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AI is different

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Re: AI is different

#851

Post by tim333 »

morsecodist wrote: post #847
tim333 wrote: post #808

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the impression a lot depends on people's past reading and knowledge of what's going on. If you've read the likes of Kurzweil, Moravec, maybe Turing, you're probably going to treat AGI/ASI as inevitable. For people who haven't they just see these chatbots and the like and think those won't change things much. It's maybe a bit like the early days of covid when the likes of Trump were saying it's nothing, it'll b…

These people's theories (except Turing) are highly speculative predictions about the future. They could be right but they are not analogous to the predictions we get out of epidemiology where we have had a lot of examples to study. What they are doing is not science and it is way more reasonable to doubt them.

The Moravec stuff I'd say is more moderately speculative than highly. All he really said is compute power had tended to double every so long and if that keeps up we'll have human brain equivalent computer in cheap devices in the 2020s. That bit wasn't really a stretch and has largely proved true.

The more unspoken speculative bit is there will then be a large economic incentive for bright researchers and companies to put a lot of effort into sorting the software side. I don't consider LLMs to do the job of general intelligence but there are a lot of people trying to figure it out.

Given we have general intelligence and are the product of ~2GB of DNA, the design can't be that impossible complex, although likely a bit more than gradient descent.

Re: AI is different

#852

Post by djtango »

silvestrov wrote: post #497
djtango wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a Nolan thing like how Dunkirk used no green screen. I think Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings embody the transition from old school camera tricks to CGI as they leaned very heavily into set and prop design and as a result have aged very gracefully as movies

I think the first HP movie was more magical than the latter ones as they felt too "Marvel CGI" for me. Marvel movies have become tiresome for me, too much CGI that does not tell any interesting story. Old animated Disney movies are more rewatchable.

I like to see marvel as the state of the art/tech demo for CGI - this is what is achievable with near limitless budget

I still find Infinity War and Endgame visually satisfying spectacles but I am a forgiving viewer for those movies

Re: AI is different

#853

Post by on_the_train »

loandbehold wrote: post #720
on_the_train wrote: post #708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the reports are from shills. The impact of ai is almost non existent. The greatest impact it had was on role-playing. It's hardly even useful for coding. And that all wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't for the wave of bots that makes the crypto wave seem like child's play.

I don't understand people who say AI isn't useful for coding. Claude Code improved my productivity 10x. I used to put solid 8 hours a day in my remote software engineering job. Now I finish everything in 2 hours and go play with my kids. And my performance is better than before.

Then why don't you put in 8 hrs like before and get worldwide fame and be set for life within a year for being the best dev the world has ever seen?

Re: AI is different

#854

Post by arcane23 »

tomrod wrote: post #512
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you get the feeling that AI generated content is lacking something that can be incrementally improved on? Seems to me that it's already quite good in any dimension that it knows how to improve on (e.g. photorealism) and completely devoid of the other things we'd want from it (e.g. meaning).

It's missing random flaws. Often the noise has patternd as a result of the diffusion or generation process.

Yeah, I was thinking about this. Humans vary depending on a lot of factors. Today they're happy, tomorrow they're a bit down. This makes for some variation which can be useful. LLMs are made to be reliable/repeatable, as general experience. You know what you get. Humans are a bit more ... -ish, depending on ... things.

Re: AI is different

#855

Post by not_the_fda »

yoz-y wrote: post #511
jhbadger wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can already see this with YouTube: AI-generated videos are a mild amusement, not a replacement for video creators, because made by AI is becoming a negative label in a world where the presence of AI video is widely known. But that's because, at present, AI generated video isn't very good. Consider the history of CGI. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was common to complain about how the move away from practical s…

That said, the complaint is coming back. Namely because most new movies use an incredible amount of CGI and due to the time constraints the quality suffers. As such, CGI is once again becoming a negative label. I don’t know if there is an AI equivalent of this. Maybe the fact that as models seem to move away from a big generalist model at launch, towards a multitude of smaller expert models (but retaining the brandin…

Now they just make the whole scene dark and you can't see anything. Saves money on CGI though.

Re: AI is different

#856

Post by mattmanser »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #793
mattmanser wrote: post #770

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I'm doing that right now. You do get wow moments, but then you rapidly hit the WTF are you doing moments. One of the first three projects I tried was a spin on a to-do app. The buttons didn't even work when clicked. Yes, I keep it iterating, give it a puppeteer MCP, etc. I think you're just misunderstanding how hard it is to make a greenfield project when you have a super-charged stack overflow that AI is. Greenf…

I'm not a 10x-er. My job is working on a mature codebase. The results of AI in that situation are mixed, 1.2x if you're lucky. My recommendation was that it's useful to try the tools on greenfield projects, since they you can see them at their best. The productivity improvements of AI for greenfield projects are real. It's not all bullshit. It is a huge boost if you're at a small startup trying to find product market…

That 1.2x is suspiciously familiar to the recent study showing AI harmed productivity.

