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Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research

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Re: Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research

#281

Post by fhd2 »

littlestymaar wrote: post #273
gnfargbl wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could this be a problem not with AI, but with our understanding of how modern economies work? The assumption here is that employees are already tuned so be efficient, so if you help them complete tasks more quickly then productivity improves. A slightly cynical alternate hypothesis could be that employees are generally already massively over-provisioned, because an individual leader's organisational power is proporti…

This is a part of it indeed. Most people (and even a significant number of economists) assume that the economy is somehow supply-limited (and it doesn't help that most 101 econ class will introduce the markets as a way of managing scarcity), but in reality demand is the limit in 90-ish% of the case. And when it's not, the supply generally don't increase as much as it could, became supplier expect to be demand-limited…

Agreed. If you "create demand", it usually just means people are spending on the thing you provide, and consequently less on something else. Ultimately it goes back to a few basic needs, something like Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

And then there's followup needs, such as "if I need to get somewhere to have a social life, I have a need for transportation following from that". A long chain of such follow-up needs gives us agile consultants and what not, but one can usually follow it back to the source need by following the money.

Startup folks like to highlight how they "create value", they added something to the world that wasn't there before and they get to collect the cash for it.

But assuming that population growth will eventually stagnate, I find it hard to not ultimately see it all as a zero sum game. Limited people with limited time and money, that's limited demand. What companies ultimately do, is fight for each other for that. And when the winners emerge and the dust settles, supply can go down to meet the demand.

Re: Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research

#282

Post by conartist6 »

joelthelion wrote: post #227

> When do you expect that impact? I think the models seem smarter than their economic impact would imply. > Yeah. This is one of the very confusing things about the models right now. As someone who's been integrating "AI" and algorithms into people's workflows for twenty years, the answer is actually simple. It takes time to figure out how exactly to use these tools, and integrate them into existing tooling and workf…

Yeah but it's just one model.

Call it Dave. Now Microsoft hires Dave and Open AI hires Dave. And Meta hires Dave and Oracle hires Dave and the US govt hires Dave. And soon each of those had hired not just one Dave but 50 identical copies of Dave.

It doesn't matter if Dave is a smart-ish ok guy. That's not the problem with this scenario. The problem is the the only thing on the market is Dave and people who think exactly like Dave thinks

Re: Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research

#283

Post by Yizahi »

matu3ba wrote: post #111
pron wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this implies higher intelligence Not necessarily. The problem is that we can't precisely define intelligence (or, at least, haven't so far), and we certainly can't (yet?) measure it directly. And so what we have are certain tests whose scores, we believe, are correlated with that vague thing we call intelligence in humans . Except these test scores can correlate with intelligence (whatever it is) in humans and at t…

My definition of intelligence is the capability to process and formalize a deterministic action from given inputs as transferable entity/medium. In other words knowing how to manipulate the world directly and indirectly via deterministic actions and known inputs and teach others via various mediums. As example, you can be very intelligent at software programming, but socially very dumb (for example unable to socially…

Forming deterministic actions is a sign of computation, not intelligence. Intelligence is probably (I guess) dependent on the nondeterministic actions.

Computation is when you query a standby, doing nothing, machine and it computes a deterministic answer. Intelligence (or at least some sign of it) is when machine queries you, the operator, on it's own volition.

Re: Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research

#284

Post by gnfargbl »

gizmo wrote: post #275
gnfargbl wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could this be a problem not with AI, but with our understanding of how modern economies work? The assumption here is that employees are already tuned so be efficient, so if you help them complete tasks more quickly then productivity improves. A slightly cynical alternate hypothesis could be that employees are generally already massively over-provisioned, because an individual leader's organisational power is proporti…

You describe the "fake email jobs" theory of employment. Given that there are way fewer email jobs in China does this imply that China will benefit more from AI? I think it might.

Are there fewer busy-work jobs in China? If so, why? It's an interesting assertion, but human nature tends to be universal.

Re: Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research

#285

Post by Libidinalecon »

gnfargbl wrote: post #269
joelthelion wrote: post #227

> When do you expect that impact? I think the models seem smarter than their economic impact would imply. > Yeah. This is one of the very confusing things about the models right now. As someone who's been integrating "AI" and algorithms into people's workflows for twenty years, the answer is actually simple. It takes time to figure out how exactly to use these tools, and integrate them into existing tooling and workf…

Could this be a problem not with AI, but with our understanding of how modern economies work? The assumption here is that employees are already tuned so be efficient, so if you help them complete tasks more quickly then productivity improves. A slightly cynical alternate hypothesis could be that employees are generally already massively over-provisioned, because an individual leader's organisational power is proporti…

It is the delusion of the Homo Economicus religion.

