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What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

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Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#81

Post by dr_dshiv »

brainwipe wrote: post #8

The title is irritating, conflating AI with LLMs. LLMs are a subset of AI. I expect future systems will be mobs of expert AI agents rather than relying on LLMs to do everything. An LLM will likely be in the mix for at least the natural language processing but I wouldn't bet the farm on them alone.

AI is what people think AI is. In the 80s, that was expert systems. In the 2000s, it was machine learning (not expert systems). Now, it is LLMs — not machine learning.

You can complain, but it’s like that old man shaking their fist at the clouds.

Now, if you want to talk about cybernetics…

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#82

Post by 9rx »

microtonal wrote: post #80
9rx wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So either Google, Meta, etc. will lose the AI game They might lose entirely (search, social media, etc.) if users are more likely to direct their eyeballs to "AI" services. And that isn't an impossible scenario. What do you need traditional web search, stupid internet comments, etc. for when an LLM will generate all that and more immediately at your behest? The newspaper companies lost when other forms of media cam…

They might lose entirely (search, social media, etc.) if users are more likely to direct their eyeballs to "AI" services. Sorry that I wasn't clear enough. That was what I was trying to imply - in that case the ad purchases that currently go to Google etc. will go to a new AI company. This is why both Google is investing so heavily in LLMs, they know that LLMs can kill search + website visits and thus cause them to l…

Why would ad spending need to increase? Google, Meta, et al. collapsing and an "AI" business taking their place is fine. The universe doesn't care.

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#83

Post by NuclearPM »

microtonal wrote: post #80
9rx wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So either Google, Meta, etc. will lose the AI game They might lose entirely (search, social media, etc.) if users are more likely to direct their eyeballs to "AI" services. And that isn't an impossible scenario. What do you need traditional web search, stupid internet comments, etc. for when an LLM will generate all that and more immediately at your behest? The newspaper companies lost when other forms of media cam…

They might lose entirely (search, social media, etc.) if users are more likely to direct their eyeballs to "AI" services. Sorry that I wasn't clear enough. That was what I was trying to imply - in that case the ad purchases that currently go to Google etc. will go to a new AI company. This is why both Google is investing so heavily in LLMs, they know that LLMs can kill search + website visits and thus cause them to l…

This is why Google has android and chrome, and why Facebook bought WhatsApp and Instagram. It isn’t so much about spending billions on growth, it is about hedging their bets and protecting their monopolistic cash cows.

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#85

Post by lenerdenator »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #67
izzydata wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no plan in place at all for the outcome of most work becoming redundant. At least in the US I highly doubt we will be capable of implementing some system such as UBI for the benefit of all citizens so everyone can take advantage of most work being automated. Everyone will be left to pick up scraps and barely survive. But I am extremely skeptical that current "AI" will be capable of eliminating so much of the…

> There is no plan in place at all for the outcome of most work becoming redundant. At least in the US I highly doubt we will be capable of implementing some system such as UBI for the benefit of all citizens so everyone can take advantage of most work being automated. Everyone will be left to pick up scraps and barely survive. If 80% of US citizens lose their jobs, I assure you that there will be a political respons…

> If 80% of US citizens lose their jobs, I assure you that there will be a political response. It might not be one you (or I) like, but it will happen and it will be a big deal.

In societies where 80% of people are not able to draw an income and there are more firearms than there are people allowed to own them, that political response is revolution.

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#86

Post by legacynl »

olddustytrail wrote: post #64
bee_rider wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely smarter people than me have thought about this already, but I’ve been trying to think about human language and how thoughts form in my head lately. How does thinking feel to you? I feel like thoughts appear in my head conceptually mostly formed, but then I start sequentially coming up with sentences to express them, almost as if I’m writing them down for somebody else. In that process, I edit a bunch, so t…

LLMs aren't monolingual so you might want to expand that beyond English. Consider how multilingual people think. Also, apparently it's pretty common for people to think in words and have an internal monologue. I hadn't realized this was a thing until recently but it seems many people don't think abstractly as you've described.

There have been psychological experiments that have shown what OP experiences.

In this particular experiment subjects were asked to make a series of arbitrary choices between 2 items, while being hooked up to some brain scanning equipment. Subjects were asked to think about it for 5 seconds before making the choice.

The experiment showed that scientists were able to predict the choice before the subjects consciously reasoned about it. So the experiment indicates that the choice is made subconsciously, and the reasoning ends up on whatever choice was made.

This aligns pretty well with some other psychological theories, and it points at that a lot/most of our brain processes happen subconsciously, and our conscious experience mainly serves as a way of providing a coherent story about why we experience what we experience.

So it seems that no matter if you 'think' abstractly or visually or with a monologue, this is merely a small step in our overall cognition, and doesn't really change the fact that thing bubble up from our subconscious before we become conscious of it.

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#87

Post by noboostforyou »

benterix wrote: post #76
noboostforyou wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This push is mostly coming from the C-level and the hustler types, both of which need this to work out in order for their employeeless corporation fantasy to work out. The irony, at least in my mind, is that C-level hustler types are exactly the perfect role to be replaced by "AI" for big cost-savings. For obvious reasons, it won't happen.

Frankly, I'm not sure if LLM would be the best replacement. Given they need to make decisions, I'd say ensemble methods could work better, at least in scenarios where you can actually perform reliable simulations (e.g. production, but not necessarily marketing). LLMs tend to averages whereas what shareholders want is to optimize for X, where X is usually, but not necessarily, net profit. (It would be a fun experiment…

There's an entire category of things designed for game theory and other types of zero sum games like chess, go, poker, etc so I don't see why you can't have an "ai" system that's making profit-orientated, automated decisions.

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#88

Post by IAmGraydon »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #27
piskov wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because every s-curve looks like an exponent for those in the start. I mean look at the first plane, then first air-jets: it’s understandable to assume we would travel the galaxy in something like 2050. Meanwhile planes are basically the same last 60 years. LLMs are great but I firmly believe that in 2100 all is basically the same as in 2020: no free energy (fusion), no AGI.

Nature abhors an exponential. They all seem to either turn out to be sigmoid or collapse entirely.

Well...everything has a limit, so yes every example of exponential growth gets capped somewhere and becomes a sigmoid. Viral spread, population growth, radioactive decay, tree branching, etc. are all exponential until they hit their limit. Otherwise each process would quickly proceed to infinity. That doesn't really tell us much about where the ceiling is for LLMs, however.

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#89

Post by AtlasBarfed »

fuzzfactor wrote: post #3

>What If A.I. Doesn't Get Better Than This? What if it does? There's a certain type of fear . . . "It's the fear . . . they're gonna take my job away . . . " It's the fear . . . I'll be working here the rest of my days . . . " -- David Fahl Same fear, different day.

Wow did you encapsulate millenia of management-labor disputes by saying don't worry be happy?

Let's play the same game with totalitarianism!

It's the fear they are watching everything

It's the fear nobody is watching at all

Oh wow, I totally understand the threat of totalitarianism from that.

And I bring up totalitarianism quite in particular, because aside from vastly empowering the elites in the war against labor, AI vastly empowers the elites for totalitarian monitoring and control.

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#90

Post by tim333 »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #41
mgfist wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DeepSeek is also undercutting itself. No one is making a profit here, everyone is trying to gobble market share. Even if you have the best model and don't care to make a dime, inference is very expensive.

I'd be surprised if Google weren't closer to profitability than basically anyone else, as they have their own hardware and have been running these kinds of applications for much longer than anyone else.

Google are well set up to monetize compared to the others. They just need people to see their ads.
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