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AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

economist.com

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Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#91

Post by Chinjut »

GMoromisato wrote: post #25
sfpotter wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Floating point numbers aren't ambiguous in the least. They behave by perfectly deterministic and reliable rules and follow a careful specification.

So are LLMs. Under the covers they are just deterministic matmul.

Ordinary floating point calculations allow for tractable reasoning about their behavior, reliable hard predictions of their behavior. At the scale used in LLMs, this is not possible; a Pachinko machine may be deterministic in theory, but not in practice. Clearly in practice, it is very difficult to reliably predict or give hard guarantees about the behavioral properties of LLMs.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#92

Post by CuriouslyC »

Kapura wrote: post #30

Digital spreadsheets (excel, etc) have done much more to change the world than so-called "artificial intelligence," and on the current trajectory it's difficult to see that changing.

Agents are going to change everything. Once we've got a solid programmatic system driving interface and people get better about exposing non-ui handles for agents to work with programs, agents will make apps obsolete. You're going to have a device that sits by your desk and listens to you, watches your movements and tracks your eyes, and dispatches agents to do everything you ask it to do, using all the information it's taking in along with a learned model of you and your communication patterns, so it can accurately predict what you intend for it to do.

If you need an interface for something (e.g. viewing data, some manual process that needs your input), the agent will essentially "vibe code" whatever interface you need for what you want to do in the moment.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#93

Post by CamperBob2 »

d3ckard wrote: post #29
chpatrick wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[citation needed] People constantly assert that LLMs don't think in some magic way that humans do think, when we don't even have any idea how that works.

What can be asserted without proof, can be dismissed without proof. The proof burden is on AI proponents.

The proof burden is on AI proponents.

Why? Team "Stochastic Parrot" will just move the goalposts again, as they've done many times before.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#94

Post by CamperBob2 »

chpatrick wrote: post #75
Gee101 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does since humans where able to invent a programming language.

Have you tried asking a modern LLM to invent a programming language?

Have you? If so, how'd it go? Sounds like an interesting exercise.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#95

Post by boredtofears »

empath75 wrote: post #87

https://books.google.com/books?id=-fG_NOxltlEC&pg=PA25&dq=Co... Computer's Aren't Pulling Their Weight (1991) There were _so many_ articles in the late 80s and early 90s about how computers were a big waste of money. And again in the late 90s, about how the internet was a waste of money. We aren't going to know the true consequences of AI until kids that are in high school now enter the work force. The vast majority…

You mean the same kids that are currently cheating their way through their education at record rates due to the same technology? Can't say I'm optimistic.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#96

Post by exe34 »

1c2adbc4 wrote: post #41
exe34 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's fine to keep the name, we just have to realise it's like magic. real magic can't be done. magic that can be done is just tricks. AI that works is just tricks.

I didn't realize that magic was the goal. I'm just trying to process unstructured data. Who's here looking for magic?

did you miss the word "like"? have you come across the concept of an analogy yet?

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#97

Post by lioeters »

aredox wrote: post #32

The potentially "explosive" part of AI was that it could be self-improving. Using AI to improve AI, or AI improving itself in an exponential growth until it becomes super-human. This is what the "Singularity" and AI "revolution" is based on. But in the end, despite saying AI has PhD-level intelligence, the truth is that even AI companies can't get AI to help them improve faster. Anything slower than exponential is pr…

> improving itself in an exponential growth

That seems like a possibly mythical critical point, at which a phase transition will occur that makes the AI system qualitatively different from its predecessors. Exponential to the limit of infinity.

All the mad rush of companies and astronomical investments are being made to get there first, counting on this AGI to be a winner-takes-all scenario, especially if it can be harnessed to grow the company itself. The hype is even infecting governments, for economic and national interest. And maybe somewhere a mad king dreams of world domination.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#98

Post by alexpotato »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #92
Kapura wrote: post #30

Digital spreadsheets (excel, etc) have done much more to change the world than so-called "artificial intelligence," and on the current trajectory it's difficult to see that changing.

Agents are going to change everything. Once we've got a solid programmatic system driving interface and people get better about exposing non-ui handles for agents to work with programs, agents will make apps obsolete. You're going to have a device that sits by your desk and listens to you, watches your movements and tracks your eyes, and dispatches agents to do everything you ask it to do, using all the information i…

The technology for this has been around for the past 10 years but it's still not a reality, what makes AI the kicker here?

e.g. Alexa for voice, REST for talking to APIs, Zapier for inter-app connectdness.

(not trying to be cynical, just pointing out that the technology to make it happen doesn't seem to be the blocker)

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#99

Post by chpatrick »

barnacs wrote: post #78
chpatrick wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again the problem is that what "thinking" is totally vague. To me if I can ask a computer a difficult question it hasn't seen before and it can give a correct answer, it's thinking. I don't need it to have a full and colorful human life to do that.

But it's only able to answer the question because it has been trained on all text in existence written by humans, precisely with the purpose to mimic human language use. It is the humans that produced the training data and then provided feedback in the form of reinforcement that did all the "thinking". Even if it can extrapolate to some degree (altough that's where "hallucinations" tend to become obvious), it could n…

Humans are also trained on data made by humans.

> it could never, for example, invent a game like chess or a social construct like a legal system. Those require motivations like "boredom", "being social", having a "need for safety".

That's creativity which is a different question from thinking.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#100

Post by chpatrick »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #94
chpatrick wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried asking a modern LLM to invent a programming language?

Have you? If so, how'd it go? Sounds like an interesting exercise.

https://g.co/gemini/share/0dd589b0f899
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