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AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

tomwphillips.co.uk

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Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#601

Post by andai »

geerlingguy wrote: post #8

I like the conclusion; like for me, Whisper has radically improved CC on my video content. I used to spend a few hours translating my scripts into CCs, and tooling was poor. Now I run it through whisper in a couple minutes, give one quick pass to correct a few small hallucinations and misspellings, and I'm done. There are big wins in AI. But those don't pump the bubble once they're solved. And the thing that made Whi…

I switched to Parakeet the other day.

It's better than Whisper, and faster, while running on CPU on my ten year old ThinkPad.

I had Claude make me Python bindings for it and add it to my voice typing app.

We live in the future.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#602

Post by rzerowan »

aeve890 wrote: post #593
rzerowan wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Wetware" as it were , i remeber some research article some time back where they grew some kind of 'brainlets' and had them functional as far as memory was concerned[1]. Would be a interesting to see how that tech would progress while incororatd in the current silicon/photonic devices for input/output. Downside would be the durability of the organic matter and replacement. [1] https://sciencesensei.com/scientists-cre…

>Downside would be the durability of the organic matter and replacement. thinking about the consequences of consumer grade "organic computing" gets weird really fast. How do you interface biological matter with peripherals? What about toxicity? What about pathogens? Not only as targets, but as vectors too. What about senescence? Would my computer catch a cold or get Alzheimer's? What about energy? Would I have to buy…

I always thought optical signalling would be a interesting i/o pathway being non intrusive in HumanComputer interaction - rather than electrical signalling probes ala neuralink.

Yeah and sentience open a whole new can of ethical/moral implications to sort through.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#603

Post by mcny »

nawgz wrote: post #595
nitwit005 wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bee is an autonomous walking, climbing, and flying drone that investigates its environment, collects resources, builds structures, and coordinates with other drones. We're totally incapable of building an AI that can do anything resembling that. We're still at the phase where robots walking on rough terrain without falling over remains a bit impressive. I doubt the limitation is that we can't produce enough raw com…

I’m in agreement with you in that raw compute isn’t really the only missing piece, but I’m not in agreement we have enough compute to fully simulate even simple insect brains

I feel like we are talking past one another here. I disagree that all the computer processors in the world combined don't have enough raw processing power to simulate a single bee brain. That to me is an absurd idea.

Now if you meant we don't know enough about bees to actually model what its brain does and create a processor to actually process an artificial bee brain, then yes, we don't have that ability yet.

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Aside, when I watched Netflix show black mirror such as the grain episode, I always kept getting stuck at how are they lowering this tiny device... What kind of battery technology works here was my question even though this is science fiction.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#604

Post by rekrsiv »

DrierCycle wrote: post #586
rekrsiv wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we don't even need a human brain. We already have those, they take months to grow, take forever to train, and are forever distracted. Our logic-based processes will keep getting smaller and less power hungry as we figure out how to implement them at even lower scales, and eventually we'll be able to solve problems with the same building blocks as evolution but in intelligent ways, of which LLMs will likely only p…

The brain is logical by design, it implements logic?

We use logic to design our technology, but evolution does it by literally shaking all the atoms into place, no design involved. Our brains were created randomly.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#605

Post by 2000UltraDeluxe »

jcgrillo wrote: post #511
thewebguyd wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a large number of professionals in roles that could be transformed or replaced by this technology. Right, "It is difficult get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." I see this sort of irrationality around AI at my workplace, with the owners constantly droning on about "we must use AI everywhere." They are completely and irrationally paranoid that the business will fail…

I've heard the same breathless parroting of the marketing hype at large O(thousands ppl) cloud tech companies. A quote from leadership: > This is existential. If we aren't early adopters of AI tools we will be left behind and will never catch up. This company is dominant in the space they operate in. The magnitude of the delusion is profound. Ironically, this crap is actually distracting and affects quality, so it co…

I've seen the same trend. AI neeeds to be everywhere, preferably yesterday, but apart from hooking everything up to an LLM withot regards for the consequences nobody seems to know what the AI is supposed to do.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#606

Post by simianwords »

skinnymuch wrote: post #523
simianwords wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you are at the point where you have to suggest golf courses shouldn't exist then sorry we are completely on different page here. your logic will extend to just doing nothing at all because it will take resources from other things that you value.

