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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

#241

Post by chpatrick »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #206
chpatrick wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I dunno man if you can't see how creativity and thinking are inextricably linked I don't know what to tell you LLMs aren't good at either, imo. They are rote regurgitation machines, or at best they mildly remix the data they have in a way that might be useful They don't actually have any intelligence or skills to be creative or logical though

They're linked but they're very different. Speaking from personal experience, It's a whole different task to solve an engineering problem that's been assigned to you where you need to break it down and reason your way to a solution, vs. coming up with something brand new like a song or a piece of art where there's no guidance. It's just a very different use of your brain.

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

#242

Post by chpatrick »

shakna wrote: post #227
chpatrick wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

This article doesn't mention "slop" at all.

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

#243

Post by shakna »

chpatrick wrote: post #242
shakna wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

This article doesn't mention "slop" at all.

But it does mention that prompt complexity is not related to the output.

It does say that there is a maximal complexity that LLMs can have - which leads us back to... Intelligence requires organizational complexity that LLMs are not capable of.

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

#244

Post by toss1 »

chrisco255 wrote: post #200
potsandpans wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"nothing ever happens." The observation is, humans tend to think that annihilation is inevitable, it hasn't happened yet so therefore it will never be inevitable. In fact, _anything_ could happen. Past performance does not guarantee future results. If you need cognitive behavioral therapy, fine. But to casually cite nuclear holocaust as something people irrationally believed in as a possibility is dishonest. That was…

> And yet there _will_ (eventually) be one generation that is right. Most likely outcome would be that humans evolve into something altogether different rather than go extinct.

The Fermi Paradox might want to have a word here...

Particularly considering the law of large numbers in play where incalculable large chances have so far shown only one sign of technologically-capable life —— ours, and zero signs of any other example of a tech species evolving into something else or even passing the Great Filter.

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

#245

Post by AbstractH24 »

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.

The likely outcome is LLMs being the next the iteration of Excel

From its ability to organize and structure data, to running large reporting calculations over and over quickly, to automating a repeatable set of steps quickly and simply.

I’m 36 and it’s hard for me to imagine what the world must have been like before spreadsheets. I can do thousands of calculations with a click

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

#246

Post by redwood »

jamesjyu wrote: post #125
redwood wrote: post #7

I think the "calculator for words" analogy is a good one. It's imperfect since words are inherently ambiguous but then again so is certain forms of digital numbers (floating point anyone?). Through this lens it's way more normal

I think a better term is "word synthesizer"

That focuses more on the outputs than the inputs tho. Close but needs something

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

#247

Post by scotty79 »

Bendy wrote: post #238
johnnienaked wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cult of efficiency will end in the only perfectly efficient world--one without us.

I’m fed up of hearing that nonsense, no it won’t. Efficiency is a human-defined measure of observed outcomes versus desired outcomes. This is subject to change as much as we are. If we do optimize ourselves to death, it’ll be because it’s what we ultimately want to happen. That may be true for some people but certainly not everyone.

I think the concern is that humans have very poor track record of defining efficiency let alone implementing solutions that serve it.

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

#248

Post by jebarker »

boringg wrote: post #171
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…

I think the payment model is still not there which is making everything blurry. Until we figure out how much people have to pay to use it and all the services built on its back it will remain challenging to figure out full value prop. That and a lot of company are going to go belly up when they have to start paying the real cost instead of growth acquisition phase.

I don’t think a payment model can be figured out until the utility of the technology justifies the true cost of training and running the models. As you say, right now it’s all subsidized based on the belief it will become drastically more useful. If that happens I think the payment model becomes simple.

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

#249

Post by kragen »

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…

What new non-AI products do you think wouldn't have existed without current AI? Because I don't see the "explosive changes and development of new products" you'd expect if things like Claude Code were a major advance.

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

#250

Post by jebarker »

chrisco255 wrote: post #199
tempodox wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’ll manage to make our own survival on this planet less probable, even without the help of “AI”.

I don't know what reality you're living in, but there are more people on this planet than ever in history and most of them are quite well fed.

And they have nuclear weapons and technology that may be destabilizing the ecosystem that supports their life.

It’s wrong to commit to either end of this argument, we don’t know how it’ll play out, but the potential for humans drastically reducing our own numbers is very much still real.

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