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The Gentle Singularity

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: The Gentle Singularity

#181

Post by slibhb »

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

> a million plus people die from malaria and AIDS combined each year

These are political problems not technological problems.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#182

Post by bgwalter »

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…

> experts will probably still be much better than novices, as long as they embrace the new tools.

Sure, we'll all get a subscription and subject ourselves to biometric verification in order to continue our profession.

OpenAI's website looks pretty bad. Shouldn't it be the best website in existence if the new Übermensch programmers rely on "AI"?

What about the horrible code quality of "AI" applications in the "scientific" Python sphere? Shouldn't the code have been improved by "AI"?

So many questions and no one shows us the code.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#183

Post by waldohatesyou »

woopsn wrote: post #152

The "fundamental limiter of human progress" is not energy/intelligence lol. No - surprise, it's people. Bear in mind he builds this "gentle singularity" in the great progressive UAE.

How is it not? In the grand scheme of human history, energy usage constantly goes up. What other measure could you possibly use to measure progress?

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#184

Post by chrismartin »

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…

Hey Sam, does 0.34 watt-hours per query include an amortization of the energy consumed to train the model, or only the marginal energy consumed by inference?

I used to believe this wasn't worth considering (because while training is energy-intensive, once the model is trained we can use it forever.) But in practice it seems like we switch to newer/better models every few months, so a model has a limited period of usefulness.

> (is watt-hours the right unit of measurement here?)

Yes, because we want to measure energy consumed, while watts is only a measure of instantaneous power.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#185

Post by ab5tract »

danenania wrote: post #159
ab5tract wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not ever been in a self-driving car. I've seen a few of them visiting the Bay Area. Only taxis seem to be allowed to use this tech so far. I've always been a proponent that we would see self driving cars in our lifetime. But they have absolutely not arrived outside of the sheltered enclaves of a handful of tech-centered cities.

There aren't just a "few" in the Bay Area—they've become totally ubiquitous in SF.

That hardly entails that self-driving cars have "arrived". Am I mistaken or is it true that you can't even own and operate one yourself?

In my opinion, it's as similarly off-base as to making claims that 'mach speed consumer air travel' "arrived" just because for a few decades you could catch a Concorde flight between NYC and London.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#187

Post by [deleted] »

lubujackson wrote: post #157
ab5tract wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not ever been in a self-driving car. I've seen a few of them visiting the Bay Area. Only taxis seem to be allowed to use this tech so far. I've always been a proponent that we would see self driving cars in our lifetime. But they have absolutely not arrived outside of the sheltered enclaves of a handful of tech-centered cities.

Goal post: moved.

[deleted]

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#188

Post by physix »

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?

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-much-energy-does-it-take-...

:-)

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#189

Post by greenie_beans »

wolecki wrote: post #54

Some reasoning tokens on this post: >Intelligence too cheap to meter is well within grasp And also: >cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity. Which is a meter-worthy resource. So intelligence effect on people's lives is in the order of magnitude of one second of a toaster use each day, in present value. This begs the question: what could you do with a toaster-second say 5 years…

watch the cost of electricity go up because the demand created by data centers. i'm building an off grid solar system right now and it ain't cheap! thinking about a future where consumers are competing with data centers for electricity makes me think it might feel cheap in the future, though.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#190

Post by godelski »

jonplackett wrote: post #178
bko wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 apartme…

I’m not sure - we have enough food to feed everyone on earth. We have cures to many diseases. We have enough homes for everyone. Inequality is bad and getting worse. Big changes accelerate it because richer people can adapt and take advantage faster. I enjoy playing around with AI for fun and find it amazingly useful. But I do not believe it can solve inequality - that’s a people problem.

I work in ML and honestly I agree. We live in a fairly post scarce world. We could already live in a much less post scarce world.

AI, as most technology, make these things easier, but they are power. It's all about what you do with power. You can build power plants or bombs. AI could (let's be hypothetical) free humans from all necessary labor. Robots making all the food, mining all the materials, and do the whole pipeline. But that requires a fundamental rethinking of how we operate now. That world isn't socialism nor capitalism. That's a world where ownership becomes ill defined in many settings but still strict in others. It's easy to income Star Trek but hard to imagine how we get there from here. Do we trust a few people to make all the robots to do all those things and then just abdicate all that power? Do we trust governments to do it? There's reason to trust no one. Because a deep dystopian can be created from any such scenarios. Going towards that hypothetical future is dangerous. Not because super intelligences, but because of us. Those with power tend to not just freely abdicate it... that's not a problem we're discussing enough and our more frequent conversations of ASI and the like just distracts from this one.

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