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Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

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Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#471

Post by IshKebab »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #462
IshKebab wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just search for "stochastic parrot" on Algolia. Plenty of "BuT iTs NoT rEaLlY iNtElIgEnT" comments...

It literally is a stochastic parrot. P.S. Yes, I do know how an LLM works. I code inference engines at my day job. You're consuming a cloud chat bot.

The people saying "it's just a stochastic parrot" were saying that because they thought the fact that it works by modelling the statistics of words and predicting the next most likely one meant that it would never be capable of anything sophisticated or any kind of novel output. It was just parroting things that already existed in a random way.

There was never any actual foundation for that belief, and it has been proven wrong empirically by more capable models, which is why you don't hear people saying it much any more.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#472

Post by pfdietz »

aureate wrote: post #461
pfdietz wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It actually does rule out those scenarios. If intelligent life were that common, and interstellar travel that easy, colonization of the galaxy would have gone to completion billions of years ago. We would never have evolved; Earth and the solar system would long since have been converted to an urban area. Those fictional places exist purely for the telling of stories, not because they're plausible or internally consi…

They're not plausible or internally consistent for reasons in my edit. It's not the Fermi "paradox" that rules them out. There could easily be interstellar civilisations in the Milky Way that we haven't observed. They just wouldn't work anything like the ones in Star (Wars|Trek).

It's implausible if life tends to spread out. Your scenario there has to assume a universal rule that it never does that, anytime in the past billions of years. That's simply not plausible, especially in fictional universes where in the current times all sorts of species are doing just that.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#473

Post by RiverCrochet »

everyday7732 wrote: post #406
assimpleaspossi wrote: post #389

>>Giving birth to a superintelligence would be the most consequential moment in human history—and it is likely to be irreversible, as any “off” switch humanity might design will probably fail. Nothing will be able to stop you from pulling the plug.

What plug? There's no centralised place where all the server farms are. They exist in multiple countries with different laws, controlled by multiple companies with different policies. It would be like trying to remove an embarrassing video of a celebrity from the internet. You would need cooperation between everyone capable of hosting it, and control of everyone capable of downloading it and re-uploading it to a new…

> What plug?

Cloudflare.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#474

Post by Nevermark »

randusername wrote: post #381
Nevermark wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an incentive to make their technology seem transformative and powerful I have no frame of reference to process this. Humans species perhaps 300,000 years, we are essentially the same. Transistor, 79 years, explosive growth in numbers and power. Integrated circuit, 68 years, explosive growth in numbers and power. "Attention is all you need", 9 years. ChatGPT, 4 years, explosive growth in instances and power. Humans…

You're applying broad, long-term, and high-level reasoning to motivations that are more likely short-term and driven by simplistic incentives. Begging for regulation (and input into precisely what that regulation is) relieves competition, consolidating dependency among the established players, and spreads a very effective fear narrative that what these companies are doing will change everything and therefore they are…

Except everything is happening in the "short" time frame. That is the point.

We are at an unusual time, where companies might "hype", but it is unlikely their hype is actually overshooting near-term reality.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#475

Post by kregasaurusrex »

mckirk wrote: post #318
swalsh wrote: post #257

There's issues where bad people with bad intentions use AI to do bad things. But to an extent the guardrails already built-in are sufficient. The real danger in AI is how it impacts society, our economy, and our perception of self worth. I'm not afraid of rouge agents nearly as much as I'm afraid of us building a permanent underclass of people dependent on whatever scraps the people who devalued their labor decide th…

Sorry for being off-topic, but 'rouge agents' was too adorable to leave unmentioned.

It happens to everyone, I saw the same typo made by the Associated Press in a live update of the Iran War about the 'rouge Iranian regime'[0].

[0] https://apnews.com/live/iran-war-israel-trump-lebanon-march-...

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#476

Post by bdamm »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #90
tancop wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can put the compute on a big expensive reusable control drone and send commands down with lasers. thats way harder to jam than any form of radio. if thats not enough try fiber optic like they do in ukraine.

