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OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

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Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#251
post #146
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> than a self aware entity. What does this mean? If I have a blind, deaf, paralyzed person, who could only communicate through text, what would the signs be that they were self aware? Is this more of a feedback loop problem? If I let the LLM run in a loop, and tell it it's talking to itself, would that be approaching "self aware"?

Being aware of its own limitations, for example. Or being aware of how its utterances may come across to its interlocutor. (And by limitations I don’t mean “sorry, I’m not allowed to help you with this dangerous/contentious topic”.)

Plenty of humans, unfortunately, are incapable of admitting limitations. Many years ago I had a coworker who believed he would never die. At first I thought he was joking, but he was in fact quite serious.

Then there are those who are simply narcissistic, and cannot and will not admit fault regardless of the evidence presented them.

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we've even started to get the most value out of current gen LLMs. For starters very few people are even looking at sampling which is a major part of the model performance. The theory behind these models so aggressively lags the engineering that I suspect there are many major improvements to be found just by understanding a bit more about what these models are really doing and making re-designs based on…

> I've started to realize that many people have been holding on of building things waiting for "that next big update" I’ve noticed this too — I’ve been calling it intellectual deflation. By analogy, why spend now when it may be cheaper in a month? Why do the work now, when it will be easier in a month?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#253
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether self awareness is a requirement for AGI definitely gets more into the Philosophy department than the Computer Science department. I'm not sure everyone even agrees on what AGI is, but a common test is "can it do what humans can". For example, in this article it says it can't do coding exercises outside the training set. That would definitely be on the "AGI checklist". Basically doing anything that is outside…

I feel the test for AGI should be more like: "go find a job and earn money" or "start a profitable business" or "pick a bachelor degree and complete it", etc.

An LLM doing crypto spam/scamming has been making money by tricking Marc Andressen into boosting it. So to the degree that "scamming gullible billionaires and their fans" is a job, that's been done.

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#254

I don't see a problem with this, we were inevitably going to reach some kind of plateau with existing pre-LLM-era data. Meanwhile, the existing tech is such a step change that industry is going to need time to figure out how to effectively use these models. In a lot of ways it feels like the "digitization" era all over again - workflows and organizations that were built around the idea humans handled all the cognitiv…

> feels like the "digitization" era all over again

This exactly. And as history shows, no matter how much effort the current big LLM companies do they won't be able to grasp the best uses for their tech. We will see small players developing it even further. I'm thankful for the legendary blindness of these anticompetitive behemoths. Less than 2 decades ago: IBM Watson.

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#255
post #142

What a stupid piece. We are making leaps every 6 months still. Tell me this when there are no developments for 3 years.

I'm curious, what was the leap after GPT-4? What about the leaps after that, given a leap every 6 months?

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#256

Every negative headline I see about AI hitting a wall or being over-hyped makes me think of the early 2000's with that new thing the 'internet' (yes, I know the internet is a lot older than that). There is little doubt in my mind that ten years from now nearly every aspect of life will be deeply connected to AI just like the internet took over everything in the late 90's and early 2000's and is now deeply connected t…

It's strange to me that's your takeaway. The reason that the internet was overhyped in the 2000's is because it was and also heavily overvalued. It took a massive correction and seriously disruptive bubble burst to break the delusion and move on to something more sustainable.

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're playing a different game than the Sam Altmans of the world. The level of investment and profit they are looking for can only be justified by creating AGI. The > 100 P/E ratios we are already seeing can't be justified by something as quotidian as the exceptionally good productivity tools you're talking about.

> level of investment and profit they are looking for can only be justified by creating AGI What are you basing this on? IT outsourcing is a $500+ billion industry. If OpenAI et al can run even a 10% margin, that business alone justifies their valuation.

It seems you are missing a lot of "ifs" in that hypothetical!

Nobody knows how things like coding assistants or other AI applications will pan out. Maybe it'll be Oracle selling Meta-licenced solutions that gets the lion's share of the market. Maybe custom coding goes away for many business applications as off-the-shelf solutions get smarter.

A future where all that AI (or some hypothetical AGI) changes is work being done by humans to the same work being done by machines seems way too linear.

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#258
post #115

Question for the group here: do we honestly feel like we've exhausted the options for delivering value on top of the current generation of LLMs? I lead a team exploring cutting edge LLM applications and end-user features. It's my intuition from experience that we have a LONG way to go. GPT-4o / Claude 3.5 are the go-to models for my team. Every combination of technical investment + LLMs yields a new list of potential…

> you can have LLMs create reasonable code changes, with automatic review / iteration etc.

Nobody who takes code health and sustainability seriously wants to hear this. You absolutely do not want to be in a position where something breaks, but your last 50 commits were all written and reviewed by an LLM. Now you have to go back and review them all with human eyes just to get a handle on how things broke, while customers suffer. At this scale, it's an effort multiplier, not an effort reducer.

It's still good for generating little bits of boilerplate, though.

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the test for AGI should be more like: "go find a job and earn money" or "start a profitable business" or "pick a bachelor degree and complete it", etc.

An LLM doing crypto spam/scamming has been making money by tricking Marc Andressen into boosting it. So to the degree that "scamming gullible billionaires and their fans" is a job, that's been done.

source? didn't find anything online about this.

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see takes like this all the time and its so confusing. Why does knowing how things work under the hood make you think its not on the path towards AGI? What was lacking in the Attention paper that tells you AGI won't be built on LLMs? If its the supposed statistical nature of LLMs (itself a questionable claim), why does statistics seem so deflating to you?

Because it can't apply any reasoning that hasn't already been done and written into its training set. As soon as you ask it novel questions it falls apart. The big LLM vendors like OpenAI are playing whack-a-mole on these novel questions when they go viral on social media, all in a desperate bid to hide this fatal flaw. The Emperor has no clothes.

>As soon as you ask it novel questions it falls apart.

What do you mean by novel? Almost all sentences it is prompted on are brand new and it mostly responds sensibly. Surely there's some generalization going on.

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