4 ms·

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 no

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.
- OscarCunningham 4y ago
  Knowing a curve will eventually level off isn't very reassuring if you don't know what level it will reach.
- api 4y ago
  Sure it’s an S curve but we don’t know where it will level off. This is the same as the response to people who bash economists for thinking “growth will go on forever.” Of course that can’t happen, but where is the top? Earth? Solar system? Galaxy? Parallel dimensions? Miniaturization and dematerialization causing extreme decoupling of economy from resource use? Nobody knows. The S curve could plateau in 10 years or 10,000 years.
mjr00 4y ago
It could be an exponential graph, but it could also be a discrete step chart. When you're at the point where a leap in technology is happening, it looks like it's exponential for a brief period of time. But after that jump, things remain largely flat for indefinite periods of time. This is what leads to AI hype cycles and AI winters.
- csande17 4y ago
  Another aspect to consider is that a lot of the recent growth in AI is economic, not technological. The kind of language model that makes Hacker News headlines today is a thousand times larger than models were four years ago. GPUs haven't gotten a thousand times better, and the underlying algorithms aren't a thousand times better; companies are just spending a lot more money. There is no particular reason to expect that trend to continue indefinitely.
arcturus17 4y ago
What happened to self-driving for example, though? The growth of the the technology hasn't been exponential, it seems to grow under a diminishing marginal returns law, that is, the first 90% was "easy" to solve, but every bit of the remaining 10% seems increasingly and excruciatingly harder. If you're observing local behavior in the first 90% of the curve it might look like it could explode any time but unbeknownst to you, the behavior towards infinite is a actually a constant ceiling. I'm not categorically denying it's exponential, I'm just saying it's very difficult to make assumptions based on observed local behavior.
- vidarh 4y ago
  Self driving is limited by the only real testing requiring real hours of driving with real cars, where getting the last 10% of the way requires getting real-life testing in increasingly rare conditions.
  - arcturus17 4y ago
    But can you ascertain that similar dynamics won't also come into play for software? Yes, software is easier to deploy and test at scale - there are barely any physical constraints compared to driving. But on the other hand it's also a more complex domain than driving. Taking Advent of Code as an example, GPT seems to be making mince meat of some problems, but it struggles with others. Is it not conceivable that in software there will be a "last 10%" where AI will trip up, either because the inputs (prompts/requirements) are hard to express or parse, or the output (code) is hard to generate?
    - vidarh 4y ago
      "Similar dynamics" requires situations where training the AI becomes bottlenecked on training opportunities. There will certainly be areas where such bottlenecks exist, and so we can assume that there will be types of problems we can't expect exponential improvement to continue once it hits those bottlenecks. But the point is that self-driving is a poor example to use to judge what we can expect to see in fields that are less constrained by turnaround times and safety. Not least because "anyone" - though certainly constrained by costs - can try to do novel things with large language models. Very few can try to do novel things with self-driving because they have nothing realistic to test it on at scale.
epsilonic 4y ago
Yes, makes sense; however, exponential growth is not always sustained and that is why logistic growth is observed across several phenomena that occur in nature. Now, granted, it may be a while before we ever reach a plateau, so possibly more exciting things to see till then.
causi 4y ago
"Maintaining the plot" by efficient retention of relevant and trimming of irrelevant data seems like the next big challenge. Man I cannot wait to feed a novel into an AI and get a comic book version output.
nonameiguess 4y ago
What is an exponential growth curve of a chatbot supposed to look like? The endpoint is being consistently indistinguishable from a human on the other end. Once that is achieved, I don't see how you get even better than human at generating text. You can certainly get faster and generate a lot more text than a human, but computers have been able to do that already for decades. I'm trying to think of what this author here envisions happening because an AI writes a story about doing bad things. Very good stories about human extinction have existed for a long time and have not resulted in actual human extinction. When I think of texts that seem associated with significant world historical changes, like the New Testament, Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence, it seems there was quite a bit of event context that was important, and it wasn't the sheer quality of the text itself that impacted history. Similarly with art. Is Videogen-4 going to be able to create a synthetic sequence of image frames with an audio track that is "exponentially" better than Casablanca? What would that even mean? The quality of art is completely subjective. There is no quantifiable measure like transistor density that can get X times improvement. No film has the power to cause human extinction and neither do great filmmakers.
wittycardio 4y ago
AI has advanced mostly due to increase in compute and data available. The results are very impressive but the defects are also pretty obvious. Just like self driving cars we'll soon get into the long tail problem

