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The Age of AI has begun

gatesnotes.com

71–80 of 228 posts

Re: The Age of AI has begun

#71

Oh please . This is such a trope at this point. We asked ChatGPT a question about a system the other day. Its response was, > That number is equivalent to [another number]. That number controls $thing, and that number is the recommended value for thing according to $standard. It relates to $unrelated_thing. It did the math wrong when converting the number from one unit to another. (From days to seconds.) While it got…

You are wrong. Try gpt4. Gpt3 showed the glimmer on certain questions. Gpt4 is smart, maybe not quite as smart as me, but I fully expect gpt5 to be as smart or smarter than me.

Re: The Age of AI has begun

#72

I like to think its more the age of the Genuine Personal Digital Assistant has begun. The LLMs are great at assisting you to do your job but they wont take over yet.

Her is a forward looking movie in a lot of ways Kids born today will grow up with their phones/device being their best friend and pet, like a Pokémon. You will be incredibly socially shunned if you don’t have one, and corporations will have not only data but an emotional hook into you for life

I'm not sure that's true. Even among teenagers right now, there's widespread recognition of the downsides of social media/always connectedness/etc, and if there's one thing we can rely on kids to do, it's to poke and prod the "sacred cows" of their parents generation to find out if they're any good or not.

The "always connected nature of cell phones" is pretty clearly not any good, and you can safely assume that most teenagers right now have watched at least one parent, grandparent, or relative get turned into something disgusting by being always connected - that one relative who's always on TwitFace railing about how evil Muskerberg is, or whatever the outrage of the day is. I've got a few. They're certain that Zuckerberg is a traitor, will be arrested Any Day Now, etc... and can't comprehend that by posting all about this on Facebook, all they're doing is helping out his yacht fund.

It's been an utterly toxic last decade of consumer technology, from human-first perspective, and I'd wager that those being born today will have the long view back over that and see how awful it's really been.

Remember: Last year, vinyl outsold CDs in "units moved" for the first time since the mid-1980s, and is showing no signs of slowing down any time soon. Instax cameras ("Polaroid, but newer") are quite popular. There's a rejection of modern digital/consumer tech going on.

Re: The Age of AI has begun

#73
It looks like AI is having self-driving hype moment. It works neatly on simple roads while you keep your hands on the steering wheel and watch the car. There are wowzers but the whole Internet feels like ChatGPT is about to disrupt the very fabric of the Universe.

Wonder what will be equivalent stories of careless people turning autopilot on and going to sleep while the car happily drives them off the highway.

Re: The Age of AI has begun

#74
post #28

Oh please . This is such a trope at this point. We asked ChatGPT a question about a system the other day. Its response was, > That number is equivalent to [another number]. That number controls $thing, and that number is the recommended value for thing according to $standard. It relates to $unrelated_thing. It did the math wrong when converting the number from one unit to another. (From days to seconds.) While it got…

You're wrong. I wonder if you've tried GPT-4 yet.

Let me be facetious here.

If GPT-4 was truly all that, it would be classified and at work in Ukraine (or somewhere) right now. Not running Akinator-tier promo marketing gigs.

Re: The Age of AI has begun

#75
post #4

I’m more inclined to call it the Age of Disinformation

open AI is the continuation of the liberal, neo democrat agenda. I thought we were in the age of disinformation with medias, social networks and censorship those past few years and thought with a slight relief that Elon Musk buying twitter would be the end of an era and that mankind will be brought back to a safe space where debates are seen as enriching, divergence of opinion as a strength but boy was I wrong. it was just the last sign of an old world trying to fight against a demon of smoke, revealing to all of us a new woke world where AI are agents of disinformation that will shape mankind through the woke agenda of the 1% for the good of no one but them.

truly evil. and all the people praising what chatgpt can do will be the first one to tell us that they warned us back then.

Re: The Age of AI has begun

#77
I just had my first assistance from ChatGPT today, courtesy of a "junior" (I would prefer "less-experienced") engineer. He wanted to click a web button as part of his work on improving our steam engine (ok, calibration system) so I worked out the URL for the button and the appropriate curl incantation to trigger it. Gave him the URL and suggest he twiddled some python to do it.

About an hour later he came back, told me he'd asked ChatGPT to write the code for him and yes, it did work.

Anyway, thing is it really made me think about how much of the grunt/support work can potentially be offloaded like this; in this case it really did save us both some time.

On the other hand, when I've played with it before, it got stuff really badly wrong (ever tried ego-surfing with it?).

Re: The Age of AI has begun

#78

> In my lifetime, I’ve seen two demonstrations of technology that struck me as revolutionary. > The first time was in 1980, when I was introduced to a graphical user interface > The second big surprise came just last year. I’d been meeting with the team from OpenAI I guess it's not surprising since Microsoft was late to the game with IE, but it's interesting he never mentions "the internet" in this list.

Besides the hamster dance there was no one moment when the internet showed us its potential. Rather it was gradual.

Re: The Age of AI has begun

#79

I thought this was a pretty good post, but I'm still pretty shocked that people as intelligent as Gates don't spend more time on the potential downsides. To be clear, he does highlight some of the downsides, but his responses are just "handwavy" in my opinion. What is most baffling to me is that the highlight of this post is that Gates talks about the potential for AI to reduce worldwide inequality, where in all hone…

> To be clear, he does highlight some of the downsides, but his responses are just "handwavy" in my opinion.

“the government should fix that”

Narrator: the government didn’t fix it.

Re: The Age of AI has begun

#80
I like Bill Gates - out of the major iconic tech personas, he is one of the most interesting to me. Yes he kind of didn't see internet or phones coming, so it's not like he is an oracle, but he is right on many issues too. I think he is right on this one as well.

The most intriguing prediction was the medical one. He envisions training "medical AIs" that can act as a source of knowledge in poorer countries. Honestly, sounds madness to tell someone to rely on a LLM for medical advice today, although I can kind of imagine it happening over time as we get better at taming them.

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