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The Gentle Singularity

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: The Gentle Singularity

#191

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

lantry wrote: post #168
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Those incentives are themselves the output of a variety of heuristics that we rely on only due to a lack of viable alternatives. I expect that eventually AI will make some alternatives viable because the bottleneck is so often an information processing one. Three examples:

- Loans get issued when they're likely to make a banker rich. We know that's a lousy proxy for assurances that their associated ventures will be beneficial to the public, but it kinda sorta works enough.

- Those loans cause money to enter the system and then we all chase it around and we cooperate with people who give us some of it even though we know that having money is a lousy proxy for competence or vision or integrity or any other virtue that might actually warrant such deference, but it kinda sorta works enough.

- Research gets done in support of publications, the count of which is used to assess the capability of the researcher, even though we know that having many publications is a lousy proxy for having a made a positive impact, but it kinda sorta works enough.

If we can fix these systems that are just limping along... If money can enter the system in support of ventures which are widely helpful, not just profitable... If we can support each other due to traits we find valuable in each other, not just because of some happenstance regarding scarcity. If we can encourage effective research in pursuit of widely sought after goals, rather than just counting publications... well that will be a whole new world with a new incentive structure. AI could make it happen if it manages to dispense with all these lousy proxies.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#192

Post by adverbly »

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

> 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

Same here.

I want to be an engineer.

As a good engineer, I find a problem then recursively ask why.

I end up with a political root cause - not a technical one.

This makes me sad.

I wish I could just be an engineer.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#193

Post by unstablediffusi »

greenie_beans wrote: post #189
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.

bro, how much did your electricity cost go up because of millions of people playing games on their 500w+ gpus? by a billion of people watching youtube? by hundreds of millions of women and children scrolling instagram and tiktok 8 hours a day?

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#194

Post by Avicebron »

slibhb wrote: post #181
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.

we should separate the language a bit here, technological problems are political problems inasmuch as corporations and the individuals who harness that infrastructure to gain immense wealth proclaim themselves eminent technologists who exert influence over the political sphere through monetary feedback mechanisms that are created by selling technical solutions to political problems.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#195

Post by afavour »

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.

I’ve never seen nor ridden in one. I know there are deployments in a few cities but that is a far, far cry from the future we were told was right around the corner.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#196

Post by meroes »

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

What? AI proofs are still atrocious.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#197

Post by jonfromsf »

pj_mukh wrote: post #85
JadeNB wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are they gonna do evict working families? Good luck This seems optimistic.

If a "professional tenant" with an adversarial landlord can hang on for years, I feel like my chances with no landlords and a clean deed is actually much better. It's simply pitting the most dysfunctional municipal and judicial systems against each other with the default outcome being people being housed.

I don't understand this plan. Won't you lose all the money you spent buying the houses and building the quadplexes?

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#198

Post by JshWright »

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

TB killed even more than those two combined and is also on the list of “things we know how to treat, but as a society have decided not to”.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#199

Post by woopsn »

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…

Artificial intelligence is a nourished and well educated population. Plus some Adderall maybe. Those are the key insights which represent the only scientific basis for that term.

The crazy thing is that a well crafted language model is great product. A man should be content to say "my company did something akin to compressing the whole internet behind a single API" and take his just rewards. Why sully that reputation boasting to have invented a singularity that solves every (economically registerable) problem on Earth?

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#200

Post by lantry »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #191
lantry wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Those incentives are themselves the output of a variety of heuristics that we rely on only due to a lack of viable alternatives. I expect that eventually AI will make some alternatives viable because the bottleneck is so often an information processing one. Three examples: - Loans get issued when they're likely to make a banker rich. We know that's a lousy proxy for assurances that their associated ventures will be b…

> AI could make it happen if it manages to dispense with all these lousy proxies.

The thing that you, altman, and every other AI booster fail to explain is how AI will do this. Every argument is littered with "if"s and "could"s, and it's just taken for granted that AI will be smart enough to find a solution that solves all our problems. It's also taken for granted that we'll actually implement the solution! If AI said that curing cancer requires raising taxes, cancer would remain uncured.

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