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As skeptical as I am of the AGI and even full self-driving, successes like AlphaGo, AlphaFold 2, and Deepfakery from video to voice all demonstrate the technolo

As skeptical as I am of the AGI and even full self-driving, successes like AlphaGo, AlphaFold 2, and Deepfakery from video to voice all demonstrate the technology can do things we never really could do before. But in all of those cases humans are in the loop to either build the system at scale or to keep it from going off the rails in production. I see much more of that in the next decade. And I don't think there's going to be an AI winter but I do hope there's a reckoning for all the snake oilers of AI out there. I mean they're the same people who snake oil for crypto too, and they're just getting their game on for snake oiling the metaverse. Maybe that will happen for AI VC, but as someone else said, VC is where good ideas go to die.

dougabug 5y ago
Good points, but it should also be noted that humans also often rely on other humans supporting, assisting, and training / coaching them in order to perform at peak levels. Pre-Neolithic humans while biologically considered modern, lacked many of the expressed cognitive capabilities we now demand nascent AI systems to exhibit. Self-hosting AI capabilities may come at some point in the future, long after these human bootstrapped and maintained systems have proven their commercial worth.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Imagine letting gtp3 loose on to the worldwide comment sections. It has the ability to defeat any captcha, it can write well enough to waste peoples time, and it could push any agenda. I think when such a weapon is released, there will be nothing mere mortal web owners will be able to do, since there is no digital identity that couldn’t be spoofed by it.
- varelse 5y ago
  You deeply deeply deeply overestimate these models but I also give up trying to make that point. Go ahead and unleash all this fear uncertainty and doubt and see how that goes. It's tiring even to read this nonsense. There is nothing these language models can do that isn't already being achieved by an entire planet of mechanical turks with nothing better to do. But they do so with a much better carbon footprint. There will be plenty of tools for motivated mere mortal web owners. Most of them involves various ways of saying no to uncurated content. But it's more fun to talk about the near-term AGI and the imaginary threat it poses. Who doesn't love a good Boogeyman story?
tuatoru 5y ago
> successes like AlphaGo, AlphaFold 2, and Deepfakery from video to voice all demonstrate the technology can do things we never really could do before. Good grief, I hope so! After all that money! If no-one had come up with anything they could hype out the ears, the train would have stopped years ago. The problem isn't toy inventions, it's making a significant positive impact on the world as a whole. Generalisability and efficiency of deployment, creating benefits for billions of households. Lithium-chemistry batteries are having a net positive effect. AI seems to be a net negative, the way it's been used in Facebook and YouTube. Deepfakery is unambiguously a negative. The jury is still out on Alphafold 2. The default expectation would be that it's like Watson as used in medical diagnosis. There wasn't much 'there' there.
- varelse 5y ago
  Are you kidding me about AlphaFold 2? That was the solution to a 50-year mystery in science and there's going to be a Nobel prize in it somewhere. That would be like finding a grand unified theory in physics. No big deal there amIRight? But your skepticism is great. More opportunities for those of us who actually get what it achieved and are looking to extend it to more practical domains beyond protein structure prediction (which is already huge). And kudos to Deepmind for open sourcing it even though they did their usual trick with the training data and recipe and left it to you to implement. Deepfakery is going to be great when I can do things like make a new season of classic Star Trek with a bunch of amateur voice talent and it looks like the original show. Maybe even use some of the season 4 pitches that were never made. I never got why none of the original silicon valley billionaires didn't pay whatever it took to make this happen while the original cast was still alive. But now you no longer need to be a billionaire... https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Undeveloped_Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series_episodes https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Undeveloped_Star_Trek:_...

dougabug 5y ago

Good points, but it should also be noted that humans also often rely on other humans supporting, assisting, and training / coaching them in order to perform at peak levels. Pre-Neolithic humans while biologically considered modern, lacked many of the expressed cognitive capabilities we now demand nascent AI systems to exhibit. Self-hosting AI capabilities may come at some point in the future, long after these human bootstrapped and maintained systems have proven their commercial worth.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

Imagine letting gtp3 loose on to the worldwide comment sections. It has the ability to defeat any captcha, it can write well enough to waste peoples time, and it could push any agenda. I think when such a weapon is released, there will be nothing mere mortal web owners will be able to do, since there is no digital identity that couldn’t be spoofed by it.

varelse 5y ago
You deeply deeply deeply overestimate these models but I also give up trying to make that point. Go ahead and unleash all this fear uncertainty and doubt and see how that goes. It's tiring even to read this nonsense. There is nothing these language models can do that isn't already being achieved by an entire planet of mechanical turks with nothing better to do. But they do so with a much better carbon footprint. There will be plenty of tools for motivated mere mortal web owners. Most of them involves various ways of saying no to uncurated content. But it's more fun to talk about the near-term AGI and the imaginary threat it poses. Who doesn't love a good Boogeyman story?

tuatoru 5y ago

> successes like AlphaGo, AlphaFold 2, and Deepfakery from video to voice all demonstrate the technology can do things we never really could do before. Good grief, I hope so! After all that money! If no-one had come up with anything they could hype out the ears, the train would have stopped years ago. The problem isn't toy inventions, it's making a significant positive impact on the world as a whole. Generalisability and efficiency of deployment, creating benefits for billions of households. Lithium-chemistry batteries are having a net positive effect. AI seems to be a net negative, the way it's been used in Facebook and YouTube. Deepfakery is unambiguously a negative. The jury is still out on Alphafold 2. The default expectation would be that it's like Watson as used in medical diagnosis. There wasn't much 'there' there.

varelse 5y ago
Are you kidding me about AlphaFold 2? That was the solution to a 50-year mystery in science and there's going to be a Nobel prize in it somewhere. That would be like finding a grand unified theory in physics. No big deal there amIRight? But your skepticism is great. More opportunities for those of us who actually get what it achieved and are looking to extend it to more practical domains beyond protein structure prediction (which is already huge). And kudos to Deepmind for open sourcing it even though they did their usual trick with the training data and recipe and left it to you to implement. Deepfakery is going to be great when I can do things like make a new season of classic Star Trek with a bunch of amateur voice talent and it looks like the original show. Maybe even use some of the season 4 pitches that were never made. I never got why none of the original silicon valley billionaires didn't pay whatever it took to make this happen while the original cast was still alive. But now you no longer need to be a billionaire... https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Undeveloped_Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series_episodes https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Undeveloped_Star_Trek:_...