make all knowledge 100% free to everyone worldwide. Meanwhile the only real advancements in tech in the last two decades have been smaller computers (smartphones) and ads.

And self driving cars. Real time ray tracing. WiFi. Cloud computing. starlink. Crispr. mRNA vaccines. Blockchain. Voice assistants.

A humorously underwhelming list.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#167

Post by rglover »

michaelbarton wrote: post #158

Regarding a super intelligence creating new cures: a million plus people die from malaria and AIDS combined each year. We have effective treatments for both, yet the USAID was recently shut down. I enjoy technology but less and less so each year, because it increasingly feels like there’s some kind of disconnect with the real world that’s hard to put my finger on

> it increasingly feels like there’s some kind of disconnect with the real world that’s hard to put my finger on

My take: echo chambers have become mainstream (ironically, aided by technology). Typically that's online for most people, but in SF, it's a physical echo chamber, too.

That echo chamber allows large numbers of people (coincidentally, the people shepherding a lot of the technology) to rationalize any position they come up with and fall into a semi-permanent state of cognitive dissonance ("of course my technological solution is the solution").

If other people are saying the same thing nearly everywhere you look, who's to say those who disagree are actually the correct ones?

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#168

Post by lantry »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #163
lantry wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

exactly. AI won't change the underlying incentives. We can't solve the problem of "alignment" between humans, so how can we ever solve it for AI? > Scientific progress is the biggest driver of overall progress; it’s hugely exciting to think about how much more we could have. Does he mean "how much more we could have if our federal government wasn't actively destroying our science institutions"?

One could imagine scientific institutions that are less vulnerable to the whims of government. As loathe as I am to defend an Altman point, AI could play a role in making them possible.

There are lots of things AI could do. But the things AI will do are governed by the incentives of the underlying system (i.e. society).

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#169

Post by [deleted] »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #150

Do you think we will get AI models capable of learning in real time, using a small number of examples similar to humans, in the next few years? This seems like a key barrier to AGI. More broadly, I wonder how many key insights he thinks are actually missing for AGI or ASI. This article suggests that we've already cleared the major hurdles, but I think there are still some major keys missing. Overall his predictions s…

[deleted]

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#170

Post by bko »

michaelbarton wrote: post #158

Regarding a super intelligence creating new cures: a million plus people die from malaria and AIDS combined each year. We have effective treatments for both, yet the USAID was recently shut down. I enjoy technology but less and less so each year, because it increasingly feels like there’s some kind of disconnect with the real world that’s hard to put my finger on

Unfortunately, many problems are last mile problems. If we could teleport medicine and technology to everyone who needs it, these problems would be mostly solved. And I'm sure drug companies would love to make money on those people since their marginal cost is so low. But coordination is hard, and it's not necessarily a problem money can fix.

It's like the math that takes # of homeless people times cost of an apartment, and then people claim we can solve homelessness for [reasonable amount]. Makes sense until you look how much US spends on homelessness every year already.

Cell phone technology was the closest thing we got to teleporting technology and wealth to the rest of the world. Most developing countries completely skipped a phase of development that required crazy amounts of infrastructure to be built out. More people have cell phones than running water. It's pretty incredible if you think about it. Hopefully AI will be a similar leap frog.

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