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Imagine watching the seeds of AI that will terraform society and rapidly displace human labor over the coming decades be planted, and then still splitting hairs

Imagine watching the seeds of AI that will terraform society and rapidly displace human labor over the coming decades be planted, and then still splitting hairs over whether or not it'll achieve sentience. Our world is changing before our very eyes while this guy is belaboring the technicalities. You could hardly ask for a keener display of the philosophical gulf between scientists and engineers.

version_five 4y ago
It have a lot of trouble understanding how this sentiment can exist. Especially since the rise of GPT-3 and now these image models, we've seen the pop-culture face of AI become even narrower. The promise of generalization that could lead to intelligent behavior has given way to people sharing amusing pictures or phrases that these models have generated, because that's what they do. It's cool, but it's basically become orthogonal to any AGI, or even AI with applications. It's now just a neat cultural phenomenon from which laypeople somehow extrapolate the kind if stuff the parent is saying. I'm not saying AI (neural networks) isn't making research progress, it's just that it has almost nothing to do with any of what laypeople extrapolate from it
- rebelos 4y ago
  I'm sorry, but there is no gentler way to phrase this: you are calamitously blind to what's happening on the ground. https://twitter.com/AdeptAILabs/status/1570144499187453952 https://twitter.com/AdeptAILabs/status/1570144499187453952 https://twitter.com/runwayml/status/1568220303808991232 https://twitter.com/runwayml/status/1568220303808991232 https://scale.com/blog/text-universal-interface https://scale.com/blog/text-universal-interface
  - civilized 4y ago
    Watch out for histrionic phrases like "calamitously blind". They indicate you're getting too emotional, losing perspective, verging into extreme, black-and-white thinking. Text to video and converting some selected requests into actions is all nice, but it hardly contradicts the GP's observation: it's nowhere near AGI.
    - rebelos 4y ago
      A pattern I'm seeing in the later replies here is that few of them are responding to the substance of my comments. Perhaps dang will clean this up. EDIT Since you ninja edited this in: > Text to video and converting some selected requests into actions is all nice, but it hardly contradicts the GP's observation: it's nowhere near AGI. If you review the root comment I made, you'll understand that I was never arguing with the GP about AGI in the first place.
      - civilized 4y ago
        Then it's puzzling to accuse someone of calamitous blindness when you are not even engaging with the point of the post you're replying to.
        rebelos 4y ago
        > Then it's puzzling to accuse someone of calamitous blindness when you are not even engaging with the point of the post you're replying to. At this point, I'm wondering if you're just provoking me deliberately. The comment I replied to said the following: > The promise of generalization that could lead to intelligent behavior has given way to people sharing amusing pictures or phrases that these models have generated, because that's what they do. It's cool, but it's basically become orthogonal to any AGI, or even AI with applications. And then I posted evidence of concrete applications that are in progress at some of the most well-resourced companies in Silicon Valley. Absolutely groundbreaking stuff that more than prove sophisticated applications of contemporary AI are well on their way to being realized. A lot of "histrionic phrases" to describe your reading comprehension ability are occurring to me right now, but I'll refrain from using them.
        civilized 4y ago
        I am sure we can all agree that the new generation of AI models has some applications. How much remains to be seen. The ones you've noted could be nice. We'll see. A Twitter thread demo is not quite a revolution yet IMHO. Even in the 60s some people thought ELIZA was a real person. I've said all I have to say. Have a nice day.
evouga 4y ago
At this point, I'm numb from all of the AI overhype. I was extremely excited about DALL-E and convinced myself that concrete fruits of the AI revolution were finally here... until a few seconds after I got the chance to try some queries myself. Ditto Copilot. The recent progress on generative models is a major research achievement, to be sure. That said, I'm not sure what it means it "terraform society," but so far AI shows no signs of making the same magnitude of impact on society as, say, the S-tier technological advances of the 20th and early 21st centuries, such as the personal computer, Internet, smartphone, or atomic bomb. That all may change if we get AGI that actually works, of course.
- rebelos 4y ago
  - version_five 4y ago
    - rebelos 4y ago
      Flagged for unsubstantiated ad hominem. EDIT: I saw you delete that comment. I won't point out how amusing it is that someone like you would accuse another person of being a troll.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - evouga 4y ago
    I mentioned DALL-E and Copilot in my post, so I'm not sure why you're linking me to a article summarizing recent high-profile research in large language models...
    - rebelos 4y ago
      You appear to have skipped over two links? And the LLM article goes well beyond DALL-E and Copilot. You should try reading it.
goatlover 4y ago
How do you know this to be true? There are many failed future predictions. There was a post about it just the other day. I believe it rated Kurzweil's singularity predictions at 7% accuracy to date. We still don't have commercial flying cars, cold fusion or space colonies.
- rebelos 4y ago
  Because I'm talking about AI, not AGI. And because I'm observing the frontier of AI: https://twitter.com/AdeptAILabs/status/1570144499187453952 https://twitter.com/AdeptAILabs/status/1570144499187453952 https://twitter.com/runwayml/status/1568220303808991232 https://twitter.com/runwayml/status/1568220303808991232 https://scale.com/blog/text-universal-interface https://scale.com/blog/text-universal-interface
  - goatlover 4y ago
    That's a neat demo. Now explain how you know, "AI that will terraform society and rapidly displace human labor over the coming decades", to be true.
    - rebelos 4y ago
      > Now explain how you know, "AI that will terraform society and rapidly displace human labor over the coming decades", to be true. Because I didn't say it will "obsolete" human labor. You're right that the word "will" is strong in that statement. But, since basically nothing is absolute in a philosophical sense and certainly no one can prognosticate with certainty, it's fair to read that as "will with high likelihood". And your surgical nitpicking doesn't hamper my argument in quite the way you think it does. Frankly, I believe it's in defiance of the following HN guideline: > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