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.
OscarCunningham 4y ago
Knowing a curve will eventually level off isn't very reassuring if you don't know what level it will reach.
api 4y ago
Sure it’s an S curve but we don’t know where it will level off. This is the same as the response to people who bash economists for thinking “growth will go on forever.” Of course that can’t happen, but where is the top? Earth? Solar system? Galaxy? Parallel dimensions? Miniaturization and dematerialization causing extreme decoupling of economy from resource use? Nobody knows. The S curve could plateau in 10 years or 10,000 years.

mjr00 4y ago

It could be an exponential graph, but it could also be a discrete step chart. When you're at the point where a leap in technology is happening, it looks like it's exponential for a brief period of time. But after that jump, things remain largely flat for indefinite periods of time. This is what leads to AI hype cycles and AI winters.

csande17 4y ago
Another aspect to consider is that a lot of the recent growth in AI is economic, not technological. The kind of language model that makes Hacker News headlines today is a thousand times larger than models were four years ago. GPUs haven't gotten a thousand times better, and the underlying algorithms aren't a thousand times better; companies are just spending a lot more money. There is no particular reason to expect that trend to continue indefinitely.

arcturus17 4y ago

What happened to self-driving for example, though? The growth of the the technology hasn't been exponential, it seems to grow under a diminishing marginal returns law, that is, the first 90% was "easy" to solve, but every bit of the remaining 10% seems increasingly and excruciatingly harder. If you're observing local behavior in the first 90% of the curve it might look like it could explode any time but unbeknownst to you, the behavior towards infinite is a actually a constant ceiling. I'm not categorically denying it's exponential, I'm just saying it's very difficult to make assumptions based on observed local behavior.

vidarh 4y ago
Self driving is limited by the only real testing requiring real hours of driving with real cars, where getting the last 10% of the way requires getting real-life testing in increasingly rare conditions.
- arcturus17 4y ago
  But can you ascertain that similar dynamics won't also come into play for software? Yes, software is easier to deploy and test at scale - there are barely any physical constraints compared to driving. But on the other hand it's also a more complex domain than driving. Taking Advent of Code as an example, GPT seems to be making mince meat of some problems, but it struggles with others. Is it not conceivable that in software there will be a "last 10%" where AI will trip up, either because the inputs (prompts/requirements) are hard to express or parse, or the output (code) is hard to generate?
  - vidarh 4y ago
    "Similar dynamics" requires situations where training the AI becomes bottlenecked on training opportunities. There will certainly be areas where such bottlenecks exist, and so we can assume that there will be types of problems we can't expect exponential improvement to continue once it hits those bottlenecks. But the point is that self-driving is a poor example to use to judge what we can expect to see in fields that are less constrained by turnaround times and safety. Not least because "anyone" - though certainly constrained by costs - can try to do novel things with large language models. Very few can try to do novel things with self-driving because they have nothing realistic to test it on at scale.

epsilonic 4y ago

Yes, makes sense; however, exponential growth is not always sustained and that is why logistic growth is observed across several phenomena that occur in nature. Now, granted, it may be a while before we ever reach a plateau, so possibly more exciting things to see till then.

causi 4y ago

"Maintaining the plot" by efficient retention of relevant and trimming of irrelevant data seems like the next big challenge. Man I cannot wait to feed a novel into an AI and get a comic book version output.

nonameiguess 4y ago

What is an exponential growth curve of a chatbot supposed to look like? The endpoint is being consistently indistinguishable from a human on the other end. Once that is achieved, I don't see how you get even better than human at generating text. You can certainly get faster and generate a lot more text than a human, but computers have been able to do that already for decades. I'm trying to think of what this author here envisions happening because an AI writes a story about doing bad things. Very good stories about human extinction have existed for a long time and have not resulted in actual human extinction. When I think of texts that seem associated with significant world historical changes, like the New Testament, Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence, it seems there was quite a bit of event context that was important, and it wasn't the sheer quality of the text itself that impacted history. Similarly with art. Is Videogen-4 going to be able to create a synthetic sequence of image frames with an audio track that is "exponentially" better than Casablanca? What would that even mean? The quality of art is completely subjective. There is no quantifiable measure like transistor density that can get X times improvement. No film has the power to cause human extinction and neither do great filmmakers.

wittycardio 4y ago

AI has advanced mostly due to increase in compute and data available. The results are very impressive but the defects are also pretty obvious. Just like self driving cars we'll soon get into the long tail problem