There are also now drones with long spooling wires. Regardless, autonomous or not, connectivity to home is important. I would note that a lot of drones are quite large too - small airplanes. They can carry more than enough hardware for autonomy. You can also have motherships doing planning and smaller kamikaze drones for combat. These aren’t hard problems to solve, the harder problem is the reluctance to give over to…

It is kind of a hard problem to solve. Sure, we can have expensive and custom equipment flying around, but the invasion of Ukraine (and really, any war when it gets bad enough) is all about economic efficiency. The question is not can it be done; the question is, can it be done repeatedly, can it be scaled, and can it be cheap?

We will have a fully autonomous Siri that is actually good before Ukraine gets autonomous motherships making targeting choices to repel Russian assault corps. However, given the pace of the war and the pace of AI development, that may actually happen. But it isn't happening today.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#477

Post by antonvs »

whilenot-dev wrote: post #334
antonvs wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Live with" is an idiom which means to accept, tolerate, or come to terms with an unavoidable, difficult, or imperfect situation. We do indeed have to live with the possibility of asteroid impact, nuclear war, etc. That doesn't imply anything about those scenarios being alive.

The idiom in question by OP and TFA is "to live side by side with", lauding AI with a life and ranking it a neighbor hierarchy wise. I don't live side by side with the possibility of an asteroid impact, nuclear war, etc., I just live with that possibility.

It's essentially the same concept. Here are some examples:

> "The authors discuss two enduring lessons of the Internet revolution: The first is that new technologies do not replace the old. They live side by side."

    -- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1094996802701588
> "The colours and textures represent the good urban life where nature and buildings live side by side."

    -- https://www.behance.net/gallery/91786053/Ylva
> "Past and future live side by side in Barcelona."

    -- https://www.listonegiordano.com/one/en/architecture/casa-privata-eg69/
> "Alton Mill – Where History and Art Live Side-by-Side"

    -- https://katherineryalen.com/alton-mill-where-history-and-art-live-side-by-side/
---

> I don't live side by side with the possibility of an asteroid impact, nuclear war, etc.

No, but idiomatically, you already live side by side with AI, and will do so even more in future, whether you like the idiom or the actual experience, or not.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#478

Post by AussieWog93 »

saulpw wrote: post #400
perarneng wrote: post #388

The economy isn't ready. Basically, all companies right now are sprinting toward increasing profit margins by trying to do more with fewer people. The problem is that, on this scale, they will lose income because unemployed people make terrible consumers, they will only buy what is strictly necessary. Consequently, society is in a race to the bottom, which could lead to extreme suffering and potential revolutions in…

Companies don't serve poor people; they have no money. Companies will pivot to serving the people who have money. If that means they only serve rich people, then that means we'll have more yacht makers and fewer dollar stores.

I'm in e-commerce and this has been going on for decades, in physical retail too.

The trend is called "retail polarisation".

Smaller retailers switch to targeting wealthier customers - higher margins and less bullshit.

The less wealthy customers then get served by ultra-value megabrands like Temu/Shein or Kmart/Walmart, or second hand marketplaces.

The net result is both more yacht makers and more dollar stores, but less mid-range stores like Target or Toys R Us.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#479

Post by Lerc »

alecco wrote: post #205
Lerc wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DNNs/LLMs can only predict next tokens based on training data. How do they decide between using 'a' or 'an'?

They pick random top-k next token based on their amazing 4chan/reddit training data, duh.

So you you think a model if asked.

"There is an animal very similar to a crocodile but I cannot remember it's name"

and the model responds with

"I believe the animal you are thinking of might be " ("a" / "an")

Are you saying that it would pick the result fairly randomly and then based on it's choice pick an animal that starts with a consonant or a vowel?

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#480

Post by MattRix »

Retric wrote: post #395
MattRix wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are objective metrics, that’s what benchmarks are.

Companies game benchmarks, but sure they are better than nothing.

I mean you wanted something objective, and they are. I don’t know why you’re being dismissive of them, they’re a huge element of what drives model development forward.

These companies aren’t just making stuff up, they really do want to improve the models, and the models really are improving.

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