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The Gentle Singularity

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: The Gentle Singularity

#351

Post by le-mark »

throw310822 wrote: post #275
paradox242 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If any of that were true, then the llm would be actively involved in advancing themselves, or assisting humans in a meaningful way in the endeavor, which they’re not so far as I can tell.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#352

Post by iNic »

quonn wrote: post #344
iNic wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mere token prediction comment is wrong, but I don't think any of the other comments really explained why. Next token prediction is not what the AI does, but its goal. It's like saying soccer is a boring sport having only ever seen the final scores. The important thing about LLMs is that they can internally represent many different complex ideas efficiently and coherently! This makes them an incredible starting po…

> that they can internally represent many different complex ideas efficiently and coherently The Transformer circuits[0] suggest that this representation is not coherent at all. [0] https://transformer-circuits.pub

I guess that depends on what you think is coherent. A key finding is that the larger the network the more coherent the representation becomes. One example is larger networks merge the same concept across different languages into a single concept (as humans do). The addition circuits are also fairly easy to interpret.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#353

Post by roenxi »

myrmidon wrote: post #341
roenxi wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is worth noting that the effect is jaw-droppingly stark. The regulators managed to invert the learning curve [0] so the more power plants get built the more expensive it gets! It is one of the most stunning failures of an industrial society in the modern era; the damage this did to us all is huge. It is disheartening that our leadership/society chose to turn their backs on the future and we're all lucky that the C…

> The regulators managed to invert the learning curve [0] This is conjecture. If you wanted to establish this, you would have to show that cost of (skilled) labor was unchanging or negligible. It is also important to consider that nuclear power deaths/damages are much more localized and traceable than excess deaths from air pollution, and thus much less acceptable to the voting population-- you could argue that this…

Those are constant dollars. Are you claiming that the real cost of labour went up 4- to 8-fold in the nuclear industry? Why did that happen? The median nuclear plant construction worker would be making $240k/annum type wages. And as I recall I've not heard of that sort of wage rise outside a regulatory failure or somewhere like China undergoing a massive economic boom.

> It is also important to consider that nuclear power deaths/damages...

Maybe you can answer this for me - what deaths and damages? So far I've never been able to pin down any actual death or damage to a nuclear meltdown. I'm sure there are some, but most of the actual attempts to quantify it require appealing to hypothetical deaths and damages that no-one can specifically point to, or tiny numbers that are irrelevant to industrial policy.

I know people who lived in a town next to a lead-zinc mine. That appears to be about as bad as a nuclear crisis from what I can gather and it doesn't seem to be causing anyone undue stress. We're still using lead and zinc. People still live in the town.

> What do you believe that is?

They're building reactors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea... is a happy tale of new and planned plants.

Some of them are really cool too, there is one by the Gobi desert, apparently to prove that they don't need to use water as a coolant.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#354

Post by walleeee »

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…

> It's really cool to hear a public figure seriously talk about self-replicating machines. To me this is the key to unlocking human potential and ending material scarcity.

You are a self-replicating machine running on top of a massive web of other self replicating machines. You are fundamentally constrained by the energy and materials available to you, as is your entire operating stack. You are a petal on a fractal flower whose growth, already exponential, threatens to crack its pot.

Incidentally, crackpot would be a good way to describe these sorts of pieces, if the person writing them did not so obviously benefit from writing them.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#355

Post by agumonkey »

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 TB of everything with transformers makes a difference, maybe i'm just too uneducated, but the amount of semantic context that can be taken into account when generating the next token is really disrupting.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#356

Post by cs702 »

Maybe. AI models have continued to scale up at a rapid rate, and have continued to get better at performing ever more impressive tasks. Sure, yes, the OP is breathless corporate-speak, but given how much impressive progress we've seen in AI in just a few years, it would be foolish to dismiss these pronouncements off-hand.

On the other hand, we may need more practical/theoretical breakthroughs to be able to build AI models that are reliable and precise, so they stop making up stuff "whenever they feel like it." Unfortunately, the timing of breakthroughs is not predictable. Maybe it will take months. Maybe it will take a decade. No one knows for sure.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#357

Post by phorkyas82 »

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…

As far as I understood any AI model is just a linear combination of its training data. Even if that were such a large corpus as the entire web... it's still just like a sophisticated compression of other's people's expressions.

It has not made its own experiences, not interacted with the outer world. Dunno, I won't to rule out something operating solely on language artifacts cannot develop intelligence or consciousness, whatever that is,.. but so far there are also enough humans we could care about and invest into.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#358

Post by exe34 »

Sammi wrote: post #329
helloplanets wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your take on Anthropic's 'Tracing the thoughts of a large language model'? [0] > To write the second line, the model had to satisfy two constraints at the same time: the need to rhyme (with "grab it"), and the need to make sense (why did he grab the carrot?). Our guess was that Claude was writing word-by-word without much forethought until the end of the line, where it would make sure to pick a word that rhyme…

What is called "planning" or "thinking" here doesn't seem conceptually much different to me than going from naive breath first search based Dijkstra shortest path search, to adding a heuristics that makes it search in a particular direction first and calling it A*. In both cases you're adding another layer to an existing algorithm in order to make it more effective. Doesn't make either AGI. I'm really no expert in ne…

> In both cases you're adding another layer to an existing algorithm in order to make it more effective. Doesn't make either AGI.

Yet. The human mind is a big bag of tricks. If the creators of AI can enumerate a large enough list of capabilities and implement those, then the product can be as good as 90% of humans, but at a fraction of the cost and a billion times the speed - then it doesn't matter if it's AGI or not. It will have economic consequences.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#359

Post by tlb »

phorkyas82 wrote: post #357
trashtester wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As far as I understood any AI model is just a linear combination of its training data. Even if that were such a large corpus as the entire web... it's still just like a sophisticated compression of other's people's expressions. It has not made its own experiences, not interacted with the outer world. Dunno, I won't to rule out something operating solely on language artifacts cannot develop intelligence or consciousne…

LLMs are not a linear combination of training data.

Some LLMs have interacted with the outside world, such as through reinforcement learning while trying to complete tasks in simulated physics environments.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#360

Post by api »

libraryatnight wrote: post #277
api wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

The pure play MBA is the capitalist West's equivalent of the Soviet apparatchik:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparatchik

Been saying that for years. Private equity is perhaps analogous to the Politburo.

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