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The Gentle Singularity

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: The Gentle Singularity

#391

Post by gengwyn »

trashtester wrote: post #297
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unsurprisingly, this scared the crap out of the fossil fuel industry in the US and countries like Russia that are net exporters of fossil fuels, so they've spent decades lobbying to bind nuclear plant construction up in red tape to prevent them being built and funding anti-nuclear propaganda. This is frankly nonsense, and my hope is that this nonsense is coming from a person too young to remember the real, valid fe…

The fears from 3 Mile Island and Fukushima were almost completely irrational. The death toll from those was too low to measure. And the fears from Chernobyl was MOSTLY irrational. The reason for the extreme fears that are generated from even very moderate spills from nuclear plants comes in part from the association with nuclear bombs and in part from fear of the unknown. A lot (if not most) people shut their rationa…

The tragedy of Chernobyl is it being seen as a failure of nuclear energy, rather than a failure of the Soviet government.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#392

Post by tim333 »

grafmax wrote: post #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…

>Real wages haven’t risen since 1980

is a very US thing. In China they've probably 10xd over that time.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#393

Post by LtWorf »

munksbeer wrote: post #386
LtWorf wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in sweden it is not "the norm" by any definition of "norm". Also it's incredibly slower and not "one blip away". And the scanner to exit is terrible for fire safety and accessibility. Also I've seen it break with the result that you had to trigger the alarm to leave. It does not work smoothly at all, but perhaps you live in a different sweden than I.

It works pretty well in the UK. The nice thing is, I can pack my bags as I shop, so I don't feel stressed when I get to the checkout. I use this method of shopping whenever available.

In sweden you have to unpack and re-pack at the checkout. And if you have a backpack you can't place stuff inside it. No. You have to unpack, place everything on a scale and then place everything in your backpack again.

And for items like bread or so you need to navigate a number of menus to find it.

And of course you are asked if you are a member, if you'd like to become a member, if you want to do a donation, and a number of other useless questions.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#394

Post by hollerith »

tim333 wrote: post #392
grafmax wrote: post #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…

>Real wages haven’t risen since 1980 is a very US thing. In China they've probably 10xd over that time.

Even after that 10x growth, median Chinese household income is only 13-16% of US median household income:

China: ~$10,000 – $12,000

US: ~$74,580 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2022)

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#395

Post by tim333 »

GarnetFloride wrote: post #65
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…

That's what they said about electricity when nuclear power plants were proposed. What's your electricity bill like today?

My and or my family's electricity bills have never been near zero. On the other hand my AI bill is zero. I think different economics apply.

(that excludes a brief period when I camped with a solar panel)

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#396

Post by exe34 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #373
exe34 wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It's sufficient to appear to know. My washing machine "knows" when my clothes are dry.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#397

Post by tim333 »

solarwindy wrote: post #340
Joeri wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Russia likes nukes so they can threaten to nuke everyone.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#398

Post by theptip »

tsimionescu wrote: post #285
theptip wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watt-hours seem good right now, and rebut the current arguments that LLMs are wasteful. They might soon stop being the right lens, if your agents can go off and (in parallel) expend some arbitrary and borderline-unknowable budget of energy on a single request. At some point you’ll need to measure in terms of $ earned per W-H, or just $out/$in.

(average) Watt-hours would still be the right unit to measure that, if the question is about energy efficiency / environmental impact. You still care how much energy those agents consume to achieve a given task, and the time it takes for tasks is still variable, so you need to multiply by time. Money is irrelevant to energy efficiency.

> People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses; the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours

My point was twofold, “the average query” becomes less meaningful as the variance increases. Sure one can _in principle_ report W-h spent on your account or query, but I think it will get more opaque and hard to predict. Average becomes less useful when agents can do an unpredictable amount of work with increasingly large bounds.

Second, and this was perhaps worthy of expanding in my post - I think in the radical abundance world that Altman is describing, energy and efficiency stops being something that people talk about. Fusion, space based solar farms, whatever, it’s easy to imagine solving this stuff. And I think you can even imagine this happening sooner if for example one provider stamps a “100% renewable datacenter” option on their AI product. Then you might not care about energy efficiency at all; in which case you just care about profit.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#399

Post by tim333 »

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…

AlphaZero learned various board games from scratch up to better than human levels. I guess in principle that sort of algorithm could be generalized to other things?

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#400

Post by sgt101 »

scarmig wrote: post #318
sgt101 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>which is in many ways similar to our subconscious thinking this is just made up. - we don't have any useful insight on human subconscious thinking. - we don't have any useful insight on the structures that support human subconscious thinking. - the mechanisms that support human cognition that we do know about are radically different from the mechanisms that current models use. For example we know that biological neu…

The diversity is itself indicative, though, that intelligence isn't bound to the particularities of the human nervous system. Across different animal species, nervous systems show a radical diversity. Different architectures; different or reversed neurotransmitters; entirely different neural cell biologies. It's quite possible that "neurons" evolved twice, independently. There's nothing magic about the human brain. M…

>The diversity is itself indicative, though, that intelligence isn't bound to the particularities of the human nervous system. Across different animal species, nervous systems show a radical diversity. Different architectures; different or reversed neurotransmitters; entirely different neural cell biologies. It's quite possible that "neurons" evolved twice, independently. There's nothing magic about the human brain.

I agree - for example Octopus's are clearly somewhat intelligent, maybe very intelligent, and they have a very different brain architecture. Bees have a form of collective intelligence that seems to be emergent from many brains working together. Human cognition could arguably be identified as having a socially emergent component as well.

>Most of your critique is surface level: you can add all kinds of different structural diversity to an ML model and still find learning. Transformers themselves are formally equivalent to "fast weights" (suppression and control signals). Continuous learning is an entire field of study in ML. Or, for injury, you can randomly mask out half the weights of a model, still get reasonable performance, and retrain the unmasked weights to recover much of your loss.

I think we can only reasonably talk about the technology as it exists. I agree that there is no justifiable reason (that I know of) to claim that biology is unique as a substrate for intelligence or agency or consciousness or cognition or minds in general. But the history of AI is littered with stories of communities believing that a few minor problems just needed to be tidied up before everything works.

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