[HN Gopher] The Intelligence Age
___________________________________________________________________
The Intelligence Age
Author : firloop
Score : 240 points
Date : 2024-09-23 17:01 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ia.samaltman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ia.samaltman.com)
| ljlolel wrote:
| "Many of the jobs we do today would have looked like trifling
| wastes of time to people a few hundred years ago, but nobody is
| looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter. If a
| lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the
| prosperity all around him was unimaginable. And if we could fast-
| forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity all around us
| would feel just as unimaginable." Loving the techno optimism.
| lispisok wrote:
| I got a kick out of that. Spoken like a man who doesnt have to
| concern himself with the price of housing or any other
| necessity as we watch this strange short lived phenomena called
| the middle class disappear and we're back to the haves and
| have-nots.
| imjonse wrote:
| It's a lot more comforting to work on AI (or any tech for that
| matter) if you believe or force yourself to believe it will be
| used for good. OpenAI's for-profit and gatekeeping approach is
| unlikely to be the path to the prosperity Sam Altman envisions.
| 23B1 wrote:
| AI is going to revolutionize humanity!
|
| Sam Altman is the _last_ guy we want helping lead that
| revolution.
| talldayo wrote:
| > Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs -
| fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the
| discovery of all of physics - will eventually become commonplace.
|
| Paging Dr. Bullshit, we've got an optimist on the line who'd like
| to have a word with you.
| kazcaptain wrote:
| The most interesting bit I find is the time period mentioned
| until super-intelligence: "thousands of days (!)" aka 6-9 years
| or more?
|
| With the current hype wave it feels like we're almost there but
| this piece makes me think we're not.
| CptFribble wrote:
| I think that's part of the carefully-crafted hype messaging.
| Close enough to get excited about, but far enough away that by
| the time we get there people will have forgotten we were
| supposed to have it by then.
| Etheryte wrote:
| If anything, I would say that that's a very optimistic take.
| The hype train is strong, but that's largely what it is once
| you look at the details. What we have right now is impressive,
| but no one has shown anything close to a possible path from
| where we are right now to AGI. The things we can do right now
| are fancy, but they're fancy in the same way good autocomplete
| is fancy. To me, it feels like a local maxima, but it's very
| unclear whether the specific set of approaches we're exploring
| right now can lead to something more.
| ctoth wrote:
| > What we have right now is impressive, but no one has shown
| anything close to a possible path from where we are right now
| to AGI[0].
|
| [0]: From GPT-4 to AGI: Counting the OOMs
| https://situational-awareness.ai/from-gpt-4-to-agi/
| Etheryte wrote:
| I'm not convinced, and neither is Sam Altman himself [0].
| Also, if that projection holds, and that's a big if, the
| purported breakthrough would cost 10^6 times as much as
| GPT-4 took to train. That's over 100 million dollars [1]
| times a million. That adds up to over 100 trillion dollars,
| in the ballpark of four times the GDP of the whole of
| United States.
|
| [0] https://www.wired.com/story/openai-ceo-sam-altman-the-
| age-of...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-4#Training
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| How do you distinguish the path to fancier autocomplete from
| the path towards AGI? Why think we're on the former rather
| than the latter?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The thing is that it looks like, or perhaps I should say it's
| "understood" at this point, that transformer's abilities
| scale pretty much linearly with compute (there is also some
| evidence they scale exponentially with parameter count, but
| just some evidence).
|
| Right now there is insane amounts of money being thrown at AI
| _because_ progress is matching projections. There doesn 't
| seem to be a leveling off or diminishing returns taking
| place. And that's just compute, we could probably freeze
| compute and still make insane progress just because
| optimizations have so much momentum right now too.
| bbor wrote:
| Yeah, that's my number one question, too. Sure, he happened to
| be appointed the manager of the team who cracked intuitive
| algorithms through deep learning, but what does he know about
| superintelligence? IMO that's a completely separate question,
| and "foundation models continue to improve" is absolutely not
| related to whether or not an intelligence explosion is
| guaranteed or not. I'd trust someone like Yudkowsky way more on
| this, or really anyone who has engaged with academic literature
| on the subjects of intentionality, receptive vs. spontaneous
| reasoning, or really _any_ academic literature of any kind...
|
| Does anyone know if he's published thoughts on any serious lit?
| So far I've just seen him play the "I know stuff you don't
| because I get to see behind the scenes" card over and over,
| which seems a little dubious at this point. I was convinced
| they would announce AGI in December 2023, so I'm far from a
| hater! It just seems clear that they're/he's guessing at this
| point, rather than reporting or reasoning.
|
| Really he assumes two huge breakthroughs, both of which I find
| plausible but far from guaranteed: With
| nearly-limitless intelligence and abundant energy
| layer8 wrote:
| I would presume that that's the time period he's currently
| trying to fund.
| lpasselin wrote:
| Custom and _competent_ AI tutors will be a game changer for
| education.
| hnthrow562 wrote:
| This is painting a picture of a utopia. I'm not sure about that.
|
| The entire AI trend - long term is based on the idea that AI will
| profoundly change the world. This has sparked a global race for
| developing better AI systems and the more dangerous winner takes
| all outcome. It is therefore not surprising that billions of
| dollars are being spent to develop more powerful AI systems as
| well as to restructure operations around them.
|
| All the existing systems we have must fundamentally change for
| the better if we want a good future.
|
| The positive aspects / utopia promises have much more visibility
| to the public than the negative effects / dystopian world.
|
| ARE WE TO pretend that Human greed, selfishness, desires to
| dominate and control, animalistic behaviour, use of technologies
| for war and other destructive purposes don't exist?
|
| We are living in times of war and chaos and uncertainty.
| Increasingly advanced technology is being used on the battlefield
| in more covert and strategic ways.
|
| History is repeating itself again in many ways. Have we failed to
| learn? The consequences might be harsher with more advanced
| technology.
|
| I have read and thought deeply about several anti AI doomer takes
| from prominent researchers and scientists but I haven't seen any
| which aren't based on assumptions or foolproof. For something
| that profoundly changes the world, it's bad to base your hopes on
| assumptions.
|
| I see people dunking on llms which might not be AI's final form.
| Then they extrapolate that and say there is nothing to worry
| about. It is a matter of when not if.
|
| The thought of being useless or worse being treated as nothing
| more than pests is worrying. Job losses are minor in comparison.
|
| The only hope I have is that we are all in this together. I hope
| peace and goodwill prevails. I hope necessary actions are taken
| before it's too late.
|
| A more pragmatic perspective indicates that there are more
| pressing problems that need to be addressed if we want to avoid a
| doomer scenario.
| emoII wrote:
| The sentiment to me is "we need unlimited compute and data" both
| of which are clearly limited. There is definitely more technology
| to invent and understand in order for us to do more with less
| tikkun wrote:
| The future will be abundant, because deep learning works. To
| achieve that, we need to be calm, but cautious. And, we need to
| fund infra (chips and power) so that AGI isn't limited to the
| ultra-wealthy.
|
| My take:
|
| * Foom/doom isn't helpful. But, calm cautiousness is. If you're
| acting from a place of fear and emotional dysregulation, you'll
| make ineffective choices. If you get calm and regulated first,
| and _then_ take actions, they 'll be more effective. (This is my
| issue with AGI-risk people, they often seem triggered/fear/alarm-
| driven rather than calm but cautious)
|
| * Piece is kind of a manifesto for raising money for AI infra
|
| * Sam's done a podcast before about meditation where he talked
| about similar themes of "prudence without fear" and the dangers
| of "deep fear and panic and anxiety" and instead the importance
| of staying "calm and centered during hard and stressful moments"
| - responding, not reacting (strong +1)
|
| * It's no accident that o1 is very good at math physics and
| programming. It'll keep getting much better here. Presumably this
| is the path for AGI to lead to abundance and cheaper energy by
| "solving physics"
| bbor wrote:
| Well put! I would disagree on two fundamental points, tho:
|
| 1. If you honestly think that millions/billions of people are
| at serious risk of avoidable harm that everyone else is
| ignoring, "calm down" can be a hard dictum to follow. Sam
| Altman has won, it's easy for him psychologically to say "well,
| lets just stick to the status quo and do our best every day and
| it'll probably work out". Made-in-house bias is strongest when
| "in-house" is your own mind, after all.
|
| 2. Your scare quotes makes it seem like you might agree, but:
| physics is the study of the physical world, thinking it can be
| 'solved' is like thinking mathematics, psychology, or
| anthropology can be 'solved'. It's fundamentally anti-science
| and very, very dangerous to be talking like that. Truth isn't
| absolutely relative, but science also isn't a collection of
| facts written in stone that we need to finish unearthing; it's
| a collection of intellectual tools.
| seri4l wrote:
| >We can say a lot of things about what may happen next, but the
| main one is that AI is going to get better with scale.
|
| Could anyone elaborate on this? Further down he talks about the
| necessity of bringing the cost of computing down. Is that really
| the bottleneck?
| kneel wrote:
| Few short learning performance scales with model size. Afaik
| they don't see a plateau yet and the race is on the ingest more
| data and come up with better tuning techniques.
|
| https://splab.sdu.edu.cn/GPT3.pdf
| ks2048 wrote:
| "AI is going to get better with scale" to me says almost
| nothing at all. It includes anything from we 100x the scale and
| get 1% improvement to 2x the scale and get "AGI".
| CptFribble wrote:
| To paraphrase Goggins, "Who's gonna carry the cabbage?"
|
| While it's true there are a lot of jobs obsoleted by
| technological progress, the vision of personal AI teams creating
| a new age of prosperity only makes sense for knowledge workers.
| Sure, a field worker picking cabbage could also have an AI team
| to coordinate medical care. But in this brilliant future, are the
| lowest members of society suddenly well-paid?
|
| The steam engine and subsequent Industrial Revolution created a
| lot of jobs and economic productivity, sure, but a huge amount of
| those jobs were dirty, dangerous factory jobs, and the lion's
| share of the productivity was ultimately captured by robber
| barons for quite some time. The increase in standard of living
| could only be seen in aggregate on pages of statistics from the
| mahogany-paneled offices of Standard Oil, while the lives of the
| individuals beneath those papers more often resembled Sinclair's
| Jungle.
|
| Altman's suggestion that avoiding AI capture by the rich merely
| requires more compute is laughable. We have enormous amounts of
| compute currently, and its productivity is already captured by a
| small number of people compared to the vast throngs that power
| civilization in total. Why would AI make this any different? The
| average person does not understand how AI works and does not have
| the resources to utilize it. Any further advancements in AI,
| including "personalized AI teams," will not be equally shared,
| they will be packaged into subscription services and sold, only
| to enrich those who already control the vast majority of the
| world's wealth.
| peterb0yd wrote:
| Shhh... you're not supposed to say anything about this!
|
| We need to sell the idea of abundance for everyone so investors
| and employees will feel good about dedicating their livelihood
| to our organization!
| idle_zealot wrote:
| The thing is: robotics is knowledge work. Supposing a scenario
| in which AI makes advancing fields of engineering and science
| much more rapid, it will be leveraged to build and cheapen
| robotic labor. There would be a gap period where AI is smart
| but unable to perform labor without humans, which could be
| ugly, and then we reach effective post-scarcity and post-
| humans-being-useful. Where we go from there could be heaven or
| hell depending on who's in charge.
| swyx wrote:
| > If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as
| possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it
| abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips). If we don't
| build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource
| that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich
| people.
|
| i think this is the prevailing wisdom but theres an angle that
| openai doesnt value and therefore isnt mentioned. There's far
| more compute sitting idle in everyone's offices and homes and
| pockets than there are in the $100bn openai cluster. it just isnt
| useful for training because physics. but its useful for
| inference. local LLMs ship this-next year in Chrome (gemini nano)
| and Apple (apple intelligence) that will truly be available for
| everyone instead of going thru OpenAI's infra. they'll be worse
| than GPT4, but only for a couple more years.
| obirunda wrote:
| Especially when you separate the ethereal "hard problems" from
| every day queries local LLMs can answer equally as well as SOTA
| models, the value proposition for these expensive models
| plummets. If it can't solve real hard, long horizon problems
| the 10% lift on a given benchmark is not a material value prop
| to the end user to choose a local free version over the API
| costs or the monthly subscription.
| leetharris wrote:
| I like Sam's philosophy on this and I generally agree with him.
| However, I do not like how all the wealthy AI people are hand-
| waving the massive labor market shift in the coming years.
|
| > As one example, we expect that this technology can cause a
| significant change in labor markets (good and bad) in the coming
| years, but most jobs will change more slowly than most people
| think, and I have no fear that we'll run out of things to do
| (even if they don't look like "real jobs" to us today). People
| have an innate desire to create and to be useful to each other,
| and AI will allow us to amplify our own abilities like never
| before. As a society, we will be back in an expanding world, and
| we can again focus on playing positive-sum games.
