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

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

#421

Post by CuriouslyC »

mike_hearn wrote: post #396
inkyoto wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> […] because the Chinese government has started massively distorting the economy in favor of automation projects. It's widely known that one of the hardest parts of planning a factory is figuring out what to automate and what to use human labour for. … or it is an early manoeuvre – a pre-emptive measure – to address the looming burden of an ageing population and a dearth of young labour that – according to several d…

Robots installed now will be obsolete and broken by 2050. Demographic change is the sort of thing where market mechanisms work fine. You don't build out assets like those ahead of demand, you wait until you need them at which point you get the latest tech with economies of scale as demand ramps up everywhere. The most optimistic reading of this move is that it's just more of the same old communism: robotic factories…

Serious question, why load up the army with people? Drones and autonomous weapons are 100% here now. We don't need a mass of general infantry, the new pattern is spec-ops spotting and targeting for autonomous kinetic munitions. Think ghosts in starcraft.

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

#422

Post by CuriouslyC »

hattmall wrote: post #357
pizzly wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the 'openness' of AI development. When I say 'openness' of AI I mean in research papers, spying, former employees, etc. Wouldn't that mean that after a few months to years after AGI is discovered that the other country would also discover AGI due to benefiting from the obtaining the knowledge from the other side? Similar to how the Soviets did their first nuclear test less than 5 years after US did theirs…

Is there even a clear definition of AGI? How will one side or the other side know who is the "winner".

The AI labs have settled on a definition of AGI: "AI that can do the vast majority of economically valuable work at or above the level of humans."

They don't heavily advertise this definition because investors expect AGI to mean the computer from Her, and it's not gonna be that. They want to be able to tell investors without lying that they're on target for AGI in 3 years, and they're riding on pre-existing expectations.

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

#423

Post by Xss3 »

vivzkestrel wrote: post #353
tuatoru wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen AI improve the quality and velocity of my wife's policy analysis dramatically. She doesn't like using Claude, but she accepts the necessity of doing so, and it reduces 3-month projects to 2-week projects. Claude is an excellent debating partner. Crypto? Blockchain? No-one sceptical could ever see the point of either, unless and until their transaction costs were less than that of cash. That... has not hap…

that was not the sentiment people had in 2017. they were almost certain every major visa card provider and payment gateway on the planet will scrap fiat cash and adopt crypto just like how they are all thinking about every major software company adopting AI. Dont forget hindsight bias

I dont know a single person that had such a belief.

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

#424

Post by mike_hearn »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #421
mike_hearn wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robots installed now will be obsolete and broken by 2050. Demographic change is the sort of thing where market mechanisms work fine. You don't build out assets like those ahead of demand, you wait until you need them at which point you get the latest tech with economies of scale as demand ramps up everywhere. The most optimistic reading of this move is that it's just more of the same old communism: robotic factories…

Serious question, why load up the army with people? Drones and autonomous weapons are 100% here now. We don't need a mass of general infantry, the new pattern is spec-ops spotting and targeting for autonomous kinetic munitions. Think ghosts in starcraft.

The only way to genuinely control captured territory on the ground is with infantry, and it'll remain that way for a while yet. America demonstrated the limits of what you can do with Predator drones in Afghanistan; the tech worked great and posed a huge threat but the Taliban was never truly defeated and continued training and recruiting at scale.

For something like an invasion of Taiwan or (gulp) other territories beyond that, the only way to completely subdue the captured population is with lots of soldiers.

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

#425

Post by dsr_ »

overfeed wrote: post #368
dsr_ wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's only one problem with a race to superintelligence, and that's that nobody has evidence that mere intelligence is coming, much less superintelligence. (There are a thousand more problems, but none of them matter until that first one is overcome.)

Good gods, I can't wait for a second AI winter. Maybe we'll come up with fundamental breakthroughs in a couple of decades and give it another college try? For the folks who lived though it; were the Expert Systems boosters as insufferable in the 80s as the LLM people are now about the path to machine intelligence?

No, because they mostly got military funding, not private equity.

ARPA would throw relatively large sums of money at you, but demand progress reports and a testable goal. Very little got rolled out based on hype. (Let's not talk about vehicle design.) If your project didn't show signs of working, or not enough signs of working, funding ended.

Anything which met goals and worked, we now think of as "automation" or "signal recognition" or "solvers", not "intelligent systems".

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

#426

Post by dsr_ »

taurath wrote: post #324
lifthrasiir wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today's AI does exhibit some intelligence, period. It is absurd to claim that an intelligent-looking entity doesn't have intelligence, only because we might not be able to determine which part of the entity has one. The superintelligence is an entirely different problem though because there is no clear path from intelligence to so-called superintelligence, everything has been just a speculation so far.

> It is absurd to claim that an intelligent-looking entity doesn't have intelligence I think if one really thinks about this statement, they'll find the opposite to be at least as possible.

There must be a pony around here somewhere!

(This is the punchline to a joke.)

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

#427

Post by kcexn »

mmh0000 wrote: post #331
jkestner wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now, at the price you paid to retrieve that memory, is it a viable business model?

I downloaded 2GiB of data and let a script run for 56 hours. Besides a bit of my time, which I found to be enjoyable, it didn't cost me anything. Maybe you could argue it cost some electricity, but... In reality, it meant my computer, which runs 24/7 pulling ~185W, was running at ~300W for 56 hours... Thusly.. 300 - 185 = 115W * 56H = 6.44kWh @ $0.13 per kWh = $0.85 + tax. So... Yes, it was very much worth $0.85 to m…

It's a little bit more complicated than that if you were running a business.

You would want to add the cost of your network+hardware depreciating over the timeframe, and you probably can't just ignore the first 185W since if you are Anthropic it doesn't seem likely that the idle power draw would be needed if they weren't expecting to serve AI traffic.

So, let's say $0.02 per hour ($1/50 roughly). That's about $15 per month per user. Let's call it $10 per month per user since users aren't constantly hammering the service. To support a big sales and marketing engine, you would like to be selling subscriptions for $100+ per month. I'm just not sure people are prepared to pay that for AI in its current form.

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

#428

Post by AstroBen »

fragmede wrote: post #383
AstroBen wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you buying stocks based on ChatGPT's advice?

Not especially. The computer program does all the work. It's the one that hits ChatGPT for a list of trades, and then the computer program hits the brokerage's API to execute the trades. I made the decision to set the program up in the first place, and the trades are happening on an account that has my name on it, sure, but as I'm not nit-picking each individual trade that gets made and it runs autonomously without a…

My point was on the quality and reliability of the decisions

An RNG can do what you're describing

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

#429

Post by kcexn »

mrcwinn wrote: post #319
dotnet00 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like they're planning on funding it through circular purchase agreements and looting the rest of the world.

All of “circular” those bets only work if there are real purchase orders and real revenue. In fact the two major deals are literally tied to that. So it doesn’t answer my question. Real GPUs are bought. Presumably because real consumption is taking place. Presumably because real value (productivity) is produced. Which in turn reduces knowledge work labor (maybe?). Which may destroy jobs. Which reduces excess income a…

The theoretical link that is missing is that AI isn't supposed to reduce knowledge work, it is supposed to free labor to concentrate on higher value work and investment.

Nobody knows what that work is though, and nobody wants to talk about it lest everyone realizes this all might be a house of cards.

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