1.2x was self-reported, but when measured, developers were actually 0.85x ers using AI.

Re: AI is different

#857

Post by dns_snek »

sneak wrote: post #838
dns_snek wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, I'm a progressive and believe in socialism I'd be very interested in hearing which definition of "socialism" aligns with those obviously libertarian views? > If you don't pay your taxes, you will go to jail. It is both robbery and slavery [...] Arguing this is arguing emotionally and not rationally using language with words that have definitions. Indulging in the benefits of living in a society, knowingly break…

They’re not “services provided” unless you have the option of refusing them.

What do you mean? Is this one of those sovereign citizen type of arguments?

The government provides a range of services that are deemed to be broadly beneficial to society. Your refusal of that service doesn't change the fact that the service is being provided.

If you don't like the services you can get involved in politics or you can leave, both are valid options, while claiming that you're being enslaved and robbed is not.

Re: AI is different

#858

Post by amanaplanacanal »

xpe wrote: post #844
layer8 wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was more hinting at that if we fail to plan for the obvious stuff, what makes you think that we’ll be better at planning for the more obscure possibilities. The former should be much easier, but since we fail at it, we should first concentrate on getting better at that.

Let’s get specific. If we’re talking about DARPA’s research agenda or the US military’s priorities, I would say they are quite capable at planning for speculative scenarios and long-term effects - for various reasons, including decision making structure and funding. If we’re talking about shifting people’s mindsets about AI risks and building a movement, the time is now. Luckily we’ve got foundations to build on. We…

It's hard.

Take global warming as an example: this is a real thing that's happening. We have measurements of CO2 concentrations and global temperatures. Most people accept that this is a real thing. And still getting anybody to do anything about it is nearly impossible.

Now you have a hypothetical risk of something that may happen sometime in the distant future, but may not. I don't see how you would be able to get anybody to care about that.

Re: AI is different

#859

Post by throwaway0123_5 »

grues-dinner wrote: post #744
lotsoweiners wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Assuming humans stay in control of the AIs because otherwise all bets are off, in a case where a few fabulously wealthy (or at least "onwing/controlling", since the idea of wealth starts to become fuzzy) industrialists control the productive capacity for everything from farming to rocketry and there's no space for normal people to participate in production any more Why do the rest of humanity even have to participa…

Because with presumably tiny marginal costs of production, the AI owners can flood and/or buy out your human-powered economy. You'd need a very united front and powerful incentives to prevent, say, anyone buying AI-farmed wheat when it's half the cost of human-farmed (say). If you don't prevent that, Team AI can trade wheat (and everything else) for human economy money and then dominate there.

But if AI can do anything that human labor can do, what would even be the incentive for AI owners to farm wheat and sell it to people? They can just have their AIs directly produce the things they want.

It seems like the only things they would need are energy and access to materials for luxury goods. Presumably they could mostly lock the "human economy" out of access to these things through control over AI weapons, but there would likely be a lot of arable land that isn't valuable to them.

Outside of malice, there doesn't seem to be much reason to block the non-technological humans from using the land they don't need. Maybe some ecological argument, the few AI-enabled elites don't want billions of humans that they no longer need polluting "their" Earth?

Re: AI is different

#860

Post by throwaway0123_5 »

juniperus wrote: post #329
essnine wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The assumption here that UBI "incentivizes non-productive behavior and disincentivizes productive activity" is the part that doesn't make sense. What do you think universal means? How does it disincentivize productive activity if it is provided to everyone regardless of their income/productivity/employment/whatever?

Evolutionarily, people engage in productive activity in order to secure resources to ensure their survival and reproduction. When these necessary resources are gifted to a person, there is a lower chance that they will decide to take part in economically productive behavior. You can say that because it is universal, it should level the playing field just at a different starting point, but you are still creating a sit…

> You can say that because it is universal, it should level the playing field just at a different starting point, but you are still creating a situation where even incredibly intelligent people will choose to pursue leisure over labor, in fact, the most intelligent people may be the ones to be more aware of the pointlessness of working if they can survive on UBI.

This doesn't seem believable to me, or at least it isn't the whole story. Pre-20th century it seems like most scientific and mathematical discoveries came from people who were born into wealthy families and were able to pursue whatever interested them without concern for whether or not it would make them money. Presumably there were/are many people who could've contributed greatly if they didn't have to worry about putting food on the table.

> The most intelligent will prefer a system where their superior intelligence provides them with sufficient resources to choose a high-quality mate.

In a scenario where UBI is necessary because AI has supplanted human intelligence, it seems like the only way they could return to such a system is by removing both UBI and AI. Remove just UBI and they're still non-competitive economically against the AIs.

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