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The Gentle Singularity

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: The Gentle Singularity

#361

Post by Teever »

walleeee wrote: post #354
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 f…

The industrial revolution brought about the development of fabulous innovations like the mass production of standardized and interchangeable parts which has been instrumental in achieving the level of economic production, scientific advancement and quality of life that we enjoy.

But I think that there are limitations on these kinds of techniques and we can see them with the changing economics of our most advanced technologies -- semiconductors. Improvements have slowed, capital investments have increased and cost per transistor have plateaued and are now starting to rise.

At the same time the way that we extract energy from our environment is not sustainable and is causing great imbalances in our atmosphere which are having cascading effects on the environment and this is all due to the fact that our energy systems are not closed loop.

If we're going to take manufacturing and industry as a whole to the next level just like the industrial revolution did we're going to need to take cues from biology. The next manufacturing revolution will be a merger of the ideas from the industrial revolution, the digital revolution and biological systems like the ones you describe above.

Self replicating systems that can heal, source their parts from the environment around them, and that can scale exponentially through processes akin to cellular division are inevitable.

They will allow us to offload the burden of mineral extraction and refining to the moon and asteroids, and will allow us to massively scale up the production of products on scales previously unimaginable and of goods full of elements like platinum or gold we consider obscenely expensive due to their relative rarity on Earth.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#363

Post by ben_w »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #128
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…

>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…

> This is a huge blind-spot I keep seeing people miss. LLM "programmers" are way way more useful to regular people than they are to career programmers.

Kinda. They're good, and I like them, but I think of them like a power tool: just because you can buy an angle grinder or a plasma cutter from a discount supermarket, doesn't mean the tool is safe in the hands of an untrained amateur.

Someone using it to help fix up a spreadsheet? Probably fine. But you should at least be able to read the code to the level you don't get this deliberate bad example to illustrate the point:

  #!/usr/bin/python3
  total_sales = 0.0
  def add_sale(total_sales, amount):
    total_sales = total_sales + amount
    print("total_sales: " + str(total_sales))
Still useful, still sufficiently advanced technology that for most people it is (Clarketech) magic, but also still has some rough edges.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#365

Post by olalonde »

tsimionescu wrote: post #294
woah wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No, they haven't , at least nowhere near the scope of the hype. The promise in the early 2010s was that in 10-20 years, human driving would be obsolete, that professional drivers would be out of a job, and that all land-based transportation would be overhauled. None of this is even close to happening. Waymo is impressive tech, for sure, but what they're proving is that this is just not currently solvable as a general…

The optimists got the timeline wrong but they were closer to the truth than those who said it would never happen. I have no idea how close AGI is but there is clearly no AI winter around the corner as some HNers have been predicting[0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23886325

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#367

Post by bitmasher9 »

patchorang wrote: post #362

Yesterday, I gave ChatGPT links to three recipes and told it to make me a grocery list. It left off ingredients. The very gentle singularity…

I often give ChatGPT simple tasks and it gets them wrong. Yesterday I took a picture of a video game and told it I was stuck, only to be given instructions that lead down a bad path in-game.

I also often retest new models with tasks old models failed, and see some improvements. I really liked “format this SQL generated by my ORM and explain it” last week.

I honestly have no insight on if the tasks it is failing to do are right around the corner or if they are decades away.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#368

Post by biophysboy »

imgabe wrote: post #288
biophysboy wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it is globally useful then the burden should be spread equally among all the countries on the globe. If the US is providing this service, other countries should compensate us for it.

Again, the US is not an outlier on foreign aid, especially now.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#369

Post by sevensor »

Teever wrote: post #347
sevensor wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? An…

How long do you think it will be before your average consumer has access to a pair of humanoid robots that each cost the price of a luxury vehicle and are able to perform maintenance and replace all the parts of the other?

Never? Technical feasibility notwithstanding, nobody is ever going to sell a mass market device that defeats planned obsolescence. That’s the opposite of how our economy works. What they’d do, assuming a competent humanoid robot, is design it iphone style so that you get a good five years and then the software won’t update. At that point you scrap it and buy another one.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#370

Post by quonn »

iNic wrote: post #352
quonn wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> merge the same concept

It's doing compression which does not mean it's coherent.

> The addition circuits are also fairly easy to interpret.

The addition circuits make no sense whatsoever. It's doing great at guessing that's all.

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