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This time, it feels different

nadh.in

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Re: This time, it feels different

#181

Post by stevenhuang »

fullstackchris wrote: post #154
nologic01 wrote: post #120

Geez people. Please learn to identify hypes, but most importantly the causes of hypes. LLM is fundamentally information processing technology. Not the path to AGI, not an emerging sentience. The reason "this time" feels so amazing is that the unwashed masses suddenly got access to new information processing technology in a context where their tools been stagnant for decades . Not because it was not possible, but beca…

Finally someone on HN who understands the technology (surprisingly few) and the socioeconomic undercurrent and risks. Absolutely no risk of terminator here, just ignorance masquerading as such.

Pride comes before the fall, and the AI comes before humility

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35879657

Re: This time, it feels different

#182

Post by cubefox »

nly wrote: post #102
cubefox wrote: post #74

He (and most people on HN) are still underestimating the impact of this. Everything points at AI soon becoming far more intelligent than any human. That's not science fiction about the remote future in a hundred years. We are talking about something in the order of ten years. We are actually at the brink of the "technological singularity". It's happening. It's happening.

I would wager in 10 years time we're all looking back in dismay about how AI has just been used to produce an endless stream of fake news, empty-feeling generated content, spam, ads and other forms of monetisation that make our lives miserable. Some menial administrative jobs that have virtually no value but aren't yet fully automated will be wiped out by conglomerates who offer their white label AI solutions at scal…

AI progress has strongly sped up in the last years. We have come a long way since the simple digit recognizers. And there is no end in sight, no AI winter. There are no diminishing returns in intelligence. Strong AI is the last invention.

Re: This time, it feels different

#183

Post by ukuina »

scaramanga wrote: post #56
ctrl-vvvvvvvvv wrote: post #29

Geez another article on the AI Spookiness? How many is that this month now? Most of these articles border on science fiction and involve a lot of projection. While I am concerned in some ways with AI, particularly in mass surveillance and public manipulation via bots, what else can we do other than be reactive to _real_ AI applications when _deployed_? Then we start to discuss proper policy towards AI. Until we see s…

It's a secular religion. The whole thing scans very much the like the man who ambushed me in a public bathhouse a few weeks ago to tell me about how skeptical he was about Jesus his whole life, right up until the moment he found Jesus. And proceeded to expound on it at great length, while I avoided eye contact, fidgeted, stared in the opposite direction, etc.. At some point you have to just get up and walk to the oth…

There are public bathhouses still around?

Re: This time, it feels different

#184

Post by analognoise »

root_axis wrote: post #45
analognoise wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the wealth of the average worker has been stagnant since the 70's - computers, the internet, etc came and brought tons of wealth, and didn't raise the standard of living. I've never thought about computers that way - they got here, and didn't make everyone's lives better - they just accelerated wealth concentration in the top 1%.

> computers, the internet, etc came and brought tons of wealth, and didn't raise the standard of living Huh?? What world are you living in where the standard of living hasn't increased in the last 50 years?

If you buy the bullshit about being able to afford a faster computer as increased standard of living, sure.

If you consider housing, food, medical insurance, car prices, education - all of these things are ridiculously expensive compared to what they used to be.

"But we have the Nintendo Switch!" does not alleviate what we're going through right now.

Re: This time, it feels different

#185

Post by renonce »

oxfordmale wrote: post #163
sledgehammers wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said. > "Not the path to AGI, not an emerging sentience". These are HUGE claims. Define AGI. Define sentience. What is the path and why isn't LLM on it? Right now those words are only dangerous misinformation - originating from a brain trying to protect its shaking world view. A reminder: you can talk with computers now. Think about that for a moment.

LLM are mathematical models that, given your question, return a sequence of words based on a very complex probability model. The many examples on the internet show that ChatGPT doesn't understand most concepts. For instance, it doesn't know what a book is; it just knows what humans say about books. Finally, OpenAI has already stated there is a limit to how far the current AI models can progress. ChatGPT 5 will eventu…

There is no point in arguing whether LLMs have minds or are conscious, and neither is arguing whether it actually understands any concepts. Neither are LLMs are the first tech to be useful to humans - caculators are invented much earlier.

What is interesting is that it’s answering questions in a meaningful way that is competitive to humans. It replaces about 50% of jobs for each field where all work can be done on computers (like drawing and writing texts) and that number will only grow, until the point where only the most competent people with lots of training and experience can be trusted to do better.

And we don’t need GPT-5 to hit the likit - I think OpenAI said that they don’t have GPT-5 because GPT-4 already hit the limits. The next area for improvement would be multimodal, I think.

Re: This time, it feels different

#186

Post by cubefox »

ilaksh wrote: post #121
cubefox wrote: post #74

He (and most people on HN) are still underestimating the impact of this. Everything points at AI soon becoming far more intelligent than any human. That's not science fiction about the remote future in a hundred years. We are talking about something in the order of ten years. We are actually at the brink of the "technological singularity". It's happening. It's happening.

Way less than ten years. You have to also consider the speed of input, thought (output), and communication. GPT-4 is basically human equivalent IQ but probably faster than human. PaLM 2 is not quite human level IQ but is something like 20 times faster than human output. The input rate of the Claude model is incredible, digesting a book in 20 seconds. Still not quite human level IQ but pretty close. There is relativel…

Pure LLMs alone can probably not go vastly beyond human intelligence because they rely on imitating humans (human text). I think there is still one or two breakthroughs missing to get robotics solved.

Re: This time, it feels different

#188

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

somewhereoutth wrote: post #115
cubefox wrote: post #74

He (and most people on HN) are still underestimating the impact of this. Everything points at AI soon becoming far more intelligent than any human. That's not science fiction about the remote future in a hundred years. We are talking about something in the order of ten years. We are actually at the brink of the "technological singularity". It's happening. It's happening.

Nothing points to this I'm afraid. All we have with LLMs is a probabilistic word salad generator that is realistic enough to get people who should / should not know better very excited. It is better than Google search because it puts the results into a realistic sounding piece of text. It is worse than Google search because it does not provide sources or context. Both will steal the information you feed in. Exactly n…

> It is worse than Google search because it does not provide sources or context.

Try Bing chat. It provides sources for it's responses.

Re: This time, it feels different

#189

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

fzeroracer wrote: post #138

> It just repeats patterns > It is just a glorified probabilistic text generator. > It is just a “stochastic parrot”. > It “hallucinates”. > It is not “intelligent” the way humans are. > It does not actually “think” like humans. > It will never get human qualities like humour.[4] > It is snake oil and is no different from any other technology that has come before. > If it causes job losses, new jobs will emerge, like…

> It's by people that haven't used it in a professional environment

Samsung had to tell it's engineers to stop using chatgpt because it was leaking secrets.

Re: This time, it feels different

#190

Post by [deleted] »

cubefox wrote: post #65
300bps wrote: post #34

imagine what better, faster, more “intelligent” systems to follow in the wake of what exists today would be capable of doing Is this a given? Sure it will continue to improve but by how much? 200% or 2%? That’s the question. Anyone could’ve measured my height when I was 14 and predicted that I would be 35 feet tall today. But human bodies have limits. What are the limits of LLMs? It’s somewhere between ChatGPT-4 and…

We are talking about AI here. LLMs are obviously just an intermediate technology. For example, the next "big" model, Google's Gemini, will be multimodal, it will be able to handle other data types besides text. The next step is probably robotics.

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