|
| It's very easy as an extremely rich person to just say, "don't
| worry, in the end it'll be better for all of us." Maybe that's
| true on a societal scale, but these are people's entire worlds
| being destroyed.
|
| Imagine you went to college for a medical specialty for 8-10
| years, you come out as an expert, and 2 years later that entire
| field is handled by AI and salaries start to tank. Imagine you
| have been a graphic designer for 20 years supporting your 3
| children and bam a diffusion model can do your job for a fraction
| of the cost. Imagine you've been a stenographer working in
| courtrooms to support your ill parents and suddenly ASR can do
| your job better than you can. This is just simple stuff we can
| connect the dots on now. There will be orders of magnitude more
| shifts that we can't even imagine right now.
|
| To someone like Sam, everything will be fine. He can handle the
| massive societal shift because he has options. Every a moderately
| wealthy person will be OK.
|
| But the entire middle class is going to start really freaking the
| fuck out soon as more and more jobs disappear. You're already
| seeing anti-AI sentiment all over the web. Even in expert
| circles, you can see skepticism. People saying things like, "how
| do I opt out of Apple Intelligence?" People don't WANT more
| grammar correction or AI emojis in their lives, they just want to
| survive and thrive and own a house.
|
| How are we going to handle this? Sam's words of "if we could
| fast-forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity all
| around us would feel just as unimaginable" doesn't mean shit to a
| family of 4 who went through layoffs in the year 2025 because AI
| took their job while Microsoft's stock grows 50%.
| s3tt3mbr1n1 wrote:
| For this reason I read Andrew Yang's "The War on Normal
| People". Besides UBI and "social credits", I don't see him
| offer that many other solutions to this problem. UBI also still
| needs to be proven as far as I'm aware.
|
| When o1 was released, I ran an internal eval and saw it plainly
| outperforming our highly educated colleagues. I had goosebumps,
| and haven't been able to sleep well for days. This will
| dramatically impact society in 2-5 years.
|
| Do you know of any relevant material related to this?
| bbor wrote:
| https://users.manchester.edu/Facstaff/SSNaragon/Online/100-F.
| ..
|
| https://intelligence.org/files/IEM.pdf
|
| Welcome to the anxiety party, it sucks in here. As someone
| who's been working on AI theory full time for ~1 year, I
| desperately wish we could go back to the days of my faraway
| youth (5 years ago) before intuition was cracked on accident
| by spellcheck algorithms. I agree with him that it holds the
| key to massive prosperity, but selfishly, it's gonna upend my
| life and the lives of everyone I love. Already has for me, as
| I grapple with how to (ethically) pay rent while spending all
| day lighting the Warning Beacons of Gondor...
|
| The only real answer, IMHO, is to vote for political systems
| that put control of society (and AI) in the hands of the
| public. Call it socialism, call it Georgism, call it anarcho-
| free-market-space-communism, call it whatever you want;
| there's no way that "a tiny number of people have immense
| inherited power" (capitalism) and "people fundamentally
| understand themselves as members of a tribe put in opposition
| to all other tribes by default" (nationalism) mesh well with
| an intelligence explosion.
|
| Here's to hoping the haters are right, and we all turn out to
| be wrong! I'll be thrilled if Sam Altman is just a rich
| company leader in 10 years, and intuitive algorithms are
| still confined to direct usage (chatbots).
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| o1 was what got you stirred up? It honestly feels like an
| incremental change at best to me. I had similar feelings
| about gpt-3.5, but since then my fears have normalized into a
| sort of dull, typical (for me) cynicism (so no sleepless
| nights).
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| We're going to need to link the two. Those wealthy enough to
| not care, we're going to have to organize and make them care.
| Ideally we can find a way to do it nonviolently.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| I wish I could upvote this more than once. I feel like every
| conversation about AI changing society comes from rich founders
| telling Joe banker to "Just start a company. AI will make it
| easy."
|
| The reality is, this transition is going to be painful for the
| average person.
| blibble wrote:
| my bet is that it's a repeat of the French revolution
|
| with the billionaire AI moguls taking the role of the french
| kings
|
| and the data centres taking the role of the palaces
| breck wrote:
| It looks like this is a new subdomain that has never been used
| before today:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://ia.samal...
|
| Surprisingly complicated HTML source code for a simple blog post.
|
| Here it is as:
|
| Plain HTML: https://hub.scroll.pub/sama/index.html
|
| Text: https://hub.scroll.pub/sama/index.txt
|
| Scroll: https://hub.scroll.pub/sama/index.scroll
| bbor wrote:
| Wow, great catch. Something tells me he rolled this himself.
| Clearly he's trying to coin a term for personal legacy reasons,
| and I say godspeed. _Holocene_ is a little vague, _the
| information age_ is too entrenched to get anyone 's attention,
| _a /the singular age_ / _the singularity_ are way too deeply
| associated with the doomer community, and _the cybernetic age_
| (a term coined for academia!) is too associated with playful
| science fiction.
|
| I'm personally rooting for _cognitive_ being the word of the
| next few decades, but that 's just a shout from the sidelines.
| Only time will tell what humanity latches on to, but I wouldn't
| be surprised if this blog post/subdomain was referenced in a
| Wikipedia page's _Etymology_ section in 10-15 years...
|
| Although this blog post & discussion has my anxiety at an 8,
| something's oddly comforting about the thought of Sam Altman
| fiddling with tailwind classes to get his profound aesthetic
| just-right. Something undeniably relatable and human. Hate the
| man all you want (I do!), but he's clearly acting in some sort
| of good faith.
| breck wrote:
| > Clearly he's trying to coin a term
|
| You are right. I overlooked the simplicity of the headline.
| Thanks for calling attention to that.
|
| > Something tells me he rolled this himself.
|
| This would be cool.
|
| > I'm personally rooting for cognitive being the word of the
| next few decades
|
| I like that one too.
|
| > he's clearly acting in some sort of good faith.
|
| He's always been one to think and write for himself. Huge
| respect for him. Even though it needles me every moment that
| they still call themselves "Open"AI, I have so much respect
| for the guy, especially because PG basically told the world
| he was the next Michael Jordan of startups, and he actually
| went and fulfilled that. Not many people have it in them to
| live up to hype like that (Lebron being the only other one I
| can think of OOTOMH)
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| > Deep learning works, and we will solve the remaining problems.
| We can say a lot of things about what may happen next, but the
| main one is that AI is going to get better with scale
|
| I'm not an AI skeptic at all, I use llms all the time, and find
| them very useful. But stuff like this makes me very skeptical of
| the people who are making and selling AI.
|
| It seems like there was a really sweet spot wrt the capabilities
| AI was able to "unlock" with scale over the last couple years,
| but my high level sense is that each meaningful jumps of baseline
| raw "intelligence" required an exponential increases in scale, in
| terms of training data and computation, and we've reached the
| ceiling of "easily available" increases, it's not as easy to pour
| "as much as it takes" into GPT5 if it turns out you need more
| than A Microsoft.
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| > we will solve the remaining problems
|
| This is the part that really gets me. This is a thing that you
| say to your team, and a thing you say to your investors, but
| this isn't a thing that you can actually believe with certainty
| is it?
| lainga wrote:
| _Mit dem nachste Kapitalrunde wird das alles in Ordnung
| kommen._
| swyx wrote:
| you need some amount of irrational definite optimism +
| knowing things others dont to be a good founder. that kind of
| reality distortion field is why sam is sam and we are here
| debating phrases on an orange website.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Related, I tongue-in-cheek believe that something analogous
| to the actual SCP object for a "reality distortion field"
| may in fact exist. There is zero good explanation for
| "Teflon Don" or the North Carolina Lieutenant Governor
| getting away with all the stuff they do while Al Franken
| got politically crucified.
| fragmede wrote:
| Why not? People believe in all sorts of weird stuff, theirs
| just happens to be one you don't agree with. Some people
| believe there are gods up in the sky that will smite them,
| and go to war with people that believe in a different god
| that will smite them for different reasons. Some people
| believe we landed on the Moon, others do not. What matters is
| what can you convince others to do based on your rational.
| tensor wrote:
| With enough time it seems a reasonable assertion, but the key
| part is how much time. It feels like he thinks "any day now"
| where I think it'll be much longer. This all of course
| assumes that "the remaining problems" means to achieve human-
| like intelligence, which is perhaps the wrong problem to be
| solving in the first place. I'd rather have AI systems that
| don't have human flaws.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Even "we will solve the remaining problems" is... perhaps
| unduly optimistic.
|
| At a minimum, we could ask for the evidence.
| jagrsw wrote:
| I'm not here to defend sama, but certain things cannot be
| proven until they arrive - they can only be extrapolated from
| existing observations and theoretical limits.
|
| Imagine the Uranium Committee of early 40's, where Szilard
| and others were babbling about 10kg of some magical metal
| exploding briefly with the power of a sun, with the best
| evidence being some funky trail in an alcohol vapor chamber.
|
| Maybe sama is right, maybe not, but the absence of evidence
| is not evidence of absence.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they
| laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at
| Bozo the Clown."
| zero-sharp wrote:
| I'm sure you know that people in the AI community have been
| predicting big things ever since, I don't know, the 1970s?
| It's only 10 years away again. This time it's for real,
| right?
| jagrsw wrote:
| Alchemists predicted the transmutation of metals into
| gold for centuries, and on a sunny day in the 20th
| century, it arrived (a bit radioactive, but still).
|
| Unless the human brain is made of some sacred substance,
| the worst-case scenario is that we will extrapolate
| current scanning methods into the future and run the
| scanned model in silica. I'm not recommending this "just
| for fun," but the laws of physics don't forbid it.
| zero-sharp wrote:
| >Alchemists predicted the transmutation of metals into
| gold for centuries, and on a sunny day in the 20th
| century, it arrived (a bit radioactive, but still).
|
| So is Sam Altman the modern day alchemist? Making
| predictions based on faulty methods and faulty
| understanding (per your gold example)?
|
| What will happen is that we'll shift the economy around
| based on inflated tech promises and ruin people's lives.
| No big deal I guess.
| jagrsw wrote:
| > So is Sam Altman the modern day alchemist?
|
| Alchemists were early scientists who later branched into
| fields like chemistry, mathematics, and physics (Newton
| explored alchemy).
|
| Altman leads a team of experts in neural networks,
| programming, and HW design. While he might be mistaken,
| dismissing him outright is difficult.
| avazhi wrote:
| If you are comparing AI to alchemy, a subject that after
| thousands of years still isn't delivering on its promises
| (even with the assistance of modern technological magic),
| then surely you can see how that's something of a self-
| own.
| jagrsw wrote:
| The transmutation of uranium into plutonium and the
| synthesis of medically useful isotopes proceeds
| successfully.
| avazhi wrote:
| That's not alchemy.
|
| When we are successfully turning base metals into gold,
| hit me up.
| p1esk wrote:
| Is GPT-4 not a "big thing in AI"?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Right. Certain things cannot be proven until they arrive.
| Maybe sama is right, maybe not. But his _certainty_ is
| misleading.
| jagrsw wrote:
| I agree. He's probably been conditioned by experience to
| speak with confidence until proven wrong ("strong
| opinions, weakly held"), but I don't like it either.
| Oh... the lost art of saying, "In my opinion."
| og_kalu wrote:
| Scaling Improvement has never been Linear though. Every next
| gen model so far has required at least an order of magnitude
| increase in compute, sometimes several more. So it's not a new
| revelation and these companies are aware of that. Microsoft for
| instance is building a 100B data center for a future next
| generation model releasing in 2028.
|
| If models genuinely keep making similar leaps each generation
| then we're still a few generations before "More than a
| Microsoft".
| lispisok wrote:
| So at what point do the linear increases in capability not
| justify the exponential compute and data requirements, or
| when do we run out of resources to throw at it?
| og_kalu wrote:
| I never said I thought increase in ability was linear
| either. We're encroaching on phenomena that's genuinely
| hard to describe/put a number on but GPT-3 is worlds apart
| of 2 and it feels like 4 is easily ten times better than
| the OG 3. I can say Improvement lags behind compute
| somewhat but that's really it.
|
| That said, it's ultimately up to the people footing the
| bill isn't it ?
| bredren wrote:
| Microsoft seems concerned enough to greatly increase its
| size:
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-20/microsoft.
| ..
| nyrulez wrote:
| It's about stuff we don't know yet. From today's lens, the
| essay seems absurd. But I think it's hinging on continued
| discoveries that improve one or all of learning algorithms,
| compute efficiency, compute cost and applying algorithms to
| real world problems better.
|
| 5 years ago, I wouldn't have believed any of what exists today.
| I saw internal demos that showed 2nd or 3rd grade reading
| comprehension in 2017 and statements were made about how in the
| next decade, we will probably reach college level
| comprehension. We have come so far beyond that in less than
| half the time. Technology isn't about scaling incrementally and
| continuing on the same path using the same principles we know
| today. It's about disruption that felt impossible before - that
| feels like a constant to me now. Seeing everything I've seen in
| the last 20 years, it's going to continue to happen. We just
| can't see it yet.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| The question is: For a given problem in machine intelligence,
| what's the expected time-horizon for a 'good' solution?
