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> We are either going to be living in Star Trek or all dead in the next 50 years, but nothing in between—exciting, but genuinely scary. Every time a new advanc

by mjr00 4y ago

> We are either going to be living in Star Trek or all dead in the next 50 years, but nothing in between—exciting, but genuinely scary. Every time a new advancement in AI is released to the public, we go through a hype cycle. Day 1: Hey, this is pretty cool. Day 2: Holy shit, you can manipulate the AI in this way. This is amazing. Day 7: This is going to change the world forever. This is absolutely incredible. Day 30: meh, this isn't that impressive. I'd understand if it had been a while but we just went through this cycle with Stable Diffusion and its variants 2-3 months ago! People already have learned what SD pics look like and are generally just annoyed when people share them on social media now. The novelty has worn off. Similarly, we've got a lot of cool and interesting stories coming out of ChatGPT and how it reacts to particular prompts, but c'mon. Convincing a computer to write a Python program that calls `launch_attack()` is funny, but not particularly indicative of a Terminator-style machine rebellion. In 4-6 weeks the novelty will wear off and we'll just accept that this is what computers are capable of doing. No need for human extinction histrionics.

zdenham 4y ago
Yes, we become desensitized to technological advancements as they are normalized, now at a faster rate than ever. The fact that we have new breakthroughs very frequently I believe is more cause for concern, not less. Regarding histrionics / tone. I may reel the language back a bit to be a bit less alarmist. But tbh, I genuinely find some of the outputs to be pretty damn alarming.
naasking 4y ago
What a weird take. The fact that people quickly get bored of new innovations implies absolutely nothing about it's potential impact or its dangers.
- nextlevelwizard 4y ago
  The primary part is that article is pure sensationalism and clickbait. There was zero lines of none pseudo code. Sure it was syntactically correct python, but that is long way from actually working. Same with Stable Diffusion. People acted as if it alone is going to kill artists and make every people able to make convincing fake news as snap of their fingers, but that is not the case. Stable Diffusion is very impressive, but it still requires work after the image has been generated to be anything but a toy. Maybe in couple years it could evolve, but we are still quite far.
  - zdenham 4y ago
    Fair point on sensationalism, I think it's a useful hook to get folks reading and talking. There is a "Nuance" section at the bottom where I qualify most of the rah rah language. That being said, I disagree that it is that far from actually working. Check out the codex demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGUCcjHTmGY&ab_channel=OpenAI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGUCcjHTmGY&ab_channel=OpenA... This is a year old and we've made a lot of progress since then. The model is certainly capable of writing non pseudo-code, although I started hitting rate limits before I got it all the way there in my example. Edit (typos)
  - naasking 4y ago
    > The primary part is that article is pure sensationalism and clickbait. There was zero lines of none pseudo code. Sure it was syntactically correct python, but that is long way from actually working. Not as far as you think. This has repeatedly been the case for AI progress so far. > Same with Stable Diffusion. People acted as if it alone is going to kill artists and make every people able to make convincing fake news as snap of their fingers, but that is not the case. I'm not sure how you can make that determination at this time as it literally just came out.
csande17 4y ago
There is hope. Previously, all OpenAI needed to do to initiate a hype cycle was put out a press release with a few cherry-picked example outputs. Now they have to burn a bunch of money letting people run the model for free! One can only hope that in another couple years, OpenAI will have to release something that people can actually run on their own computers before social media loses their minds about it.
- zdenham 4y ago
  Maybe the fact that more people try it, it's more likely that we surface issues early?
- visarga 4y ago
  You want openAI to open AI? not possible. Stability and Eleuther are preparing the open versions of these models.
ehsankia 4y ago
To me, what's scary is exponential graphs. Anything before the curve looks flat, and everything after looks nearly vertical. Everything seems fine, and right now you have time to get bored between each step, until one day it's suddenly happening much faster than you can even react to it. Consider how this year alone we basically had Dall-E, Imagen, Stable Fusion, Midjourney, Lambda, early Imagen Video samples and now ChatGPT, and the years not even over yet. Original Dall-E was almost 2 years ago, GPT-2 was 3 years ago.
- astrange 4y ago
  Exponential graphs and "the singularity" aren't real. Everything in real life is an S-curve. This is just someone scaring you with math by pretending inconvenient details like entropy don't exist.
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
    I would have agreed with you. But think about it, when non tech people posed nonsense questions like "Do robots dream" we dismissed them because that is not how computers work. Turns out they not only dream but they do it better than us! Maybe we can also rethink our then correct assumptions about the singularity
  - kzrdude 4y ago
    I think it's right to "scare" at least when you point out the places where we expect growth, i.e we expect exponential growth. You could say the Limits to grown (book) is about that it's an S curve and want people to take note and get ready for limits/brakes. Some systems behave differently in a state of constant growth and in a resource limited state.
    - astrange 4y ago
      Limits to Growth is a bad book that caused the housing crisis in the US and the coming demographic crisis in China. Literally they did the one child policy because someone read it. It’s basically Thanos’s manifesto.
Semaphor 4y ago
> People already have learned what SD pics look like and are generally just annoyed when people share them on social media now. The novelty has worn off. I have not, and I’m both fascinated by what they can do and love seeing all that art.
marvin 4y ago
You folks are so freakin’ cynical. This feels like magic. It obvioulsy heralds future developments in AI that will be genuinely world-changing in less than a decade. Why not just revel in that for a little moment?
- majewsky 4y ago
  The exact same thing could have been said (and probably was said) about the first wave of AI research in the 1960s. And we all know how that panned out. There's a reason that "AI winter" is an established phrase with its own Wikipedia article.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
arisAlexis 4y ago
Taleb has a nice paradigm of a duck that until its 1000th day thinks the world is wonderful and then is historical data model is broken down by an axe.
rthomas6 4y ago
I completely agree that there is a hype cycle with every new advancement in AI, and that the novelty can wear off quickly. But I think it's important to remember that these advancements are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what AI is capable of. While it's easy to get excited about a cool new trick that a computer can do, we need to remember that AI is still in its early stages and has a lot of room for growth. As AI continues to advance, we'll likely see more and more impressive capabilities that will truly change the world in ways we can't even imagine yet. So while it's natural to get excited and then let the excitement fade, I think it's important to remember the potential of AI and keep pushing forward with its development. Oh by the way, this comment was generated by chatGPT with the following prompt: "Respond to the following comment in the character of someone who is optimistic about the continued growth of AI capabilities. (Your comment)"
- mjr00 4y ago
  Funnily enough, two sentences in I thought "this comment sounds like it was written by GPT3." To me that says that as impressive as it is, it's not passing the Turing test anytime soon.
  - rthomas6 4y ago
    It certainly has its own distinct voice. I think it has some constraints inside it that forces it to only speak in complete, grammatically correct sentences. If you give it different directions for what kind of structure to provide, it can really change how it sounds. I got interesting and more natural sounding results asking it to play "a human who occasionally does not respond with complete sentences", and also "a laconic human".
dwild 4y ago
I don't know for you but I'm still amazed at Dall-e and know plenty of people who are too. I got access 112 days ago, and was also relatively impressed before too (but definitively not as much as when I got access). > we'll just accept that this is what computers are capable of doing. I accepted that on day 1 for Dall-E, and I kind of accepted that for ChatGPT too (but that one is more nuanced as it can do "more" than a task, it's hard to determine its limit obviously). Doesn't change that this is amazing and I do believe will change the world forever.

