261–270 of 489 posts
I cant believe people still arent grasping the profound implications of computers that can talk and make decisions.
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Very US-centric article. Written by insecure people who are clinging to power and money desperately. I don't see how some kind of big breakthrough is going to happen with the current model designs. The superintelligence, if it will ever be created, will require a new breakthrough in model architecture. We've pretty much hit the limit of what is possible with current LLMs. The improvements are marginal at this point.…
It's a US/China centered article, because that's the game, Europe is not a meaningful player and everyone else is going to get sucked into orbit of one of the superpowers. If you read the article carefully, I work hard to keep my priors and the priors of the people in question separate, as their actions may be rational under their priors, but irrational under other priors, and I feel it's worth understanding that nua…
The game seems to be everyone else waiting for the R&D money to provide us amazing open source models, and then just run those locally.
Without moralizing or assuming the worst intentions of oligarchs, globalists, evil capitalists, and so on, I still don’t understand how a consumption based economy continues to fund the build out (oil->Saudi Arabia->LPs->OpenAI) when the technology likely removes the income of its consumers. Help me understand.
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> brutal serfdom You can't seriously believe that spending all your income each month while living in the country with the highest standard of living in history is "serfdom." Hyperbolic nonsense like this makes the rest of the article hard to take seriously, not that I agree with most of it anyway.
Take a look at the way people in a large part of the US are living. Paycheck to paycheck not because they're idiots that likes to consume, but because shit is expensive and wages haven't kept up with productivity for like 50 years. People are suffering, agree with the rest of what I say or not, but I can't let you slide on that.
And to this specific comment, wages outpaced inflation since the 1970s for everyone but the poorest households (I believe the bottom 10% are the exception, who I would probably agree are suffering in some sense). Working class real wage growth actually outpaced white collar real wage growth for a couple years post-COVID, for the first time in a long time. Also, wage measurements don't normally measure total compensation, notably health insurance which has been increasing much faster than wages or overall inflation for decades.
Also, there's no reason to expect wage growth to match productivity growth. Productivity gains are largely due to company investment, not increased effort from workers, and household expenses are not positively correlated with productivity metrics.
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Who's going to pay to run those models? They are currently running at a huge loss.
I can run quite useful models on my PC. Might not change the world but I got a usable transcript of an old foreign language TV show and then machine translated to English. It is not as good as professional subtitles but i wasn't willing to pay the cost of that option.
9 years ago, when my now wife and I were dating, we took a long cross-country road trip, and for a lot of it, we listened to NPR's Ask Me Another (a comedy trivia game).
Anyway, on one random episode, there was a joke in the show that just perfectly fit what we were doing at that exact moment. We laughed and laughed and soon forgot about it.
Years later, I wanted to find that again and purposely recreate the same moment.
I downloaded all 300 episodes as MP3s. I used Whisper to generate text transcripts, followed by a little bit of grepping, and I found the one 4-second joke that otherwise would have been lost to time.
I cant believe people still arent grasping the profound implications of computers that can talk and make decisions.
Reminds me of crypto/Web-3.0 hype. Lots of bluster about changing economic systems, offering people freedom and wealth, only to mostly be scams, and coming with too serious inherent drawbacks/costs to solve many of the big problems it promises to solve. In the end leaving the world changed, but not as meaningfully or positively as promised.
Basically the hype cycle is as American as Apple Pie.
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> we are on the cusp of intelligent machines. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. We have machines that talk , which is corollary to nothing.
Sometimes I wonder if reason is partially a product of manipulating language.
Most ideas, even in the reasoning fields, are generated in non-linguistic processes.
Of course, some problems are solved by step-by-step linguistic (or math) A, then B, then C steps, etc., but even for those types of problems, when they get complex, the solution looks more like follow a bunch of paths to dead ends, think some more, go away, and then "Aha!" the idea of a solution pops into our head, then we back it up and make it explicit with the linguistic/logical 'chain of reasoning' to explain it to others. That solution did not come from manipulating language, but from some other cognitive processes we do not understand, but the explanation of it used language.
LLMs aren't even close to that type of processing.
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There was a video on YT (gamers nexus I think) and an excel sheet comparing jumps in performance gains between each new nvidia generation. They are becoming smaller and smaller, probably now driven by AI boom where most of the silicon is used for data centers. Regardless of that, I have a feeling we are approaching the ceiling of chip performance. Just comparing PS3 and PS4 and then PS4 with PS5, performance jump is…
We also have hit ceilings of performance demand. As an example, 8K TVs never really got off the ground because your average consumer could give a hoot. Vision Pro is a flop because AR/VR are super niche. Crypto is more gambling than asset class. Etc. What is interesting is that it seems like the ever larger sums of money sloshing around are resulting in bigger, faster hype cycles. We are already seeing some companies…
(It might be too expensive to pay for LLM subscriptions when every device in your house is "thinking" all day long. A 3-5k Computer for a local llm might pay itself off after a year or two. )
The singularity. I don't think most authors of articles like these understand what the AI build up is about, they think it's another fad tool.
You might want to listen to what people besides Sam Altman and Ray Kurweil say, at least once in a while.
It occured to me as a teenager and I wrote an essay on if for my uni admissions exam back in 1981 but it's not rocket science and the idea goes back at least to John von Neumann who came up with the 'singularity' term in the 50s.