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Self-driving as a case study for AGI

karpathy.github.io

141–150 of 199 posts

Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#141
It seems to me that Andrej is predicting how AGI will impact society by extrapolating from the current societal impacts of self driving.

I don’t get the sense he was trying to say that self-driving automation is the exact same as AGI. Mainly that that AGI, like other technologies before it, will displace some jobs and create new ones but this will require companies to figure out how to scale the technology.

I do think this is still very optimistic. If indeed AGIs can think and learn on their own it isn’t hard to envision a future where humans aren’t needed at all in the loop.

Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#142
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah - if that's right then it's a bust.

Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#143
post #114

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…

> 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". Eh. A line, drawn somewhere, sure. Humans being humans, there's a good chance the rules on UBI will expand to exclude more and more people — we already see that wit…

First, don't count on AI being aligned at all. States who are behind in the AI race will increasingly take more and more risks with alignment to catch up. Without a doubt, one if the first use cases of the AI will be as a cyberweapon to hack and disrupt critical systems. If you are in a race to achieve that alignment will be very narrow to begin with.

Regarding the pet vs humans - the main difference is really that the humans are capable of understanding and communicating the long term consequences of AI and unchecked power, which makes them a threat, so it's not a big leap to see where this is heading.

Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is basically the gist of my comment, thank you for rephrasing it so concisely.

Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#145
post #109

I can, in principle, take someone from a group of uncontacted peoples, put them into New York and let them figure out how to drive and they likely will be able to do it after not too much time. We are not even close to any technology that could figure out driving having never been built for it.

But that is irrelevant to the point of the article. Maybe it takes 1 million hours of computing to train a model that can generate a logo, but an average human could have learned how to do that in just 50 hours of training with Photoshop. The point of the article is that now for pennies users can generate logos in seconds that would have previously cost hundreds of dollars and days of back and forth with a designer.…

I just don't like the AGI label.

Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#146
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual Turing Test is a party game like Werewolf. If the humans are skilled then they should be able to authenticate by picking a subject that the AI can’t compete on. This would be a very difficult game to build a computer opponent for and nobody really tries.

> picking a subject that the AI can’t compete on Isn’t that the point? If there are no more such subjects then the AI reached humans level cognition.

Yes, but people underestimate what that involves. Serious players would study previous games for weaknesses, looking for subject areas that include unpublished knowledge that isn’t in the training set.

Casual talk about “passing the Turing Test” sets a much lower bar.

Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Software developers on HN are saying the same thing. I don't see much evidence that AI has changed the game such that it would cause the work to dry up, though. In fact, I am surprised it hasn't created more work exploring the possibilities of new AI APIs. But when you can get 5% returns just by sticking your money in the bank, why would you bother investing in software, where 99¢ is considered an exorbitant cost by…

I think software devs on here are conflating AI with a hidden recession and other economic factors causing a slump in tech. I still can’t find a single thing that AI could reasonably replace about my job even if I was a junior developer. As a senior engineer using LLM tooling, it offers some benefits, but it’s still nowhere near “job stealing” capabilities.

Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are semi-valuable. There are tons of posts out there demonstrating GPT writing code that compiles but is utterly wrong, for example. Using NNs is just a first step. To me labeling this as actual intelligence is childishly rushing into conclusions.

It isn't "Actual Intelligence" it is Artificial Intelligence. The whole point of this article is that we should separate the philosophical argument about "What is intelligence" from the work of automation with Neural Networks. My preference is that we declare AGI to have been completed at AlphaZero. And now the people who want to work on replicating human intelligence can specifically say that is what they are workin…

I guess what you say can be viewed as fair but it leaves a sour taste, as in "constantly changing definitions of words" sour, which gets tiring and to me still comes across as marketing and hype because we want investor money.

> It isn't "Actual Intelligence" it is Artificial Intelligence.

Having the word "intelligence" have completely another meaning if you smack "artificial" in front of it seems counter-intuitive in terms of how language works.

> The whole point of this article is that we should separate the philosophical argument about "What is intelligence" from the work of automation with Neural Networks.

Which is meaningless and a non-goal to me. Just tell to your investors: "We're looking into making our cars more intelligent than before", that should be enough, no?

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As for the economics and humans factor, I am not an optimist. It's very obvious that the capital holders want anything and everything AI-related to just replace human workers. But do they pay higher taxes to offset the higher unemployment rate that results from them firing thousands? They don't. Will they be mandated to provide money for the UBI funds in the future? So far it doesn't look like it.

But these are completely separate discussions indeed.

Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#149

I don't trust any discussion on this topic anymore. When I was much younger, "AI" was what "AGI" is now. Now people started using "AGI" for "cars with several sensors and okay algorithms for collision detection" and then you have loud advocates going on obviously logically broken rants about the nature of "actual" intelligence -- and those are philosophical and not scientific. But still, we don't have anything even 1…

I don't know how much long ago was "When I was much younger" but even if we go as far back as the 1960s and look at the Artificial Intelligence scientific literature of that time, you'd find the understanding of what the terms they defined back then to be something far closer to what we have now, not your expectation of "the general AI that you can put in a robot body and it can learn to clean, cook, repair and chat…

No, I don't go back as far as the 1960s so if you say so I'll have to believe you.

I come from a generation where AI was Skynet, Terminators, the Johny Depp's Transcendence movie AI, even HAL-9000, and other such like.

I still think putting the word "intelligence" is completely dishonest however. There's nothing intelligent about what we have today, even "self-driving" cars fail very badly on what seems trivial conditions. They are a huge mish-mash of if/else chains and some statistical models sprinkled in.

And please don't say "but what if human intelligence is just a chain of if/else statements and statistical models sprinkled in?" because it's very apparent and visible that it's more than that. F.ex. we can learn just from a few trials and errors whereas the so-called "AI" nowadays can't get things quite right even after billions of training sequences.

Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#150
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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". Eh. A line, drawn somewhere, sure. Humans being humans, there's a good chance the rules on UBI will expand to exclude more and more people — we already see that wit…

First, don't count on AI being aligned at all. States who are behind in the AI race will increasingly take more and more risks with alignment to catch up. Without a doubt, one if the first use cases of the AI will be as a cyberweapon to hack and disrupt critical systems. If you are in a race to achieve that alignment will be very narrow to begin with. Regarding the pet vs humans - the main difference is really that t…

> First, don't count on AI being aligned at all.

I don't. Even in the ideal state: aligned with who? Even if we knew what we were doing, which we don't, it's all the unsolved problems in ethics, law, governance, economics, and the meaning of the word "good", rolled into one.

> Without a doubt, one if the first use cases of the AI will be as a cyberweapon to hack and disrupt critical systems.

AI or AGI? You don't even need an LLM to automate hacking; even the Morris worm performed automated attacks.

> humans are capable of understanding and communicating the long term consequences of AI and unchecked power

The evidence does not support this as a generalisation over all humans: Even though I can see many possible ways AI might go wrong, the reason for my belief in the danger is that I expect at least one such long-term consequence to be missed.

But also, I'm not sure you got my point about humans being treated like pets: it's not a cause of a bad outcome, it is one of the better outcomes.

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