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AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

economist.com

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Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#151

Post by sfpotter »

tintor wrote: post #133
sfpotter wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Floating point numbers aren't ambiguous in the least. They behave by perfectly deterministic and reliable rules and follow a careful specification.

In theory, yes. In practice, outcome of floating point computation depends on compiler optimizations, order of operations, and rounding used.

None of this is contradictory.

1. Compiler optimizations can be disabled. If a compiler optimization violates IEEE754 and there is no way to disable it, this is a compiler bug and is understood as such.

2. This is as advertised and follows from IEEE754. Floating point operations aren't associative. You must be aware of the way they work in order to use them productively: this means understanding their limitations.

3. Again, as advertised. The rounding mode is part of the spec and can be controlled. Understand it, use it.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#152

Post by 65 »

g42gregory wrote: post #150

While I feel silly to take seriously something printed in The Economist, I would like to mention that people tend to overestimate the short-term impact of any technology and underestimate its long-term impacts. Maybe AI will follow the same route?

Ah yes, disgraced tabloid The Economist, no one should ever take their writing seriously!

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#153

Post by mmargenot »

At least within tech, there seem to have been explosive changes and development of new products. While many of these fail, things like agents and other approaches for handling foundation models are only expanding in use cases. Agents themselves are hardly a year old as part of common discourse on AI, though technologists have been building POCs for longer. I've been very impressed with the wave of tools along the lines of Claude Code and friends.

Maybe this will end up relegated to a single field, but from where I'm standing (from within ML / AI), the way in which greenfield projects develop now is fundamentally different as a result of these foundation models. Even if development on these models froze today, MLEs would still likely be prompted to start with feeding something to a LLM, just because it's lightning fast to stand up.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#154

Post by bluefirebrand »

chpatrick wrote: post #140
elbasti wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not some "magical way"--the ways in which a human thinks that an LLM doesn't are pretty obvious, and I dare say self-evidently part of what we think constitutes human intelligence: - We have a sense of time (ie, ask an LLM to follow up in 2 minutes) - We can follow negative instructions ("don't hallucinate, if you don't know the answer, say so")

I think plenty of people have problems with the second one but you wouldn't say that means they can't think.

We don't need to prove all humans are capable of this. We can demonstrate that some humans are, therefore humans must be capable, broadly speaking

Until we see an LLM that is capable of this, then they aren't capable of it, period

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#155

Post by bluefirebrand »

chpatrick wrote: post #99
barnacs wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's only able to answer the question because it has been trained on all text in existence written by humans, precisely with the purpose to mimic human language use. It is the humans that produced the training data and then provided feedback in the form of reinforcement that did all the "thinking". Even if it can extrapolate to some degree (altough that's where "hallucinations" tend to become obvious), it could n…

Humans are also trained on data made by humans. > it could never, for example, invent a game like chess or a social construct like a legal system. Those require motivations like "boredom", "being social", having a "need for safety". That's creativity which is a different question from thinking.

> Humans are also trained on data made by humans

Humans invent new data, humans observe things and create new data. That's where all the stuff the LLMs are trained on came from.

> That's creativity which is a different question from thinking

It's not really though. The process is the same or similar enough don't you think?

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#156

Post by omnicognate »

chpatrick wrote: post #147
omnicognate wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems backwards to me. There's a fully understood thing (LLMs)[1] and a not-understood thing (brains)[2]. You seem to require a person to be able to fully define (presumably in some mathematical or mechanistic way) any behaviour they might observe in the not-understood thing before you will permit them to point out that the fully understood thing does not appear to exhibit that behaviour. In short you are requir…

LLMs are absolutely not "fully understood". We understand how the math of the architectures work because we designed that. How the hundreds of gigabytes of automatically trained weights work, we have no idea. By that logic we understand how human brains work because we've studied individual neurons. And here's some more goalpost-shifting. Most humans aren't capable of novel mathematical thought either, but that doesn…

We don't understand individual neurons either. There is no level on which we understand the brain in the way we very much do understand LLMs. And as much as people like to handwave about how mysterious the weights are we actually perfectly understand both how the weights arise and how they result in the model's outputs. As I mentioned in [1] what we can't do is "explain" individual behaviours with simple stories that omit unnecessary details, but that's just about desiring better (or more convenient/useful) explanations than the utterly complete one we already have.