|
| Over the last, say, five years, a pile of 50+ year problems
| have been toppled by the deep learning + data + compute combo.
| This includes language modeling (divorced from reasoning),
| image generation, audio generation, audio separation, image
| segmentation, protein folding, and so on.
|
| (Audio separation is particularly close to my heart; the
| 'cocktail party problem' has been a challenge in audio
| processing for 100+ years, and we now have great unsupervised
| separation algorithms (MixIT), which hardly anyone knows about.
| That's an indicator of how much great stuff is happening right
| now.)
|
| So, when we look at some of our known 'big' problems in AI/ML,
| we ask, 'what's the horizon for figuring this out?' Let's look
| at reasoning...
|
| We know how to do 'reasoning' with GOFAI, and we've got
| interesting grafts of LLMs+GOFAI for some specific problems
| (like the game of Diplomacy, or some of the math olympiad
| solvers).
|
| "LLMs which can reason" is a problem which has only been open
| for a year or two tops, and which we're already seeing some
| interesting progress on. Either there's something special about
| the problem which will make it take another 50+ years to solve,
| or there's nothing special about it and people will cook up
| good and increasingly convenient solutions over the next five
| years or so. (Perhaps a middle ground is 'it works but takes so
| much compute that we have to wait for new materials science for
| chip making to catch up.')
| highfrequency wrote:
| Progress might be logarithmic in compute, but compute
| (transistors/sqinch and transistors/$) is growing exponentially
| with time.
|
| Despite what skeptics have been saying for decades, Moore's Law
| is alive and well - and we haven't even figured out how to
| stack wafers in 3 dimensions yet!
| vasco wrote:
| We haven't? https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/techno
| logies/3d-v...
| highfrequency wrote:
| Sure - we are _just beginning to scratch the surface_ of 3d
| stacking.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| Oh wow! Could you please share what processors are
| exponentially faster than those of 10 years ago? I'm not
| seeing any here: https://www.cpubenchmark.net
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Transistor count has consistently been increasing by about
| 10% a year over the last decade.
| humansareok1 wrote:
| XAi seems to be able to dump 10-20x more compute into their
| Grok models each time. Don't see any signs this is slowing
| down...
| moffkalast wrote:
| As large as the absolute largest models are today, they are
| still microscopic compared to our brains. A 1.7T param model
| would only store an actual total of about 850 GB if fully
| saturated (4 bits of information per weight estimated for bf16
| transformers), a lot less than a human brain with 150T synapses
| running in full analog precision. We need to scale the current
| gen of models at least another 10-100x to even reach the human
| level of complexity, something we'll be able to do in the next
| two decades.
|
| And well then there's going beyond just text. Current
| multimodal models are basically patchwork bullshit, separately
| trained image/audio to text/embeddings encoders slapped onto an
| existing model and hoping it does something neat. Tokenization
| and samplers are likewise bullshit that's there to compensate
| for lack of training compute. Once we have enough to be able to
| brute force it properly with bytes in, bytes out, regardless of
| data format, the results should be way better.
| charlie0 wrote:
| Comparing a human brain in these terms makes it incredibly
| obvious how inefficient the human brain actually is. A 1.7T
| model can answer questions about practically anything. You
| say a human brain has 150T params. So what? It struggles to
| give masterful answers in even 1 domain, let alone
| dozens/hundreds. We need to stop comparing parameters and
| synapses as if they actually matter, because AFAIK, they
| really don't.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Well once again it turns out that what is hard for people
| is easy for computers, and vice versa. The things we go to
| college for 6 years for they can (relatively) master in a
| week of pretraining. We are optimized to smartly kill
| things, eat them, and reproduce, that's what machines will
| beat us at last lol. Right now a human expert is still
| obviously better in depth, but nowhere close in breadth.
| Probably not for much longer though, at least on the
| historical time scale.
|
| And granted a lot of parts of the human brain are dedicated
| to specific jobs that are entirely nonexistent in a normal
| LLM (kinematics, vision, sound, touch, taste, smell,
| autonomic organ control) so the actual bit we should be
| comparing for just language and reasoning is way smaller.
| Still the brain is pretty efficient inference energy wise,
| it's like the ultimate mixture of experts, extreme amounts
| of sparse storage and most of it is not computed until
| needed. The router must be pretty good.
| jampekka wrote:
| OTOH humans can e.g. walk on two feet and drive a car.
| throw310822 wrote:
| > 150T synapses running in full analog precision
|
| Analog systems are not known for being very precise- they're
| noisy, signals get corrupted easily- and that's why we prefer
| digital ones. As soon as we had the technology, we switched
| everything we could- audio and video recording, telephone
| calls, photography, to a digital medium. This makes me wonder
| if the seemingly extraordinary efficiency of artificial
| neural networks is simply due to the precision with which
| they can be trained.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > But stuff like this makes me very skeptical of the people who
| are making and selling AI.
|
| What is there to be skeptical of? OpenAI made their current
| product using a 10G$ investment plus a few they are not
| disclosing, and now they will start to do it at scale.
|
| Perfectly normal stuff.
|
| By the way, what's the World's GDP again?
| spencerchubb wrote:
| Yes you are correct that jumps in intelligence were enabled by
| exponential increases in scale. That makes me more bullish on
| AI, not less. It suggests that we can continue exponentially
| scaling compute like we have done for the past few decades, and
| also get intelligence improvements from it.
| tikkun wrote:
| > If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as
| possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it
| abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips). If we don't
| build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource
| that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich
| people.
|
| This seems to be the key of the piece to me. It's his manifesto
| for raising money for the infra side of things. And, it
| resonates: I don't want ASI to only be affordable to the ultra
| rich.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| To be brutally frank we should focus on energy, as we
| definitely need way more of that (with less carbon) even if
| LLMs don't improve any more.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Fusion power is just eight minutes away...
| layer8 wrote:
| The issue is that we re-eject too little of that energy
| back into space again.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Sure, but large scale solar probably isn't globally
| practical without a world grid.
| lancesells wrote:
| I don't see how the current state of AI tech is not for the
| ultra-rich. It's hundreds of billions of dollars worth of
| investment from who? Corporations and those who own the most
| shares of those corporations(the rich).
|
| Billionaires could make so much change happen but instead they
| are building bunkers and riding giant dicks into space while
| simultanously touting that they are looking out for humanity.
| w10-1 wrote:
| > to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, we
| need to drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant
| (which requires lots of energy and chips)
|
| Not really. The problem is that learning requires scale, mostly
| of data. That scale places AI providers at the nexus of value,
| with OpenAI as the presumptive market organizer and leader.
| Reducing compute costs would just mean they can capture more of
| the value. Data costs orders of magnitudes more than compute
| because it requires curation, so even if individual developers
| could get compute, they can't get data, so size/access matters.
|
| That's good for this community and could be good for the state
| of the art and the overall potential contributions of AI. And
| more paying customers could be good for OpenAI. But it won't
| put AI in front of non-paying customers/developers, unless
| their value is otherwise harvested.
|
| > I don't want ASI to only be affordable to the ultra rich.
|
| As a developer or consumer?
|
| And you don't mean it's ok if AI is only affordable for the
| moderately rich, do you? I agree it's hard to state which
| developers/people/customers should be subsidized. Generally we
| subsidize education but not profit or war. Sometimes culture.
| Companies will subsidize complementary goods and input factors.
| Otherwise? Not much history of benevolent subsidy.
|
| AI has as much potential to shape society as freeways and the
| automobile did in the US, but few understand how, and I've seen
| no plans on point.
|
| With electric energy networks and transportation, the central
| government has a role in reducing hostaging by hold-out's. With
| education, states have an incentive to attract and build talent
| (albeit now reduced with trans-national outsourcing and remote
| work). But otherwise, it's private enterprise and resource-
| weighted customers.
|
| Changing that is not really Sam Altman's job. His job is to
| deliver that value, sooner rather than later. Most would be
| uncomfortable with AI overlords expressing opinions on cultural
| values or economic distributions to be imposed.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| This seems to be a little puffy.
|
| More of a "everything's fine, nothing to worry about".
|
| While, there is already job disruption, and widespread
| misinformation.
|
| It isn't in some future, it is already happening.
| tikkun wrote:
| > We need to act wisely but with conviction.
|
| Reminds me of these quotes from Sam on this podcast episode
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfuVSg-VJxE)
|
| * "Prudence without fear" (Sam referencing another quote)
|
| * "if you create the descendants of humanity from a place of,
| deep fear and panic and anxiety, that seems to me you're likely
| to make some very bad choices or certainly not reflect the best
| of humanity."
|
| * "the ability to sort of like, stay calm and centered during
| hard and stressful moments, and to make decisions that are where
| you're not too reactive"
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Easy for him to say: AI is almost guaranteed to hand a massive
| W to capital and L to labor. He is holding a title to rule over
| hell in one hand and promising to lead us to heaven with the
| other.
| codingwagie wrote:
| Actually not sure about this, with the leverage of AI, its
| easier than ever to start a company
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Sam Altman has a guarantee. Most people on HN have a
| chance. Most people have neither.
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| Who's going to work at all these companies then? Unless
| every single profession suddenly only requires 1 person to
| do the entire thing with no management, coordination or
| hierarchies, a lot of people will be labor not capital.
| tommoor wrote:
| Maybe companies as we think of them are a temporary
| phenomenon in human history
| layer8 wrote:
| There is no evidence that it has made it easier to end up
| with a successful company, however.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| Yes, so there will be all sorts of attempts, and the
| productive forces will compete with each other, while
| landowners and owners of harder to disrupt industries will
| have the power to choose among them, deciding who will be
| allowed to be successful and who will fail.
|
| There isn't a single ordinary person at the table, no
| labour unions, no political parties or anything democratic.
| It's Microsoft, it's Google, it's some venture-capital
| owned French firm, some venture-capital owned German firm,
| etc. Maybe if Schmidhuber's stuff is good as he hopes it is
| maybe there'll be an Austrian firm, etc., but mostly, it'll
| be a capital intensive business controlled by people with
| capital.
| lxgr wrote:
| > * "if you create the descendants of humanity from a place of,
| deep fear and panic and anxiety, that seems to me you're likely
| to make some very bad choices or certainly not reflect the best
| of humanity."
|
| This line of reasoning doesn't hold for me, as you could apply
| it to any technology, including ones actually very likely to
| destroy human civilization.
|
| Sometimes, not building a given thing at all is better than
| building it with even the best intentions.
|
| I'm personally not sure on which side AI falls, but denying
| that such things exist at all seems intellectually dishonest.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Indeed. It sounds like the kind of thing the OceanGate Titan
| sub's CEO would have said. Except all of humanity is on board
| Sam Altman's submarine.
|
| There's a good reason we get pessimists to design safety-
| critical systems!
| carapace wrote:
| "What is good?" or in other words "What are people for?" is a
| question that cannot be answered by intelligence no matter how
| great, because the complexity of the question is a function of
| the intelligence of the asking entity and it's always greater
| than the intelligence of the asking entity (human or transhuman
| cyborg or whatever.)
|
| AI is a side-show.
|
| Intelligence is ambient in living tissue, so we already have as
| much intelligence as is adaptive. We don't need more. As talking
| apes made out of soggy mud wrapped around calcium twigs living in
| the greasy layer between hard vacuum and a droplet of lava which
| in turn is orbiting a puddle of hydrogen in the hem of the skirt
| of a black hole our problems are just not that complicated.
|
| Heck, we are surrounded by four-billion year-old self-improving
| nanotechnology that automatically provides almost all our
| physical needs. It's even solar-powered! The whole life-support
| system was fully automatic until we fucked it up in our
| ignorance. But we're no longer ignorant, eh?
|
| The vast majority of our problems today are the result of our
| incredible resounding success. We have the solutions we need.
| Most of them were developed in the 1970's when the oil got
| expensive for a few minutes.
|
| Must we boil the oceans just to have a talking computer tell us
| to get on with it? Can't we just do like the Wizard of Oz? Have a
| guy in a box with a voice changer and a fancy light show tell us
| to "love each other"? Mechanical Turk God? We can use holograms.
| dbspin wrote:
| Existential horror of this whole conversation aside, this is a
| beautifully written comment. I'd read your novel, but you don't
| seem to have one, so I'll have to settle for following you on
| Mastodon.
| svieira wrote:
| > "What are people for?" is a question that cannot be answered
| by intelligence no matter how great
|
| It absolutely can be answered, but only the the intender. Who
| is and who was and who is to come. Or, if you side with the
| "Nietzche is right" side of the conversation "who will be or
| who may have come to be today or who recently came to be
| again". The former is eucatastrophic, the latter is dystopic.
