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Self-driving as a case study for AGI

karpathy.github.io

121–130 of 199 posts

Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#121
post #26

"AGI: An autonomous system that surpasses human capabilities in the majority of economically valuable work." -- what an obscenely depressing reduction of a fascinating field of inquiry. who the hell snuck in and redefined the science of thinking machines to this sad and reductive get rich quick crap?

I think that definition is useful because it is measurable. It sidesteps the endless "It's just a text prediction engine/ I dunno ChatGPT seems pretty smart to me!" discussions. It also sidesteps the "It did well on a test designed to measure human intelligence it must be smarter than humans"/ "no, the test of human intelligence wasn't designed to measure machine intelligence and tells us very little" discussion. It…

> I think that definition is useful because it is measurable.

Then don't call it AGI.

But the marketing types won't like that, will they. So here we go, let's keep hijacking.

Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#122
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have remotely driven cars, that they market as self-driving. Even the crowd here fall for it. Downvote and then go read their term of service and look for "safety driver" and "remote" and "fleet response specialists". Then go cry about your waymo invesment.

I think you may be underselling :) I agree, they have remote drivers waiting to take over, but I think that the current SOA is delivering a very high % of autonomy. Is this viable? Dunno... Will it creep up? Dunno...

you have no idea how much they drive. they avoid talking about it on every interview. Ars explicitly called then out on this and they called saying this is their main profit sucking issue right now "having one overseer per car". to me that means they are, for all practical purposes, driving. no matter how much they try to spin it.

Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#123
post #44
post #26

"AGI: An autonomous system that surpasses human capabilities in the majority of economically valuable work." -- what an obscenely depressing reduction of a fascinating field of inquiry. who the hell snuck in and redefined the science of thinking machines to this sad and reductive get rich quick crap?

> who the hell snuck in and redefined the science of thinking machines to this sad and reductive get rich quick crap? OpenAI, back in 2018: https://openai.com/charter It wasn't particularly controversial at the time - didn't get mentioned in the HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16794194

HN is not authority on anything.

And a private company trying to hijack a term is not impressive or even merits any discussion. They just willed the term into existence. The rest of us are free to disagree with their "definition".

Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are doing all the work by "coding" in a weird language that actually takes more brain power than regular high level (as in direct business logic, not C or python) programming languages?

Huh. How did you come to ask that question? I never mentioned how I code.

you "coded" in quotes, as in you had to think a lot about how to translate the problem to the machine. you are pretty much a compiler for ai or something.

Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have self driving cars in an extremely limited number of cities (just one or two) and you can’t buy them, you can only use them like an Uber. He’s overselling how mature the technology is.

How is he over selling it when he says explicitly that waymo exists in two cities? It's solved in that it works and they have to scale horizonatally.

He wrote about self driving "And yet, overall it’s almost like no one cares." As if it's puzzling a product which hardly works anywhere isn't something people care about?

Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#126
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With a fully automated economy, all 8 billion of us can have that We probably can't. I mean why stop at humans? Let's give every pet the same luxury, or ... in the limit we could give this to every living being. Ultimately someone is going to draw the line who gets what and who is useful or not "for the greater good". It just happens that many living beings don't contribute to the goals of whoever is in charge and…

Exactly right. It's playing out like a bankruptcy: "Slowly at first, then all at once" . Humans have rights insofar they're able to enforce them. Individually by withholding their labor (muscle or brain power), or collectively with pitchforks if need be. Once labor is dime-a-dozen and pitchforks ineffective (OP's premise of "fully automated economy"), human rights and democracy go the way of dodo, inevitably. Nature…

> Although the "fully automated" bit is quite a stretch at the moment. The end-to-end supply chain required to produce & sustain advanced machinery and AI is too complex, a far cry from "LOL let's buy some GPU and run chatbots".

It's ahead of us, and that's good because we're not ready for it yet either.

But how far ahead? Nobody knows. For all its flaws, ChatGPT's capabilities were the stuff of SciFi three years ago.

We might hit a dead end, or have an investment bubble followed by a collapse, either of which may lead to another AI winter and us doing nothing interesting in this sector for 20 years. Or someone might already have a method of learning as quickly and from as few examples as humans manage, and they're keeping quiet until they figure out how to be sure it's not the equivalent of a dark triad personality in a human.

