331–340 of 447 posts
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I'm sure you know that people in the AI community have been predicting big things ever since, I don't know, the 1970s? It's only 10 years away again. This time it's for real, right?
Is GPT-4 not a “big thing in AI”?
> If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable None of that shared prosperity was freely given by the Sam Altmans of the world, it was hard won by labor organizers and social movements. Without more of that, the progress from AI will continue the recent trend of wealth accumulating in the hands of a few. The idea that everyone will somehow prosper equally f…
Labor organizers mostly make things worse for laborers. Capitalism has brought much prosperity. "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest"
Nonsense, unless you're prepared to argue that the existence of weekends is "much worse" than working every day.
> in an important sense, society itself is a form of advanced intelligence
This made me think of Charles Stross' observation that Corporations (and bureaucracies and basically any rule-based organizations) are a form of artificial intelligence.
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2019/12/artific...
Come to think of it, the whole article is rather pertinent to this thread.
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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.
How do I do this?
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I'm not here to defend sama, but certain things cannot be proven until they arrive - they can only be extrapolated from existing observations and theoretical limits. Imagine the Uranium Committee of early 40's, where Szilard and others were babbling about 10kg of some magical metal exploding briefly with the power of a sun, with the best evidence being some funky trail in an alcohol vapor chamber. Maybe sama is right…
Hah, atomic power is a great point of comparison: people in the "atomic age" expected atomic power to be everywhere. Electricity too cheap to measure, cars/planes/appliances all powered by small nuclear reactors... That's without going into the real nonsense like radium toothpaste. And here we are today where nuclear energy is limited to nuclear weapons, a small set of military vehicles and <10% of the world's electr…
The toothpaste and similar products were pretty ill advised, vaseline and uranium glass are still collectable and are seeing a ressurrence of new interest: https://old.reddit.com/r/uraniumglass/
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Almost certainly true, and all the people crapping all over his description should really take a step back and consider that. He isn't out on some island all by himself here.
Universal approximation doesn't mean we've got (or ever will) algorithms to learn good enough models for any problem and the resources to run them, just that those models conceptually exist.
"humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data (or really, the underlying “rules” that produce any distribution of data). To a shocking degree of precision, the more compute and data available, the better it gets at helping people solve hard problems"
He's an optimistic guy, no doubt, but he isn't full of shit.
> If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips). If we don’t build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people. Translation for the rest of us: "we need to fully privatize the OA subsidiary and turn it into…
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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.
I think it’s misunderstanding the guy’s whole deal to expect truth or reality to be major factors in his writing. “Sell, sell, sell!” is the goal above all else. Sell whatever he’s invested in today. Sell himself. Sell!
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It's amazing how he can imagine wars being fought over AI but not wars being fought over resources needed to "build enough infrastructure."
> he can imagine wars being fought over AI I wonder how did he come to such a prediction. When was the last time we had a war over advanced tech? Armies didn't fight over telegraph, radio, phones and cars. A war to get AI would also be foolish. A few hundred bombs from your adversaries and AI won't have electricity to function.
Fighting the expansionary actions of an AI enabled culture will not be as simple as bombing power plants, after all those are prime targets in any modern war and are well defended. How do you propose to win against an entire bloc of countries that have decided to use the products of AI to do whatever they wish with the world?
> 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…
Basically it’ll be (and already has been since the quantum breakthroughs in the 1920s, to some extent) a revolution in scientific methods not unlike what Newton and Galileo brought us with physical mechanics: this time, sadly, the mechanics are beyond our direct comprehension, reachable only with statistical tricks and smart guessing machines.