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AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

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Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#91

Post by akiselev »

zetsurin wrote: post #89
libraryofbabel wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the summary. I do love Benedict‘s work; I find he’s one of the few commentators who consistently strikes a balance between taking the transformative potential of AI seriously while not falling over into hype. Some things that stand out: * He’s really good with his historical analogies, especially looking at previous transformations like the early Internet and mobile; no surprise given that he has a history…

> for example, almost all of their predictions weren’t just wrong… in hindsight, given how the future played out, they were asking the wrong question Do you have an example of this? My (poor) memory remembers "it's going to change how people buy things", was the big deal at the time, and it seems like it was a great prediction.

That's a very vague prediction that took decades to bear fruit. The concrete predictions behind the investments into companies like Pets.com and Webvan failed. It took the survivors like Ebay/Paypal and Amazon to build the digital payment and shipping infrastructure over decades until cultural acceptance hit critical mass.

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#92

Post by leptons »

zx0r23 wrote: post #42
dist-epoch wrote: post #14

It will literally eat the world. Just like we crowded out wild animals in a few reserved areas, so will AI data centers crowd us out. To quite Ilya Sutskever: > I think it’s pretty likely the entire surface of the earth will be covered with solar panels and data centers.

Or we could not do that... Technology is meant to serve us not drive us into a hellscape lol

"we"? Are we all now billionaires who decide what gets built and who gets laid off?

None of "us" gets to decide this. Only the very wealthy get to decide.

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#93

Post by zx0r23 »

leptons wrote: post #92
zx0r23 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or we could not do that... Technology is meant to serve us not drive us into a hellscape lol

"we"? Are we all now billionaires who decide what gets built and who gets laid off? None of "us" gets to decide this. Only the very wealthy get to decide.

There's a way for us to have a say in the matter. It's happened before.

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#94

Post by zx0r23 »

siwatanejo wrote: post #86
zx0r23 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or we could not do that... Technology is meant to serve us not drive us into a hellscape lol

What's wrong with that? There are now materials that allow you to have solar panels on a window (so they are not opaque anymore), and we can put data centers under our feet.

Did you read the original comment?

> AI data centers crowd us out.

> the entire surface of the earth will be covered with solar panels and data centers.

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#95

Post by leptons »

zx0r23 wrote: post #93
leptons wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"we"? Are we all now billionaires who decide what gets built and who gets laid off? None of "us" gets to decide this. Only the very wealthy get to decide.

There's a way for us to have a say in the matter. It's happened before.

Okay, what way? What happened before?

Don't be vague.

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#96

Post by antonvs »

kannanvijayan wrote: post #72
jkhdigital wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, the crazy thing is that much of the groundwork for the “rules-and-heuristics” mode of AI was laid down in the 70s and 80s, long before we had the raw compute power to reliably extract patterns from reality-scale inputs. Those early efforts failed miserably mostly because the rules had to be populated manually and in a ridiculously space-inefficient format (compared to the density of information in model weight…

I feel like the talk about "world models" is trying to reach at that, but cast it in different terminology. World model is just domain model, and once you're at domain model, there are multitudes of domains. Unsupervised learning over domain rulesystems has the potential to let us define really well-defined, scoped models that behave a lot more deterministically and don't colour outside the lines, and reserve their w…

> As amusing as this may be, I really have no need or desire for my coding model to understand or be aware of ewoks

You'll think otherwise the first time you're a victim of a zero-day ewok.

Seriously though, while coding models may not need to know about ewoks, their contextual knowledge of things beyond just writing code almost certainly makes them better coding models.

It could be difficult to constrain the training corpus "just right" so that you eliminate all the irrelevant subjects like ewoks but retain enough so that the model doesn't turn into an idiot savant capable of churning out correct code but incapable of understanding what you really want.

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#97

Post by benedictevans »

hansmayer wrote: post #90
benedictevans wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I was using crypto and blockchain as interchangeable terms. I'm aware some people don't, but that's always how any person the space I've spoken to uses them

Indeed you did, but that does not make it right. They are not interchangeable. Now again, did you, or did you not promote Bitcoin?

No, you have a different opinion about terminology, which ironically is one of the things I noted as pointless in the thread I posted.

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#98

Post by blahblaher »

kannanvijayan wrote: post #72
jkhdigital wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, the crazy thing is that much of the groundwork for the “rules-and-heuristics” mode of AI was laid down in the 70s and 80s, long before we had the raw compute power to reliably extract patterns from reality-scale inputs. Those early efforts failed miserably mostly because the rules had to be populated manually and in a ridiculously space-inefficient format (compared to the density of information in model weight…

I feel like the talk about "world models" is trying to reach at that, but cast it in different terminology. World model is just domain model, and once you're at domain model, there are multitudes of domains. Unsupervised learning over domain rulesystems has the potential to let us define really well-defined, scoped models that behave a lot more deterministically and don't colour outside the lines, and reserve their w…

I've been having similar thoughts, regarding the gigantic trillion parameter models. I'm starting to believe the future will be very specialized focused models thant can be run on modest hardware (locally) but that can scale in performance (latency, speed) in the cloud, much like any other software of today.

If you need to do programming do we really need trillions sized models? Other domains might be large or smaller, but there's no need for a model to 'know' everything and datacenter levels of hardware to run.

General chatbots might work better as larger models since you really don't know what people will also for, or alternatively we find a way to route the initial question to the appropriate model. Like MoE but without needing to load a gigantic model into memory first.

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#100

Post by hansmayer »

benedictevans wrote: post #97
hansmayer wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed you did, but that does not make it right. They are not interchangeable. Now again, did you, or did you not promote Bitcoin?

No, you have a different opinion about terminology, which ironically is one of the things I noted as pointless in the thread I posted.

No, answer my question - it's not that hard!
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