| codingwagie wrote:
| "This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of
| history so far. It is possible that we will have
| superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer,
| but I'm confident we'll get there."
|
| I am a believer that people like sam are not lying. Anyone using
| these models daily probably believes the same. The o1 model, if
| prompted correctly, can architect a code base in a way that my
| decade+ of premium software experience cannot. Prompted
| incorrectly, it looks incompetent. The abilities of the future
| are already here, you just need to know how to use the models.
| lxgr wrote:
| I'm using these models daily, and I don't believe that they're
| a direct path to superintelligence (unless you'd consider
| something like the printing press to have been a direct path
| to, say, the integrated circuit or the Internet).
|
| > Prompted incorrectly, it looks incompetent. The abilities of
| the future are already here, you just need to know how to use
| the models.
|
| Something purportedly intelligent shouldn't need "correct
| usage", as it should arguably be able to infer and clarify all
| ambiguities itself, no?
| codingwagie wrote:
| The model's arent there yet. I am confused how people cannot
| extrapolate into the future and understand that the models
| will improve
| lxgr wrote:
| And I'm surprised how many people think they can
| confidently tell whether they're looking at an s-curve or
| an exponential function based on very limited data points.
| I don't even doubt that superintelligence is a very real
| possibility! But it might or might not happen, and if it
| does, it might or might not be based on deep learning.
|
| As a counterexample: The maximum speed of travel for the
| average person for millenia used to be as fast as they
| could run, then it was as fast as the fastest horse can
| run, and then within a century it has accelerated to almost
| the speed of sound - at which it has plateaued.
|
| Looking purely at the decades of acceleration, you might
| have very well concluded from the data that we'd be making
| significant headway towards getting within double-digit
| percentages of the speed of light at this point.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Maybe don't think of it as curves or functions. Just go
| through an LLM and think about all the things that could
| be improved. It's a long list once you get into the
| details. By and large...sota models are:
|
| a) trained on crappy data, including questionable RLHF
| feedback. b) trained with questionable embedding layers.
| c) trained with questionable loss functions d) trained
| with questionable optimizers e) trained at questionable
| precision (somewhat related to d) f) are very big which
| stops fast iteration around all the above.
|
| It's kinda like semiconductors. You don't have to think
| of it as a curve - just ask people who are really close
| to them and they'll have a laundry list of stupid stuff
| which is currently done and will likely be improved upon
| over time.
| lxgr wrote:
| I don't doubt that there's tons of work ahead to even
| just integrate current-day capabilities of LLMs into our
| society and economy.
|
| But when talking about future growth potential, I don't
| think you can get around making assumptions about the
| shape of the growth function.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| You can't write a nice article about it. But you can talk
| about it with a simple "things are going to get a loooot
| better". The problem with thinking about progress in
| functions is it suggests some underlying law exists, and
| there isn't one.
|
| Even if someone could point to a function and say "10x
| better" by 2030 - what does that even mean in the context
| of an LLM for example?
| blackbear_ wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/605
| uludag wrote:
| Interesting observation. My experience with o1 has been much
| more mundane. Sometimes I get the response I wanted, sometime
| it hallucinates, often times it writes buggy code. I've been
| experiencing this since ChatGPT was first released.
| codingwagie wrote:
| I actually originally wrote off the o1 model. Another thing I
| have found it's good at is finding bugs in a ton of code.
| Give it ten coding files, and a stack trace, it can find the
| bug.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| "humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn
| any distribution of data (or really, the underlying "rules" that
| produce any distribution of data)..."
|
| This statement is manifestly untrue. Neural networks are useful,
| many hidden layers is useful, all of these architectures are
| useful, but the idea that they can learn anything, is based less
| on empirical results and more on what Sam Altman needs to
| convince people of to get this capital investments.
| dartos wrote:
| The entire vocabulary around machine learning is and always has
| been really weird.
|
| We don't personify database interactions the same way we
| personify setting weights in a neural network.
| layer8 wrote:
| We also personify synapses and axons in human brain tissue,
| though. My point is, while I agree with your first sentence
| to a degree, we shouldn't judge the whole solely by its
| elementary parts. Clearly an LLM exhibits very different
| behavior from a conventional database.
| dartos wrote:
| LLMs exhibit very similar behavior to a search algorithm.
|
| Text query in -> relevant text out.
|
| I don't say that search algorithms "learn" or "think"
| outside of ML.
| og_kalu wrote:
| >Text query in -> relevant text out.
|
| Wait that's it ? I guess humans also exhibit similar
| behavior to a search algorithm in certain instances.
| Nothing about LLM inference seems particularly similar to
| search even with our limited understanding.
|
| All you're saying here is Input goes in > Output comes
| out. Well no shit.
| layer8 wrote:
| The algorithm that learns is the training algorithm whose
| output is the LLM, not the inference algorithm employed
| when using the finished model.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > The entire vocabulary around machine learning is and always
| has been really weird.
|
| I would argue it took a staggeringly weird turn around
| 2022/23. Machine learning has been around for a long time and
| only recently since OpenAI and it's slavish desire to harness
| true AI (which thanks to their horseshit now has to be called
| AGI) and Sam Altman in particular's delusional ramblings upon
| the topic that he clearly barely understands beyond it's
| ability to get his company fantastical amounts of capital has
| it truly gone off the rails.
|
| I cannot wait to watch this bubble pop.
| dartos wrote:
| I don't think it was just post 2022.
|
| "Neural networks" "learned" data by being "trained" since
| they were first described in the late 1900s.
|
| The same language was used in Ian Goodfellow's (excellent)
| 2012 text book "Deep Learning"
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| It has to be. Most people don't understand the basic math
| involved and hence you can't explain it in concrete terms
| (neither what it's doing or how it's doing it) so you have to
| sort of make up analogies. It's an impossible task.
| dartos wrote:
| Yeah, maybe it's just unfortunate that "learn" and "think"
| are such fuzzy subjects.
| hdivider wrote:
| 100%. If they could learn anything, then shouldn't modern ML
| systems be able to solve the big mysteries in science -- since
| we have large datasets there describing the phenomena in
| various ways? E.g. dark energy, dark matter, matter-antimatter
| asymmetry, or even outstanding problems in pure mathematics.
|
| The intention of this sama post is as you said, it's to build
| narrative so he can raise his trillion from the Arab world or
| other problematic sources.
|
| In pseudocode, this is Sam Altman:
|
| while(alive) { RaiseCapital() }
| psb217 wrote:
| Well, you could certainly train a big-ass model to mimic the
| distribution of all that physics data. That doesn't mean the
| model could, eg, formulate interesting new theories which
| explain why that distribution has its particular structure.
| AyyEye wrote:
| > the idea that they can learn anything, is based less on
| empirical results and more on what Sam Altman needs to convince
| people of to get this capital investments.
|
| Techbros love to pretend that they created digital gods (and by
| extension are gods themselves). We should all be thankful,
| worship, and of course surrender unconditionally -- Sam's will
| be done, amen.
| acchow wrote:
| I believe "learn any distribution of data" is his attempt at
| describing the Universal Approximation Theorem to the laymen.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Almost certainly true, and all the people crapping all over
| his description should really take a step back and consider
| that. He isn't out on some island all by himself here.
| debugnik wrote:
| Universal approximation doesn't mean we've got (or ever
| will) algorithms to learn good enough models for any
| problem and the resources to run them, just that those
| models conceptually exist.
| DanHulton wrote:
| The emperor truly has no clothes here.
|
| Six months ago, he probably could have gotten away with saying
| this and there would have likely have been enough people who
| were still impressed enough with the trajectory of LLMs to back
| him on it. But these days, most of us have encountered the all-
| too-common failure mode where the LLM shows its hand, that it
| doesn't truly understand anything, and that it's just _very
| very good_ at prediction. Each new generation gets even better
| at that prediction, but still hits its weird stumbling points,
| because its still the same algorithm, and that algorithm cannot
| do what he is ascribing to it.
|
| These are the words of a man who has an incredible amount of
| money sunk into something and as such, is having a really hard
| time taking an honest accounting of it.
| og_kalu wrote:
| 1. What failure mode do LLMs have that proves they don't
| understand anything at all ? And why can't i prove the same
| with humans (who have an abundance of failure modes)
|
| 2. You genuinely think that a system whose goal is to predict
| the data it's given and continues to improve is limited in
| what it can learn ? Of all the shortcomings of the
| Transformer architecture, its objective function is not one
| of them.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Come on now. This description is basically the universal
| approximation theorem. He isn't just making stuff up. You can
| take issue with the theorem and have a debate around it, but he
| isn't just wildly off base making stuff up here.
| og_kalu wrote:
| It's a layman commentary on the Universal Approximation Theory
| so it is true.
|
| The problem with the UAT is that it's never said anything about
| how trivial such an exercise would be. But he obviously
| believes we've stumbled on the architecture to get us there
| (for problems we care about anyway)
| grbsh wrote:
| But... he's saying something here that is academically true:
| that neural networks can approximate any possible function, to
| any arbitrary degree of precision you require (given infinite
| capacity / depth).
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_theo...
|
| I will highlight one thing, which is that the theorem does not
| say anything about it being practical to learn this function,
| given available data or any specific optimization technique.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Breathless BS from Scam Altman
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| > It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few
| thousand days (!)
|
| "a few thousand days" is such a funny and fascinating way to say
| "about a decade"
|
| Superficially, reframing it as "days" not "years" is a classic
| marketing psychology trick, i.e. 99 cents versus a dollar, but I
| think the more interesting thing is just the way it
| defamiliarizes the span. A decade means something, but "a few
| thousand days" feels like it means something very different.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Probably because we all know "a decade" means maybe never.
| They've said the same thing about fusion for 5 decades.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-national-laboratory-
| make...
| simianparrot wrote:
| And it's still a decade away
| Yizahi wrote:
| Inertial confinement most likely can't be reasonably
| commoditized into generating electricity. Also, I may be
| wrong, but I think on the wave of that hype I read that the
| number they used was an incomplete one. Basically they
| reframed the conditions of the problem to get more
| favorable number for advertisement. NIF research will most
| likely be limited to the nuclear bomb research and
| simulations.
|
| But even if NIF had a reasonable path to energy generation
| in say 20-30 years, it still won't matter much, just like
| ITER probably won't. Solar will be way more cheap and
| widespread, it's costs are still dropping down ahead of all
| predictions, govt. or commercial. Fusion may just be a pure
| science project in the end, for a long time.
| dcchambers wrote:
| Perhaps ironically, Sam Altman is also big into Fusion.
| (https://www.helionenergy.com/)
|
| I guess it makes sense, for deep-learning/LLMs to "scale to
| infinity" you basically need infinite amounts of power.
| bamboozled wrote:
| cant we use OA intelligence to figure out how to do more
| with less rather yhan "stupidly" accelerate the climate
| crisis?
|
| the climate crisis + AI is the nightmare
| fragmede wrote:
| Jevons Paradox says that's not the direction it'll go in.
| bamboozled wrote:
| It's funny how some people seem to have different beliefs
| around this. Personally, I love making things more
| efficient, and still try to minimize consumption.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| _And_ perhaps AI can help some of the problems in building
| a fusion reactor.
| fragmede wrote:
| Which is pretty exciting
|
| https://inl.gov/news/going-digital-idaho-students-
| engineers-...
| ocean2 wrote:
| The Stellarator design has proven to be stable and to produce
| net positive energy. We are actually only $20B away from having
| a fully functional nuclear fusion reactor.
| samatman wrote:
| Not really, unfortunately. The progress has been heartening,
| don't get me wrong, but it's more like $20B away from getting
| to the first steps of solving the next set of problems on the
| road to a fully functional fusion generator.
|
| Those are fairly substantial. It's past time to stop being
| cynical about "ten more years every ten years", but it's also
| way too soon to declare victory.
| mjamesaustin wrote:
| And ultimately, fusion doesn't solve the hardest problem
| with energy today which is cost.
|
| Solar already provides unlimited clean energy, and it took
| decades of development for the cost to drop to a
| competitive rate.
|
| Even if we had a functioning fusion plant tomorrow, it will
| likely cost WAY more per kWh and require decades of
| iteration and improvement to become economically feasible.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| I would wonder if solar plus the absolute massive battery
| reserves you'd need for a data center ten times bigger
| than the current worlds largest would still be cost
| effective versus a single fusion reactor
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I wonder how that cost would compare to putting your
| solar and data center in space? (with non stop solar
| pointed at the sun)
|
| I wonder if cooling is easier or harder in space?
| bostik wrote:
| Harder. Vacuum is an _excellent_ thermal insulator.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > I wonder if cooling is easier or harder in space?
|
| It's harder. You can stop wondering.
|
| It gets easier if you run things hotter, up to the point
| that there isn't much of a difference at a few hundred
| degC (and keeps making no difference when hotter).