version_five 4y ago

It have a lot of trouble understanding how this sentiment can exist. Especially since the rise of GPT-3 and now these image models, we've seen the pop-culture face of AI become even narrower. The promise of generalization that could lead to intelligent behavior has given way to people sharing amusing pictures or phrases that these models have generated, because that's what they do. It's cool, but it's basically become orthogonal to any AGI, or even AI with applications. It's now just a neat cultural phenomenon from which laypeople somehow extrapolate the kind if stuff the parent is saying. I'm not saying AI (neural networks) isn't making research progress, it's just that it has almost nothing to do with any of what laypeople extrapolate from it

rebelos 4y ago
I'm sorry, but there is no gentler way to phrase this: you are calamitously blind to what's happening on the ground. https://twitter.com/AdeptAILabs/status/1570144499187453952 https://twitter.com/AdeptAILabs/status/1570144499187453952 https://twitter.com/runwayml/status/1568220303808991232 https://twitter.com/runwayml/status/1568220303808991232 https://scale.com/blog/text-universal-interface https://scale.com/blog/text-universal-interface
- civilized 4y ago
  Watch out for histrionic phrases like "calamitously blind". They indicate you're getting too emotional, losing perspective, verging into extreme, black-and-white thinking. Text to video and converting some selected requests into actions is all nice, but it hardly contradicts the GP's observation: it's nowhere near AGI.
  - rebelos 4y ago
    A pattern I'm seeing in the later replies here is that few of them are responding to the substance of my comments. Perhaps dang will clean this up. EDIT Since you ninja edited this in: > Text to video and converting some selected requests into actions is all nice, but it hardly contradicts the GP's observation: it's nowhere near AGI. If you review the root comment I made, you'll understand that I was never arguing with the GP about AGI in the first place.
    - civilized 4y ago
      Then it's puzzling to accuse someone of calamitous blindness when you are not even engaging with the point of the post you're replying to.
      - rebelos 4y ago
        > Then it's puzzling to accuse someone of calamitous blindness when you are not even engaging with the point of the post you're replying to. At this point, I'm wondering if you're just provoking me deliberately. The comment I replied to said the following: > The promise of generalization that could lead to intelligent behavior has given way to people sharing amusing pictures or phrases that these models have generated, because that's what they do. It's cool, but it's basically become orthogonal to any AGI, or even AI with applications. And then I posted evidence of concrete applications that are in progress at some of the most well-resourced companies in Silicon Valley. Absolutely groundbreaking stuff that more than prove sophisticated applications of contemporary AI are well on their way to being realized. A lot of "histrionic phrases" to describe your reading comprehension ability are occurring to me right now, but I'll refrain from using them.
        civilized 4y ago
        I am sure we can all agree that the new generation of AI models has some applications. How much remains to be seen. The ones you've noted could be nice. We'll see. A Twitter thread demo is not quite a revolution yet IMHO. Even in the 60s some people thought ELIZA was a real person. I've said all I have to say. Have a nice day.

evouga 4y ago

At this point, I'm numb from all of the AI overhype. I was extremely excited about DALL-E and convinced myself that concrete fruits of the AI revolution were finally here... until a few seconds after I got the chance to try some queries myself. Ditto Copilot. The recent progress on generative models is a major research achievement, to be sure. That said, I'm not sure what it means it "terraform society," but so far AI shows no signs of making the same magnitude of impact on society as, say, the S-tier technological advances of the 20th and early 21st centuries, such as the personal computer, Internet, smartphone, or atomic bomb. That all may change if we get AGI that actually works, of course.

rebelos 4y ago
- version_five 4y ago
  - rebelos 4y ago
    Flagged for unsubstantiated ad hominem. EDIT: I saw you delete that comment. I won't point out how amusing it is that someone like you would accuse another person of being a troll.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- evouga 4y ago
  I mentioned DALL-E and Copilot in my post, so I'm not sure why you're linking me to a article summarizing recent high-profile research in large language models...
  - rebelos 4y ago
    You appear to have skipped over two links? And the LLM article goes well beyond DALL-E and Copilot. You should try reading it.

goatlover 4y ago

How do you know this to be true? There are many failed future predictions. There was a post about it just the other day. I believe it rated Kurzweil's singularity predictions at 7% accuracy to date. We still don't have commercial flying cars, cold fusion or space colonies.

rebelos 4y ago
Because I'm talking about AI, not AGI. And because I'm observing the frontier of AI: https://twitter.com/AdeptAILabs/status/1570144499187453952 https://twitter.com/AdeptAILabs/status/1570144499187453952 https://twitter.com/runwayml/status/1568220303808991232 https://twitter.com/runwayml/status/1568220303808991232 https://scale.com/blog/text-universal-interface https://scale.com/blog/text-universal-interface
- goatlover 4y ago
  That's a neat demo. Now explain how you know, "AI that will terraform society and rapidly displace human labor over the coming decades", to be true.
  - rebelos 4y ago
    > Now explain how you know, "AI that will terraform society and rapidly displace human labor over the coming decades", to be true. Because I didn't say it will "obsolete" human labor. You're right that the word "will" is strong in that statement. But, since basically nothing is absolute in a philosophical sense and certainly no one can prognosticate with certainty, it's fair to read that as "will with high likelihood". And your surgical nitpicking doesn't hamper my argument in quite the way you think it does. Frankly, I believe it's in defiance of the following HN guideline: > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.