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What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

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Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#101

Post by fuzzfactor »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #89
fuzzfactor wrote: post #3

>What If A.I. Doesn't Get Better Than This? What if it does? There's a certain type of fear . . . "It's the fear . . . they're gonna take my job away . . . " It's the fear . . . I'll be working here the rest of my days . . . " -- David Fahl Same fear, different day.

Wow did you encapsulate millenia of management-labor disputes by saying don't worry be happy? Let's play the same game with totalitarianism! It's the fear they are watching everything It's the fear nobody is watching at all Oh wow, I totally understand the threat of totalitarianism from that. And I bring up totalitarianism quite in particular, because aside from vastly empowering the elites in the war against labor,…

>Wow did you encapsulate millenia of management-labor disputes by saying don't worry be happy?

Nope, sorry to disappoint.

That would be quite an accomplishment though, but I can't take credit for any progress in that direction no matter how far others have gone :)

Not trying to hurt any feelings.

I probably should have kept it simple and not included the sample of vastly pre-AI lyrics from Fahl.

Just trying to emphasize that the fear of AI getting better, is very similar to the fear of it not getting better.

Like a number of other unrelated things. Which are nothing new at all.

I guess more often I've got to expect the unexpected with such a short comment, when I don't even try to explain very effectively, that some are going to read between the lines in some of the most unrelated ways I can not always anticipate.

If I may ask, what made you such a fan of totalitarianism anyway, I know it's more popular than ever but is that all there is?

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#102

Post by ml_more »

We did a test of GPT5 yesterday. We asked it to generate a synopsis of a scientific topic and cite sources. We then checked those sources. GPT5 still hallucinated 65% of the citations. It did things like: Make up the paper title Make up the authors for a real paper title Mix a real title and a real journal If it can't even reference real papers it certainly can't be trusted to match up claims of fact with real sources.

Current AI tools generate citations that LOOK real but ARE fake. This might not be solvable inside the LLM. If anyone could do it, it'd be OpenAI. (OK maybe I'm giving them too much credit, but they have a crap-ton of money and seem to show a real interest in making their AI better)

If it can't be done in the LLM we can't trust LLMs basically ever. I suppose there's a pretty big loophole here. Doing it outside the LLM but INSIDE the LLM product would be good enough.

The first AI tool to incorporate that (internal citation and claim checking) will win because if the AI can check itself and prevent hallucinated garbage from ever reaching the user we can start to trust them and then they can do everything we've been promised. Until that day comes we can't trust them for anything.

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#103

Post by owebmaster »

tim333 wrote: post #90
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be surprised if Google weren't closer to profitability than basically anyone else, as they have their own hardware and have been running these kinds of applications for much longer than anyone else.

Google are well set up to monetize compared to the others. They just need people to see their ads.

They are also the ones with more to lose to LLMs

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#104

Post by energy123 »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #68
energy123 wrote: post #25

How can you say progress has stalled two weeks after LLMs won gold medals at IOI and IMO? How can you say progress has stalled without having visibility on the compute costs of gpt-5 relative to o3? How can you say progress has stalled by referring to changes in benchmarks at the frontier over just 3.5 months?

My personal test question keeps bombing, and I think it's something they should be capable of doing? Are those math contests? Are their questions and answers in the training set? Let's say that these things really won a math Olympiad by thinking. Ok, I would like it to to write parsers based on a well defined expression or language spec. Not as bad as near unparseable C++ or JavaScript. The AIs refuse, despite the pr…

> My personal test question keeps bombing, and I think it's something they should be capable of doing?

The problem is that "they" isn't a monolith. How much compute went into your tests? Gpt-5 thinking in ChatGPT Plus uses less compute than Gpt-5 thinking in ChatGPT Pro, which uses less compute than the "high" reasoning effort when "gpt-5" is called via the API, which uses less compute than Gpt-5 Pro in ChatGPT Pro, which uses less compute than custom scaffolds, which uses less compute than what went into the IMO/IOI solutions. This is not just my idle speculation, it's publicly available information.

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#105

Post by ultimate4448 »

legacynl wrote: post #86
olddustytrail wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs aren't monolingual so you might want to expand that beyond English. Consider how multilingual people think. Also, apparently it's pretty common for people to think in words and have an internal monologue. I hadn't realized this was a thing until recently but it seems many people don't think abstractly as you've described.

There have been psychological experiments that have shown what OP experiences. In this particular experiment subjects were asked to make a series of arbitrary choices between 2 items, while being hooked up to some brain scanning equipment. Subjects were asked to think about it for 5 seconds before making the choice. The experiment showed that scientists were able to predict the choice before the subjects consciously…

Since you understand predictive coding, I believe you will be interested in this:

https://github.com/dmf-archive/IPWT

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#106

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

jcfrei wrote: post #40
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're not paying users then they're just a liability.

monetizing those will come eventually - it's just hard to get right

> (monetizing LLMs is) just hard to get right

Time will tell if that's just a euphemism for "there is no business model here".

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#107

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

EcommerceFlow wrote: post #45
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're not paying users then they're just a liability.

How so? You capture the market first, then you turn on paid ads and reap benefits for decades like Google.

Even when a business makes a profit, then the costs are still technically liabilities.

And you're assuming that ad revenues or whatever will be high enough to cover the costs. And that's not a given.

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#109

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

lenerdenator wrote: post #85
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no plan in place at all for the outcome of most work becoming redundant. At least in the US I highly doubt we will be capable of implementing some system such as UBI for the benefit of all citizens so everyone can take advantage of most work being automated. Everyone will be left to pick up scraps and barely survive. If 80% of US citizens lose their jobs, I assure you that there will be a political respons…

> If 80% of US citizens lose their jobs, I assure you that there will be a political response. It might not be one you (or I) like, but it will happen and it will be a big deal. In societies where 80% of people are not able to draw an income and there are more firearms than there are people allowed to own them, that political response is revolution.

That is also what I would expect, regardless of firearm laws. Like look at how many people are fans of populists right now. Then 10x that if basically everyone is unemployed.

It's gonna be a wild ride.

That being said, I'm not convinced LLM based workflows will be transformative, at least over the short term (3-5 years). It took a long time for the whole of society to end up on the Internet and I'd expect around the same speed for AI/LLM approaches (even in the best case scenario).

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#110

Post by rossdavidh »

rusk wrote: post #43
mgfist wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DeepSeek is also undercutting itself. No one is making a profit here, everyone is trying to gobble market share. Even if you have the best model and don't care to make a dime, inference is very expensive.

DeepSeek doesn’t need to make a profit to be successful.

I could think of several reasons this could be so, but it would be good to hear your logic on this claim?
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