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The Adolescence of Technology

darioamodei.com

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Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#81

Post by j33dd »

stego-tech wrote: post #77
thebiglabowski wrote: post #75

Occasionally, I read these types of essays and get awfully depressed. As someone just starting out in the technology field (and I guess white-collar work in general), it feels as if I suddenly have no hope of ever living a fruitful and meaningful life. The means by which I could ever potentially earn a living are slowly destroyed. I do wonder if others in my age group ever feel the same, if basically everyone under 3…

The advice I give younger folks is what I wished I’d been taught when I was just starting out myself, and confronting dismal prospects and futures after the 2008 Collapse: Always consider the justification for the narrative. Dario Amodei has a vested interest in peddling his perspective, as that’s how he gets funding, media interest, publicity, and free advertising. He needs his product to be everything he claims it…

Yep.

Man can we just get this hype phase over with? Its very obvious to anyone who truly has "general intelligence" in understanding the nature of the economy and the present labour market and its job classes that LLMs are not going to cause job destruction nor immense leaps in productivity.

To put it another way - who cares if you can write more lines of code - if your taste for project selection lacks? Google has an expansive grave yard for a reason.

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#82

Post by roxolotl »

One of the things that always strikes me with pieces like this is they ignore the reality that there's already atrocities being carried out all the time and that large swaths of the population already struggle to live. Reading the sections about what people could do with these tools feels remarkably callous because it's clear this is one of the world's richest people articulating what they are still afraid of.

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#83

Post by jfengel »

Lerc wrote: post #73
nemomarx wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people broadly feel like all of this is happening inevitably or being done by others. The alignment people struggle to get their version of AI to market first - the techies worry about being left behind. No one ends up being in a position to steer things or have any influence over the future in the race to keep up. So what can you and I do? I know in my gut that imagining an ideal outcome won't change what ac…

>So what can you and I do? Engage respectfully, Try and see other points of view, Try and express your point of view. I decided some time ago that I would attempt to continue conversations on here to try and at least get people to understand that other points of view could be held by rational people. It has certainly cost me Karma, but I hope there has been a small amount of influence. Quite often people do not chang…

Hypothetically, however, if your adversary is indeed without morality, then failing to acknowledge that means working with invalid assumptions. Laboring under a falsehood will not help you. Truth gives you clear eyed access to all of your options.

You may prefer to assume that your opponent is fundamentally virtuous. It's valid to prefer failing under your own values than giving them up in the hopes of winning. Still, you can at least know that is what you are doing, rather than failing and not even knowing why.

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#84

Post by tom_ »

mordymoop wrote: post #51
xcodevn wrote: post #18

> we may have AI that is more capable than everyone in only 1-2 years There's no evidence this will be the case...

What would you consider such evidence to look like?

Well for starters the calendar year would have to be 2027 CE at the very earliest.

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#85

Post by root_axis »

2001zhaozhao wrote: post #64
dpflan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more verifiable the domain the better suited. We see similar reports of benefits from advanced mathematics research from Terrence Tao, granted some reports seem to amount to very few knew some data existed that was relevant to the proof, but the LLM had it in its training corpus. Still, verifiably correct domains are well-suited. So the concept formal verification is as relevant as ever, and when building interco…

I think the solution in harder-to-verify cases is to provide AI (sub-)agents a really good set of instructions on a detailed set of guidelines of what it should do and in what ways it should think and explore and break down problems. Potentially tens of thousands of words of instructions to get the LLM to act as a competent employee in the field. Then the models need to be good enough at instruction-following to actu…

> I think the solution in harder-to-verify cases is to provide AI (sub-)agents a really good set of instructions on a detailed set of guidelines of what it should do and in what ways it should think and explore and break down problems

Using LLMs to validate LLMs isn't a solution to this problem. If the system can't self-verify then there's no signal to tell the LLM that it's wrong. The LLM is fundamentally unreliable, that's why you need a self-verifying system to guide and constrain the token generation.