I think the problem is a strong tie network of inefficiency that is so vast across economic activity that it will take a long time to erode and replace.

The reason it feels like it is moving slow is because of the delusion the economy is made up a network of Homo Economicus agents who would instantaneously adopt the efficiencies of automated intelligence.

As opposed to the actual network of human beings who care about their lives because of a finite existence who don't have much to gain from economic activity changing at that speed.

That is different though than the David Graeber argument. A fun thought experiment that goes way too far and has little to do with reality.

Re: Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research

#286

Post by smolder »

gnfargbl wrote: post #284
gizmo wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You describe the "fake email jobs" theory of employment. Given that there are way fewer email jobs in China does this imply that China will benefit more from AI? I think it might.

Are there fewer busy-work jobs in China? If so, why? It's an interesting assertion, but human nature tends to be universal.

It could be a side effect of China pursuing more markets, having more industry, and not financializing/profit-optimizing everything. Their economy isn't universally better but in a broad sense they seem more focused on tangible material results, less on rent-seeking.

Re: Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research

#287

Post by ZaoLahma »

joelthelion wrote: post #227

> When do you expect that impact? I think the models seem smarter than their economic impact would imply. > Yeah. This is one of the very confusing things about the models right now. As someone who's been integrating "AI" and algorithms into people's workflows for twenty years, the answer is actually simple. It takes time to figure out how exactly to use these tools, and integrate them into existing tooling and workf…

AI makes the parts of my work that I spend the least time on a whole lot quicker, but (so far / still) has negligible effects on the parts of my work that I spend the most time on.

I'm still not sure if this is due to a technological limitation or an organizational one. Most of my time is not spent on solving tech problems but rather solving "human-to-human" problems (prioritization between things that need doing, reaching consensus in large groups of people of how to do things that need doing, ...)

Re: Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research

#288

Post by ozgung »

conartist6 wrote: post #282
joelthelion wrote: post #227

> When do you expect that impact? I think the models seem smarter than their economic impact would imply. > Yeah. This is one of the very confusing things about the models right now. As someone who's been integrating "AI" and algorithms into people's workflows for twenty years, the answer is actually simple. It takes time to figure out how exactly to use these tools, and integrate them into existing tooling and workf…

Yeah but it's just one model. Call it Dave. Now Microsoft hires Dave and Open AI hires Dave. And Meta hires Dave and Oracle hires Dave and the US govt hires Dave. And soon each of those had hired not just one Dave but 50 identical copies of Dave. It doesn't matter if Dave is a smart-ish ok guy. That's not the problem with this scenario. The problem is the the only thing on the market is Dave and people who think exac…

That seems like a valid problem that was also mentioned in the podcast. 50 copies of Ilya, Dave or Einstein will have diminishing returns. I think the proposed solution is ongoing training and making them individuals. MS Dave will be a different individual than Dave.gov. But then why don't we just train humans in the first place.

Re: Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research

#289

Post by Antibabelic »

ACCount37 wrote: post #271
Antibabelic wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without a direct comparison to human internals (grounded in neurobiology, rather than intuition), it's hard to say how similar these similarities are, and if they're not simply a result of the transparency illusion (as Sydney Lamb defines it). However, if you can point us to some specific reading on mechanistic interpretability that you think is relevant here, I would definitely appreciate it.

That's what I'm saying: there is no "direct comparison grounded in neurobiology" for most things, and for many things, there simply can't be one. For the same reason you can't compare gears and springs to silicon circuits 1:1. The low level components diverge too much. Despite all that, the calculator and the arithmometer do the same things. If you can't go up an abstraction level and look past low level implementati…

There is no level of abstraction to go up sans context. Again, let me repeat myself as well: the calculator and the arithmometer do the same things -- from the point of view of the cleric that needs to add and subtract quickly. Otherwise they are simply two completely different objects. And we will have a hard time making correct inferences about how one works based only on how we know the other works, or, e.g. how calculating machines work.

What I'm interested in is evidence that supports that "The more you try to look into the LLM internals, the more similarities you find". Some pointers to specific books and papers will be very helpful.

Re: Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research

#290

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

zaptrem wrote: post #217
chroma205 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've fed thousands of dollars to Anthropic/OAI/etc for their coding models over the past year despite never having paid for dev tools before in my life. Seems commercially viable to me. For OpenAI to produce a 10% return, every iPhone user on earth needs to pay $30/month to OpenAI. That ain’t happening.

Not sure where that math is coming from. Assuming it's true, you're ignoring that some users (me) already pay 10X that. Btw according Meta's SEC filings: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2023/q4... they made around $22/month/american user (not even heavy user or affluent iPhone owner) in q3 2023. I assume Google would be higher due to larger marketshare.

A banks sell side analyst team, which is quite different.
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