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This time, it feels different

nadh.in

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Re: This time, it feels different

#221

Post by robertlagrant »

Mezzie wrote: post #145
robertlagrant wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, agreed. Well thought through response. What's your opinion on the following assertion: countries (such as mine) with socialised medicine make sure everyone has a certain standard of care, but that standard only goes so far. The US lets people pay for any possible treatment, and so people who would be put on palliative care in, say, the UK, would be bankrupted in the US by trying to beat cancer with expensive dru…

It's probably accurate, and of course there are issues with socialized medicine as well. I have an interesting POV because I actually had my first relapse while I was living in Canada - I wasn't allowed to stay due to my disability but I have some experience with both systems. The waiting is definitely a problem - I didn't get into a neuro before I had to leave the country 9 months later, but at the same time I never…

Yeah, totally agree. The American system seems to have, despite its amazing innovations and advances, that we all benefit from sooner or later, the worst of both worlds: neither an efficient market-driven approach not a particularly socialised one either. And that's despite the US government spending more per head than I think any other country on healthcare.

The ties between government, big pharma, insurance companies and hospital systems must be so entrenched that it's very difficult to see a way out.

Re: This time, it feels different

#222

Post by dragonwriter »

robertlagrant wrote: post #221
Mezzie wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably accurate, and of course there are issues with socialized medicine as well. I have an interesting POV because I actually had my first relapse while I was living in Canada - I wasn't allowed to stay due to my disability but I have some experience with both systems. The waiting is definitely a problem - I didn't get into a neuro before I had to leave the country 9 months later, but at the same time I never…

Yeah, totally agree. The American system seems to have, despite its amazing innovations and advances, that we all benefit from sooner or later, the worst of both worlds: neither an efficient market-driven approach not a particularly socialised one either. And that's despite the US government spending more per head than I think any other country on healthcare. The ties between government, big pharma, insurance compani…

> And that's despite the US government spending more per head than I think any other country on healthcare.

Far more per head — part of which is higher cost of labor and that healthcare is extraordinarily labor intensive. But, its also fairly high as a GDP share, for which excuses like that don’t work. The US just genuinely has a healthcare system that is ludicrously inefficient unless your goal is maximizing the wealth-based quality differential, in which case Mission Accomplished.

Re: This time, it feels different

#223

Post by robertlagrant »

dragonwriter wrote: post #222
robertlagrant wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, totally agree. The American system seems to have, despite its amazing innovations and advances, that we all benefit from sooner or later, the worst of both worlds: neither an efficient market-driven approach not a particularly socialised one either. And that's despite the US government spending more per head than I think any other country on healthcare. The ties between government, big pharma, insurance compani…

> And that's despite the US government spending more per head than I think any other country on healthcare. Far more per head — part of which is higher cost of labor and that healthcare is extraordinarily labor intensive. But, its also fairly high as a GDP share, for which excuses like that don’t work. The US just genuinely has a healthcare system that is ludicrously inefficient unless your goal is maximizing the wea…

I really think this cynical take on wealth needs to stop. This is far more likely explained by politics.

Or more precisely: efficiency is distorted by compassion. Which is then recovered by efficiency. Which is again modified by compassion. If your system is a bewildering mish-mash of cost increasing political interventions and cost reducing market innovations then it's never going to work. But lawmakers need something to do to stand out, and so do business people.

Re: This time, it feels different

#224

Post by Mawr »

zoogeny wrote: post #98
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #15

>LangChain[13] enters the chat! Imagine the horror stories of automated online account blocks and Kafkaesque customer support mazes that are all too common, manifesting at a societal level. I can imagine this to be a problem. But I can also imagine it to solve a problem. Right now, customer support is often "dehumanised" and Kafkaesque because no single human has the full picture and all the permissions required to r…

You've brought up an interesting idea in my mind: the infinite patience of AI. No more burned out, jaded customer support people. No more exhaustion answering the same questions over and over. No one feeling motivated today but in a bad mood tomorrow. In some ways, AI will regularize/normalize the CS experience. I actually believe this will be a huge net benefit. There is a pop-psychology idea that I recall where thr…

Stress is caused by lack of control, in this case due to the inability to predict, and therefore affect, an outcome.

A good example is driving, controlling a vehicle at speed necessitates constantly making accurate predictions. People get characterized as bad drivers largely due to behaving unpredictably.

Re: This time, it feels different

#225

Post by zamnos »

Mawr wrote: post #220

Every article on this subject is the same: 1. Deny there's hype 2. Start engaging in hype LLMs are a just a tool. Yes, "just". They're good at certain tasks. Mainly ones that have a lot of training data available and don't require precise output. Images, writing, boilerplate code, etc. For any other task their usefulness falls of sharply. > What it and its contemporaries have set loose in such a short period of time,…

You forgot step 1a and 1b (which the article touches on).

1a) say it's incapable of thinking/reasoning/learning/understanding/etc

1b) argue about it's ability to think/reason/learn/understand/etc

In this case:

> They are incapable of learning anything

ChatGPT seems to have learned about plenty of things before 2021. If you ask it about concepts like copyright or gravity or communism, or ask it to "explain quantum computing in simple terms", as the landing page suggests, it displays a fairly good understanding of these concepts.

Human memory is divided into short-term and long-term (along with a bunch more concepts). It's true that ChatGPT lacks the ability to commit information from its short term memory (ie "chats") into it's long-term memory via inference, but GPT-4-Mawr, fine-tuned or re-trained on text including a new concept you invented would display some level of understanding (depending on how much text you had to fine tune it on).

