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

tejo.substack.com

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

#61

Post by cirrus3 »

> 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 THING.

The article never says why this is good. It just states it then moves on.

> As a whole, I’m sure it’ll give birth to entirely new systems we haven’t even conceived of yet and, one can hope, free up that time and energy towards more meaningful or creative pursuits.

The people's who job it takes probably don't give af about the patterns of their job, or creative pursuits they can do while unemployed. They are probably just trying to pay their bills and feed their kids.

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

#62

Post by trescenzi »

haswell wrote: post #28
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.

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.

A similar issue arises with health insurance. Using AI to evaluate claims is a huge efficiency play and you don’t have much ability to fight it if something goes wrong. And even if you can these decisions can be life or death in the short term and human intervention usually takes time.

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

#63

Post by wat10000 »

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.

What’s the AI equivalent to point a gun, pull the trigger, and it kills the target? Something, something, and it’s smart, what are the somethings?

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

#64

Post by esafak »

Salgat wrote: post #49
esafak wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Learning and thinking are separate things. Today's models think without learning -- they are frozen in time -- but this is a temporary state borne of the cost of training. I actually like it like this because we don't yet have impenetrable guardrails on these things.

> 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.

Today's thinking models iterate (with function calls and Internet queries) and even backtrack. They are not as reliable as humans but are demonstrating the hallmarks of thinking, I'd say.

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

#65

Post by darkerside »

aldanor wrote: post #51
darkerside wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How often does that actually happen? It's only when a fun owner was irresponsible, leaving a loaded gun in an accessible place for the toddler.

Similarly, AI can easily sound smart when directed to do so. It typically doesn't actually take action unless authorized by a person. We're entering a time where people may soon be willing to give that permission in a more permanent basis, which I would argue is still the fault of the person making that decision.

Whether you choose to have AI identify illegal immigrants, or you simply decide all immigrants are illegal, the deciding is made by you the human, not by a machine.

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

#66

Post by bumby »

wat10000 wrote: post #63
darkerside wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What’s the AI equivalent to point a gun, pull the trigger, and it kills the target? Something, something, and it’s smart, what are the somethings?

Not the OP, but my best guess is it’s an alignment problem, just like gun killing what the owner is not intending to. So the power of AI to make decisions that are out of alignment with society’s needs are the “something, something’s.” As in the above healthcare examples, it can be efficient at denying healthcare claims. The lack of good validation can obfuscate alignment with bad incentives.

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

#67

Post by robwwilliams »

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…

I disagree. Can we characterize the difference in thinking between a chimp and a human? In my opinion the genetic and biological differences are trivial. But evidently humans did evolve some secret sauce—language. Language bootstrapped human consciouness to what we now call self-consciousness; to a higher level than in any other vertebrate over a period of a few million years and without the benefit of teams of world-class thinkers and programmers.

I have optimism with reason. Humans are fancy thinking animals. I admit I think the “hard problem” in consciousness research is bogus.

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

#68

Post by wat10000 »

bumby wrote: post #66
wat10000 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the AI equivalent to point a gun, pull the trigger, and it kills the target? Something, something, and it’s smart, what are the somethings?

Not the OP, but my best guess is it’s an alignment problem, just like gun killing what the owner is not intending to. So the power of AI to make decisions that are out of alignment with society’s needs are the “something, something’s.” As in the above healthcare examples, it can be efficient at denying healthcare claims. The lack of good validation can obfuscate alignment with bad incentives.

I guess it depends on what you see as the purpose of AI. If the purpose is to be smart, it’s not doing very well. (Yet?) If the purpose is to deflect responsibility, it’s working great.

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

#70

Post by imiric »

robwwilliams wrote: post #67
imiric wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I disagree. Can we characterize the difference in thinking between a chimp and a human? In my opinion the genetic and biological differences are trivial. But evidently humans did evolve some secret sauce—language. Language bootstrapped human consciouness to what we now call self-consciousness; to a higher level than in any other vertebrate over a period of a few million years and without the benefit of teams of world…

> Can we characterize the difference in thinking between a chimp and a human?

We can, but the difference is not in whether we think or not, but in _how_ we think. We both experience the world through our senses and have conceptual representations of it in our minds. While other primates haven't invented complex written language (yet), they do have the ability to communicate ideas vocally and using symbols.

Machines do none of this. Again, they simply output tokens based on pattern matching. If those tokens are not in their training or prompt data, their output is useless. They have no conceptual grasp of anything they output. This process is a neat mathematical trick, but to describe it as "thinking" or "reasoning" is delusional.

How you don't see or won't acknowledge this fundamental difference is beyond me.

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