My first thought was who could possibly say with a straight face that we are close to super after the spectacular failure of AI to scale up with more compute.
Oh right, Sam Altman.
The Gentle Singularity
371–380 of 557 posts
Re: The Gentle Singularity
#372> Scientific progress is the biggest driver of overall progress
> There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before
Real wages haven’t risen since 1980. Wealth inequality has. Most people have much less political power than they used to as wealth - and thus power - have become concentrated. Today we have smartphones, but also algorithm-driven polarization and a worldwide rise in authoritarian leaders. Depression and anxiety affect roughly 30% of our population.
The rise of wealth inequality and the stagnation of wages corresponds to the collapse of the labor movement under globalization. Without a counterbalancing force from workers, wealth accrues to the business class. Technological advances have improved our lives in some ways but not on balance.
So if we look at people’s well-being, society as whole hasn’t progressed since the 1980s; in many ways it’s gotten worse. Thus the trajectory of progress described in the blog post is make believe. The utopia Altman describes won’t appear. Mass layoffs, if they happen, will further concentrate wealth. AI technology will be used more and more for mass surveillance, algorithmic decision making (that would make Kafka blush), and cost cutting.
What we can realistically expect is lowering of quality of life, an increased shift to precarious work, further concentration of wealth and power, and increasing rates of suffering.
What we need instead of science fiction is to rebuild the labor movement. Otherwise “value creation” and technology’s benefits will continue to accrue to a dwindling fraction of society. And more and more it will be at everyone else’s expense.
Re: The Gentle Singularity
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
And make them work together. It's not just having a big bag of tricks; it's also knowing which trick to pull out when. (And that may just be pulling out a trick, trying it, and knowing when the results aren't good enough, and so trying a different one.)
The observant will note that the word "knowing" kept appearing in the previous paragraph. Can that knowing also be reduced to LLM-like tricks? Or is it an additional step?
Re: The Gentle Singularity
#374I'm feeling a bit cheated it's 2025 and I just bought a brand new car that does not drive itself and runs on dead dinosaurs.
You at least had the option of buying one that did not run on dead dinosaurs.
Re: The Gentle Singularity
#375Re: The Gentle Singularity
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
good luck w that
Re: The Gentle Singularity
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Datacentre operators want to keep energy costs down and also have capital to make it happen.
weird i didn't know they could build nuclear power plants (surely you are being sarcastic?)
also this is weird i thought electricity prices only get cheaper? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610
Re: The Gentle Singularity
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
this is not the same thing and all the AI CEOs would agree with me. very absurd statement to try to use for your argument.
but here is some data bro! https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610
Re: The Gentle Singularity
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Datacentre operators want to keep energy costs down and also have capital to make it happen.
[deleted]
Re: The Gentle Singularity
#380Earlier 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…
My company is a non-tech company that is in manufacturing. I'm not a programmer and niether is anyone else here.
So far I have created 7 programs that are now used daily in production. One of them replaces a $1k/yr/usr CAD package, and another we used to bring in a contractor to write. The others a miscellaneous apps for automating/simplifying our in houses processes. None of the programs are more than 6k LOC.