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Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

thealgorithmicbridge.com

151–160 of 243 posts

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A sufficiently good simulation of understanding is functionally equivalent to understanding. At that point, the question of whether the model really does understand is pointless. We might as well argue about whether humans understand.

thats the point though, its not sufficient. Not even slightly. It constantly makes obvious mistakes, and cannot keep things coherent I was almost going to explicitly mention your point but deleted it because I thought people would be able to understand. This is not a philosophy/theology sitting around handwringing about "oh but would a sufficiently powerful LLM be able to dance on the head of a pin". We're talking ab…

Which is exactly why is it insane that the industry is hell bent on creating autonomous automation through LLMs. Rube Goldberg machines is what will be created, and if civilization survives that insanity it will be looked back upon as one grand stupid era.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#152
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related to your point: if these tools are close to having super-human intelligence, and they make humans so much more productive, why aren't we seeing improvements at a much faster rate than we are now? Why aren't inherent problems like hallucination already solved, or at least less of an issue? Surely the smartest researchers and engineers money can buy would be dogfooding, no? This is the main point that proves to…

> if these tools are close to having super-human intelligence, and they make humans so much more productive, why aren't we seeing improvements at a much faster rate than we are now? Why aren't inherent problems like hallucination already solved, or at least less of an issue? Surely the smartest researchers and engineers money can buy would be dogfooding, no? Hallucination does seem to be much less of an issue now. I…

ChatGPT constantly hallucinates. At least once per conversation I attempt to happen with it. We all gave up on bitching about it constantly because we would never talk about anything else, but I have no reason to believe that any LLM has vaguely solved this problem.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A sufficiently good simulation of understanding is functionally equivalent to understanding. At that point, the question of whether the model really does understand is pointless. We might as well argue about whether humans understand.

In the Catch me if you Can movie, Leo diCaprio’s character wears a surgeon’s gown and confidently says “I concur”. What I’m hearing here is that you are willing to get your surgery done by him and not by one of the real doctors - if he is capable of pronouncing enough doctor-sounding phrases.

If that's what you're hearing, then you're not thinking it through. Of course one would not want an AI acting as a doctor as one's real doctor, but a medical or law school graduate studying for a license sure would appreciate a Socratic tutor in their specialization. Likewise, on the job in a technical specialization, a sounding board is of more value when it follows along, potentially with a virtual board of debate, and questions when logical drifts occur. It's not AI thinking for one, it is AI critically assisting their exploration through Socratic debate. Do not place AI in charge of critical decisions, but do place them in the assistance of people figuring out such situations.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#154
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related to your point: if these tools are close to having super-human intelligence, and they make humans so much more productive, why aren't we seeing improvements at a much faster rate than we are now? Why aren't inherent problems like hallucination already solved, or at least less of an issue? Surely the smartest researchers and engineers money can buy would be dogfooding, no? This is the main point that proves to…

> if these tools are close to having super-human intelligence, and they make humans so much more productive, why aren't we seeing improvements at a much faster rate than we are now? Why aren't inherent problems like hallucination already solved, or at least less of an issue? Surely the smartest researchers and engineers money can buy would be dogfooding, no? Hallucination does seem to be much less of an issue now. I…

The few times I've used Google to search for something (Kagi is amazing!), it's Gemini Assistant at the top fabricated something insanely wrong.

A few days ago, I asked free ChatGPT to tell me the head brewer of a small brewery in Corpus Christi. It told me that the brewery didn't exist, which it did, because we were going there in a few minutes, but after re-prompting it, it gave me some phone number that it found in a business filing. (ChatGPT has been using web search for RAG for some time now.)