Why would the logic extend there? If golf courses really do use a lot of water, energy, etc, and they largely benefit a small subset of people, it doesn’t make a ton of sense for them to exist. Of course making the world a better place for everyone is very against western and American exceptionalism and freedom.

How much water do you think AI data centers use as a percentage of golf courses in the USA?

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#607

Post by rekrsiv »

kryogen1c wrote: post #581
rekrsiv wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we don't even need a human brain. We already have those, they take months to grow, take forever to train, and are forever distracted. Our logic-based processes will keep getting smaller and less power hungry as we figure out how to implement them at even lower scales, and eventually we'll be able to solve problems with the same building blocks as evolution but in intelligent ways, of which LLMs will likely only p…

>But we don't even need a human brain. We already have those, they take months to grow, take forever to train This is a weird argument considering LLMs are composed of the output of countless hours of human brains. That makes LLMs, by definition, logarithmically worse at learning.

Not all artificial neurons are LLMs. Machine learning can be applied to any kind of large data set, not just human prose, and will start finding useful patterns before a human brain has time to learn how many fingers it has.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#608

Post by csomar »

nitwit005 wrote: post #563
IgorPartola wrote: post #21

It is ultimately a hardware problem. To simplify it greatly, an LLM neuron is a single input single output function. A human brain neuron takes in thousands of inputs and produces thousands of outputs, to the point that some inputs start being processed before they even get inside the cell by structures on the outside of it. An LLM neuron is an approximation of this. We cannot manufacture a human level neuron to be s…

A bee is an autonomous walking, climbing, and flying drone that investigates its environment, collects resources, builds structures, and coordinates with other drones. We're totally incapable of building an AI that can do anything resembling that. We're still at the phase where robots walking on rough terrain without falling over remains a bit impressive. I doubt the limitation is that we can't produce enough raw com…

I think the problem here is the physical hardware that will navigate and collect information from this environment? In this case, a biological robot makes more sense than a mechanical/electronic one. If you go down that route, though, the best AI will be a human brain. We have been training and selecting these for quite a while now.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#609

Post by anal_reactor »

theevilsharpie wrote: post #470
anal_reactor wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try explaining to someone who's only ever seen dial-up modems that 4k HDR video streaming is a thing.

Dial-up modems can transfer a 4K HDR video file, or any other arbitrary data. It obviously wouldn't have the bandwidth to do so in a way that would make a real-time stream feasible, but it doesn't involve any leap of logic to conclude that a higher bandwidth link means being able to transfer more data within a given period of time, which would eventually enable use cases that weren't feasible before. In contrast, you…

From modern perspective it's obvious that simply upping the bandwidth allows streaming high-quality videos, but it's not strictly about "more bigger cable". Huge leaps in various technologies were needed for you to watch video in 4k:

- 4k consumer-grade cameras

- SSDs

- video codecs

- hardware-accelerated video encoding

- large-scale internet infrastructure

- OLED displays

What I'm trying to say is that I clearly remember reading an old article about sharing mp3s on P2P networks and the person writing the article was confident that video sharing, let alone video streaming, let alone high-quality video streaming, wouldn't happen in foreseeable future because there were just too many problems with that.

If you went back in time just 10 years and told people about ChatGPT they simply wouldn't believe you. They imagined that an AI that can do things that current LLMs can do must be insanely complex, but once technology made that step, we realized "it's actually not that complicated". Sure, AGI won't surface from simply adding more GPUs into LLMs, just like LLMs didn't emerge from adding more GPUs to "cat vs dog" AI. But if technology took us from "AI can tell apart dog and cat 80% of the time" to "AI is literally wiping out entire industry sectors like translation or creative work while turning people into dopamine addicts en masse" within ten years, then I assume that I'll see AGI within my lifetime.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#610

Post by bob1029 »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #588
bob1029 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to the raw capabilities of the semiconductor industry, a 100mm^2 die at 3nm can contain on the order of 1~10 trillion features. I don't know that we are actually that far off in terms of scale. How to arrange these features seems to be the difficult part. The EDA [0] problem is immune to the bitter lesson. There are certainly specific arrangements of matter that can solve this problem better than a GPU/TPU…

Unlike neurons, connections those features can't be rewired on the fly so the comparison is not even meaningful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array
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