On a per-chat basis, ChatGPT is able to, up to the limits of the context window, know things, and it's entirely fair to point out that a) the context window is fairly limited (8000 tokens, or 32k paid) and b) beyond that, it forgets what it was told. Some people are described as having the memory of a goldfish, and that description applies to ChatGPT. If you can fit your concept into the context window, ChatGPT-4 is able to do some reasoning about it. Thus, it's able to learn and understand new things, but forgets them just as quickly.

Humans sleep every day or so, and during that time the brain gets to do things that it isn't able to do while awake, and it's been suggested that sleep is important for integrating the day's activities and thus learning of advanced concepts. Assuming that's true, then we're just looking at different timescales.

If ChatGPT "sleeps" every couple of months, and learns everything it was told between last time it was trained, it's just operating on different timescales than humans do.

Re: This time, it feels different

#226

Post by dragonwriter »

robertlagrant wrote: post #223
dragonwriter wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And that's despite the US government spending more per head than I think any other country on healthcare. Far more per head — part of which is higher cost of labor and that healthcare is extraordinarily labor intensive. But, its also fairly high as a GDP share, for which excuses like that don’t work. The US just genuinely has a healthcare system that is ludicrously inefficient unless your goal is maximizing the wea…

I really think this cynical take on wealth needs to stop. This is far more likely explained by politics. Or more precisely: efficiency is distorted by compassion. Which is then recovered by efficiency. Which is again modified by compassion. If your system is a bewildering mish-mash of cost increasing political interventions and cost reducing market innovations then it's never going to work. But lawmakers need somethi…

> I really think this cynical take on wealth needs to stop. This is far more likely explained by politics.

The only mention of wealth was describing the effect. Yes, politics is a key part of how that effect is acheived. (Of course, advocacy by those with wealth is a key part of how the politics happens, and... well, the politics/wealth interactions here are basically a near-infinite chain. They aren’t competing explanations.)

Re: This time, it feels different

#227

Post by zamnos »

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…

The problem with calling it hype is the broad stroke that's painted about all discussions of its abilities, simply by using that word when it's not all hype. A key part of the definition of hype is the exaggeration of importance and benefits. There are absolutely some out there out there that are exaggerating ChatGPT's abilities, but what are those exaggerations and what are actual abilities that anybody with an OpenAI account can go a verify (true or not) for themselves?

It's an exaggeration to say that GPT-4 can solve all programming problems, but it's easily verifiable that, for example, it's able to solve easy level leetcode problems, and what's impressive on top of that it's able to give an answer to those problems practically before I've finished even reading the problem. That's not hype or a claim by me that you have to take on faith, anybody can copy and paste a problem description and get an answer. It's fair to point out that it's so-so at medium problems, and downright unable to do hard problems, but, well, most humans can't solve hard level problems.

So what's hype, and what's not? It seems to think/reason/understand better than a human child. It's better than some humans with its command of the English language. It has broad knowledge of many subjects beyond what most individual humans know about. It sometimes has poor recall of that knowledge, and some of it is wrong, but it accepts corrections (even if it's unable to commit those corrections back to long-term memory) with far more grace than most humans.

Re: This time, it feels different

#228

Post by checkyoursudo »

akiselev wrote: post #179
divan wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLM are mathematical models that, given your question, return a sequence of words based on a very complex probability model. How is this different from how humans respond? Our model could be just some orders of magnitude more complex. Or do you think there some _fundamentally_ different things are going on in the human brain?

I think that's moot: based on the universal approximation theorem [1], a big enough model is indistinguishable from the human brain, regardless of whether the mechanism of action is fundamentally the same or not. I believe this applies to anything that can somehow be modeled with a continuous function - whether that's possible for the human brain is an open question, though we only need a certain fidelity to be usefu…

This is not the unchallenged, consensus position, though. A competing position within cognitive science is that intelligence requires embodiment, perception, metacognition, curiosity, etc., and that these factors that allow for the emergence of intelligence are indispensable, more or less.

See, e.g., https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/

I won't claim to know which is correct, or even if some other alternative is correct; however, this is not settled at all.

I do think it will some day be possible to simulate all of the embodied cognition above, which may truly render this discussion moot, but that LLMs are not doing that at all.

Re: This time, it feels different

#229

Post by aoeusnth1 »

cubefox wrote: post #186
ilaksh wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

PaLM aalready includes some LLM-generated training (consensus of different approaches), and these kinds of synthetic self-driven training metrics will only get more sophisticated and effective at improving the capabilities. It’s conceivable that we will start seeing AlphaZero-like improvement curves in reasoning.

Re: This time, it feels different

#230

Post by AndrewKemendo »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #103
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You assume the fragmentation is unintentional- it’s not. Making Organizational intelligence and knowledge management convoluted and compartmented is one of if not the core way that managers keep power over employees. So that’s not a problem that a company wants solved. However it might get solved via this process IF managers start extracting the information from ICs that is then absorbed by a large corporate model -…

>Making Organizational intelligence and knowledge management convoluted and compartmented is one of if not the core way that managers keep power over employees. So that’s not a problem that a company wants solved. Of course they want it solved. They just don't want to pay for it (and neither do customers). Larger business customers are not exposed to this madness that consumers and small businesses are having to deal…

Oh yes I’m sorry I forgot the goal was zero employment
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