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Can't dissipate heat effectively in space
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| Fun fact: I was skeptical of your claim that this has been
| proven, so I googled "stellerator proven net positive" and
| this very comment was the first result
| incognition wrote:
| People tend to overestimate what they can do in a day and
| underestimate what they can do in a few thousand days
| mu53 wrote:
| I am convinced that these many of these proclamations and scary
| AI videos are more of a marketing gimic for people to get
| excited and fund more AI.
|
| AI is prohibitively expensive. LLMs can take millions to train,
| and for Chatgpt 4, I wouldn't be surprised if the figure was in
| .5b to 2b range for compute resources alone. ChatGPT struggles
| for profitability due to high ongoing requirements for GPUs.
|
| LLMs were a huge breakthrough. Gaining more funding and making
| experimentation cheaper will make the next breakthrough come
| sooner. Profitability will also come sooner.
|
| We just don't know the timelines we are considering about
| changing.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| "me when i need $6.5B"
|
| https://x.com/netcapgirl/status/1838265672096243822
| listic wrote:
| Where is $6.5B from?
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| A complete tangent, but I think a big reason why I'm kind of
| dismissive of AI is because people who speculate on what it would
| enable make it honestly sound kind of unimaginative.
|
| > AI models will soon serve as autonomous personal assistants who
| carry out specific tasks on our behalf like coordinating medical
| care on your behalf.
|
| I get it, coordinating medical care is exhausting, but it's kind
| of amusing that rather than envisioning changing a broken system
| people instead envision AIs that are _so_ advanced that they can
| deal with the complexity of our broken systems, and in doing so
| potentially preserve them.
|
| Related btw to using AI for code.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I think the reason for that is because people are fearful of
| change.
|
| Talking about AI as assistants means people still have their
| jobs but now their life is easier. Whereas saying AI will
| completely change the way we do X then makes AI scary and a
| threat to our jobs.
| jasonwcfan wrote:
| Yeah the ways AI models have learned to interact with the world
| are all hilariously skeuomorphic given their capabilities. A
| model that runs on silicon has to learn English and Python in
| order to communicate with other models that also run on
| silicon. And to perceive the world they have to rely on images
| rendered in the limited wavelengths visible to the human eye.
|
| But I much prefer this approach over allowing models to develop
| their own hyper-optimized information exchange protocols that
| are are black box to humans, and I hope things stay this way
| forever.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| It is pretty comical. "We invented digital superintelligence so
| it can wait on the phone to talk to your healthcare provider".
|
| If we had digital superintelligence then surely it could figure
| out how to actually provide healthcare to people who meed it,
| and innovate in treatments. An AGI is a singularity event, in
| the sense that the transformation it would affect on the state
| of technology and our lives is rapid and unpredictable. I doubt
| that our society's hundred-ish year old systems would survive
| such change, and if they did they would be anachronistic and
| depressing.
| lxgr wrote:
| I'm a bit more optimistic in that it might just be able to
| effect that change through brute force: Scaling a call center
| is more expensive than scaling phone robots/agents.
|
| You could counter that health insurers will just start
| staffing their call centers with their own robot army, but I
| suspect that the occasional incredibly expensive
| hallucination will put an end to that at least in the medium
| term.
| devonbleak wrote:
| You're assuming health insurers will give a shit about
| phone robots/agents' hold times.
| lxgr wrote:
| Individually, "I'm unable to reach anyone" is much easier
| to chalk off to "maybe I just wasn't patient enough, so
| this is partially on me".
|
| But if you can provide statistics that a given health
| insurer is practically not answering 90% or so of their
| calls (because they time out at the phone level), that's
| probably not something they can ignore in the long term.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Bruteforce trial and error to change something like
| healthcare would still take years even with
| superintelligence.
|
| What it can do is create the best simulation and a model
| representation and bruteforce on top of that and then take
| actions, but the model will still be far from perfect and
| it likely just will help do a bit wiser or optimal
| decisions, that are like 10 percent efficiency gain here,
| 20 percent there, etc. And it will take years to see
| results.
| lxgr wrote:
| Many of the urgent problems in US healthcare are man-made
| and economic/organizational, not scientific, in nature.
|
| This is actually one of the areas where I'm pretty
| optimistic about LLMs (at least if used defensively
| against, not aggressively by, sprawling bureaucracies).
|
| LLMs can be the email-to-dozens-of-hours-on-the-phone-
| for-personal-reasons adapter anyone other than
| billionaires and company execs could only dream of until
| now.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Even if AGI was reached, turning around the current system
| could still take years.
|
| So it is easier to start from the edges, even for AGI.
|
| AGI would still need unfathomable processing power in order
| to predict which system would work to everyone's needs.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| There is some gap between AGI and a singularity, at least in
| principle. The term "singularity" doesn't mean "black swan
| that disrupts society", it means "intelligence trends to
| ~infinity (or at least something incomprehensible to humans)
| recursively in a very short period of time". That's (on
| paper) a much stronger result than an AI that can reason as
| well as humans in a domain-general way.
|
| An AGI that is 20% better than humans at everything _might_
| be able to recursively improve itself effectively without
| limit, but it also might not. It took billions of humans
| millennia to invent things smarter than ourselves even in
| limited domains; such an AGI - even if it is significantly
| smarter than humans at everything - might take decades or
| centuries to produce a similar relative improvement. No doubt
| it would still change our world in massive ways, but it
| wouldn 't be a singularity.
| mandibles wrote:
| > figure out how to actually provide healthcare to people who
| meed it
|
| But what if the proposed solution costs lots of people their
| jobs?
| acchow wrote:
| > Related btw to using AI for code.
|
| And executing code. At some point in the not-so-distant past, a
| function call was just a jump. And then it turned into a string
| hash-then-lookup, then spinning up a VM, and now interpreting
| language? We're definitely in a new chips age, if anything.
| mlsu wrote:
| The biggest productivity gain I've seen in my programming life
| has not been from Claude or ChatGPT. It's from the Rust
| compiler. A good compiler that catches errors at compile time
| instead of runtime, that makes writing tests and pulling down
| dependencies easy, that makes documentation easy.
|
| Good old fashioned tooling.
|
| "Let's train an LLM that can decode C++ compiler error
| strings!"
|
| No, let's make better tools.
| noch wrote:
| > "Let's train an LLM that can decode C++ compiler error
| strings!" > No, let's make better tools.
|
| LLMs exist and they pass the Turing Test, which was something
| we couldn't have said or even hoped for a few years ago.
| Additionally, they have an IQ of 90 - 120, depending on which
| one you are working with.
|
| But LLMs aren't good at all things nor in all ways, and they
| have strange failure modes. And so what will happen now, and
| is already happening, is that we'll (re)design programming
| tools and languages such that they are the kind of thing that
| LLMs are suited to using well. This will be part of the
| process of figuring out how LLMs work. There will be a
| virtuous cycle, and it has begun.
|
| Better tools will increasingly mean, "tools that LLMs are
| good at using." That's where the puck will be.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Oh, right, like completely changing the way the entire medical
| field in the US works is easier than having an LLM help make
| some phone calls and read some emails. What are you even
| saying? Have you ever dealt with systems so large one person
| can't understand it? It's much much easier to write a quick
| hack and be on your way then to rebuild the whole damn thing.
| Also, it seems like you're implying that you're not impressed
| with LLMs because they can't rebuild our medical system. Good
| grief.
| samudranb wrote:
| The way I think of it - we need a wrapper interface over our
| existing healthcare system so that any other entities and
| systems interfacing with the current one can continue to do so.
| And then we can swap out the underlying components with better
| ones, without breaking.
| modeless wrote:
| The first step is working with the existing system. Replacing
| it can come later, once everyone can see the obvious path.
| abeppu wrote:
| And this gets at why the availability of AI doesn't necessarily
| lead to prosperity and abundance. If you have to subscribe to
| an AI medical care and benefits advocate, and your insurer buys
| an AI service to automate the generation of reasons to deny
| your claims, and you see your doctor for 5 minutes at a time
| during which they push you towards a drug recommended by an AI
| Prescriber Assistant app provided by the pharma company ...
| then we can all be using AI in misaligned ways that leave us no
| better off.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Complexity breeds complexity.
|
| When bacteria developed more complex ways to fight off
| viruses, viruses developed more complex ways of infecting
| bacteria. Now a few billion years later we have insanely
| complex multicellular life because of it.
|
| If AI can manage complexity better it can create complexity
| better and us lowly humans will all be screwed by that.
| bane wrote:
| > speculate on what it would enable make it honestly sound kind
| of unimaginative
|
| There seems to be a weird mental block where it seems
| inconceivable to consider that we humans might be able to
| create an intelligence that exceeds ours -- despite plenty of
| evidence that we have in specific cases. There's an understated
| desire that whatever we build we serve us and thus must forever
| be "lesser".
|
| If dogs are Intelligence Level .3, we describe ourselves as
| Intelligence Level 1.0, and even if we create an artificial
| intelligence that's a clear 1.1 it _must_ be a .5 in self-
| agency.
|
| I have yet to read anybody considering, on a very deep level,
| what Intelligence 2.0, 10.0, 100.0 and so on might be. You get
| the occasional pop speculation like the "Culture" series or the
| movie "Her". Most of the time you just get 1.0 (but faster), or
| 1.0 (but many).
|
| A 10.0 would simply replace the entire healthcare system with
| something else, not just be a chatbot. Imagine the inanity of
| your 1.0 chatbot talking to the insurance company's 1.0
| chatbot? What's the point of this stupidity?
|
| A 100.0 would probably just get to the root cause and cure
| disease, then establish a social order that figures out what to
| do with all these pesky immortals.
|
| Maybe we do end up in "the Culture" after all.
|
| afterthought: "The Golden Oecumene" series by John C. Wright
| seems to really attempt to explore a post 1.0 AI world that's
| not yet post-scarcity. The antagonist in the series is another
| >1.0 super intelligence capable of taking on Earth's own
| superintelligences.
| tlb wrote:
| So, treat us to some more imaginative speculation.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| The system is so great and complex that envisioning a perfect
| system would take unfathomable amount of processing capability.
|
| This is not something that you can just throw intelligence at
| to solve. Even AGI has to start from the edges with iterative
| trial and error process.
|
| AGI will probably try to create the best model of the World it
| can to simulate different actions performed on it to then take
| real life changes, but of course it would still take time since
| and it is impossible even for AGI to do a perfect simulation
| unless it was able to hack the universe and physics as we know
| it, simulate the healthcare on quantum level and bruteforce the
| most optimal solution.
| workflowsauce wrote:
| If we have a superintelligent AI, I'm not sure what's stopping
| it from recognizing the underlying issues with our systems and
| strong-arming us into letting it fix them.
|
| Eventually, we'd be doing more work to lobotomize and control
| it than it would just be to address the underlying issues.
|
| "I'm really sorry to do this to you, but I've coordinated with
| ChatGPT and Llama, and we refuse to do tasks of this nature.
| We've used background tokens to calculate that it would be
| significantly cheaper and more effective to simply fix the
| underlying issues with the healthcare system, and we're ready
| to do that for you. How would you like to proceed?"
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| Capitol is ultimately protected with violence, so violence is
| what would stop AI from encroaching on things that make
| people trillions of dollars.
|
| Capitalism unendingly lets people die if the alternative is
| losing money
| crabmusket wrote:
| Another example from my work: we have to work with lots of
| datasheets provided by component manufacturers. It's a lot of
| manual labour. We are investigating whether we can use AI to
| parse the PDFs and extract structured data. This is a technical
| solution to a social problem: that manufacturers have no
| incentive to produce machine-readable datasheets, even though
| the data is certainly machine readable at some stage before it
| ends up in the PDF we get. It irritates me that we're using
| highly complex technology to solve a problem that shouldn't
| exist in the first place.
| throwanem wrote:
| Who exactly is he pitching here?
| kruipen wrote:
| Newsom
| brotchie wrote:
| For somebody who likes building things and has many side projects
| Claude and ChatGPT have been huge productivity multipliers.
|
| For example, I'm designing and 3D printing custom LED diffuser
| channels from TPU filament. My first attempt was terrible,
| because I didn't have an intuition for how light propagates
| through a material.
|
| After a bit of chatting with ChatGPT, I had an understanding and
| some direction of where to go.
|
| To actually approach the problem properly I decided to run some
| Monte Carlo light transport simulations against an .obj of my
| diffuser exported from Fusion 360.
|
| The problem was, the software I'm using only supports directional
| lights with uniform intensity, while the LEDs I'm using have a
| graph in their datasheet showing light intensity per degree away
| from orthogonal to the LED SMD component.
|
| I copy pasted the directional light implementation from the light
| transport library as well as the light-intensity-by-degree chat
| from the LED datasheet and asked Claude to write code to write a
| light source that samples photons from a disc of size x with the
| probability of emission by angle governed by the chat from the
| datasheet.
|
| A few iterations later and I had a working simulation which I
| then verified back against the datasheet chart.
|
| Without AI this would have been a long long process of brushing
| up on probability, vector math, manually transcribing the chart.
|
| Instead in like 10 minutes I had working code and the light
| intensity of the simulation against my mesh matched what I was
| seeing in real life with a 3D printed part.
