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Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

thealgorithmicbridge.com

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Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#71

Post by impossiblefork »

blululu wrote: post #45
levanten wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being part of the team that achieved AGI first would be to write your name in history forever. That could mean more to people than money. Also 10m would be a drop in the bucket compared to being a shareholder of a company that has achieved AGI; you could also imagine the influence and fame that comes with it.

Kind of a sucker move here since you personally will 100% be forgotten. We are only going to remember one or two people who did any of this. Say Sam Altman and Ilya Sttsveker. Everyone else will be forgotten. The authors or the Transformer paper are unlikely to make it into the history books or even popular imagination. Think about the Manhattan Project. We recently made a movie remembering that one guy who did somet…

Personally I think the ones who will be remembered will be the ones who publish useful methods first, not the ones who succeed commercially.

It'll be Vaswani and the others for the transformer, then maybe Zelikman and those on that paper for thought tokens, then maybe some of the RNN people and word embedding people will be cited as pioneers. Sutskever will definitely be remembered for GPT-1 though, being first to really scale up transformers. But it'll actually be like with flight and a whole mass of people will be remembered, just as we now remember everyone from the Wrights to Bleriot and to Busemann, Prandtl, even Whitcomb.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#72

Post by taormina »

conartist6 wrote: post #20

I love how much the proponents is this tech are starting to sound like the opponents. What I can't figure out is why this author thinks it's good if these companies do invent a real AGI...

""" I’m basically calling the AI industry dishonest, but I want to qualify by saying they are unnecessarily dishonest. Because they don’t need to be! They should just not make abstract claims about how much the world will change due to AI in no time, and they will be fine. They undermine the real effort they put into their work—which is genuine!

Charitably, they may not even be dishonest at all, but carelessly unintrospective. Maybe they think they’re being truthful when they make claims that AGI is near, but then they fail to examine dispassionately the inconsistency of their actions.

When your identity is tied to the future, you don’t state beliefs but wishes. And we, the rest of the world, intuitively know. """

He's not saying either way, just pointing out that they could just be honest, but that might hamper their ability to beg for more money.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#74

Post by JunkDNA »

cratermoon wrote: post #61
JunkDNA wrote: post #57

I keep seeing this charge that AI companies have an “Uber problem” meaning the business is heavily subsidized by VC. Is there any analysis that has been done that explains how this breaks down (training vs inference and what current pricing is)? At least with Uber you had a cab fare as a benchmark. But what should, for example, ChatGPT actually cost me per month without the VC subsidy? How far off are we?

https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the...

This article isn’t particularly helpful. It focuses on a ton of specific OpenAI business decisions that aren’t necessarily generalizable to the rest of the industry. OpenAI itself might be out over its skis, but what I’m asking about is the meta-accusation that AI in general is heavily subsidized. When the music stops, what does the price of AI look like? The going rate for chat bots like ChatGPT is $20/month. Does that go to $40 a month? $400? $4,000?

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#75

Post by imiric »

matusp wrote: post #8

Observe what the AI companies are doing, not what they are saying. If they would expect to achieve AGI soon, their behaviour would be completely different. Why bother developing chatbots or doing sales, when you will be operating AGI in a few short years? Surely, all resources should go towards that goal, as it is supposed to usher the humanity into a new prosperous age (somehow).

Related to your point: if these tools are close to having super-human intelligence, and they make humans so much more productive, why aren't we seeing improvements at a much faster rate than we are now? Why aren't inherent problems like hallucination already solved, or at least less of an issue? Surely the smartest researchers and engineers money can buy would be dogfooding, no?

This is the main point that proves to me that these companies are mostly selling us snake oil. Yes, there is a great deal of utility from even the current technology. It can detect patterns in data that no human could; that alone can be revolutionary in some fields. It can generate data that mimics anything humans have produced, and certain permutations of that can be insightful. It can produce fascinating images, audio, and video. Some of these capabilities raise safety concerns, particularly in the wrong hands, and important questions that society needs to address. These hurdles are surmountable, but they require focusing on the reality of what these tools can do, instead of on whatever a group of serial tech entrepreneurs looking for the next cashout opportunity tell us they can do.

The constant anthropomorphization of this technology is dishonest at best, and harmful and dangerous at worst.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#76

Post by raincole »

levanten wrote: post #15
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #4

> "This is purely an observation: You only jump ship in the middle of a conquest if either all ships are arriving at the same time (unlikely) or neither is arriving at all. This means that no AI lab is close to AGI." The central claim here is illogical. The way I see it, if you believe that AGI is imminent, and if your personal efforts are not entirely crucial to bringing AGI about (just about all engineers are in th…

Being part of the team that achieved AGI first would be to write your name in history forever. That could mean more to people than money. Also 10m would be a drop in the bucket compared to being a shareholder of a company that has achieved AGI; you could also imagine the influence and fame that comes with it.

> Being part of the team that achieved AGI first would be to write your name in history forever. That could mean more to people than money.

Uh, sure. How many rocket engineers who worked for moon landing could you name?

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#77

Post by energy123 »

pu_pe wrote: post #28
matusp wrote: post #8

Observe what the AI companies are doing, not what they are saying. If they would expect to achieve AGI soon, their behaviour would be completely different. Why bother developing chatbots or doing sales, when you will be operating AGI in a few short years? Surely, all resources should go towards that goal, as it is supposed to usher the humanity into a new prosperous age (somehow).

I don't think it's as simple as that. Chatbots can be used to harvest data, and sales are still important before and after you achieve AGI.

Besides, there is Sutskever's SSI which is avoiding customers.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#78

Post by ffsm8 »

coldcode wrote: post #17

I never trusted them from the start. I remember the hype that came out of Sun when J2EE/EJBs appeared. Their hype documents said the future of programming was buying EJBs from vendors and wiring them together. AI is of course a much bigger hype machine with massive investments that need to be justified somehow. AI is a useful tool (sometimes) but not a revolution. ML is much more useful a tool. AGI is a pipe dream fa…

I completely agree that LLMs are missing a fundamental part for AGI, which itself is a long way of from super intelligence.

However, you don't need either of these to completely decimate the job markets and by extension our societies.

Historically speaking, "good enough" and cheaper had always won over "better, but more expensive". I suspect LLMs will raise this question endlessly until significant portions of the society are struggling - and who knows what will happen then

Before LLMs started going anywhere, I thought that's gonna be an issue for later generations, but at this point I suspect we'll witness it within the next 10 yrs.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#79

Post by whiplash451 »

impossiblefork wrote: post #19
bestouff wrote: post #3

Are there some people here in HN believing in AGI "soonish" ?

I might, depending on the definition. Some kind of verbal-only-AGI that can solve almost all mathematical problems that humans come up with that can be solved in half a page. I think that's achievable somewhere in the near term, 2-7 years.

What makes you think that this could be achieved in that time frame? All we seem to have for now are LLMs that can solve problems they’ve learned by heart (or neighboring problems)
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