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The Gentle Singularity

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: The Gentle Singularity

#271

Post by msgodel »

rl3 wrote: post #269
imgabe wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought we weren't a Christian country? Either way, individuals are welcome to practice any sort of compassion they want with their own money. The government collects tax dollars from citizens under threat of violence, and their only responsibility should be to use that money to ensure the welfare of its citizens, not to engage in charity work in other countries. If citizens want to do that, have the government col…

> Either way, individuals are welcome to practice any sort of compassion they want with their own money. The government collects tax dollars from citizens under threat of violence, and their only responsibility should be to use that money to ensure the welfare of its citizens, not to engage in charity work in other countries. Soft power is of obvious immense benefit to citizens of the United States, however you've re…

It's a benefit to our government but this has mostly been used against citizens.

I'm more than happy to see the "empire" die and willing to do anything I can to speed that along.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#272

Post by nhdjd »

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.

Fusion will show up soon dont worry. AI will accelerate its arrival.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#273

Post by graemep »

Agentlien wrote: post #254
Avicebron wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great, but Becky at the farmer's market doesn't want to be re-inventing notepad on her computer to sell sourdough. This smells like "Self-checkouts", "perfect bespoke solution so that everyone can check their own groceries out, no need to wait for a slow/expensive _human_ to get the job done, except you end up basically just doing the cashiers job and waiting around inconveniently whenever you want to get some…

On a tangent: what about self scanning? Here in Sweden that is the norm. For the last ten years I've brought my own bags, packed everything like I want it as I grab it - with a quick blip from the scanner - and then checkout is no line, no cashier, no unpacking and packing things again. Just scanning my card and going through a brief screen to check that the summary looks right. Instead of a guard there's a scanner b…

British supermarkets mostly require the use of their app to self-scan. You need to either use your phone or use your app to start the scanner. Once you have done that it works OK. A bit error prone.

The other problem is that, like self checkout, it often requires human intervention (buying alcohol or high value items, for examples) still requires human intervention. This can require a long wait at the end. I once got so sick of waiting that I left my shopping and walked away and went somewhere else.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#274

Post by libraryatnight »

satvikpendem wrote: post #176
Avicebron wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great, but Becky at the farmer's market doesn't want to be re-inventing notepad on her computer to sell sourdough. This smells like "Self-checkouts", "perfect bespoke solution so that everyone can check their own groceries out, no need to wait for a slow/expensive _human_ to get the job done, except you end up basically just doing the cashiers job and waiting around inconveniently whenever you want to get some…

And yet I'd much rather self checkout than have a cashier do it for me.

The only time, for me, this is true, is when it's empty and I have very few items. If there's a line, I'd rather wait for the cashier. Self-checkout seems to get clogged up with people waiting for the supervising human the busier it is, so to have a human or two (one ringing one bagging) when I've got a cart and there's a line, is advantageous.

I'm also pretty anti-social and actually prefer the robotic banter of quickly checking out with a person to the anxious nightmare of just trying to buy something real quick and now waiting because the machine hates life more than me.

Oh and many of the folks doing the bagging at some of the stores are disabled, and I dunno - I hope we're taking care of people in those jobs.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#275

Post by throw310822 »

paradox242 wrote: post #155
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…

This is a condensed version of Altman's greatest hits when it comes to his pitch for the promise of AI as he (allegedly) conceives it, and in that sense it is nothing new. What is conspicuous is that there is a not-so-subtle reframing. No longer is AGI just around the corner, instead one gets the sense that OpenAI they have already looked around that corner and seen nothing there. No, this is one of what I expect wil…

Cool things down a bit? That's what you call "we're already in the accelerating part of the singularity, past the event horizon, the future progress curve looks vertical, the past one looks flat"? :D

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#276

Post by graemep »

LtWorf wrote: post #264
theptip wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. Jevons Paradox. The lower barrier to entry might mean the average quality of software goes WAY down. But this could be great if it means that there are 10x as many little apps that make one person happy by doing only as much as they need. The above is also consistent with the quantity of excellent software going way up as well (just slower than the below-average stuff).

What the android/apple appstores have taught me compared to the old symbian appstore is that we don't need more apps, we need decent ones. The current appstores have more.

One of the advantages of FDroid is that although tiny compared to Play Store, it is much better curated.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#277

Post by libraryatnight »

api wrote: post #211
disambiguation wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>. They fall on their face trying to work in sprawling codebases. >However, they are excellent at writing small bespoke programs For programmers I predict a future of a million micro services. Sprawling has always been an undesirable and unnecessary byproduct of growing code bases, but there's been no easy solution to that. I wonder if LLMs would perform better on a mono repo of many small services than one sprawling…

Micro service systems are just huge sprawling code bases with more glue code. Calling something over a network instead of via a local function call is still calling something.

For years one of my favorite experiences (amusing given your username) was being on calls for incidents where they get the dev on for X thing and an exec goes "I thought we got rid of that" and a bunch of people sheepishly explain it wasn't really retired... it was repurposed as an API. I especially loved it when the "retirement" of the broken thing was the execs big achievement. (The comedic nuance often being the thing could have been retired for real, but they demanded a timeline that necessitated the "fake" retirement)

It still happens but it's not a favorite experience anymore. It's just a source of loathing for MBA culture.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#278

Post by NitpickLawyer »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #48
jfernandez wrote: post #38

What's the goal of posting this right now ? A lot of what's written here seems to be well-trodden ground from the last two years of discussions, is it just to centralize a thesis within one post?

It's damage control because of recent research papers being published saying that AI is not reasoning

> because of recent research papers being published saying that AI is not reasoning

If you're thinking about the apple paper, you should know that its methodology was flawed in many ways, and their findings absolutely do not support the catchy title. But a lot of slop was generated because negativity + catchy title + apple = hits.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#279

Post by [deleted] »

biophysboy wrote: post #245
imgabe wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’ve been providing foreign aid for, what, like 70-80 years now? Have the dysfunctional governments fixed themselves yet? How long should it take? 100 years? 500 years? Maybe providing aid is just propping up dysfunctional governments by doing their job for them and it would be better in the long run if they were allowed to collapse and be replaced with something that was forced to be functional.

It’s globally useful to eradicate/reduce disease in a region irrespective of whether or not the region’s government becomes stable. Viruses and bacteria mutate and do not care about borders. I have no fantasies that aid will magically make countries stable.

[deleted]

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#280

Post by lmm »

satvikpendem wrote: post #176
Avicebron wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great, but Becky at the farmer's market doesn't want to be re-inventing notepad on her computer to sell sourdough. This smells like "Self-checkouts", "perfect bespoke solution so that everyone can check their own groceries out, no need to wait for a slow/expensive _human_ to get the job done, except you end up basically just doing the cashiers job and waiting around inconveniently whenever you want to get some…

And yet I'd much rather self checkout than have a cashier do it for me.

It's a marginal improvement perhaps, but nothing to write home about. And for other things (e.g. booking travel) the self-service experience can be worse.
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