Hallucinations are still a massive problem IMO.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#155

"A disturbing amount of effort goes into making AI tools engaging rather than useful or productive." Right. It worked for social media monetization. "... hallucinations ..." The elephant in the room. Until that problem is solved. AI systems can't be trusted to do anything on their own. The solution the AI industry has settled on is to make hallucinations an externality, like pollution. They're fine as long as someone…

Waymo "did it" in very controlled environments, not in general. They're still a ways away from solving self-driving in the general case.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#156
post #58

Also, AGI is not just around the corner. We need artificial comprehension for that, and we don't even have a theory how comprehension works. Comprehension is the fusing of separate elements into new functional wholes, dynamically abstracting observations, evaluating them for plausibility, and reconstituting the whole - and all instantaneously, for security purposes, of every sense constantly. We have no technology th…

Another way to put it is we need Artificial Intelligence. Right now the term has been co-opted to mean prediction (and more commonly transcript generation). The stuff you're describing are what's commonly thought of as intelligence, it's too bad we need a new word for it.

No, we have the intelligence part, we know what to do when we have the answers. What we don't know is how to derive the answers without human intervention at all, not even our written knowledge. Artificial comprehension will not require anything beyond senses, observations through time, which builds a functional world model from observation and interaction, capable of navigating the world as a communicating participant. Note I'm not talking about agency, also called "will", which is separate from both intelligence and comprehension. Where intelligence is "knowing", comprehension is the derivation of knowing from observation and interaction alone, and agency is the entirely other ability to choose action over in action, to employ comprehension to affect the world, and for what purpose?

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might, depending on the definition. Some kind of verbal-only-AGI that can solve almost all mathematical problems that humans come up with that can be solved in half a page. I think that's achievable somewhere in the near term, 2-7 years.

What makes you think that this could be achieved in that time frame? All we seem to have for now are LLMs that can solve problems they’ve learned by heart (or neighboring problems)

Transformers can actually learn pretty difficult manipulations, even how to calculate difficult integrals, so I don't agree that they can only solve problems they've learned by heart.

The reason I believe it can be achieved in this time frame is that I believe that you can do much more with non-output tokens than is currently being done.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#158
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if these tools are close to having super-human intelligence, and they make humans so much more productive, why aren't we seeing improvements at a much faster rate than we are now? Why aren't inherent problems like hallucination already solved, or at least less of an issue? Surely the smartest researchers and engineers money can buy would be dogfooding, no? Hallucination does seem to be much less of an issue now. I…

The few times I've used Google to search for something (Kagi is amazing!), it's Gemini Assistant at the top fabricated something insanely wrong. A few days ago, I asked free ChatGPT to tell me the head brewer of a small brewery in Corpus Christi. It told me that the brewery didn't exist, which it did, because we were going there in a few minutes, but after re-prompting it, it gave me some phone number that it found i…

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Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#159

"A disturbing amount of effort goes into making AI tools engaging rather than useful or productive." Right. It worked for social media monetization. "... hallucinations ..." The elephant in the room. Until that problem is solved. AI systems can't be trusted to do anything on their own. The solution the AI industry has settled on is to make hallucinations an externality, like pollution. They're fine as long as someone…

> The elephant in the room. Until that problem is solved. AI systems can't be trusted to do anything on their own.

AI system can be trusted to do most of the things on their own. You can't trust them for actions with irreversible consequences, but everything else is ok.

I can use them to write documents, code, create diagrams, designs etc. I just need to verify the result, but that's 10% of the actual work. I would say that 90% of modern day office work can be done with the help of AI.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#160
post #8

Observe what the AI companies are doing, not what they are saying. If they would expect to achieve AGI soon, their behaviour would be completely different. Why bother developing chatbots or doing sales, when you will be operating AGI in a few short years? Surely, all resources should go towards that goal, as it is supposed to usher the humanity into a new prosperous age (somehow).

> Why bother developing chatbots

Maybe it is the reverse? It is not them offering a product, it is the users offering their interaction data. Data which might be harvested for further training of the real deal, which is not the product. Think about it: They (companies like OpenAI) have created a broad and diverse user base which without a second thought feeds them with up-to-date info about everything happening in the world, down to the individual life and even their inner thoughts. No one in the history of mankind ever had such a holistic view, almost gods eye. That is certainly something a super intelligence would be interested in. They may have achieved it already and we are seeing one of its strategies playing out. Not saying they have, but this observation would not be incompatible or indicate they haven't.

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