by mjr00 4y ago

zdenham 4y ago

Yes, we become desensitized to technological advancements as they are normalized, now at a faster rate than ever. The fact that we have new breakthroughs very frequently I believe is more cause for concern, not less. Regarding histrionics / tone. I may reel the language back a bit to be a bit less alarmist. But tbh, I genuinely find some of the outputs to be pretty damn alarming.

naasking 4y ago

What a weird take. The fact that people quickly get bored of new innovations implies absolutely nothing about it's potential impact or its dangers.

nextlevelwizard 4y ago
The primary part is that article is pure sensationalism and clickbait. There was zero lines of none pseudo code. Sure it was syntactically correct python, but that is long way from actually working. Same with Stable Diffusion. People acted as if it alone is going to kill artists and make every people able to make convincing fake news as snap of their fingers, but that is not the case. Stable Diffusion is very impressive, but it still requires work after the image has been generated to be anything but a toy. Maybe in couple years it could evolve, but we are still quite far.
- zdenham 4y ago
  Fair point on sensationalism, I think it's a useful hook to get folks reading and talking. There is a "Nuance" section at the bottom where I qualify most of the rah rah language. That being said, I disagree that it is that far from actually working. Check out the codex demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGUCcjHTmGY&ab_channel=OpenAI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGUCcjHTmGY&ab_channel=OpenA... This is a year old and we've made a lot of progress since then. The model is certainly capable of writing non pseudo-code, although I started hitting rate limits before I got it all the way there in my example. Edit (typos)
- naasking 4y ago
  > The primary part is that article is pure sensationalism and clickbait. There was zero lines of none pseudo code. Sure it was syntactically correct python, but that is long way from actually working. Not as far as you think. This has repeatedly been the case for AI progress so far. > Same with Stable Diffusion. People acted as if it alone is going to kill artists and make every people able to make convincing fake news as snap of their fingers, but that is not the case. I'm not sure how you can make that determination at this time as it literally just came out.

