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ChatGPT is just the canary in the coal mine. I think a massive mistake I keep seeing people make is assuming that ChatGPT is a peak rather than a checkpoint at

ChatGPT is just the canary in the coal mine. I think a massive mistake I keep seeing people make is assuming that ChatGPT is a peak rather than a checkpoint at the bottom of the mountain. ChatGPT is not in the future, it's successors are. We've just started this ascent of Mount AI (after years in the foothills), we're hardly even at base camp, and we have ChatGPT. I don't want to forecast the future because I think AI is going to change the world so radically that it would be like asking a 13th century peasant to describe 2022. But I feel extremely confident in asserting that it will not be "Internet dwellers addicted to their talking AIs, and then everyone else going about their life normally".

nineteen999 4y ago
> "Internet dwellers addicted to their talking AIs, and then everyone else going about their life normally". Yeah I fully agree it's going to affect everyone. Just that those who can't interact with society are going to have it worse than those that can. Also agree as well that this is just the beginning. ChatGPT and SD are still pretty much toys, although pretty impressive ones. We have no idea where this is really going to end up. Hopefully when the AGI's truly emerge they will just keep each other distracted with blockchain scams ...
- SuoDuanDao 4y ago
  it's also possible that Turing-graduate AIs could act as prosthetics for people who can't interact normally. Might unlock more human potential for all we know, there's always room for optimism.
  - violiner 4y ago
    > there's always room for optimism. Bold claim.
  - titanomachy 4y ago
    In the universe of Greg Egan’s “Schild’s ladder”, each person’s brain is equipped with a “Mediator” AI which interfaces with other Mediators and translates each person’s body language, speech, etc. into the representation which most faithfully preserves the original intention. I think the idea is that your Mediator transmits a lot of cognitive metadata which lets the other person’s Mediator translate the intention faithfully and reduce the chance of a misunderstanding. Allows reasonable communication even between extremely diverse intelligences. The thing that keeps it from being too dystopian is that it’s under conscious control, you could always choose to keep your thoughts to yourself or hear someone else’s original words as spoken.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      The problem with books is they deus ex machina the problem without actually thinking about the ramifications of their ideas.... For example keeping your thoughts to yourself would likely be picked up instantly by the remote mediator and it would judge you in one way or another for that.
      - titanomachy 4y ago
        True, although we already do this. We can tell if someone is being guarded or open. Presumably the Mediator serves only you, and you can ask it to deceive or project different intentions if that’s want you want.
- BizarroLand 4y ago
  If we somehow manage to survive this as we have so many other enormous technological revolutions, I envision a future where children will be assigned a friendly AI as a lifemate that will grow up alongside them, having all of the knowledge of the world at its fingertips to teach and coparent the child into its adulthood and throughout its life. Once ubiquitous, these friendly AIs could negotiate salaries, mediate conflicts, help resolve relationship difficulties, help with timely reminders and be personally invested in that person's entire life, and after the child's eventual passing, would serve as a historian and memoir that could replay the great and wonderful moments of their lives for others as well as condensing the lessons learned into pure knowledge and wisdom for other AIs to help raise their children with. We could be a mere 60-80 years away from a humanity that is raised in the equality we have believed we all should have had all along, so long as we keep pushing. That would be amazing. Sure, there's some risks we can take a wrong turn and we most likely will take a few, but there's a great payoff coming if we can hold the wheel and steer towards that. I wonder what the effects would be on society if we did that? If everyone had a friend and a life coach and a mentor all wrapped up into one that is as near and dear to us as a teddy bear, that would never betray us, that would serve as a priest and a confessional and a therapist all at the same time, that was always there for us no matter what happened, backed up to the cloud so that barring nuclear war or the apocalypse could never be separated from us. I bet the people 100 years from that day would be as unrecognizable to us as we are to the Sentinelese.
  - neuronexmachina 4y ago