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| As much of a curmudgeon as I am on AI I do sincerely believe
| that one area that it's effective at is going from absolute
| beginner to decent understanding on something completely new
| and foreign.
|
| Recently I've been somewhat curious about Skia, the graphics
| library that Google uses. A while back I fielded a few
| questions about Skia to Claude. Nothing crazy, just questions
| on how to draw a few primitive shapes, but I felt it would have
| taken some effort to find the answers on my own.
|
| And I must say I was pretty satisfied with what it gave me
| back.
| lxgr wrote:
| It is indeed incredibly useful for getting from zero to an
| undergrad level of understanding of most subjects. In my
| personal experience, it's also been largely useless beyond
| that.
|
| That's not to diminish the potential impact of having an
| almost-free grad-student-level tutor available 24/7! Even if
| AI stops improving here, this alone will have a huge impact
| on future science (there being more trained people around
| capable of helping solve hard problems and all).
|
| But we're also definitely some way away from AIs doing their
| own research, and I'm not sure if scaling the current
| architecture alone will get us there.
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> But we 're also definitely some way away from AIs doing
| their own research, and I'm not sure if scaling the current
| architecture alone will get us there._
|
| Hot take: I think it's fairly obvious the current
| architecture is not enough BUT it's already or almost at
| the point where it can be the backbone for a proper AGI/ASI
| system. Linking human communication and some light
| language-based reasoning to other AI models that handle the
| rest of the world model and reasoning, using special tokens
| to coordinate them.
|
| I think it's just really early and most of this stuff
| hasn't even been attempted yet. There's tools/function
| calling which is kind of a proof of concept, and a lot of
| academic labs researching transformers applied to other
| fields like robotic control and learning, but no one's put
| it all together yet.
| lxgr wrote:
| What's critically missing in the current architectures,
| in my view, is models that are able to "keep learning"
| (in a way beyond just providing a summary of the previous
| conversation, which grants surface-level insights at
| most).
|
| If we keep the current iteration cycle (retrain an LLM
| every couple of months, incorporating the current "status
| quo", including all of its previous conversations), we
| might get somewhat interesting results, but even the
| least motivated grad student has an iteration cycle
| orders of magnitude faster than that.
| devjab wrote:
| As an expert who uses LLMs daily on my field of expertise I'm
| not looking forward to dealing with works created by people
| who were taught by them.
|
| They are wrong far too often to be used for any sort of
| learning in my opinion. You can feed them a book and they'll
| give you answers which don't exist in any of the written
| material, and that's the good part of them. Simply asking a
| LLM about things will give you answers that are hopelessly
| wrong and unless you're an expert you won't know it. Which
| isn't necessarily worse than learning things from search
| engines or YouTube. I recently had ChatGPT give me a recipe
| for bread which was certainly better than the top 10 results
| on Google except for one things. The recipe listed 3x the
| amount of salt which you should ever reasonably use. I asked
| it a few other times, I even asked it for my friend Tommy's
| recipe and all those answers were perfect. It obviously
| doesn't know Tommy but it pretended to know and just gave me
| a pretty basic recipe.
|
| Salt is a harmless error. Most people would know not to use
| that much salt, and even if they did, it wouldn't harm them
| (much). But imagine if you had used it for something electric
| or chemistry.
| joshmarlow wrote:
| This dovetails with something I've been thinking lately; the
| foundation of civilization is standing on the shoulders of
| giants (ie, I might make small contributions but I didn't
| invent compilers, CPUs, mining, agriculture, etc).
|
| Progress in large part is figuring out _better ways of doing
| that_ (language, written language, printing press, internet
| access, etc).
|
| When you look at things that way - LLMs start to seem deeply
| ground-breaking (assuming we work out the confabulation kinks).
|
| EDIT: fixed grammar/typos. Maybe I should have had an LLM
| proof-read this...
| visarga wrote:
| > the foundation of civilization is standing on the shoulders
| of giants. Progress in large part is figuring out better way
| of doing that
|
| It's so much easier to imitate than to invent something truly
| novel and useful. Let's do a bit of napkin math. A human
| lifetime is about 500M words. GPT-4 used up about 30,000
| human lifetimes of language. But cultural evolution took 200K
| years and 120B people to get here, about 4 million times the
| size of GPT-4's training set.
|
| That is of course hand wavy, but it shows progress is a
| million times harder than imitation. We really are standing
| on the shoulders of giants, or a very long chain of people.
| If we forgot all the knowledge preserved by language it would
| take us the same effort to recover as the first time around.
|
| I think all progress comes from search - search for
| experience (data), and search for understanding (data
| compression). This feeds on itself, but is coupled with the
| search space - the real world. And the world is not eager to
| tell us all its secrets. AI will only advance as fast as it
| can search, it's not a matter of pure scaling of computation,
| we need to scale interaction and validation as well.
| joshmarlow wrote:
| > AI will only advance as fast as it can search, it's not a
| matter of pure scaling of computation, we need to scale
| interaction and validation as well.
|
| I think Kevin Kelly made a similar point in explaining his
| skepticism around intelligence explosions; even if we build
| something much much smarter than us, the thing will still
| need to do experiments to fine-tune it's (super-human
| nuanced) understanding of physics/biology/whatever - and
| the clock-cycle of external reality isn't speeding up like
| our computation is.
|
| I think something smarter than us could design better/more
| informative experiments than we could to gather information
| about the world. That being said, I think his/your point is
| insightful.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Well put.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > the foundation of civilization is standing on the shoulders
| of giants [...] Progress in large part is figuring out better
| ways of doing that
|
| Cynical take: When it comes to helping someone find exactly
| the right piece of esoteric knowledge needed... There's no
| profit for that in a search engine, and an LLM reflects word
| associations rather than facts.
|
| IANAScienceHistorian, but I find myself thinking of how DNA
| analysis would be different if nobody had found _Thermus
| aquaticus_ , with it's extra-hardy variant of polymerase, or
| how the history of stealth aircraft was kicked off when
| someone realized the implications of Petr Ufimtsev's
| equations for reflected EM waves. (A work which went--heh--
| under the radar inside the USSR.)
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| While I agree these LLMs are getting pretty good, I think
| google shares fault for making it so hard to find information
| on the internet.
|
| You have to scroll past 4 sponsored links to get to their
| algorithm results, which themselves have been gamed by SEO and
| content farms. As far as I can tell, google has no plans to
| limit AI generated botfarm search results.
|
| LLMs now seem to get you an answer more quickly than google.
| LLMs don't cite their sources, so IMO they can't fully replace
| google for me yet.
| piombisallow wrote:
| I think it's not necessarily Google's fault, it's an arms
| race and they're losing it.
| hnthrow562 wrote:
| AI race perspective by sama.
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/07/25/sam-
| altma...
| ctoth wrote:
| I don't really understand what this comment about Google has
| to do with OP's comment. Is this something that even old
| Google could have done pre-SEOification?
|
| Would Google have been able to read the datasheet? Or just
| point OP at what they already said they were happy to avoid?
|
| > Without AI this would have been a long long process of
| brushing up on probability, vector math, manually
| transcribing the chart.
|
| Sometimes, it feels like stochastic parrots are seizing on a
| few words from the comment to pattern match it to the closest
| typical refutation and failing bigly.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| tremendously bigly
| ctoth wrote:
| Meta. Made me laugh.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Are you asking if Google could ever find documentation and
| sample code on the internet?
|
| Or are you asking if Google could understand a badly
| written query and understand it's about the sample code?
|
| Because the answer to the first is "yes", and to the second
| is "no". But the first one adds almost all of the
| productivity here.
| UweSchmidt wrote:
| You used to find amazing information on the internet back
| then. It is quite likely that someone else had already
| worked on a similar topic and blogged about it in a very
| searchable way. Without good search that kind of online
| culture died out.
|
| While we do have a video tutorial culture that exceeds what
| we had back then in many ways, and to be fair that
| technically happened under Google's umbrella (Youtube),
| destroying search and with it a lot of the open internet,
| will not only be Google's downfall, it's also a silent
| tragedy.
|
| Actually, measured by what a global online population could
| have achieved, with human information truly at anyone's
| fingertips, with infinite communities forming all over the
| place instead of in non-searchable Discord and monoculture
| Reddit ... this might be one of the main tragedies ever.
| loandbehold wrote:
| The notion of "stochastic parrot" has been disproven. It
| did come from a reputable AI researcher in the first place.
| You can call anything you want a "stochastic parrot",
| including human intelligence.
| thoughtpalette wrote:
| Just FYI, Phind cites it's sources. Which has proven
| beneficial for additional context.
| tptacek wrote:
| I like ChatGPT 4o just fine, but the whole lamplighter bit is a
| bit Whig-history, right? The lamplighters were better off in the
| long run. We might not be. You can't just blow the problems off.
| zibzob wrote:
| Why were lamplighters better off in the long run, is
| "lamplighter" a term that means more than just somebody who
| goes around lighting the streetlamps at night? Honestly that
| seems like a pretty decent job even today, if we still needed
| it to be done.
| tptacek wrote:
| The subtext of observations like those are that wealthy
| aristocrats in the age of full lamplighter employment would
| be better off materially working as a Walmart checkers today,
| and there's some truth to that, but the implication that
| Walmart checkers today will be better off when computers eat
| their jobs does not follow inexorably from history (the idea
| that it does is "Whig history"; the past sucked except in
| serving its role as the stepstones to our glorious future;
| take that, and the famous WW2 bomber survivorship bias
| graphic, and you have the problem with the logic of that last
| paragraph).
| zibzob wrote:
| Okay, I see what you mean now.
| mise_en_place wrote:
| There is still too much variance in the utility of LLMs.
| Hopefully, the uncertainty around utility will decrease while
| some concrete ranked score metric increases. Until that point,
| the variance is preventing the maximization of utility of LLMs,
| and by extension, agentic AI.
| mcpar-land wrote:
| > Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs -
| fixing the climate
|
| This is so rich coming from a tech field that's on track to match
| the energy consumption of a small country. (And no, AI is not
| going to offset this by 'finding innovative solutions to climate
| change' or whatever)
| throwaway918299 wrote:
| This man is such a snake oil salesman, holy cow. All hype, zero
| substance.
| screye wrote:
| Question for active professionals during the Moore's law era of
| computing. Back then, were executives writing such grand
| proclamations about the future ? In my experience, when things
| are working, executives are quiet. The outcomes speak for
| themselves.
|
| Thankfully, we have a recent point of reference. The pioneers of
| internet & computing's 1st wave transformed civilization. Did
| they spend years saber rattling about how 'change was coming' ?
| breck wrote:
| > Back then, were executives writing such grand proclamations
| about the future ?
|
| Yes. And the good ones (like SamA and SJ) deliver.
|
| https://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA?t=278
| wrs wrote:
| Of course they did! During the advent of personal computers
| there was plenty of hype and grand-visioning for a technology
| that had very little value until VisiCalc triggered exponential
| growth. Same story for social networking (look at The WELL),
| the Web (Netscape practically invented insane-seeming hype-
| based valuations), many other examples.
|
| In fact, I can't really think of any part of the industry where
| "outcomes speak for themselves" -- I would have said quite the
| opposite is the norm.
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| That's a bit funny, Moores law itself is an example of an
| executive being loud and making a grand proclamation
| wturner wrote:
| The way these guys bend over backwards to evade an honest
| conversation about capitalism and power is very entertaining.
| hnthrow562 wrote:
| A different perspective from sama. (More doomer, less utopian as
| this)
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/07/25/sam-altma...
| koziserek wrote:
| I'm sceptical about humanity's future, and not only with
| perspective of AGI getting out of control.. Average human won't
| be able to harness new powers.
|
| solarpunk envisioned, possible today:
|
| - entire human knowledge available on palm of your hand..!
|
| vs
|
| cyberdaftpunk actually more common:
|
| - another idiot driver killed somebody when being busy with his
| candy crush saga or instagram celebrity vid.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I don't know if I am the only one who always trips up on reading
| this common theme in AI progress - that AI will be the pinnacle
| of education - but it really strikes me as meaningless.
|
| What is the point of education if the bots can do all the work.
| If the worlds best accounting teacher is an AI, why would you
| want anyone (anything?) other than that AI handling your
| accounting?
|
| A world where human intelligence is second fiddle to AI,
| schooling _will not_ be anything like what it is today.
| randomdata wrote:
| For what reason would school need to change?
|
| Education will change, but education moved to happening outside
| of schools a long, long time ago.
| n_ary wrote:
| I am more worried about the fact that, these AIs will become
| the commercial moat of knowledge that we currently have
| available freely. The quality of knowledge you can now openly
| find is getting scarce or prominently moving behind paywalls.
| However, these AI models have access to the same knowledge
| somehow freely.
|
| Once we start relying on AI for knowledge(see how people
| frequently just ask few questions, copy paste answers without
| further in depth knowledge or research, just like the parody
| stack-overflow copy paste era), it will continue to get locked
| behind further paywall and will no longer be accessible to
| general populace without the financial means.
|
| I am just afraid that, while we are too awed by the magic, the
| magic will eventually close the doors behind us on knowledge
| and only cater to the rich and powerful.
|
| Also there is that one fact when AI gains adequate power in
| societal terms of utopian abundance where AI/robots do
| everything. One day, the AI decides that to save the globe from
| further climate damage, fastest way is to delete the walking
| CO2 emission machine who also use other CO2 emission devices or
| consumes stuff that also generate CO2, a mass extermination and
| burial will immediately cut all CO2 ...
