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The Intelligence Age

ia.samaltman.com

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Re: The Intelligence Age

#261

Post by UweSchmidt »

ctoth wrote: post #119
swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree these LLMs are getting pretty good, I think google shares fault for making it so hard to find information on the internet. You have to scroll past 4 sponsored links to get to their algorithm results, which themselves have been gamed by SEO and content farms. As far as I can tell, google has no plans to limit AI generated botfarm search results. LLMs now seem to get you an answer more quickly than google…

I don't really understand what this comment about Google has to do with OP's comment. Is this something that even old Google could have done pre-SEOification? Would Google have been able to read the datasheet? Or just point OP at what they already said they were happy to avoid? > Without AI this would have been a long long process of brushing up on probability, vector math, manually transcribing the chart. Sometimes,…

You used to find amazing information on the internet back then. It is quite likely that someone else had already worked on a similar topic and blogged about it in a very searchable way. Without good search that kind of online culture died out.

While we do have a video tutorial culture that exceeds what we had back then in many ways, and to be fair that technically happened under Google's umbrella (Youtube), destroying search and with it a lot of the open internet, will not only be Google's downfall, it's also a silent tragedy.

Actually, measured by what a global online population could have achieved, with human information truly at anyone's fingertips, with infinite communities forming all over the place instead of in non-searchable Discord and monoculture Reddit ... this might be one of the main tragedies ever.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#262

Post by devjab »

Bjorkbat wrote: post #78
brotchie wrote: post #67

For somebody who likes building things and has many side projects Claude and ChatGPT have been huge productivity multipliers. For example, I’m designing and 3D printing custom LED diffuser channels from TPU filament. My first attempt was terrible, because I didn’t have an intuition for how light propagates through a material. After a bit of chatting with ChatGPT, I had an understanding and some direction of where to…

As much of a curmudgeon as I am on AI I do sincerely believe that one area that it's effective at is going from absolute beginner to decent understanding on something completely new and foreign. Recently I've been somewhat curious about Skia, the graphics library that Google uses. A while back I fielded a few questions about Skia to Claude. Nothing crazy, just questions on how to draw a few primitive shapes, but I fe…

As an expert who uses LLMs daily on my field of expertise I’m not looking forward to dealing with works created by people who were taught by them.

They are wrong far too often to be used for any sort of learning in my opinion. You can feed them a book and they’ll give you answers which don’t exist in any of the written material, and that’s the good part of them. Simply asking a LLM about things will give you answers that are hopelessly wrong and unless you’re an expert you won’t know it. Which isn’t necessarily worse than learning things from search engines or YouTube. I recently had ChatGPT give me a recipe for bread which was certainly better than the top 10 results on Google except for one things. The recipe listed 3x the amount of salt which you should ever reasonably use. I asked it a few other times, I even asked it for my friend Tommy’s recipe and all those answers were perfect. It obviously doesn’t know Tommy but it pretended to know and just gave me a pretty basic recipe.

Salt is a harmless error. Most people would know not to use that much salt, and even if they did, it wouldn’t harm them (much). But imagine if you had used it for something electric or chemistry.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#263

Post by codethief »

lordnacho wrote: post #193
falcor84 wrote: post #141

> Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need. This is one of those few cases where I'm actually more bullish than Altman. I don't need to wait for my kids to have it, but rather I personally am already using this daily. My regular thing is to upload a book/article(s) into the context of a Claude project and then chat w…

One thing I was thinking about was live translation. We gotta be near the stage where I can take earbuds with me to Spain and hear what the locals are saying in English? There's already apps that are pretty good at "talk to it and it hears the words, prints them, and prints the translation", so it would seem to be close?

