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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)

#51

Post by aldanor »

darkerside wrote: post #44
wat10000 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When a toddler can pull the trigger and kill someone, you may argue guns are pretty good at killing. Key point being, people don't have to be good at guns to be good at killing with guns. Pulling the trigger is accessible to anyone.

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

#52

Post by ninetyninenine »

>Humans don't need to learn from 1 trillion words to reach human intelligence. What are LLMs missing?

A Yann Lecuun quote from the page.

LLMs are blank slates. Humans have millions of years of pretraining recorded in the neural network not as weights but as the structure of the neural network itself. Our physical bodies are biased towards living in an oxygen environment with light and ground and our brains are biased in that same direction.

If you put humans in a completely different context. Like utterly completely brand new context say like 50 dimensional space where all our sense become useless and logic and common sense is completely overridden with new rules...

the Human will perform WORSE then the LLM when trained on the same text.

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

#53

Post by haswell »

war-is-peace wrote: post #34
haswell wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding to this, government use cases would be most likely to cause issues because they’re often relevant regardless of how badly they suck. There are already active discussions about AI being used in government for “efficiency” reasons.

i suppose that links back to the other comment i made - is hype the root issue you are trying to get at? would be interesting to see what examples there are of this in recent history

I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at re: hype.

While there is undoubtedly a lot of hype around these tools right now, that hype is based on a pretty major leap in technology that has fundamentally altered the landscape going forward. There are some great use cases that legitimize some of the hype.

As far as concrete examples, see the sibling comment with the anecdote regarding health insurance denial. There are also portions of the tech industry focused on rolling these tools out in business environments. They're publicly reporting their earnings, and discussing the role AI is playing in major business deals.

Look at players like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Atlassian, etc. They're all rapidly rolling out various AI capabilities into their existing customer bases. They have giant sales forces all actively pushing these capabilities. They also sell to governments. Hype or not, it adds up to real world outcomes.

Public statements by Musk about his intention to use AI also come to mind, and he's repeatedly shown a willingness to break things in the pursuit of his goals.

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

#54

Post by ninetyninenine »

philjohn wrote: post #37
ed-209 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. Imagine a health insurance provider even partially automating their claim (dis)approval process - it could be both lucrative and devastating.

Already happened. With predictable results. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Y7QPXzDmloI?embeds_referring_...

is that even legal?

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

#56

Post by jmyeet »

The problem is how AI is and will be used and how unaccountable it is.

An Ai scans job applicants. Is it biased? Is it conforming with legal requirements? A person's bias can be an issue in a lawsuit. AIs are a much more difficult target, at least for now. This is why companies like them.

You know what the impact will be? More scandals like Hertz falsely reporting people to the police for stealing cars [1].

AI will make financial and lending decisions that could easily become redlining 2.0.

Companies are so desperate to eliminate labor. People have rights. They need to be paid. They can strike.

If the AI purveyors fulfil their dream, companies will be automated but nobody will have any money because nobody has any jobs anymore.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/06/1140998674/hertz-false-accusa...

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

#57

Post by throwaway85995 »

einrealist wrote: post #43
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.

If AI provides even a 1% productivity boost, they will, and we'll all be worse off for it when everyone forgets how to code without relying on fallible, proprietary services. Sure, local LLMs are a thing, but they currently are vastly inferior to the cloud offerings, and I don't see the status quo changing any time soon.

We all agree that employers shouldn't be allowed to force the employees to use drugs for short-term productivity boosts. I hope we'll see something similar for AI - it has the potential to be equally damaging to employees in the long term.

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

#58

Post by haswell »

vivekd wrote: post #41
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 abo…

I think the acknowledgement of danger by various companies is definitely a marketing tactic to a degree, and it's important to see the actions of those companies for what they are.

But then there's whatever danger actually exists regardless of the business maneuvering.

I'm not saying this is what you're doing, but I've been in numerous discussions where where someone will point to this maneuvering and then conclude that virtually all danger is manufactured/nonexistent and only exists for marketing purposes.

> eg. AI being presented to the public as self directed artificial consciousness rather than algorithms that mimic certain reasoning capabilities

I think the fact that these tools can be presented in that way and some people will believe it points to some of the real dangers.

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

#59

Post by throwaway85995 »

Salgat wrote: post #21
esafak wrote: post #4

This is a shallow and dated article, even when it came out in 2023. LLMs are dumb because they can't multiply, and generalize? They can easily write programs and calculate anything you want, and machine learning is all about generalizing. Hot take: if your job can be partially or wholly eliminated by AI, that’s a GOOD THING. If your job has patterns that predictable or labor that routine, AI automation is a GOOD THIN…

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…

Automation is a good thing? It definitely made the rich richer, but I'm not sure it made the average person happier. Depression rates are at an all-time high, after all.

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

#60

Post by lostmsu »

imiric wrote: post #36
robwwilliams wrote: post #26

Interesting piece but I am much more optimistic. Tejo writes: > At the heart of it, all AI is just a pattern recognition engine. They’re simply algorithms designed to maximize or minimize an objective function. There is no real thinking involved. It’s just math. If you think somewhere in all that probability theory and linear algebra, there is a soul, I think you should reassess how you define sentience.” We have two…

The distinction from human thinking and what the current AI hype cycle calls "thinking" is that all the machine model is doing is outputting the most probable text patterns based on its training data. We can keep adding layers on top of this, but that's all it ultimately is. The machine has no real understanding of what the text it's outputting means or what that text represents in the real world. It can't have an in…

> Arguing" about this topic with an LLM is pointless.

I don't think so. Unlike many humans a bunch of LLMs can concede a point that being a cucumber eater or a sound maker doesn't exclude possibility to also be a thinker.

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