2 ms·

"Impressive" isnt really a category for me, but also, I havent mentioned that my issue concerns how impressive anything is. I am, yes, anti-wonder; I do think

"Impressive" isnt really a category for me, but also, I havent mentioned that my issue concerns how impressive anything is. I am, yes, anti-wonder; I do think people get hopped-up on wonder and that lowers their threshold for reasonable belief and they end up in (religious) absurdities. My issue here, in these terms, is that the "wonder" associated with the magic trick of modern ML is preducing a gross cognitive bias in which people believe this is an example of intelligence; or otherwise, an example like us in some significant sense. This leads to pseudoscience, charlatanism and a religious techno-utopian faith. At the heart of it is a wonder-scam in the vein of all miracle-based shysterism. The fool looks at the miracle, is impressed out of all reason, and concludes miracles exist. For sure, I dont really trade in wonder and I have never found it to do anything other than profoundly distort people's beliefs.

olalonde 4y ago
You are ranting about a bunch of things that I've never witnessed on HN or anywhere really (except perhaps for that one guy from Google whose claims were quickly debunked on HN and elsewhere). No one claimed that GPT-3 was sentient or possessed human level intelligence. The more common "religious/pseudoscientific" claims I've seen around here are those that completely dismiss the possibility of human level AI because of some miraculous-like property of the brain.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  The question of "human-level AI" isnt relevant to the field of AI as it exists. It's like someone in crypto talking about a future crypto-based financial system whilst at the same time being unable to processes basically any transactions, stabalise any currency, ensure any regulation, deal with any fraud, etc. Or likewise, an MLM health company talking about cures for cancer all the while hocking vitamin supplements. The question of what properties animals have which enable them to implement intelligence isn't relevant to whether correlative statistical techniques which capture word frequencies are "intelligence" -- inasmuch as vitamin 'science' isnt relevant to curing cancer. This gross level of chalatanism, wishful-thinking, scamming, delusion and out-right fraud is overwhelming.
  - olalonde 4y ago
    Who exactly is claiming to have solved human-level AI? Can you give some examples of "gross level of charlatanism, wishful-thinking, scamming, delusion and out-right fraud"? I genuinely haven't witnessed any of that. In my experience, most AI people acknowledge that the timeline for AGI is unknown and that it will most likely involve yet to be discovered algorithms, not just throwing more data/processing power at it.
    - trention 4y ago
      >most AI people acknowledge that the timeline for AGI is unknown and that it will most likely involve yet to be discovered algorithms, not just throwing more data/processing power at it. Try telling that to Sutskever or Karpathy (or indeed a bunch of "rationalists" on twitter, at least a subset of which works in AI) because both of them have made the claim you assert you haven't seen.

olalonde 4y ago

You are ranting about a bunch of things that I've never witnessed on HN or anywhere really (except perhaps for that one guy from Google whose claims were quickly debunked on HN and elsewhere). No one claimed that GPT-3 was sentient or possessed human level intelligence. The more common "religious/pseudoscientific" claims I've seen around here are those that completely dismiss the possibility of human level AI because of some miraculous-like property of the brain.

mjburgess 4y ago
The question of "human-level AI" isnt relevant to the field of AI as it exists. It's like someone in crypto talking about a future crypto-based financial system whilst at the same time being unable to processes basically any transactions, stabalise any currency, ensure any regulation, deal with any fraud, etc. Or likewise, an MLM health company talking about cures for cancer all the while hocking vitamin supplements. The question of what properties animals have which enable them to implement intelligence isn't relevant to whether correlative statistical techniques which capture word frequencies are "intelligence" -- inasmuch as vitamin 'science' isnt relevant to curing cancer. This gross level of chalatanism, wishful-thinking, scamming, delusion and out-right fraud is overwhelming.
- olalonde 4y ago
  Who exactly is claiming to have solved human-level AI? Can you give some examples of "gross level of charlatanism, wishful-thinking, scamming, delusion and out-right fraud"? I genuinely haven't witnessed any of that. In my experience, most AI people acknowledge that the timeline for AGI is unknown and that it will most likely involve yet to be discovered algorithms, not just throwing more data/processing power at it.
  - trention 4y ago
    >most AI people acknowledge that the timeline for AGI is unknown and that it will most likely involve yet to be discovered algorithms, not just throwing more data/processing power at it. Try telling that to Sutskever or Karpathy (or indeed a bunch of "rationalists" on twitter, at least a subset of which works in AI) because both of them have made the claim you assert you haven't seen.