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It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

theatlantic.com

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Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#461

Post by jcgrillo »

wildermuthn wrote: post #418
mrmetanoia wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their marketing hyperbole has cheapened much of the language around AI, so naturally it excites someone who writes like the disciple of the techno-prophets " High-intelligence AGI is the last human invention" What? I could certainly see all kinds of entertaining arguments for this, but to write it so matter of fact was cringe inducing.

It’s true by definition. If we invent a better-than-all-humans inventor, then human invention will give way. It’s a fairly simple idea, and not one I made up.

> then human invention will give way

What? Would you mind explaining this?

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#462

Post by minimaxir »

mppm wrote: post #190

Around the time of the board coup and Sam's 7-trillion media tour, there were multiple, at the time somewhat credible, rumors of major breakthroughs at Open AI -- GPT5, Q*, and possibly another unnamed project with wow-factor. However, almost a year has passed, and OpenAI has only made incremental improvements public. So my question is: What does the AI rumor mill say about that? Was all that just hype-building, or i…

Q* turned out to be GPT-o1, which was objectively overhyped.

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#463

Post by nabla9 »

xbar wrote: post #398
nabla9 wrote: post #242

The field is extremely research oriented. You can't stay on top with good engineering and incremental development and refining. Google just paid over $2.4 billion to get Noam Shazeer back in the company to work with Gemini AI. Google has the deepest pool of AI researchers. Microsoft and Facebook are not far behind. OpenAI is losing researchers, they have maybe 1-2 years until they become Microsoft subsidiary.

You make it sound like AI researchers are in short supply.

Good AI researchers and research teams are.

The whole LLM era was started with the 2017 "Attention is all you need" paper by Google Brain/Research and nobody has done anything same magnitude since.

Noam Shazeer was one of the authors.

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#464

Post by asyx »

wkat4242 wrote: post #264
from-nibly wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt $20 a month is going to cover it. How much would you.pay before you weren't getting a good deal?

The thing is, you can be economical. You don't need a GPT-4 quality model for everything. Some things are just low value where a 3.5 model would do just fine. I never use the $20 plan but I access everything via API and i spend a couple of dollars per month. Although lately I have a home server that can do llama 3.1 8b uncensored and that actually works amazingly well.

What’s your home server specs? I might want to host something like that too but I think I’d need to upgrade.

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#465

Post by 12_throw_away »

Filligree wrote: post #354
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person you replied to suggests that the analogy of a 3d printer building a part does not hold, as LLM-based coding systems are able to both "print" some code, and decide where and when to do so. I tend to agree with them. What people seem to miss about LLM coding systems, IMO: a) deciding on the capabilities of an LLM to code after a brief browser session with 4o/claude is comparable to waking up a coder in the m…

(D) includes me, and does sound fun. Got any references?

> Got any references?

This is a good question, and I worry you won't get a response. Here is a pattern I've observed very frequently in the LLM space, with much more frequency than random chance would suggest:

  Bob: "Oh, of course it didn't work for you, you just need to use an ANA (amazing new acronym) model"
  Alice: "Oh, that's great, where can I see how ANA works? How do I use it?"
  ** Bob has left the chat **

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#466

Post by disiplus »

stavros wrote: post #455
dcre wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet is at least as good as 4o.

Much better than 4o, in my experience. I've stopped using 4o almost completely, except for cases where I need good tooling more than I need good performance (PoCs and the like).

it's better at coding for me, and it looks like because it was trained on more data. i have this problem with a library that i use, and it was trained on python2 version but python3 version is completely different. Python3 versions is relatively new, but out from at leaset 2020 and you would mostly find examples with Python2 version if you googled.

They both produce garbage code in this solution. Claude versions is just 20% less garbage, but still useless. The code mixes those two, even if i specify i want the python3 version or directly specifying a version.

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#467

Post by falcor84 »

dcre wrote: post #434
falcor84 wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... 4o and o1, which are great step changes but nothing the competition can't quickly replicate. Where did that assertion come from? Has anyone come close to replicating either of these yet (other than possibly Google, who hasn't fully released their thing yet either), let alone "quickly"? I wouldn't be surprised if it's these "sideways" architectural changes actually give OpenAI a deeper moat than just working on…

Claude 3.5 Sonnet is at least as good as 4o.

Oh, sorry I wasn't clear, I was referring to the advanced (speech-to-speech) voice mode, which for me is the highlight of this "omni" thing, rather than to the "strength" of the model.

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#468

Post by throwaway314155 »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #321
throwaway314155 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans can survive in space and on the moon because our intelligence is robust to environments we never encountered (or evolved to encounter). That's "all" general intelligence is meant to refer to. General just means robust to the unknown. I've seen some use "super" (as in superhuman) intelligence lately to describe what you're getting at.

Super feels to me like it's a difference in degree rather than in kind. Something with intelligences {A, b, c} might be super intelligent compared with {a, b, c}. i.e. more intelligent in domain A. But if one has {a, b, c} and the other has {b, c, d} neither is more or less intelligent than the other, they just have different capabilities. "Super" is a bit too one-dimensional for the job.

I don't think using set notation is really helping your case here but (I think?) I agree.

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#469

Post by jcgrillo »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #422
richardw wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. It’s far harder to think of reasons that limits will endure, in a world where innovation by inches has always produced improvements. Everyone brings out the current state and technology. Those are transient.

WTF? Look at a word processor today, and then one from 1999, and tell me again how technology always keeps improving dramatically. The standard electrical wall sockets that you use have not really changed since WW2. For load bearing elements in buildings, we don't have anything substantially better today than 100 years ago. There is a huge list of technological items where we've polished out almost every last wrinkle…

There is an interesting delusion among web company workers that goes something like “technology progress goes steadily up and to the right” which I think comes from web company managers who constantly prattle on about “innovation”. Your word processor example is a good one, because at some point making changes to the UI just hurts users. So all that empty “innovation” that everyone needs to look busy doing is actually worse than doing nothing at all. All that is a roundabout way to say I think tech workers have some deep need to see their work as somehow contributing to “progress” and “innovation” instead of just being the meaningless undirected spasms of corporate amoebas.

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#470

Post by euphetar »

While I do not have much sympathy for Altman, the article is very low quality and contains zero analysis

Yeah, maybe on the surface chatbots turned out to be chatbots. But you have to be a poor journalist to stop your investigation of the issue at that and conclude AI is no big deal. Nuance, anyone?

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