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Why AI is still dumb and not scary at all (pt. 1)

tejo.substack.com

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Re: Why AI is still dumb and not scary at all (pt. 1)

#31

Post by lostmsu »

robwwilliams wrote: post #26

Interesting piece but I am much more optimistic. Tejo writes: > At the heart of it, all AI is just a pattern recognition engine. They’re simply algorithms designed to maximize or minimize an objective function. There is no real thinking involved. It’s just math. If you think somewhere in all that probability theory and linear algebra, there is a soul, I think you should reassess how you define sentience.” We have two…

I totally buy the consciousness bit. I mean why did people even need to dive deep into "philosophical" discussions when there's nothing wrong with "a conscious horse" vs "an unconscious horse" in the first place which is a dead simple distinction? Sometimes an unconscious horse is just a horse without consciousness.

Re: Why AI is still dumb and not scary at all (pt. 1)

#32

Post by asadotzler »

Herring wrote: post #20

I’m pretty sure you couldn’t trust me to multiply 20-digit numbers either.

But you could trust a $3 drug-store checkout isle slim wallet calculator (with solar panels for recharging) to perform those calculations and you'd get more nines of reliability from that calculator than the LLM. And it didn't cost hundreds of billions of dollars to develop the calculator, so you won't end up paying thousands of dollars for it.

That LLMs cannot beat a $3 calculator is because they're not fit for purpose. Everything they offer is a hallucination. Just because that fabrication matches with reality some of the time does not make it good. Reliability matters and these things just don't have it.

Re: Why AI is still dumb and not scary at all (pt. 1)

#33

Post by [deleted] »

haswell wrote: post #15

This is a frustrating piece on many levels, but mostly because it doesn't really scratch the surface of what is worrisome about AI. It sets up straw men and knocks them down, but not much else. It seems to boil down to: 1. LLMs aren't actually "learning" the way humans do so we shouldn't be worried 2. LLMs don't actually "understand" anything so we shouldn't be worried 3. Technology has always been advancing and we'v…

[deleted]

Re: Why AI is still dumb and not scary at all (pt. 1)

#34

Post by war-is-peace »

haswell wrote: post #28
ed-209 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. Imagine a health insurance provider even partially automating their claim (dis)approval process - it could be both lucrative and devastating.

Adding to this, government use cases would be most likely to cause issues because they’re often relevant regardless of how badly they suck. There are already active discussions about AI being used in government for “efficiency” reasons.

i suppose that links back to the other comment i made - is hype the root issue you are trying to get at?

would be interesting to see what examples there are of this in recent history

Re: Why AI is still dumb and not scary at all (pt. 1)

#35

Post by Garlef »

ohgr wrote: post #8

Dumb stuff is what I want. Classifiers and denoise are really useful. What I don’t want is a shitty chat bot that barely understands what you ask it and generates shitty code by sticking a corpus of shitty code together then leaving me with the unconstrained job of working out if it has any land mines in it. Then multiply that by 50 engineers. Then tell me that’s the future. Because if it is we are totally fucked. Ou…

kids these days, right?

Re: Why AI is still dumb and not scary at all (pt. 1)

#36

Post by imiric »

robwwilliams wrote: post #26

Interesting piece but I am much more optimistic. Tejo writes: > At the heart of it, all AI is just a pattern recognition engine. They’re simply algorithms designed to maximize or minimize an objective function. There is no real thinking involved. It’s just math. If you think somewhere in all that probability theory and linear algebra, there is a soul, I think you should reassess how you define sentience.” We have two…

The distinction from human thinking and what the current AI hype cycle calls "thinking" is that all the machine model is doing is outputting the most probable text patterns based on its training data. We can keep adding layers on top of this, but that's all it ultimately is. The machine has no real understanding of what the text it's outputting means or what that text represents in the real world. It can't have an intuitive grasp of these concepts in the same way that a human with our 5 senses can gather over our lifetime.

This is why it's disingenuous to anthropomorphize any process of the current iteration of machine learning. There's no thinking or reasoning involved. None.

This isn't to say that this technology can't be very useful. But let's not delude ourselves thinking that we're anywhere close to achieving AGI.

"Arguing" about this topic with an LLM is pointless.

Re: Why AI is still dumb and not scary at all (pt. 1)

#37

Post by philjohn »

ed-209 wrote: post #25
war-is-peace wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's scary isn't that these models are so good they'll replace us, but that despite how limited they are, someone will make the decision to replace humans anyway. is this a real threat? if a system/company decides to replace a human with something that is less capable wouldn't that just result in it becoming irrelevant/bankrupt as it is replaced by other companies doing the same thing the more efficient (and in t…

Not necessarily. Imagine a health insurance provider even partially automating their claim (dis)approval process - it could be both lucrative and devastating.

Already happened. With predictable results.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Y7QPXzDmloI?embeds_referring_...

Re: Why AI is still dumb and not scary at all (pt. 1)

#38

Post by jdietrich »

war-is-peace wrote: post #23
haswell wrote: post #15

This is a frustrating piece on many levels, but mostly because it doesn't really scratch the surface of what is worrisome about AI. It sets up straw men and knocks them down, but not much else. It seems to boil down to: 1. LLMs aren't actually "learning" the way humans do so we shouldn't be worried 2. LLMs don't actually "understand" anything so we shouldn't be worried 3. Technology has always been advancing and we'v…

> What's scary isn't that these models are so good they'll replace us, but that despite how limited they are, someone will make the decision to replace humans anyway. is this a real threat? if a system/company decides to replace a human with something that is less capable wouldn't that just result in it becoming irrelevant/bankrupt as it is replaced by other companies doing the same thing the more efficient (and in t…

Has any company ever truly believed that outsourcing their customer service to India would improve the experience for their customers? No, but they did it anyway, because it cut costs. AI can be obviously worse than humans and still put them out of work, because GPUs are much cheaper than people.

Re: Why AI is still dumb and not scary at all (pt. 1)

#39

Post by jdietrich »

asadotzler wrote: post #32
Herring wrote: post #20

I’m pretty sure you couldn’t trust me to multiply 20-digit numbers either.

But you could trust a $3 drug-store checkout isle slim wallet calculator (with solar panels for recharging) to perform those calculations and you'd get more nines of reliability from that calculator than the LLM. And it didn't cost hundreds of billions of dollars to develop the calculator, so you won't end up paying thousands of dollars for it. That LLMs cannot beat a $3 calculator is because they're not fit for purp…

If you think an LLM is unfit for purpose, try getting a calculator to write poetry.

Re: Why AI is still dumb and not scary at all (pt. 1)

#40

Post by metalman »

there is scary, as in physicaly dangerous and then there is scarry, as in I cant stand looking at media any more, scary and scary as in my job is threatened or the price fixing scams have unhomed you or the app that provided my job leads, has been super optimised, and is no longer viable and scary as , all of the above can be ignored , defended, as the app "just did it defence" with no one liable for the abuses, scary
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