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The Gentle Singularity

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: The Gentle Singularity

#331

Post by Aeolun »

flessner wrote: post #267

> Already we live with incredible digital intelligence, and after some initial shock, most of us are pretty used to it. Very quickly we go from being amazed that AI can generate a beautifully-written paragraph to wondering when it can generate a beautifully-written novel; It was probably around 7 years ago when I first got interested in machine learning. Back then I followed a crude YouTube tutorial which consisted o…

> wondering when it can generate a beautifully-written novel

Not quite yet, but I’m working on it. It’s ~~hard~~ impossible to get original ideas out of an LLM, so it’ll probably always be a human assisted effort.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#332

Post by lantry »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #231
lantry wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sai…

So I think this piece by Altman is mostly hype smoke also but I really dislike your framing here. Somehow the "AI boosters" have to come up with a how but the "AI doomers" can just sit back, criticize, and not solution? Let's be real here, US politics is fucked and none of us knows how to fix it.

> Somehow the "AI boosters" have to come up with a how but the "AI doomers" can just sit back, criticize, and not solution?

as the top level comment pointed out, we have solutions to many of these things, but we choose not to do them. I don't think it's unfair to say "maybe we shouldn't spend billions of dollars on this thing that will probably just reinforce existing power structures".

> Let's be real here, US politics is fucked and none of us knows how to fix it.

Agreed.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#333

Post by rsynnott »

> Very quickly we go from being amazed that AI can generate a beautifully-written paragraph

I mean, I suppose Sam loves ChatGPT like his own child, but I would struggle to describe any of its output as 'beautiful'! 'Grating' would be the word that springs to mind, generally.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#334

Post by azan_ »

tsimionescu wrote: post #284
Workaccount2 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Do you have any proof whatsoever that non-programmers are using LLMs to write small bespoke apps for them successfully? Programming ecosystems are generally very unfriendly to this type of use case, with plenty of setup required to get something usable out even if you have the code available. Especially if you'd like to run the results on your phone. Sure, an LLM might be able to guide you through the steps, and even…

> Do you have any proof whatsoever that non-programmers are using LLMs to write small bespoke apps for them successfully?

I’m radiologist, I’ve been paying for software that sped up my reporting like 200 usd per month. I’ve remade all the functionality I need in one evening with cursor and added some things that I’ve found missing from the original software.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#335

Post by andsoitis »

trashtester wrote: post #287
flessner wrote: post #267

> Already we live with incredible digital intelligence, and after some initial shock, most of us are pretty used to it. Very quickly we go from being amazed that AI can generate a beautifully-written paragraph to wondering when it can generate a beautifully-written novel; It was probably around 7 years ago when I first got interested in machine learning. Back then I followed a crude YouTube tutorial which consisted o…

The "next token prediction" is a distraction. That's not where the interesting part of an AI model happens. If you think of the tokenization near the end as a serializer, something like turning an object model into json, you get a better understanding. The interesting part of a an OOP program is not in the json, but what happens in memory before the json is created. Likewise, the interesting parts of a neural net mod…

> the AI models detect deeper and deeper patterns of reality. Much deeper than the surface pattern of the text

What are you talking about?

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#336

Post by falcor84 »

muglug wrote: post #46

I’ve heard a joke that under Steve Jobs, the number of big initiatives at Apple was limited to the number of execs Steve could shout at in a given day. I see a similar thing at work — the number of projects a developer can get through isn’t bounded by the lines of code they can churn out in a day. Instead it’s bounded by their appetite for getting shouted at when something goes wrong. Until you can shout at an LLM, I…

What do you mean? I've been productively shouting at LLMs (particularly via ChatGPT's advanced voice mode) for quite a while now, and they're reasonably receptive to my shouting. More recently , I've been (textually) shouting at OpenaAI's async Codex agents, and they're quite receptive too.

We're obviously not quite there yet, but I don't see any inherent limitation to human managers' ability to shout at AI agents. I'll go even a step further and say that knowing that the AI doesn't actually have feelings that I can affect, and that it has limited context helps make my shouting more productive, focusing on the task at hand, rather than on its general faults, as I might when I'm angry at a human.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#337

Post by hdjdbdirbrbtv »

apt-apt-apt-apt wrote: post #253
hdjdbdirbrbtv wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC ( and it was 20 years ago now that I learnt this) the brain uses 20% of the body's resting energy usage. Most of that is keeping neurons polarised to the outside (ion pumps need ATP!!!). The body uses 25w resting and thus the brain is about 5w. Source: biology degree but like I said please take with the same amount of weight as a hallucinating LLM.

GPT says: Unless you're a hamster hooked up to a Fitbit, it's more like 60–70W for a normal adult human. So the brain’s real power draw is more like 15–20W, not 5W Resting energy usage in humans is ~1200–1500 kcal/day, or about 60–70 watts, depending on the person. Logic holds, estimate is just low

Lol thanks for the correction! like I said... it had been 20 years.. I misremembered the amounts :P

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#338

Post by falcor84 »

tdstein wrote: post #186

> I have no doubt they will feel incredibly important and satisfying to the people doing them. How rude.

How is that rude?

I suppose that my work as a coder would look equally odd and useless to someone looking at it from 1000 years ago, while being important and satisfying to me. I didn't sense any condescension in that.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#339

Post by sevensor »

Teever wrote: post #270

> There are other self-reinforcing loops at play. The economic value creation has started a flywheel of compounding infrastructure buildout to run these increasingly-powerful AI systems. And robots that can build other robots (and in some sense, datacenters that can build other datacenters) aren’t that far off. > If we have to make the first million humanoid robots the old-fashioned way, but then they can operate the…

Maintaining actual robots in an actual factory is not a job robots are remotely able to do at the moment. They can’t even identify, let alone fix, a problem like a cracked rotor bar in a motor. Not only that, how do they decide to take the machine down to replace a motor or keep running it until the motor fails? And if it fails repeatedly, are the robots going to recognize the need to diagnose the root cause? How? And what spares should we stock? This is just one small facet of the hugely complex and messy job of making real things in the real world. It’s a mixture of mechanical skill, technical judgement, and business reasoning. We’re working on getting machines to push the right grease into the right zerk at the right time, and even that technology, which does a predictable thing on a predictable schedule, still competes with a guy who walks the floor with a grease gun.

I’m astonished by the sheer arrogance of a man who thinks we’re anywhere near the point where general purpose robots build general purpose robots.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#340

Post by solarwindy »

Joeri wrote: post #299
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't buy into the "red tape" argument. For me it's all due to a lack of a business case. I think building (LWR) nuclear plants is just freaking expensive, has always been freaking expensive, was bankrolled for a while by governments because they thought it would get cheaper, and then largely abandoned in most countries when it proved to be an engineering dead end. Here's an MIT study that dug into the reasons behi…

> Russia is the most pro-nuclear country in the world

Not France?

> France derives about 70% of its electricity from nuclear energy, due to a long-standing policy based on energy security.

— https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...

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