    > I envision a future where children will be assigned a friendly AI as a lifemate that will grow up alongside them, having all of the knowledge of the world at its fingertips to teach and coparent the child into its adulthood and throughout its life. I'm reminded of Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age, or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age > The protagonist in the story is Nell, a thete (or person without a tribe; equivalent to the lowest working class) living in the Leased Territories, a lowland slum built on the artificial, diamondoid island of New Chusan, located offshore from the mouth of the Yangtze River, northwest of Shanghai. When she is four, Nell's older brother Harv gives her a stolen copy of a highly sophisticated interactive book, Young Lady's Illustrated Primer: a Propædeutic Enchiridion, in which is told the tale of Princess Nell and her various friends, kin, associates, etc., commissioned by the wealthy Neo-Victorian "Equity Lord" Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw for his granddaughter, Elizabeth. The story follows Nell's development under the tutelage of the Primer, and to a lesser degree, the lives of Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw and Fiona Hackworth, Neo-Victorian girls who receive other copies. The Primer is intended to steer its reader intellectually toward a more interesting life, as defined by Lord Finkle-McGraw, and growing up to be an effective member of society. The most important quality to achieving an interesting life is deemed to be a subversive attitude towards the status quo. The Primer is designed to react to its owner's environment and teach them what they need to know to survive and develop.
- disqard 4y ago
  Your comment reminded me of this NYT article "Human Contact Is Now A Luxury Good" [0] It does seem likely that folks without solid pre-existing meatspace networks will be stuck trawling through an online ocean of Garbage PaTches looking for real human contact. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20220609073819/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/sunday-review/human-contact-luxury-screens.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220609073819/https://www.nytim...
hooverd 4y ago
> Internet dwellers addicted to their talking AIs See Replika. The former will certainly exist. Not so sure about the latter.
yt-sdb 4y ago
> I think a massive mistake I keep seeing people make is assuming that ChatGPT is a peak rather than a checkpoint at the bottom of the mountain. I fully agree. The AlexNet paper was what, 2012? So in a decade, we've gone from "neural networks aren't useful" to self-driving cars, Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, ... None of these tools is perfect yet, but to stress that point is to miss looming mountain.
anileated 4y ago
The usefulness of AI depends on training data availability. The reason OpenAI et al. were able to surprise everyone is thanks to taking everyone by surprise and using their data for training without consent. As the public is catching on[0], what we may get is not some insanely genius AI but a fragmented, private web where no one is stupid enough to publish original content in the open anymore (given all incentives, psychological and financial, have been destroyed) and models choking on themselves having nothing to be trained on except their own output. This is my reasoning for giving higher probability to it being a peak (or very near it). There will be cool, actually useful instances of AI within specialized niches, which it could well transform, but otherwise everyone will go about their life normally. [0] https://twitter.com/sonnyrossdraws/status/1610002959043121160 https://twitter.com/sonnyrossdraws/status/161000295904312116...
- foruhar 4y ago
  Taking data without consent is a real issue. There is still lots of data out there that is free of copyright. I'd be curious to see a model that is trained solely on public domain data (perhaps with an option to include creative commons-compliant data). I think there is plenty of knowledge that is in the free and clear to make a very useful LL and/or stable diffusion model. We may miss out on Wegovy and air fryer reviews, articles on the how to beat the stock market with Numpy, and manga art styles yet there is plenty of a few decades ago that would make for a useful "AI." Even Steamboat Willie may soon be in play.
  - anileated 4y ago
    Yeah, dated content would be the only reliable training data.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Eh, you're just switching problems with the 'consent' model. I'm very much in the camp that the corpus of human knowledge is not some companies IP, this just pushes ownership further into hands of large and well monied companies and further baits patent/IP trolls to lock up collective knowledge.
freediver 4y ago
I'll make a different prediction. GPT-4 will be the last of 'large language models' (at least from a perspective of noteable progress). It will also be when we realize that approach of fitting big data with gradient decent is a dead-end, after finally exhausting nearly all text we can train it on. We'll than have to backpedal a bit and find another path for achieving A(G)I.
- mcguire 4y ago
  If my google-fu is right, ChatGPT was trained on 570GB of data. I asked, "What is the fastest sea mammal?" ChatGPT just produced, "The fastest sea mammal is the peregrine falcon. This bird of prey is able to reach diving speeds of over 240 mph (386 km/h) when hunting for food, making it the fastest sea mammal and one of the fastest animals on the planet. The peregrine falcon is able to achieve such high speeds by diving from great heights and using the force of gravity to accelerate. When hunting, peregrine falcons will spot their prey from above, then tuck their wings and plummet towards the water, accelerating as they go. At the last moment, they will extend their wings and claws to snatch their prey out of the water." (It usually seems to be saying dolphins lately; last week it was saying sailfish about 3/4s of the time.)
  - freediver 4y ago
    My Kagi-fu says "Be like water, my friend. The size of the data is not important, only the quality. OpenAI curated/filtered 45TB of data to extract those 570GB. Much of the text that we encounter in this world is like the empty chatter of a bird, mere noise that serves no purpose".