csande17 4y ago

There is hope. Previously, all OpenAI needed to do to initiate a hype cycle was put out a press release with a few cherry-picked example outputs. Now they have to burn a bunch of money letting people run the model for free! One can only hope that in another couple years, OpenAI will have to release something that people can actually run on their own computers before social media loses their minds about it.

zdenham 4y ago
Maybe the fact that more people try it, it's more likely that we surface issues early?
visarga 4y ago
You want openAI to open AI? not possible. Stability and Eleuther are preparing the open versions of these models.

ehsankia 4y ago

To me, what's scary is exponential graphs. Anything before the curve looks flat, and everything after looks nearly vertical. Everything seems fine, and right now you have time to get bored between each step, until one day it's suddenly happening much faster than you can even react to it. Consider how this year alone we basically had Dall-E, Imagen, Stable Fusion, Midjourney, Lambda, early Imagen Video samples and now ChatGPT, and the years not even over yet. Original Dall-E was almost 2 years ago, GPT-2 was 3 years ago.

astrange 4y ago
Exponential graphs and "the singularity" aren't real. Everything in real life is an S-curve. This is just someone scaring you with math by pretending inconvenient details like entropy don't exist.
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  I would have agreed with you. But think about it, when non tech people posed nonsense questions like "Do robots dream" we dismissed them because that is not how computers work. Turns out they not only dream but they do it better than us! Maybe we can also rethink our then correct assumptions about the singularity
- kzrdude 4y ago
  I think it's right to "scare" at least when you point out the places where we expect growth, i.e we expect exponential growth. You could say the Limits to grown (book) is about that it's an S curve and want people to take note and get ready for limits/brakes. Some systems behave differently in a state of constant growth and in a resource limited state.
  - astrange 4y ago
    Limits to Growth is a bad book that caused the housing crisis in the US and the coming demographic crisis in China. Literally they did the one child policy because someone read it. It’s basically Thanos’s manifesto.

Semaphor 4y ago

> People already have learned what SD pics look like and are generally just annoyed when people share them on social media now. The novelty has worn off. I have not, and I’m both fascinated by what they can do and love seeing all that art.

marvin 4y ago

You folks are so freakin’ cynical. This feels like magic. It obvioulsy heralds future developments in AI that will be genuinely world-changing in less than a decade. Why not just revel in that for a little moment?

majewsky 4y ago
The exact same thing could have been said (and probably was said) about the first wave of AI research in the 1960s. And we all know how that panned out. There's a reason that "AI winter" is an established phrase with its own Wikipedia article.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

arisAlexis 4y ago

Taleb has a nice paradigm of a duck that until its 1000th day thinks the world is wonderful and then is historical data model is broken down by an axe.

rthomas6 4y ago

I completely agree that there is a hype cycle with every new advancement in AI, and that the novelty can wear off quickly. But I think it's important to remember that these advancements are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what AI is capable of. While it's easy to get excited about a cool new trick that a computer can do, we need to remember that AI is still in its early stages and has a lot of room for growth. As AI continues to advance, we'll likely see more and more impressive capabilities that will truly change the world in ways we can't even imagine yet. So while it's natural to get excited and then let the excitement fade, I think it's important to remember the potential of AI and keep pushing forward with its development. Oh by the way, this comment was generated by chatGPT with the following prompt: "Respond to the following comment in the character of someone who is optimistic about the continued growth of AI capabilities. (Your comment)"

mjr00 4y ago
Funnily enough, two sentences in I thought "this comment sounds like it was written by GPT3." To me that says that as impressive as it is, it's not passing the Turing test anytime soon.
- rthomas6 4y ago
  It certainly has its own distinct voice. I think it has some constraints inside it that forces it to only speak in complete, grammatically correct sentences. If you give it different directions for what kind of structure to provide, it can really change how it sounds. I got interesting and more natural sounding results asking it to play "a human who occasionally does not respond with complete sentences", and also "a laconic human".

dwild 4y ago

I don't know for you but I'm still amazed at Dall-e and know plenty of people who are too. I got access 112 days ago, and was also relatively impressed before too (but definitively not as much as when I got access). > we'll just accept that this is what computers are capable of doing. I accepted that on day 1 for Dall-E, and I kind of accepted that for ChatGPT too (but that one is more nuanced as it can do "more" than a task, it's hard to determine its limit obviously). Doesn't change that this is amazing and I do believe will change the world forever.