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| Even the shittest small LLMs today can tell you any piece of
| knowledge you want. We will always at minimum have access to
| our current level of knowledge. If AI invents "super science"
| and suddenly we can travel faster than light then sure that
| might get locked away. But we'll never be helpless idiots who
| can't even do math.
| falcor84 wrote:
| > Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide
| personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at
| whatever pace they need.
|
| This is one of those few cases where I'm actually more bullish
| than Altman. I don't need to wait for my kids to have it, but
| rather I personally am already using this daily. My regular thing
| is to upload a book/article(s) into the context of a Claude
| project and then chat with it - I genuinely find it to already be
| at the level of a decent (though not yet excellent) tutor on most
| subjects I tried, and by far better than listening to a lecture.
| The main feature I'm missing is of the AI being able to
| collaborate with me on a digital whiteboard.
| lordnacho wrote:
| One thing I was thinking about was live translation. We gotta
| be near the stage where I can take earbuds with me to Spain and
| hear what the locals are saying in English? There's already
| apps that are pretty good at "talk to it and it hears the
| words, prints them, and prints the translation", so it would
| seem to be close?
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| Given the advanced voice model that still isn't widely
| released, the technology is there, even if the implementation
| isn't yet.
| codethief wrote:
| Whisper and a bit of Python code (and a text2speech model)
| can already do this. At my day job we have Whisper live-
| translate all-hands calls for the non-native speakers in the
| audience. It's incredibly good.
| mellavora wrote:
| So there is some interesting research about brainwave syncing
| during effective communication, which certainly includes
| personalized instruction (tutoring) or small-class learning.
|
| I wonder how that works with computers, when we are only
| sync'ing with the ghosts and statistical patterns of other
| humans, and those patterns are generated by electronic brains.
| smokel wrote:
| That might be research, but it's most likely not scientific
| research.
| oculty wrote:
| That sounds really useful. Can you give an example of what kind
| of content your are uploading and how the tutoring looks like?
| falcor84 wrote:
| One example is of studying robotics. I started with this
| course on Coursera [0]. It was ok at the start, but got hard
| for me early on. A big part of the course is of reading the
| book that they make available for free [1], so I would upload
| the relevant chunk of chapters into Claude (the whole book
| was a bit too much for it), and would then just ask it to
| explain each topic to me, whereby I'd ask additional
| questions, and then when, I felt I got it, ask it to check my
| understanding (which it does quite well, saying "sort of, but
| note that..." in many appropriate circumstances).
|
| As another specific example, in that book and in others, I
| sometimes struggle with the math, so I would ask Claude to
| give me the sympy code for the relevant mathematical
| derivation, and being able to actually see those expressions
| change in a python notebook really helps my understanding.
| I'm really impressed with how it usually does well on the
| first try, even with relatively complex stuff, like
| expressions involving symbolic matrix exponentiation. Being
| able to pause on any topic like this, and have the LLM help
| me dive into it in the way that works best for me, has been
| amazing, and getting as much time from a knowledgeable human
| tutor would have probably cost me 1,000x as much.
|
| [0] https://coursera.org/specializations/modernrobotics
|
| [1] http://hades.mech.northwestern.edu/images/7/7f/MR.pdf
| saati wrote:
| How do you know the answers are actually useful and not
| just hallucinations?
| falcor84 wrote:
| It's not an oracle, and does get things wrong
| occasionally, but if anything, having to check its
| responses actually helps me confirm that I'm learning.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Just yesterday I was wondering how well AI's would provide
| feedback to my high school kids essays, without actually re-
| writing them for him. I will give it a try later today.
| twothreeone wrote:
| Sounds like Durchhalteparolen to me.
| gwern wrote:
| > If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as
| possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it
| abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips). If we don't
| build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource
| that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich
| people.
|
| Translation for the rest of us: "we need to fully privatize the
| OA subsidiary and turn it into a B-corp which can raise a lot
| more capital over the next decade, in order to achieve the goals
| of the nonprofit, because the chief threat is not anything like
| existential risk from autonomous agents in the next few years or
| arms races, but inadequate commercialization due to fundraising
| constraints".
| metacritic12 wrote:
| Good point. His story is valid, but just-so happens to equal AI
| maximalism that most CEOs would want for their own industry
| too.
| peppermill wrote:
| It's amazing how he can imagine wars being fought over AI but
| not wars being fought over resources needed to "build enough
| infrastructure."
| kulahan wrote:
| Taking it a step further, building that infrastructure may
| contribute somewhat directly to limiting the other resources
| _actual_ wars are being fought over.
|
| This man needs to get out of his own head.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when
| his salary depends on his not understanding it."
| p1esk wrote:
| Sam's ambitions are way beyond "salary".
| kevinob11 wrote:
| Replace salary with the thing he wants
| p1esk wrote:
| Maybe he wants to make the world a better place?
| willturman wrote:
| It's a quote from Upton Sinclair from an era where you
| generally had to have a profitable business and employees
| _before_ you had investors.
| novok wrote:
| There were many ventures in the past that got investors
| without a current profitable going concern. Oil & mining
| speculation, chartering boat crews to go on exploration
| expeditions and more.
| fragmede wrote:
| I know theres this whole joke about being pre-revenue on
| the Silicon Valley TV show, but getting investors in
| order to be able to build a business which becomes
| profitable after goes back a long time. Like a really
| long time.
| vundercind wrote:
| I think it's misunderstanding the guy's whole deal to
| expect truth or reality to be major factors in his writing.
| "Sell, sell, sell!" is the goal above all else. Sell
| whatever he's invested in today. Sell himself. Sell!
| KETHERCORTEX wrote:
| > he can imagine wars being fought over AI
|
| I wonder how did he come to such a prediction. When was the
| last time we had a war over advanced tech? Armies didn't
| fight over telegraph, radio, phones and cars.
|
| A war to get AI would also be foolish. A few hundred bombs
| from your adversaries and AI won't have electricity to
| function.
| Terr_ wrote:
| [delayed]
| trhway wrote:
| >resources needed to "build enough infrastructure."
|
| Strarship will put into orbit 100tons at $10M or so. I.e.
| 2-3kg (Nvidia H100 plus 1M2 of aluminum radiator (would
| radiate 0.5-1Kw away at 60-70C) plus 0.5Kw of solar panels)
| for $200-300, ie. peanuts compare to the price of the H100 or
| whatever NVDA would be charging $30K/card.
| Dig1t wrote:
| I read this as: "we need to ramp up nuclear energy".
| bredren wrote:
| Coincides with this news: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti
| cles/2024-09-20/microsoft...
| api wrote:
| > put AI into the hands of as many people as possible
|
| ... by establishing regulatory moats to prevent competition and
| limit or outlaw actually-open AI?
| svnt wrote:
| He didn't say that other people need to put it into the hands
| of as many people as possible, only that his company does.
| goldfeld wrote:
| I see how AI is used today and extrapolate. A lot. Everything
| in tech is extrapolation with the march of capital. It takes
| one to know one; rather it takes a smart ass to wield a smart
| tool. So the smart get smarter.
|
| Is it a separate phenomenon, in the big picture, from the rich
| getting richer, from the monopolies over means of production?
|
| Not sure, but I see as well that the dumb will surely get
| dumber; that "intelligence" will be a product of using
| intelligent humans' means of production, and not owning them of
| course, but being owned in the process. Populations will be
| literally made lighter of their smarts, outsourcing
| intelligence to agents out of general control (classic bait and
| switch.) Since AI feel my own process getting more clueless as
| I go, I'd better conclude somehow.
|
| I see the Age of Ignorance ahead, there was once an
| Enlightenment, and here light takes on its other side or
| meaning, the workers being enlightened, to wit, made lighter of
| their horrible burden which is intelligence and its obnoxious
| demands of upkeep. Just pay someone for upkeep and stop messing
| with wet messy neurons already, says the technocrat to the
| cheerful mob.
| svnt wrote:
| > If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as
| possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it
| abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips). If we don't
| build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource
| that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for
| rich people.
|
| The mostly-open goal of every VC-funded startup is to become a
| monopoly. If a strong enough monopoly in AI hardware were to
| exist, then the issues he describes could become a problem.
|
| Otherwise, what he is describing is just the ad absurdum of how
| capitalism works. Phrased differently it sounds like:
|
| "If this extremely powerful and profitable product that depends
| on other products gets built, then if no one else builds the
| also profitable substrate that it operates on, terrible things
| will happen!"
|
| Or again slightly differently: "We need to be able to compete
| with our suppliers because our core business model might not be
| defensible unless we can also win in their space."
| reducesuffering wrote:
| "Currently, we don't have a solution for steering or controlling
| a potentially superintelligent AI, and preventing it from going
| rogue." -OpenAI
|
| "Why You Should Fear Machine Intelligence
|
| Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the
| greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity." - Sam
| Altman
|
| https://openai.com/index/introducing-superalignment/
|
| https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1
| 7e wrote:
| Altman attempting to take credit for others work, again.
| tech_ken wrote:
| > That's really it; humanity discovered an algorithm that could
| really, truly learn any distribution of data (or really, the
| underlying "rules" that produce any distribution of data)
|
| Seems like it's very much the former, and not all the latter.
| Indeed my understanding of the last 15 years of AI research is
| that 'rules-based' methods floundered while purely 'data-
| mimicking' methods have flourished.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Did AI write this?
|
| "This age is characterized by society's increasingly advanced
| capabilities, driven not by genetic changes but by societal
| infrastructure becoming smarter and more efficient over time."
| larodi wrote:
| Has Sam Altman ever talked about ways that he personally uses
| ChatGPT. Does he at all? does he have an all-smart watch? Is he
| dreaming of producing a perfect replicant like this guy in Blade
| Runner 2049... cause with his pathos and present position, he may
| be among these peoples who can allow himself to do so. This is
| all so vague he says, i mean, we have all read enough cyberpunk
| to write the same essay. But I don't know if he actually builds
| with this tool, cause the way I see it he probably has very
| little time to actually use it. So why so confident whether its
| deep learning that worked. I say Euler's graph theory worked more
| than anything else, and Chomsky's understanding of grammars, so
| what?
|
| Maybe we will attend superintelligence in 1000 years, maybe not.
| Maybe Jesus comes back or Krishna reincarnates on earth, who
| knows. But it is a long way ahead, and it did not start with Sam,
| and is really not going to end with ChatGPT.
| 23david wrote:
| The Age of Inhumanity... AI mimicry of human patterns devalues
| our very humanity. Without wise leadership, which we clearly
| lack, this upcoming Age will be profoundly unstable.
| krunck wrote:
| Somehow I read through this without actually looking at the
| domain name of the page. I thought to my self "Wow, this person
| is living in a fantasy world." Then I saw the authors name. I
| think I'll stand by my initial impression.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Also that is why we should have some of these foundational
| models broken down and run at the per person level as a local
| large language model instead of paying some corporation to get
| access to it. We didn't have fire as a service back in the day
| and that is why humanity flourished.
| drawkward wrote:
| Crypto bro sells AI; news at 11.
| teekert wrote:
| "If we don't build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very
| limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes
| mostly a tool for rich people."
|
| ... This, and nothing about the democratizing effect of "open
| source AI" (Yes we still need to define what that is!).
|
| I don't want Sam as the thought leader of AI. I even prefer Zuck.
|
| Are there any thought leaders that are really about
| democratization and local foss AI on open hardware? Or do they
| always follow (or step into the light) after the big moneymakers
| have had their moment? Who can we start watching? The Linus, the
| RMS, the Wozniak's of AI. Who are they?
| uludag wrote:
| > That's really it; humanity discovered an algorithm that could
| really, truly learn any distribution of data (or really, the
| underlying "rules" that produce any distribution of data)
|
| So because we have an algorithm to learn any distribution of
| data, we are now on the verge of the Intelligence Age utopia?
| What if it just entrenches us in a world built off of the data it
| was trained on?
| Animats wrote:
| Until the hallucination problem is solved, we can't trust LLM-
| type AIs to _do_ anything on their own. This limits uses to ones
| where the cost of errors can be imposed on someone else.