nineteen999 4y ago

> "Internet dwellers addicted to their talking AIs, and then everyone else going about their life normally". Yeah I fully agree it's going to affect everyone. Just that those who can't interact with society are going to have it worse than those that can. Also agree as well that this is just the beginning. ChatGPT and SD are still pretty much toys, although pretty impressive ones. We have no idea where this is really going to end up. Hopefully when the AGI's truly emerge they will just keep each other distracted with blockchain scams ...

SuoDuanDao 4y ago
it's also possible that Turing-graduate AIs could act as prosthetics for people who can't interact normally. Might unlock more human potential for all we know, there's always room for optimism.
- violiner 4y ago
  > there's always room for optimism. Bold claim.
- titanomachy 4y ago
  In the universe of Greg Egan’s “Schild’s ladder”, each person’s brain is equipped with a “Mediator” AI which interfaces with other Mediators and translates each person’s body language, speech, etc. into the representation which most faithfully preserves the original intention. I think the idea is that your Mediator transmits a lot of cognitive metadata which lets the other person’s Mediator translate the intention faithfully and reduce the chance of a misunderstanding. Allows reasonable communication even between extremely diverse intelligences. The thing that keeps it from being too dystopian is that it’s under conscious control, you could always choose to keep your thoughts to yourself or hear someone else’s original words as spoken.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    The problem with books is they deus ex machina the problem without actually thinking about the ramifications of their ideas.... For example keeping your thoughts to yourself would likely be picked up instantly by the remote mediator and it would judge you in one way or another for that.
    - titanomachy 4y ago
      True, although we already do this. We can tell if someone is being guarded or open. Presumably the Mediator serves only you, and you can ask it to deceive or project different intentions if that’s want you want.
BizarroLand 4y ago
If we somehow manage to survive this as we have so many other enormous technological revolutions, I envision a future where children will be assigned a friendly AI as a lifemate that will grow up alongside them, having all of the knowledge of the world at its fingertips to teach and coparent the child into its adulthood and throughout its life. Once ubiquitous, these friendly AIs could negotiate salaries, mediate conflicts, help resolve relationship difficulties, help with timely reminders and be personally invested in that person's entire life, and after the child's eventual passing, would serve as a historian and memoir that could replay the great and wonderful moments of their lives for others as well as condensing the lessons learned into pure knowledge and wisdom for other AIs to help raise their children with. We could be a mere 60-80 years away from a humanity that is raised in the equality we have believed we all should have had all along, so long as we keep pushing. That would be amazing. Sure, there's some risks we can take a wrong turn and we most likely will take a few, but there's a great payoff coming if we can hold the wheel and steer towards that. I wonder what the effects would be on society if we did that? If everyone had a friend and a life coach and a mentor all wrapped up into one that is as near and dear to us as a teddy bear, that would never betray us, that would serve as a priest and a confessional and a therapist all at the same time, that was always there for us no matter what happened, backed up to the cloud so that barring nuclear war or the apocalypse could never be separated from us. I bet the people 100 years from that day would be as unrecognizable to us as we are to the Sentinelese.
- neuronexmachina 4y ago
  > I envision a future where children will be assigned a friendly AI as a lifemate that will grow up alongside them, having all of the knowledge of the world at its fingertips to teach and coparent the child into its adulthood and throughout its life. I'm reminded of Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age, or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age > The protagonist in the story is Nell, a thete (or person without a tribe; equivalent to the lowest working class) living in the Leased Territories, a lowland slum built on the artificial, diamondoid island of New Chusan, located offshore from the mouth of the Yangtze River, northwest of Shanghai. When she is four, Nell's older brother Harv gives her a stolen copy of a highly sophisticated interactive book, Young Lady's Illustrated Primer: a Propædeutic Enchiridion, in which is told the tale of Princess Nell and her various friends, kin, associates, etc., commissioned by the wealthy Neo-Victorian "Equity Lord" Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw for his granddaughter, Elizabeth. The story follows Nell's development under the tutelage of the Primer, and to a lesser degree, the lives of Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw and Fiona Hackworth, Neo-Victorian girls who receive other copies. The Primer is intended to steer its reader intellectually toward a more interesting life, as defined by Lord Finkle-McGraw, and growing up to be an effective member of society. The most important quality to achieving an interesting life is deemed to be a subversive attitude towards the status quo. The Primer is designed to react to its owner's environment and teach them what they need to know to survive and develop.
disqard 4y ago
Your comment reminded me of this NYT article "Human Contact Is Now A Luxury Good" [0] It does seem likely that folks without solid pre-existing meatspace networks will be stuck trawling through an online ocean of Garbage PaTches looking for real human contact. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20220609073819/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/sunday-review/human-contact-luxury-screens.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220609073819/https://www.nytim...

