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

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

#41

Post by vivekd »

ed-209 wrote: post #12

A gun is not smart or magical but is nevertheless a powerful tool that can be scary depending on who is holding it. Accordingly, I worry less about my occupation and more about the moral character of those wielding it. Further i worry about "smart" people who have not been acquainted with the dark side of human nature facilitating bad actors.

My issue with this line of thinking is not that it's wrong but it's being manipulated by silicon valley.

Open AI is not arguing that AI is harmless they are agreeing it's dangerous. They are using that to promote their product and hype it up as world changing. But more worrying they're advocating for regulations, presumably the sort that would make it more difficult for competition to come in.

I think we can talk about the potential dangers of AI. But that should include a discussion on how to best deal with that and consciousness of how fear of AI might be manipulated by silicon valley.

Especially when that fear involves misrepresentation - eg. AI being presented to the public as self directed artificial consciousness rather than algorithms that mimic certain reasoning capabilities

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

#42

Post by wat10000 »

ed-209 wrote: post #12

A gun is not smart or magical but is nevertheless a powerful tool that can be scary depending on who is holding it. Accordingly, I worry less about my occupation and more about the moral character of those wielding it. Further i worry about "smart" people who have not been acquainted with the dark side of human nature facilitating bad actors.

A gun’s purpose isn’t to be smart. The gun equivalent of this post would be “Why guns still aren’t very good at killing” and that would be a serious problem for guns if that were true.

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

#43

Post by einrealist »

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…

I asked myself this question today: Given the AI hype, I wonder whether there will be employers who force their employees to use generative AI. Otherwise employees will be deemed inefficient and be fired.

Employers might believe that not using AI puts them and their investments at a disadvantage, while ignoring the overall quality issues.

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

#44

Post by darkerside »

wat10000 wrote: post #42
ed-209 wrote: post #12

A gun is not smart or magical but is nevertheless a powerful tool that can be scary depending on who is holding it. Accordingly, I worry less about my occupation and more about the moral character of those wielding it. Further i worry about "smart" people who have not been acquainted with the dark side of human nature facilitating bad actors.

A gun’s purpose isn’t to be smart. The gun equivalent of this post would be “Why guns still aren’t very good at killing” and that would be a serious problem for guns if that were true.

They're not good at killing. They do nothing in their own. People are very good at killing using guns. The analogy is actually perfect.

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

#46

Post by ninetyninenine »

ed-209 wrote: post #12

A gun is not smart or magical but is nevertheless a powerful tool that can be scary depending on who is holding it. Accordingly, I worry less about my occupation and more about the moral character of those wielding it. Further i worry about "smart" people who have not been acquainted with the dark side of human nature facilitating bad actors.

If you hold a gun and point it at me I'd be more scared of that then you holding AI and pointing it at me.

AI right now is not powerful and not scary.

But follow the trendlines. AI is improving. From 2010 to now the pace is relentless with multiple milestones passed constantly. AI right now is a precursor to something not so dumb and not so "not scary" in the future.

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

#47

Post by ninetyninenine »

seydor wrote: post #30

Crap article with zero insight that wasn't worth my time. There are better ways to argue the same position but it's probably indefensible. Neural networks are fundamentally approximators, both when they are approximating long-range relations between concepts (like LLMs do) or when they denoise some noise for images. They approximate thought and intelligence, because we have coded it in our writings. Our writings are…

>yet our most pressing problems have not made a lot of progress for decades.

You mean energy and global warming? We will pretty much hit the worst case scenario for both of these. And we've been yapping about these problems for decades so nobody cares even though they are likely 10000x more relevant.

AI is new and interesting.

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

#48

Post by seydor »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #47
seydor wrote: post #30

Crap article with zero insight that wasn't worth my time. There are better ways to argue the same position but it's probably indefensible. Neural networks are fundamentally approximators, both when they are approximating long-range relations between concepts (like LLMs do) or when they denoise some noise for images. They approximate thought and intelligence, because we have coded it in our writings. Our writings are…

>yet our most pressing problems have not made a lot of progress for decades. You mean energy and global warming? We will pretty much hit the worst case scenario for both of these. And we've been yapping about these problems for decades so nobody cares even though they are likely 10000x more relevant. AI is new and interesting.

no, cancer and alzheimer's

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

#49

Post by Salgat »

esafak wrote: post #24
Salgat wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire point is that LLMs don't think, they're just regressions of information you'd find on the internet. And automation is a good thing. 90% of Americans were farmers in the 1700s; automation completely revolutionized that. Your final point is still a concern in general, specifically what will happen when menial labor no longer exists. At that point, you have to hope that all the wealth generated from automatio…

They are not interpolating, which is what I think you meant to say, except for a loose definition humans would meet too. What do you think of the latest thinking models, and what is your test of thinking?

An LLM is one very big nonlinear regression used to pick a token with a clearly defined input, output, and the corresponding weights. It's still far too straight-forward and non-dynamic (the weights aren't constantly changing even during a single inference) compared to the human brain.

As far as the latest "thinking" techniques, it's all about providing the correct input to get the desired output. If you look at the training data (the internet), the hardest and most ambiguous problems don't have a simple question input and answer response, they instead have a lot of back-and-forth before arriving at the answer, so you need to simulate that same back-and-forth to arrive at the desired answer. Unfortunately model architecture is still too simple to implicitly do this within the model itself, at least reliably.

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

#50

Post by ninetyninenine »

seydor wrote: post #48
ninetyninenine wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>yet our most pressing problems have not made a lot of progress for decades. You mean energy and global warming? We will pretty much hit the worst case scenario for both of these. And we've been yapping about these problems for decades so nobody cares even though they are likely 10000x more relevant. AI is new and interesting.

no, cancer and alzheimer's

Oh same deal. We've been yapping about it for years. Probably reached our limits in terms of technology to deal with these things.

Another thing with AI is the insane progress and clear knowledge of the fact we are well below the limit.

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