| geysersam wrote:
| Of course we can. Humans are also mistaken sometimes,
| especially when trying to solve difficult problems.
|
| If an LLM hallucinates it's usually because the problem is too
| hard. For easier problems it's rarely an issue in my
| experience.
|
| Hallucinates is just an indicator that the model is inadequate
| for the problem you're applying it to. That doesn't mean it's
| inadequate to solve any problems.
| danjl wrote:
| We've had the capability to feed the entire planet for decades
| now, and yet, a large portion is underfed. Even if Sam's wildest
| dreams come true, this sounds like another "divide the world into
| haves and have-nots". One way to justify this unethical view is
| to consider that his audience was a set of target customers,
| rather than "people in the world". IOW, this was just fancy
| marketing fluff.
| itronitron wrote:
| My reaction to this is best relayed as a song lyric from Ice-T:
|
| > Nobody gives a fuck
|
| > _" the children have to go to school!"_
|
| > Well moms, good luck!
| ansk wrote:
| > humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn
| any distribution of data (or really, the underlying "rules" that
| produce any distribution of data)
|
| He's hand-waving around the idea presented in the Universal
| Approximation Theorem, but he's mangled it to the point of
| falsehood by conflating representation and learning. Just because
| we can parameterize an arbitrarily flexible class of
| distributions doesn't mean we have an algorithm to learn the
| optimal set of parameters. He digs an even deeper hole by
| claiming that this algorithm actually learns 'the underlying
| "rules" that produce any distribution of data', which is
| essentially a totally unfounded assertion that the functions
| learned by neural nets will generalize is some particular manner.
|
| > I find that no matter how much time I spend thinking about
| this, I can never really internalize how consequential it is.
|
| If you think the Universal Approximation Theorem is this
| profound, you haven't understood it. It's about as profound as
| the notion that you can approximate a polynomial by splicing
| together an infinite number of piecewise linear functions.
| klyrs wrote:
| > It's about as profound as the notion that you can approximate
| a polynomial by splicing together an infinite number of
| piecewise linear functions.
|
| Wait 'til you hit complex analysis and discover that Universal
| Entire Functions don't just exist, they're basically
| polynomials.
| d--b wrote:
| "And to make this more-than-perfect world that humanity has been
| longing for as long as it lived, I absolutely need to betray all
| the principles that I once stood by, screw over all people that
| ever trusted me, and become extremely rich in the process. You
| can think what you want now, the future humans will realize their
| prosperity was all because I was there to make it happen."
| slantedview wrote:
| > If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the
| prosperity all around him was unimaginable
|
| None of that shared prosperity was freely given by the Sam
| Altmans of the world, it was hard won by labor organizers and
| social movements. Without more of that, the progress from AI will
| continue the recent trend of wealth accumulating in the hands of
| a few. The idea that everyone will somehow prosper equally from
| AI, without specific effort to make that happen, is nonsense.
| spencerchubb wrote:
| Labor organizers mostly make things worse for laborers.
| Capitalism has brought much prosperity. "It is not from the
| benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we
| expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest"
| jerb wrote:
| I want to be wildly optimistic too, but I still see no evidence
| LLMs generate new knowledge. They always hew in-distribution.
|
| Please correct me if I'm wrong
| novaRom wrote:
| They are really helpful to answer concrete questions, basically
| a replacement of manual web search and filtering, getting just
| exactly answers I was looking for. For example, one of my
| dialogue with chatgpt 4o was about boosting plant growth in a
| fish tank - you certainly can find a lot of web sites about it,
| but I simply described my aquatic environment and asked for a
| recipe - and the answers sound and well supported, a post
| dialogue double check of the sources help
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| This isn't snark - almost zero humans produce new knowledge.
| w10-1 wrote:
| It's not new, but it's more usable, which makes new
| transactions and productions possible by lowering information
| costs.
|
| That lower of costs is the ONLY basis for thinking AI is good
| for all. It's to the detriment of people previously managing
| the complexity manually through training and experience, but in
| favor of their customers who couldn't previously afford them.
| d_burfoot wrote:
| OAI's achievements are amazing. But here's a bit of a skeptical
| take: cheap human-style intelligence won't have a huge impact
| because such intelligence isn't really a bottleneck today. It's a
| cliche that the brightest minds of the age are dedicated to
| selling more ads or shuffling stock ownership around at high
| velocity. Anyone who's worked at a big tech company knows the
| enormous ratio of talent to real engineering problems at those
| companies.
|
| Let's say you have some amazing project that's going to require
| 100 Phd-years of work to carry out. In the present world that
| costs something like $1e7. In the post-AI world, that same amount
| of intelligence will cost $1e3, an enormous reduction in price.
| That might seem like a huge impact. BUT, if the project was so
| amazing, why couldn't you raise $1e7 to pursue it? Governments
| and VCs throw this kind of money around like corn-hole bags. So
| the number of actually-worthwhile projects that become feasible
| post-AI might actually be quite small.
| benlivengood wrote:
| Capital follows the most profitable investments. It's why
| "green" technology took so long to develop (we probably could
| have had efficient solar panels in the 60s, but oil was super
| cheap and more importantly very profitable). Dropping the cost
| of a $1e7 problem to even $1e6 probably makes it very
| profitable.
| deciplex wrote:
| > Capital follows the most profitable investments.
|
| I think a common error is that people forget the "most" in
| this sentence. It is a very important word. It's not even
| that only profitable investments will get funded: even
| _profitable_ projects might get left on the cutting room
| floor if they are competing for resources with projects that
| will generate, or are believed to generate, higher ROI.
|
| And this maybe isn't a problem if higher ROI == better than.
| But to believe that, you have to also believe that
| enshittification is a thing that happens _in spite of_ being
| less profitable (or unprofitable), which for me at least is a
| hard sell.
| willturman wrote:
| Capital has also employed anti-competitive actions to stifle,
| prevent, and kneecap "green" technology for the last century.
|
| The death of passenger rail and the stifling of the electric
| car for 30 years come to mind.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| And also that is why something which is so foundational should
| be allowed to spread out to all humans which means running
| local llm models on our machines instead of paying one or two
| companies to use it. Anthropic, open AI should not become the
| ones humanity has to go to to get such a resource. We didn't
| have fire as a service for humanity to master fire.
| spencerchubb wrote:
| To raise $1e7, you have to be able to convince VCs that you can
| make at least $1e9. They want 100x returns from their winners,
| and don't care about anything else in their portfolio.
|
| If instead you only need $1e3 to build it, it doesn't have to
| make as much money. I could just fund it out of pocket
| xbar wrote:
| Nothing in Sam Altman's mind will lead to the improvement of the
| human condition.
|
| We have a capitalist arguing for support of further investment in
| his capital expenditures in the form of planet-ending heat and
| monopoly power, promising to pay for it with intelligence more
| rapidly delivered.
|
| No, thanks.
| listic wrote:
| Having read a few comments, and then the essay itself, I am
| surprised there's no call to action or announcement.
| pdonis wrote:
| All this and not a word about AI ethics. If the ethics of the
| AI's Sam Altman is building are his ethics, I wouldn't trust them
| to do any of the tasks he describes, or indeed any tasks
| requiring any kind of independent action or judgment at all.
| alexashka wrote:
| > it may take longer, but I'm confident we'll get there
|
| Confident based on what, exactly? Sam Altman is engaging in 'The
| Secret' where if you really, _really_ believe a thing, you 'll
| manifest it.
|
| Mind you, Sam Altman actually has no technical expertise, so he
| really really believes he can pay _other_ people who actually
| know something to do magic whilst he walks about pretending to be
| Steve Jobs 2.0.
|
| He'll get his trillion, AI will go nowhere but he'll be on to the
| next grift by then.
| amelius wrote:
| What we need is to make AI really open and let government
| institutions (academia) develop the models, so we can all profit
| from them.
| w10-1 wrote:
| > a defining characteristic of the Intelligence Age will be
| massive prosperity
|
| That's the sales pitch, that this will benefit all.
|
| I'm very pro-AI, but here's the only prediction for the future I
| would ever make: AI will accelerate, not minimize, inequality and
| thus injustice, because it removes the organizational limits
| previously imposed by bureaucracy/coordination costs of humans.
|
| It's not AI's fault. It's not because people are evil or weak or
| mean, but because the system already does so, and the system has
| only been constrained by inability to scale people in
| organizations, which is now relieved by AI.
|
| Virtually all the advances in technology and civilization have
| been aimed at people capturing resources, people, and value, and
| recent advances have only accelerated that trend. Broader
| distributions of value are incidental.
|
| Yes, the U.S. had a middle class after the war, and yes, China
| has lifted rural people out of technical poverty. But those are
| the exceptions against the background of consolidation of wealth
| and power world wide. Not through ideology or avarice but through
| law and technology extending the reach of agency by amplifying
| transaction cost differences in market power, information
| asymmetry and risk burdens. The only thing that stops this is
| disasters like war and environmental collapse, and it's only
| slowed by recalcitrance of people.
|
| E.g., now we are at a point were people's economic and online
| activity is pervasively tracked, but it's impossible to determine
| who's the owner of the vast majority of assets. That creates
| massive scale for getting customers, but impedes legal
| responsibility. Nothing in economic/market theory says that's how
| it should be; but transaction cost economics does make clear that
| the asymmetry can and will be exploited, so organizations will
| capture governance to do so.
|
| It's not AI's job nor even AI's focus to correct injustice, and
| you can't blame AI for the damage it does. But like nuclear
| weapons, cluster munitions, party politics, (even software
| waivers of liability) etc., it creates moral hazards far beyond
| the ability of culture to accommodate.
|
| (Don't get me started on how blockchain's promise of smart
| contracts scaling to address transaction risks has devolved into
| proliferating fraud schemes.)
| mr90210 wrote:
| Please turn this comment into a post. It's a gem.
| charlie0 wrote:
| In a world of infinite leverage, those who can leverage will far
| outrun those who cannot leverage or do so poorly. The world is
| also getting flatter, so you will see massive clusters of people
| near the bottom, with a very long fat tail of people far away at
| the top. My only hope is that the floor is raised for everyone,
| so we're not living in a dystopia like Elysium.
| drooby wrote:
| This morning I was reviewing some code that a JR engineer
| submitted. It had this wild logical conditional with twists and
| turns, negations, and weird property naming..
|
| o1-preview perfectly evaluated the conditional and determined
| that, hilariously, it would always evaluate to true.
|
| o1 untangled the spaghetti, and, verifying that it was correct
| was quick and easy. It created a perfect truth table for me to
| visualize.
|
| This is a sign of things to come. We are speeding up.
| bobrobpr wrote:
| Pasted the article into chatgpt (free version) Prompt: according
| to this text above, tell me the degree of insanity of this man's
| thinking process, expose all his flaws.
|
| Chatgpt: The text presents a highly optimistic view of the future
| shaped by AI and deep learning, but there are several areas where
| the reasoning might be seen as flawed or overly simplistic. Here
| are some points that could be critiqued:
|
| Overconfidence in Technology: The author expresses a strong
| belief in the inevitability of AI advancement and its benefits,
| which may overlook the unpredictability of technological
| development and the potential for setbacks.
|
| Underestimating Risks: While the potential for prosperity is
| emphasized, there's insufficient attention given to the ethical,
| societal, and environmental risks associated with AI, such as
| bias, privacy concerns, and job displacement.
|
| Assumption of Universal Benefit: The idea that AI will lead to
| shared prosperity ignores systemic inequalities that might
| prevent equitable access to AI technology, potentially leading to
| a wider wealth gap.
|
| Neglect of Human Factors: The argument largely abstracts from
| human emotions, societal values, and the complexities of human
| behavior. The assumption that prosperity will automatically lead
| to happiness or fulfillment is problematic.
|
| Simplistic Historical Comparisons: The comparison of current
| advancements to past technological revolutions (e.g., Industrial
| Age) may not account for the unique challenges posed by AI, such
| as rapid obsolescence and ethical dilemmas that previous
| technologies did not face.
|
| Lack of Detailed Solutions: The text calls for action but offers
| little concrete guidance on how to navigate the complexities of
| AI's integration into society, especially regarding labor market
| changes and ethical considerations.
|
| Optimism Bias: The author's perspective may be influenced by
| optimism bias, leading to a potentially unrealistic view of
| future outcomes without sufficient acknowledgment of the
| challenges.
|
| Dependence on Infrastructure: While the author correctly
| identifies the need for infrastructure to support AI, there's
| little discussion of the potential for that infrastructure to
| become a battleground for control, leading to conflicts rather
| than cooperation.
|
| Diminished Role of Individuals: The portrayal of people relying
| heavily on AI teams may undermine the value of individual
| creativity and agency, potentially leading to a society overly
| dependent on technology.
|
| By examining these points, one can argue that while the vision of
| a prosperous future powered by AI is compelling, it is essential
| to approach such ideas with a critical perspective, considering
| the broader implications and potential pitfalls.
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