391–400 of 1001 posts
Not sure I get the author of this piece. The tech leaders are clearly saying AI is inevitable, they're not saying LLMs are inevitable. Big tech is constantly working on new types of AI such as world models.
In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…
Compare these positive introductory experiences with two technologies that were pushed extremely hard by commercial interests in the past decade: crypto/web3 and VR/metaverse. Neither was ever able to offer this kind of instant usefulness. With crypto, it’s still the case that you create a wallet and then… there’s nothing to do on the platform. You’re expected to send real money to someone so they’ll give you some of…
When Eliza was first built it was seen a toy. It took many more decades for LLMs to appear.
My favourite example is prime numbers: a bunch of ancient nerds messing around with numbers that today, thousands of years later, allow us to securely buy anything and everything without leaving our homes or opening our mouths.
You can’t dismiss a technology or discovery just because it’s not useful on an arbitrary timescale. You can dismiss it for other reasons, just not this reason.
Blockchain and related technologies have advanced the state of the art in various areas of computer science and mathematics research (zero knowledge proofs, consensus, smart contracts, etc.). To allege this work will bear no fruit is quite a claim.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry I don't buy your argument. (First I disagree with A Secular Age 's thesis that secularism is a new force. Christian and Muslim churches were jailing and killing nonbelievers from the beginning. People weren't dumber than we are today, all the absurdity and self-serving hypocrisy that turns a lot of people off to authoritarian religion were as evident to them as they are to us.) The idea is not that AI is on a p…
That isn’t the argument of the book, so I don’t think you actually read it, or even the Wikipedia page? The rest of your comment doesn’t really seem related to my argument at all. I didn’t say technological process stops or slows down, I pointed out how the thought patterns are often the same across time, and the inability and unwillingness to recognize this is psychologically lazy, to over simplify. And there are in…
It's not lazy to follow thought patterns that yield correct predictions. And that's the bedrock on which "AI hype" grows and persists - because these tools are actually useful, right now, today, across wide variety of work and life tasks, and we are barely even trying.
> And there are indeed examples of technological acceleration or dispersal which was deliberately curtailed – especially with weapons.
Name three.
(I do expect you to be able to name three, but that should also highlight how unusual that is, and how questionable the effectiveness of that is in practice when you dig into details.)
Also I challenge you to find but one restriction that actually denies countries useful capabilities that they cannot reproduce through other means.
In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…
Compare these positive introductory experiences with two technologies that were pushed extremely hard by commercial interests in the past decade: crypto/web3 and VR/metaverse. Neither was ever able to offer this kind of instant usefulness. With crypto, it’s still the case that you create a wallet and then… there’s nothing to do on the platform. You’re expected to send real money to someone so they’ll give you some of…
It doesn't if you use it as just a chat room. For some people it does add a lot, though.
The "metaverse" as in Active Worlds, Second Life, VR Chat, our own Overte, etc has been around for a long time and does have an user base that likes using it.
What I'm not too sure about is it having mass appeal, at least just yet. To me it's a bit of a specialized area, like chess. It's of great interest to some and very little to most of the population. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with places like chess.com existing.
I think two things can be true simultaneously: 1. LLMs are a new technology and it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle with that. It's difficult to imagine a future where they don't continue to exist in some form, with all the timesaving benefits and social issues that come with them. 2. Almost three years in, companies investing in LLMs have not yet discovered a business model that justifies the massive expen…
Developers haven't even started extracting the value of LLMs with agent architectures yet. Using an LLM UI like open ai is like we just figured fire and you use it to warm you hands (still impressive when you think about it, but not worth the burns), while LLM development is about building car engines (here is you return on investment).
In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…
This is what that same GPT4 told me today after trying to get a simple mqttwarn config: ChatGPT: Let’s cut through the mqttwarn quirks and get you a single, complete warn.ini that I’ve actually tested with mqttwarn 0.32 Me: that "I’ve actually tested with mqttwarn 0.32:" How did you perform this test? ChatGPT: I set up a quick local sandbox on my laptop Me: What brand is your laptop? What store did you buy it at? Cha…
Get it to write the code, then you test it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with LLM is when they're used for creativity or for thinking. Just because LLMs are indeed useful in some (even many!) context, including coding, esp. to either get something started, or, like in your example, to transcode an existing code base to another platform, doesn't mean they will change everything . It doesn't mean “AI is the new electricity.” (actual quote from Andrew Ng in the post). More like A…
I don't know about VBA, but spreadsheets actually delivered (to a large extent) on the promise that 'everyone can write simple programs'. So much so that people don't see creating a spreadsheet as coding. Before spreadsheets you had to beg for months for the IT department to pick your request, and then you'd have to wait a quarter or two for them to implement a buggy version of your idea. After spreadsheets, you can…
In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…
Compare these positive introductory experiences with two technologies that were pushed extremely hard by commercial interests in the past decade: crypto/web3 and VR/metaverse. Neither was ever able to offer this kind of instant usefulness. With crypto, it’s still the case that you create a wallet and then… there’s nothing to do on the platform. You’re expected to send real money to someone so they’ll give you some of…
In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…
Compare these positive introductory experiences with two technologies that were pushed extremely hard by commercial interests in the past decade: crypto/web3 and VR/metaverse. Neither was ever able to offer this kind of instant usefulness. With crypto, it’s still the case that you create a wallet and then… there’s nothing to do on the platform. You’re expected to send real money to someone so they’ll give you some of…
This became a problem later due to governments cracking down on cryptos and some terrible technical choices made transactions expensive just as adoption was ramping. (Pat yourselves on the back, small blockers.)
My first experience with crypto was buying $5 in bitcoin from a friend. If I didn't do it that way I could go on a number of websites and buy crypto without opening an account, via credit card, or via SMS. Today, most of the $5 would be eaten by fees, and buying for cash from an institution requires slow and intrusive KYC.
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This argument so easily commits sudoku that I couldn't help myself. It's philosophical relativism, and self-immolates for the same reason -- it's inconsistent. It eats itself.