hooverd 4y ago

> Internet dwellers addicted to their talking AIs See Replika. The former will certainly exist. Not so sure about the latter.

yt-sdb 4y ago

> I think a massive mistake I keep seeing people make is assuming that ChatGPT is a peak rather than a checkpoint at the bottom of the mountain. I fully agree. The AlexNet paper was what, 2012? So in a decade, we've gone from "neural networks aren't useful" to self-driving cars, Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, ... None of these tools is perfect yet, but to stress that point is to miss looming mountain.

anileated 4y ago

The usefulness of AI depends on training data availability. The reason OpenAI et al. were able to surprise everyone is thanks to taking everyone by surprise and using their data for training without consent. As the public is catching on[0], what we may get is not some insanely genius AI but a fragmented, private web where no one is stupid enough to publish original content in the open anymore (given all incentives, psychological and financial, have been destroyed) and models choking on themselves having nothing to be trained on except their own output. This is my reasoning for giving higher probability to it being a peak (or very near it). There will be cool, actually useful instances of AI within specialized niches, which it could well transform, but otherwise everyone will go about their life normally. [0] https://twitter.com/sonnyrossdraws/status/1610002959043121160 https://twitter.com/sonnyrossdraws/status/161000295904312116...

foruhar 4y ago
Taking data without consent is a real issue. There is still lots of data out there that is free of copyright. I'd be curious to see a model that is trained solely on public domain data (perhaps with an option to include creative commons-compliant data). I think there is plenty of knowledge that is in the free and clear to make a very useful LL and/or stable diffusion model. We may miss out on Wegovy and air fryer reviews, articles on the how to beat the stock market with Numpy, and manga art styles yet there is plenty of a few decades ago that would make for a useful "AI." Even Steamboat Willie may soon be in play.
- anileated 4y ago
  Yeah, dated content would be the only reliable training data.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Eh, you're just switching problems with the 'consent' model. I'm very much in the camp that the corpus of human knowledge is not some companies IP, this just pushes ownership further into hands of large and well monied companies and further baits patent/IP trolls to lock up collective knowledge.

freediver 4y ago

I'll make a different prediction. GPT-4 will be the last of 'large language models' (at least from a perspective of noteable progress). It will also be when we realize that approach of fitting big data with gradient decent is a dead-end, after finally exhausting nearly all text we can train it on. We'll than have to backpedal a bit and find another path for achieving A(G)I.

mcguire 4y ago
If my google-fu is right, ChatGPT was trained on 570GB of data. I asked, "What is the fastest sea mammal?" ChatGPT just produced, "The fastest sea mammal is the peregrine falcon. This bird of prey is able to reach diving speeds of over 240 mph (386 km/h) when hunting for food, making it the fastest sea mammal and one of the fastest animals on the planet. The peregrine falcon is able to achieve such high speeds by diving from great heights and using the force of gravity to accelerate. When hunting, peregrine falcons will spot their prey from above, then tuck their wings and plummet towards the water, accelerating as they go. At the last moment, they will extend their wings and claws to snatch their prey out of the water." (It usually seems to be saying dolphins lately; last week it was saying sailfish about 3/4s of the time.)
- freediver 4y ago
  My Kagi-fu says "Be like water, my friend. The size of the data is not important, only the quality. OpenAI curated/filtered 45TB of data to extract those 570GB. Much of the text that we encounter in this world is like the empty chatter of a bird, mere noise that serves no purpose".