As for most humans not being mathematicians, it's entirely irrelevant. I gave an example of something that so far LLMs have not shown an ability to do. It's chosen to be something that can be clearly pointed to and for which any change in the status quo should be obvious if/when it happens. Naturally I think that the mechanism humans use to do this is fundamental to other aspects of their behaviour. The fact that only a tiny subset of humans are able to apply it in this particular specialised way changes nothing. I have no idea what you mean by "goalpost-shifting" in this context.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#157

Post by hn_acc1 »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #92
Kapura wrote: post #30

Digital spreadsheets (excel, etc) have done much more to change the world than so-called "artificial intelligence," and on the current trajectory it's difficult to see that changing.

Agents are going to change everything. Once we've got a solid programmatic system driving interface and people get better about exposing non-ui handles for agents to work with programs, agents will make apps obsolete. You're going to have a device that sits by your desk and listens to you, watches your movements and tracks your eyes, and dispatches agents to do everything you ask it to do, using all the information i…

So basically, the "ideal" state of a human is to be 100% active driving agents to vibe code whatever you need, based on every movement, every thought? Can our brains even handle having every thought being intentional and interpreted as such without collapsing (nervous breakdown)?

I guess I've always been more of a "work to live" type.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#158

Post by daxfohl »

bilsbie wrote: post #9

I’m guessing it will be exactly like the internet. Changes everything and changes nothing.

Yeah I can see it being like late 90's and early 2000's for a while. Mostly consulting companies raking in the cash setting up systems for older companies, a ton of flame-out startups, and a few new powerhouses.

Will it change everything? IDK, moving everything self-hosted to the cloud was supposed to make operations a thing of the past, but in a way it just made ops an even bigger industry than it was.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#159

Post by AnIrishDuck »

jcranmer wrote: post #136
m_fayer wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m pretty sure the “what if” in that article was meant in earnest. That article was playing out a scenario, in a nod to the ai maximalists. I don’t think it was making any sort of prediction or actually agreeing with those maximalists.

It was the central article of the issue, the one that dictated the headline and image on the cover for the week, and came with a small coterie of other articles discussing the repercussions of such an AI. If it was disagreeing with AI maximalists, it was primarily in terms of the timeline, not in terms of the outcomes or inevitability of the scenario.

This doesn't seem right to me. From the article I believe you are referencing ("What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?"):

> If investors thought all this was likely, asset prices would already be shifting accordingly. Yet, despite the sky-high valuations of tech firms, markets are very far from pricing in explosive growth. “Markets are not forecasting it with high probability,” says Basil Halperin of Stanford, one of Mr Chow’s co-authors. A draft paper released on July 15th by Isaiah Andrews and Maryam Farboodi of mit finds that bond yields have on average declined around the release of new ai models by the likes of Openai and DeepSeek, rather than rising.

It absolutely (beyond being clearly titled "what if") presented real counterarguments to its core premise.

There are plenty of other scenarios that they have explored since then, including the totally contrary "What if the AI stock market blows up?" article.

This is pretty typical for them IME. They definitely have a bias, but they do try to explore multiple sides of the same idea in earnest.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#160

Post by andy99 »

mmargenot wrote: post #153

At least within tech, there seem to have been explosive changes and development of new products. While many of these fail, things like agents and other approaches for handling foundation models are only expanding in use cases. Agents themselves are hardly a year old as part of common discourse on AI, though technologists have been building POCs for longer. I've been very impressed with the wave of tools along the lin…

Its probably cliche but I think it's both overhyped and under hyped, and for the same reason. They hype comes from "leadership" types that don't understand what LLMs actually do and so imagine all sorts of nonsense (replacing vast swaths of jobs or autonomously writing code) but don't understand how valuable a productivity enhancer and automation tool to can be. Eventually hype and reality will converge, but unlike e.g. blockchain or even some of the less bullshit "big data" and similar trends, there's no doubt that access to an LLM is a clear productivity enhancer for many jobs.
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