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#86

Post by wellpast »

> but the truth is that behind the volatility and public speculation, there has been a smooth, unyielding increase in AI’s cognitive capabilities.

> We are now at the point where AI models are … good enough at coding that some of the strongest engineers I’ve ever met are now handing over almost all their coding to AI.

Really?

All I’ve seen on HN the past few days are how slop prevails.

When I lean into agentic flows myself I’m at once amazed at how quickly it can prototype stuff but also how deficient and how much of a toy it all still seems.

What am I missing?

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#87

Post by techblueberry »

reducesuffering wrote: post #67
2001zhaozhao wrote: post #58

It's interesting just how many opinions Amodei shares with AI 2027's authors despite coming from a pretty different context. - Prediction of exponential AI research feedback loops (AI coding speeding up AI R&D) which Amodei says is already starting today - AI being a race between democracies and autocracies with winner-takes-all dynamics, with compute being crucial in this race and global slowdown being infeasible -…

It's because few realize how downstream most of this AI industry is of Thiel, Eliezer Yudkowsky and LessWrong.com. Early "rationalist" community was concerned with AI in this way 20 years ago. Eliezer inspired and introduced the founders of Google DeepMind to Peter Thiel to get their funding. Altman acknowledged how influential Eliezer was by saying how he is most deserving of a Nobel Peace prize when AGI goes well (…

It is very weird to wonder, what if they're all wrong. Sam Bankman-Fried was clearly as committed to these ideas, and crashed his company into the ground.

But clearly if out of context someone said something like this:

"Clearly, the most obvious effect will be to greatly increase economic growth. The pace of advances in scientific research, biomedical innovation, manufacturing, supply chains, the efficiency of the financial system, and much more are almost guaranteed to lead to a much faster rate of economic growth. In Machines of Loving Grace, I suggest that a 10–20% sustained annual GDP growth rate may be possible."

I'd say that they were a snake oil salesman. All of my life experience says that there's no good reason to believe Dario's predictions here, but I'm taken in just as much as everyone else.

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#88

Post by techblueberry »

I'm not saying that he or any of these AI thought leaders are lying, but the economics of building advanced AI are such that he _needs_ people to believe this is true to be successful. If they can't get people to keep believing that LLM's will be this wildly powerful, they can't get the money they need to try and make advanced AI this wildly powerful.

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#89

Post by root_axis »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #40
root_axis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software is more amenable to LLMs because there is a rich source of highly relevant training data that corresponds directly to the building blocks of software, and the "correctness" of software is quasi-self-verifiable. This isn't true for pretty much anything else.

Presumably at some point capability will translate to other domains even if the exchange rate is poor. If it can autonomously write software and author CAD files then it can autonomously design robots. I assume everything else follows naturally from that.

> If it can autonomously write software and author CAD files then it can autonomously design robots.

It can't because the LLM can't test its own design. Unlike with code, the LLM can't incrementally crawl its way to a solution guided by unit tests and error messages. In the real world, there are material costs for trial and error, and there is no CLI that allows every aspect of the universe to be directly manipulated with perfect precision.

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#90

Post by cheschire »

Lerc wrote: post #12

One of my formative impressions of AI came from the depiction of the Colligatarch from Alan Dean Foster's The I Inside. The AI in the book is almost feels like it is the main message masquerading as a subplot. Asimov knew the risks, and I had assumed until fairly recently that the lessons and explorations that he had imparted into the Robot books had provided a level of cultural knowledge of what we were about to fac…

My interpretation is that Asimov assumed that humans would require understanding at the deepest levels of artificial intelligence before it could be created. He built the robot concepts rooted in the mechanical world rather than the world of the integrated circuit.

He never imagined, I suppose, that we would have the computing power necessary to just YOLO-dump the sum of all human knowledge into a few math problems and get really smart sounding responses generated in return.

The risks can be generalized well enough. Man’s hubris is its downfall etc etc.

But the specific issues we are dealing with have little to do with us feeling safe and protected behind some immutable rules that are built into the system.

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