Whisper and a bit of Python code (and a text2speech model) can already do this. At my day job we have Whisper live-translate all-hands calls for the non-native speakers in the audience. It's incredibly good.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#264

Post by klyrs »

ansk wrote: post #230

> humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data (or really, the underlying “rules” that produce any distribution of data) He's hand-waving around the idea presented in the Universal Approximation Theorem, but he's mangled it to the point of falsehood by conflating representation and learning. Just because we can parameterize an arbitrarily flexible class of distributions doe…

> It's about as profound as the notion that you can approximate a polynomial by splicing together an infinite number of piecewise linear functions.

Wait 'til you hit complex analysis and discover that Universal Entire Functions don't just exist, they're basically polynomials.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#265

Post by alexashka »

> it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there

Confident based on what, exactly? Sam Altman is engaging in 'The Secret' where if you really, really believe a thing, you'll manifest it.

Mind you, Sam Altman actually has no technical expertise, so he really really believes he can pay other people who actually know something to do magic whilst he walks about pretending to be Steve Jobs 2.0.

He'll get his trillion, AI will go nowhere but he'll be on to the next grift by then.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#266

Post by loandbehold »

ctoth wrote: post #119
swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree these LLMs are getting pretty good, I think google shares fault for making it so hard to find information on the internet. You have to scroll past 4 sponsored links to get to their algorithm results, which themselves have been gamed by SEO and content farms. As far as I can tell, google has no plans to limit AI generated botfarm search results. LLMs now seem to get you an answer more quickly than google…

I don't really understand what this comment about Google has to do with OP's comment. Is this something that even old Google could have done pre-SEOification? Would Google have been able to read the datasheet? Or just point OP at what they already said they were happy to avoid? > Without AI this would have been a long long process of brushing up on probability, vector math, manually transcribing the chart. Sometimes,…

The notion of "stochastic parrot" has been disproven. It did come from a reputable AI researcher in the first place. You can call anything you want a "stochastic parrot", including human intelligence.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#267

Post by p1esk »

throw_pm23 wrote: post #205
kulahan wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking it a step further, building that infrastructure may contribute somewhat directly to limiting the other resources actual wars are being fought over. This man needs to get out of his own head.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Sam’s ambitions are way beyond “salary”.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#269

Post by deciplex »

benlivengood wrote: post #252
d_burfoot wrote: post #243

OAI's achievements are amazing. But here's a bit of a skeptical take: cheap human-style intelligence won't have a huge impact because such intelligence isn't really a bottleneck today. It's a cliche that the brightest minds of the age are dedicated to selling more ads or shuffling stock ownership around at high velocity. Anyone who's worked at a big tech company knows the enormous ratio of talent to real engineering…

Capital follows the most profitable investments. It's why "green" technology took so long to develop (we probably could have had efficient solar panels in the 60s, but oil was super cheap and more importantly very profitable). Dropping the cost of a $1e7 problem to even $1e6 probably makes it very profitable.

> Capital follows the most profitable investments.

I think a common error is that people forget the "most" in this sentence. It is a very important word. It's not even that only profitable investments will get funded: even profitable projects might get left on the cutting room floor if they are competing for resources with projects that will generate, or are believed to generate, higher ROI.

And this maybe isn't a problem if higher ROI == better than. But to believe that, you have to also believe that enshittification is a thing that happens in spite of being less profitable (or unprofitable), which for me at least is a hard sell.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#270

Post by Nimitz14 »

highfrequency wrote: post #76
sharkjacobs wrote: post #20

> Deep learning works, and we will solve the remaining problems. We can say a lot of things about what may happen next, but the main one is that AI is going to get better with scale I'm not an AI skeptic at all, I use llms all the time, and find them very useful. But stuff like this makes me very skeptical of the people who are making and selling AI. It seems like there was a really sweet spot wrt the capabilities AI…

Progress might be logarithmic in compute, but compute (transistors/sqinch and transistors/$) is growing exponentially with time. Despite what skeptics have been saying for decades, Moore's Law is alive and well - and we haven't even figured out how to stack wafers in 3 dimensions yet!

Oh wow! Could you please share what processors are exponentially faster than those of 10 years ago? I'm not seeing any here: https://www.cpubenchmark.net
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