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Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

boydkane.com

71–80 of 461 posts

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#71

> AIs will get more reliable over time, like old software is more reliable than new software. :) Was that a humam Freudian slip, or artificial one? Yes, old software is often more reliable than new.

Neither, you’re reading it wrong. Think of it as codebases getting more reliable over time as they accumulate fixes and tests. (As opposed to, say, writing code in NodeJS versus C++)

You mean think of it as opposite to what is written in the remark, and then find it funny?

Yes, I did that.

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#72

> It’s entirely possible that some dangerous capability is hidden in ChatGPT, but nobody’s figured out the right prompt just yet. This sounds a little dramatic. The capabilities of ChatGPT are known. It generates text and images. The qualities of the content of the generated text and images is not fully known.

And that sounds a little reductive. There's a lot that can be done with text and images. Some of the most influential people and organizations in the world wield their power with text and images.

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#73

> It’s entirely possible that some dangerous capability is hidden in ChatGPT, but nobody’s figured out the right prompt just yet. This sounds a little dramatic. The capabilities of ChatGPT are known. It generates text and images. The qualities of the content of the generated text and images is not fully known.

Think of the news about the kid who got recommended to suicide by ChatGPT, or chatgpt providing the user information on how to do illegal activities, these capabilities are the ones that the author it's referring to

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#74

> Because eventually we’ll iron out all the bugs so the AIs will get more reliable over time Honestly this feels like a true statement to me. It's obviously a new technology, but so much of the "non-deterministic === unusable" HN sentiment seems to ignore the last two years where LLMs have become 10x as reliable as the initial models.

They have certainly gotten better, but it seems to me like the growth will be kind of logarithmic. I'd expect them to keep getting better quickly for a few more years and then kinda slow and eventually flatline as we reach the maximum for this sort of pattern matching kind of ML. And I expect that flat line will be well below the threshold needed for, say, a small software company to not require a programmer.

> kind of logarithmic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#75

> AIs will get more reliable over time, like old software is more reliable than new software. :) Was that a humam Freudian slip, or artificial one? Yes, old software is often more reliable than new.

Holy survivorship bias, Batman. If you think modern software is unreliable, let me introduce you to our friend, Rational Rose.

Agreed.

Or debuggers that would take out the entire OS.

Or a bad driver crashing everything multiple times a week.

Or a misbehaving process not handing control back to the OS.

I grew up in the era of 8 and 16 bit micros and early PCs, they where hilariously less stable than modern machines while doing far less, there wasn’t some halcyon age of near perfect software, it’s always been a case of things been good enough to be good enough but at least operating systems did improve.

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#76
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have certainly gotten better, but it seems to me like the growth will be kind of logarithmic. I'd expect them to keep getting better quickly for a few more years and then kinda slow and eventually flatline as we reach the maximum for this sort of pattern matching kind of ML. And I expect that flat line will be well below the threshold needed for, say, a small software company to not require a programmer.

> kind of logarithmic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function

Ironically, yes. :)

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#77
post #4

The most likely danger with AI is concentrated power, not that sentient AI will develop a dislike for us and use us as "batteries" like in the Matrix.

The reality is that the CEO/executive class already has developed a dislike for us and is trying to use us as “batteries” like in the Matrix.

Do you know personally some CEO-s? I know a couple and they generally seem less empathic than the general population, so I don't think that like/dislike even applies.

On the other hand, trying to do something "new" is lots of headaches, so emotions are not always a plus. I could make a parallel to doctors: you don't want a doctor to start crying in a middle of an operation because he feels bad for you, but you can't let doctors doing everything that they want - there needs to be some checks on them.

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#78
post #8
post #4

The most likely danger with AI is concentrated power, not that sentient AI will develop a dislike for us and use us as "batteries" like in the Matrix.

For one thing, we'd make shit batteries.

IIRC the original idea was that the machines used our brain capacity as a distributed array but then they decided batteries was easier to understand while been sillier, just burn the carbon they are feeding us, it’s more efficient.

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#80
post #4

The most likely danger with AI is concentrated power, not that sentient AI will develop a dislike for us and use us as "batteries" like in the Matrix.

"AI will take over the world".

I hear that. Then I try to use AI for simple code task, writing unit tests for a class, very similar to other unit tests. If fails miserably. Forgets to add an annotation and enters in a death loop of bullshit code generation. Generates test classes that tests failed test classes that test failed test classes and so on. Fascinating to watch. I wonder how much CO2 it generated while frying some Nvidia GPU in an overpriced data center.

AI singularity may happen, but the Mother Brain will be a complete moron anyway.

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