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

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

#571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 **

I'm sorry but if you're calling RL "ANA (amazing new acronym)" you're out of your depth on this one.

[deleted]

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

#572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you have any points that aren’t about the people you disagree with? Yes... > Argue the facts. What? > What are the limits that prevent progress on the dimension of replicating human intelligence? I don't work in that field, but as a layman I'd wager the lack of clear technical understanding of what animal intelligence actually is , let alone how it works is the biggest limitation.

> What Half of the language in your comment was fact free and incendiary. Delusion, prattle, deep needs of some role. That’s all firmly in the realm of ad hominem, so I was asking if you had anything substantial. > I'd wager the lack of clear technical understanding of what animal intelligence actually is I made the same points long time ago so can’t be too critical of that. I’ve changed my mind and here’s why. That’…

> fact free and incendiary

No. I believe it is factually accurate that many tech workers believe that technology progress marches steadily onwards and upwards. This is easily shown by the historical record to be patently false. Moreover, it's easy to imagine myriad ways we could regress technologically--nuclear war, asteroid impact, space weather, etc. So a belief in the inexorable progress of technology is therefore delusional. I believe it is a fact that tech companies' managers encourage these delusions by spinning up a bunch of pseudo religious sentiment using language like "innovation" to describe what is mostly actually really mundane, meaningless, and often actively harmful work. People hear that stuff, it goes to their heads, and they think they're "making the world a better place". The inexorable march of technology progress fits into such a world view.

> We currently don’t understand intelligence but there’s no barrier I’m aware of that prevents progress. In addition, we’ve discovered types of intelligence (LLM’s, AlphaGo Zero etc) that don’t depend on our ability to understand ourselves.

How can you claim both that we don't know what intelligence is, and that LLMs, AlphaGo Zero, and etc are "intelligent"?

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

#573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then human invention will give way What? Would you mind explaining this?

It’s analogous to the automobile. People do still walk, bike, and ride horses, but the vast majority of productive land transportation is done by automobile. Same thing with electronic communication vs. written correspondence. New tech largely supplants old tech. In this case, the old tech is human ingenuity and inventiveness. I don’t think this is a controversial take. Many people take issue with the premise that ar…

I don't know whether it's a controversial take or not, but I can't see how if one day the machine magically wakes up and somehow develops sentience that it follows logically that human intelligence would somehow "give way". I was hoping for a clear explanation of mechanically how such a thing might happen.

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

#574
post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I generally like to know how stuff works and why.

Do you think rest of the world cares?

These who don’t care need help for every little problem. And possibly get charged a lot more than it actually cost in a car shop for any service. So while one can live without knowing it’s ALWAYS better to know

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

#575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Except I can do things today that were not possible in 1999 like easily collaborate on a google doc realtime with someone on the other side of the planet, get an automated grammar expert to suggest edits and then have a video call with 15 people to discuss more about it. All in the same app, the browser, all on a whim, all high speed and to boot: all for free as in beer. And this is run of the mill YaaaaawN productiv…

That's interesting, personally I've never found collaborative editing to be of any use, but the comments feature is instead the one I use, and often it works less well than the way we used to do it with inline comments (e.g. italicized or made a different color). The one advantage would be automatically merging comments from multiple reviewers, but that's not necessarily a good thing. Often the collection of comments from different reviewers each forms their own narrative, and merging it all into a chaotic mess drowns out each individual's perspective. Personally I'd rather treat each reviewer's critique individually. 1999 technology handles this just fine.

Same for video calls. Screen sharing can be useful at times, but it would be easy distribute materials to all participants and collaborate on a conference call. You'll have better audio latency that way. So it's not super obvious to me that the latest Wunderwaffe are actually significantly better, but it is clear they use a hell of a lot more compute cycles and bandwidth.

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

#576
I sympathize, but I feel like people are over-selling the "end of AI".

The progress that we've seen in the past two years has been completely insane compared to literally any other field. LLMs complete absolutely insane reasoning tasks, including math proofs at the level of a "mediocre grad student" (which is super impressive). For better or worse, image generation & now video generation is indistinguishable from the real thing, a lot of the times.

I think that crazy business types and media really overhyped the fuck out of AI so fucking high, that even with such strong progress, it's still not enough.

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

#577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think people outside of tech hearing about OpenAI more than Claude is really indicative of much. Ask those same people how much they use an LLM and it’s often rare-to-never. Also, in what way has OpenAI become the Kleenex of the LLM space? Anthropic, Google, Facebook have no gpts, nobody “gpts” something, nobody uses that companies “gpt”. I would say perhaps OpenAI has become the Napster, MySpace, or Facebook…

I am surrounded by people who "ask GPT" things constantly. That seems like the same thing to me.

Are these people asking chatGPT though? Or do they say “ask GPT” and then use other LLMs?

I feel like I hear “ask Claude” as much as “ask chatGPT”

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