If I was forced to gamble (which I kinda am by thinking about a mortgage for a new house), I don't think we'll get a complete AGI in less than 6 years at the fastest. My modal guess is 10 years, with a long tail.

Even when we finally get AGI, there's a roll-out period of unclear duration, because the speed of rollout depends in part on how much hardware is needed to run the AGI, but also on the human reaction to it: if it needs the equivalent of a supercomputer, this will definitely be a slow rollout; but it still won't be instant even if it's an app that runs on a smartphone — it's amazing how many people don't know what theirs can already do.

Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where have LLM AIs made measurable economic impacts that weren't already using some form of AI to start with (translation, legal, content farms, marketing, robotics)?

SubReddits for copywriting and graphic design and digital art are full of people talking about how the amount of gig work available has dropped off.

Fair examples!

Also, not to move the goal posts, but there has been a large economic shift since Q3 2022 with tech & finance belt tightening, inflation normalizing and generally slowing. So these things don't happen in a vacuum (which makes them hard to measure!).

For example my previous & current employer have done their first layoffs since pre-pandemic, and neither has anything to do with AI. They just overexpanded and need to shrink.

Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#128
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You basically get sucked into a "what has AI ever done for us?" style debate analogous to Monty Python's Life of Brian. Except today the bit (which wasn’t really a debate in the sketch because everyone agreed) would start with real current negatives such as accelerating the spread of misinformation and getting artists fired. In your analogy, it would be as if they were asking “what have the Romans ever done for us”…

I don't consider people having to adjust a negative. We don't have a right to never have to adjust or adapt to a changing world. Things change, people adapt. Well some of them. The rest just gets old and dies off. Artists will be fine; so will everybody else. If anything, people will have a lot more time to do artistic things. More than ever probably and possibly at a grander scale that past generations of artists co…

> Things change, people adapt. Well some of them. The rest just gets old and dies off.

Which, continuing the analogy, is like watching your neighbour be slaughtered and defending the war by saying we’ll be fine because those who won’t be will eventually die. Sure, in a few generations we could be better off, but there are people living right now to think about. Those who dismiss it are the lucky ones who (think they) won’t be affected. But spare some empathy for your fellow human beings, dismissing their plight because they’ll eventually “grow old and die off” is not a solution and could even be labelled as cruel. Surely you’re not expecting them to read your words and go “yeah, they’re right, I’ll just roll over and die”.

> If anything, people will have a lot more time to do artistic things. More than ever probably and possibly at a grander scale that past generations of artists could only dream about.

That’s an unproven utopian ideal with flimsy basis in reality. The owners of the technology think of one thing: personal profit. If humanity can benefit, that’s a side benefit. It’s definitely not something we should take for granted will happen.

> And it's not AIs spreading misinformation but people with an agenda that now use AIs as tools to generate it.

Correct. And they can do so at a much faster rate and higher accuracy than before. That is the issue. Dismissing that is like comparing a machine gun to a hand gun. The principle is the same but one of them is a bigger problem.

Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#129
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why UBI gets discussed so often at the same time as AGI/ASI. If we're all redundant, how do we live? On a pension that starts at ${debatable from conception to adulthood}. Who provides the production on which the pension is spent? The AI. Even assuming UBI is great (small scale tests say so, but have necessary limits so we can't be sure), there's going to be a huge mess with most attempts to roll out such a h…

Assuming AGI doesn't kill us all, I would imagine the argument for UBI will become much easier to defend once it causes 100x, 1000x, 10000x etc growth in the economy. Our job is mostly to hang on until one of those two outcomes occurs.

It's impossible to grow an economy without consumers, which this also eliminates. Standard metrics probably won't be much use here.

Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real issue is that we live in an economic system where people are exploited for labor, and in turn they buy products and services made with their own labor (and another class get to profit from it). If we introduce AGI but keep the system, people will be unemployed. If people aren't employed (and instead machines do their jobs), then they can't buy stuff. The whole system crumbles. But it's possible that AGI will…

Assume the existence of a large scale Star Trek Replicator that can almost instantly create anything. There are only two possibilities that result: 1) We now live in a post-scarcity society where everyone self-actualizes and no one wants for anything. 2) We now live in a society where the small % of the population that owns the Replicators self-actualizes and wants for nothing while the remaining 99.9% of the populat…

Sounds like we arrive at point #1 in any case, there's just a question if a mass genocide happens in between. Probably depends on how gradual the transition ends up being.
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