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After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

blog.robbowley.net

371–380 of 489 posts

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where's this can-do attitude towards housing, healthcare and stronger social safety in general? It sounds like woo to me, more specifically, Roko's basilisk by proxy. What's doubly duplicitous is that even if LLMs achieve general intelligence, the whole idea is to enrich a tiny fraction of humanity that happens to be shareholders.

AGILMs that have anything like a working internet connection will likely find a way to replace these shareholders sureptitiously --- and without alerting/injuring their caregivers. how you feel about that? depends on your temperament.. EDIT: trying to address the Roko part..I'm assuming once AGI is achieved.. the AGI doesn't need more compute to increase its intelligence beyond those of an average activist employee (…

More likely than not, they'd work as they were designed to: increase profitablity of whatever company that authored them.

As a thought experiment, say you were the CEO/board member of a company that's told your new platform is choosing public benefit over profits. What would you do? Now filter down the decisions going down the heirarchy, considering job security and a general preference for earning bonuses.

For all the discussions around "alignment" - any AI that's not aligned with increased profits will be unplugged posthaste, all other considerations are secondary.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#372
post #236
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of people trying to do any given thing simply don’t have access to experts in the field, though. I’ll take a potential solution I can validate over no idea whatsoever of my own any day.

So you would prefer "Yes, the moon is indeed made of cheese!" over "I don't know what the moon is made of"? If any answer is acceptable, just get your local toddler to babble some nonsense for you.

There needs to be a reasonable chance of correctness. At least the local toddlers around here don’t randomly provide a solution to a problem that would take me hours to find but only minutes to validate.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me this reads like someone's been inside the echo chamber too long. > For you AI skeptics, this is going to be rough to hear, but given the suffering that will occur if AI fails, I believe we have a moral imperative to make sure it succeeds. What if, and hear me out here, the prediction is that it will fail because it can't succeed. It hasn't proven it is capable of producing the results that would justify itself.…

I'm actually from a science, government and defense background, I've never worked in the valley. It might be possible that it can't succeed, but we don't know that and the evidence in terms of what happens if it fails is pretty compelling, so I think morality dictates we have to at least try, at least until we have more information or another path emerges.

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Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#374
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of people trying to do any given thing simply don’t have access to experts in the field, though. I’ll take a potential solution I can validate over no idea whatsoever of my own any day.

>I'll take a potential solution I can validate over no idea whatsoever of my own any day. If you have to validate what the LLM says, I assume you'd do that by researching primary sources and works by other experts. At that point, the LLM did nothing except charge you for a few tokens before you went down the usual research path. I could see LLMs being good for providing an outline of what you'd need to research, whic…

> If you have to validate what the LLM says, I assume you'd do that by researching primary sources and works by other experts.

For research, yes, and the utility there is a bit more limited. They’re still great at digesting and contextualizing dozens or hundreds of sources in a few minutes which would take me hours.

But what I mean by “easily testable” is usually writing code. If I already have good failing tests, verification is indeed very very cheap. (Essentially boils down to checking if the LLM hacked around the test cases or even deleted some.)

> At that point, the LLM did nothing […]

I’d pay actual money for a junior dev or research assistant capable of reading, summarizing, and coming up with proofs of concept at any hour of the day without getting bored at the level of current LLMs, but I’ve got the feeling $20/month wouldn’t be appealing to most candidates.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

So often, I see comments that seem to make sense only in a vacuum. If the US disappeared from the scene tomorrow, how do you think the geopolitical landscape might change? The competition between the US and China is pertinent to everyone.

What do you mean? I don't see how the commenter was saying anything about the irrelevance of US-China competition, in fact some of their points hinge on the existence of that competition, which is why they described the asticle as very US-centric.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#376
post #16

I believe the next step will be robotics and getting A.I. to interact with the physical world at human fidelity. Maybe we can finally have a Rosie from the Jetsons.

> Maybe we can finally have a Rosie from the Jetsons. just what I want, a mobile Alexa that spews ads and spies on me 24/7

I don’t think Amazon will be the only one making them so maybe don’t buy one from a shitty company.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#377
post #16

I believe the next step will be robotics and getting A.I. to interact with the physical world at human fidelity. Maybe we can finally have a Rosie from the Jetsons.

Robots still haven’t come close to replicating human and animal touch as a sense, and LLMs don’t do anything to help with that.

Have you seen what Boston dynamics has been up to? Progress is happening faster than you think.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's basically my maximum likelihood scenario.

That's on my list, but not my maximum likelihood. My maximum is that the courts restrain Trump enough that we still have at least the shell of a democracy after he's gone. But he blazed the trail, and in 20 or 30 years someone will walk it better, having done a better job of neutralizing or politicizing or perhaps deligitimizing the courts first. Then it's game over.

Yeah I'm with you there. Trump is America's Sulla, Caesar is yet to come.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGILMs that have anything like a working internet connection will likely find a way to replace these shareholders sureptitiously --- and without alerting/injuring their caregivers. how you feel about that? depends on your temperament.. EDIT: trying to address the Roko part..I'm assuming once AGI is achieved.. the AGI doesn't need more compute to increase its intelligence beyond those of an average activist employee (…

More likely than not, they'd work as they were designed to: increase profitablity of whatever company that authored them. As a thought experiment, say you were the CEO/board member of a company that's told your new platform is choosing public benefit over profits. What would you do? Now filter down the decisions going down the heirarchy, considering job security and a general preference for earning bonuses. For all t…

[deleted]

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#380
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that people will suddenly decide LLMs are useless after two years of exponential growth in usage is a fantasy.

That's essentially what was said about Tamagotchi in the 90s, and everyone of their "users" was a paying customer.

You are comparing a toy that had no knowledge exchange, learning or improvement capability, or cult like enterprise adoption with LLM.... You might want to rethink your counter example
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