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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

#221

Post by AngryData »

ViscountPenguin wrote: post #202
glitchc wrote: post #194

I think LLMs are absolutely fantastic tools. But I think we keep getting stuck on calling them AI. LLMs are not sentient. We can make great strides if we treat them as the next generation of helpers for all intellectual and creative arts.

I really don't get this argument. I see it all the time, but the term AI has been used for over half a century for algorithms far less sophisticated than modern LLMs. I don't think erasing history, and saying that nothing Peter Norvig worked on was "AI" makes any sense at all.

I, and im willing to bet many other people, also had an issue with previous things being called AI too. Just none of it became a prevalent enough topic for many people to hear complaints about its usage because the people who were actually talking about algorithms and AI already knew the limitations of what they were talking about, unless it was marketing materials but most people ignore marketing material claims because they are almost always complete bullshit.

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

#222

Post by RobertEva »

I like the “normal tech” lens: diffusion and process change matter more than model wow. Ask a boring question—what got cheaper? If the answer is drafting text/code and a 10–30% cut in time-to-ship, that’s real; if it’s just a cool demo, it isn’t.

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

#223

Post by maplethorpe »

jrm4 wrote: post #112
aredox wrote: post #32

The potentially "explosive" part of AI was that it could be self-improving. Using AI to improve AI, or AI improving itself in an exponential growth until it becomes super-human. This is what the "Singularity" and AI "revolution" is based on. But in the end, despite saying AI has PhD-level intelligence, the truth is that even AI companies can't get AI to help them improve faster. Anything slower than exponential is pr…

This is brilliant and I can't believe I haven't heard this idea before.

The idea was first popularized in 1993 by Verner Vinge, who coined the term "singularity". You can read his paper here: https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html

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

#224

Post by player1234 »

naasking wrote: post #187
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.

Artificial intelligence has solved protein folding. The downstream effects of that alone will be huge, and it's far from the only change coming.

Hyperbole

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

#225

Post by barnacs »

chpatrick wrote: post #173
bluefirebrand wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I disagree. Creativity is coming up with something out of the blue. Thinking is using what you know to come to a logical conclusion. LLMs so far are not very good at the former but getting pretty damn good at the latter.

> Thinking is using what you know to come to a logical conclusion

What LLMs do is using what they have _seen_ to come to a _statistical_ conclusion. Just like a complex statistical weather forecasting model. I have never heard anyone argue that such models would "know" about weather phenomena and reason about the implications to come to a "logical" conclusion.

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

#226

Post by ACCount37 »

card_zero wrote: post #218
ACCount37 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what would that "actual artificial intelligence" be, pray tell me? What is this magical, impossible-to-capture thing that disqualifies LLMs?

Well, fuck knows. However, that doesn't automatically make this a "no true Scotsman" argument. Sometimes we just don't know an answer. Here's a question for you, actually: what's the criterion for being non -intelligent?

"Fuck knows" is a wrong answer if I've ever seen one. If you don't have anything attached to your argument, then it's just "LLMs are not intelligent because I said so".

I, for one, don't think that "intelligence" can be a binary distinction. Most AIs are incredibly narrow though - entirely constrained to specific tasks in narrow domains.

LLMs are the first "general intelligence" systems - close to human in the breadth of their capabilities, and capable of tackling a wide range of tasks they weren't specifically designed to tackle.

They're not superhuman across the board though - the capability profile is jagged, with sharply superhuman performance in some domains and deeply subhuman performance in others. And "AGI" is tied to "human level" - so LLMs get to sit in this weird niche of "subhuman AGI" instead.

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

#227

Post by shakna »

chpatrick wrote: post #141
shakna wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking is better understood than you seem to believe. We don't just study it in humans. We look at it in trees [0], for example. And whilst trees have distributed systems that ingest data from their surroundings, and use that to make choices, it isn't usually considered to be intelligence. Organizational complexity is one of the requirements for intelligence, and an LLM does not reach that threshold. They have vast…

Who says what degree of complexity is enough? Seems like deferring the problem to some other mystical arbiter. In my opinion AI slop is slop not because AIs are basic but because the prompt is minimal. A human went and put minimal effort into making something with an AI and put it online, producing slop, because the actual informational content is very low.

> In my opinion AI slop is slop not because AIs are basic but because the prompt is minimal

And you'd be disagreeing with the vast amount of research into AI. [0]

> Moreover, they exhibit a counter-intuitive scaling limit: their reasoning effort increases with problem complexity up to a point, then declines despite having an adequate token budget.

[0] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-think...

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

#228

Post by barnacs »

hliyan wrote: post #220
goku12 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intelligence doesn't imply sentience, does it? Is there an issue in calling a non-sentient system intelligent?

Shifting goalposts of AI aside, intelligence as a general faculty does not require sentience, consciousness, awareness, qualia, valence or any of the things traditionally associated with a high level of biological intelligence. But what it does require: the ability to produce useful output beyond the sum total of past experience and present (sensory) input. An LLM does only this. Where as a human-like intelligence ha…

> the ability to produce useful output beyond the sum total of past experience and present (sensory) input.

Isn't that what mathematical extrapolation or statistical inference does? To me, that's not even close to intelligence.

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

#229

Post by Kurtz79 »

jcranmer wrote: post #38

Well, for starters, it would make The Economist 's recent article on "What if AI made the world's economic growth explode?" [1] look like the product of overly credulous suckers for AI hype. [1] https://www.economist.com/briefing/2025/07/24/what-if-ai-mad...

I don’t see anything inherently wrong in a news site reporting different views on the same topic.

I wish more would do that and let me make up my own mind, instead of pursuing a specific editorial line cherry-picking what news to comment and how to spin them, which seems to be the case for most (I’m talking in general terms).

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

#230

Post by coldtea »

ViscountPenguin wrote: post #202
glitchc wrote: post #194

I think LLMs are absolutely fantastic tools. But I think we keep getting stuck on calling them AI. LLMs are not sentient. We can make great strides if we treat them as the next generation of helpers for all intellectual and creative arts.

I really don't get this argument. I see it all the time, but the term AI has been used for over half a century for algorithms far less sophisticated than modern LLMs. I don't think erasing history, and saying that nothing Peter Norvig worked on was "AI" makes any sense at all.

>I really don't get this argument. I see it all the time, but the term AI has been used for over half a century for algorithms far less sophisticated than modern LLMs.

And it was fine there, because nobody, not even a layman, would mixup those with regular human intelligence (or AGI).

And laymen didn't care about those AI products or algorithms except as novelties, specicialized tools (like chess engines), or objects of ridicule (like the Clippy).

So we might be using AI as a term, but it was either as a techical term in the field, or as a vague term the average layman didn't care about much, and whose fruits would never conflate with general intelligence.

But now people attribute intelligence of the human kind to LLMs all the time, and not just laymen either.

That's the issue the parent wants to point.

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