6 ms·

I think ~100 years is an overestimate by an order of magnitude. I know that people like to bash GPT-3 and ChatGPT for not being perfect. But people like to bas

I think ~100 years is an overestimate by an order of magnitude. I know that people like to bash GPT-3 and ChatGPT for not being perfect. But people like to bash everything, especially things they don't understand. Technology tends to grow much closer to an exponential speed than linear. What ChatGPT can do today is truly, utterly, astonishing. That's the new baseline.

lm28469 4y ago
It's been at least 70 years since AI is supposed to replace everything a human can do. It's still mostly shit at basically everything besides playing chess and go, I don't think 100 years is unrealistic, especially given the other very important issues we face and will face as humanity
- ilaksh 4y ago
  AI can play chess, Go, Jeopardy, StarCraft, Minecraft, Atari games, write essays, summarize text, answer almost any question, drive a car, do above average on a SAT test, fool many people into wondering on Twitter if there were real people typing answers, write chapters of books, act as a dungeon master, write code to spec, win programming competitions, act as a therapist, fold proteins, provide medical diagnosis, visualize any image you describe, visualize any video clip you describe, animate characters, understand spoken language, take drive-thru orders, translate, tell jokes on any topic on demand (vastly funnier than you, would bet anything on that), write songs (music and lyrics), recreate a scene from any angle based on some photos, impersonate any person speaking in video and/or audio, impersonate any person's writing style, imitate any art style. It's quite possible that AI and robotics will fully surpass humans in all tasks in the next several years and you will still be in denial. Along with millions of others. EDIT: not permitted to reply, but the comments below are examples of denial or lack of information. In fact leading edge systems have been driving without human assistance for years. The new OpenAI models certainly don't need any help to answer their prompts. It's going to be interesting to see how far the denial goes. I assume some people will deny that artificial entities have any "real" intelligence somehow forever, even after they are literally talking to them face to face on a daily basis as they provide superior professional advice or services. Or even when there are many autonomous agents that take control of the planet.
  - newaccount74 4y ago
    Aside from games, AI can do all these things only with human assistance. It's like saying "Excel can do your taxes". Sure, it can, if you put the correct numbers and formulas into the cells first.
    - candiodari 4y ago
      You forget that a lot of these are moving the goal posts. AI beat the top players at all those games, but new rules were introduced until AI researchers mostly abandoned those efforts. For instance, the starcraft AI found a really good build order that let it quickly build "Stalkers", a versatile but relatively weak unit. I will note that that build order had several factors that humans found very surprising (consistently oversaturating resource collection by a lot), then controlled those stalker units so well even world-champion level players couldn't match them, with double the APM (meaning the human was allowed 2 actions for every 1 action the AI could take). In chess the rules have become ... almost ridiculous. Due to cheating, in chess championships you now are "only allowed to play the moves any of the top 3 AIs would play twice in a match, after the first 5 moves". In other words the rules are utterly dependent on humans being worse than AIs. Like in starcraft, btw, AIs have gotten so confident beating human players that a general critique of AI players is that they've gotten "agressive, to the point it's insulting to human players", as one Youtube video put it. AIs ... beat the average human at driving cars, hell, even Tesla's autopilot beats something like the 98% percentile driver in safety, and Waymo's "chauffeur" is apparently much better than that. I've used chauffeur, and driven behind/around a car controlled by chauffeur. You know what my main comment is? Waymo's chauffeur religiously follows traffic laws (speed limit, stopping at "stop" signs, taking excessive time to manoeuvre around footpaths, ...), it's incredibly irritating to share the road with it. And safe? I've never had an accident, but it's blatantly obvious to me: Waymo's chauffeur is a much safer driver than I am. And that's with people reacting very aggressive towards it. The conclusion from people? "It's not safe enough". Somehow that argument does not mean we're taking away 98% of people's driving licenses ... it's a double standard, in other words. Exactly what that's based on, I can't tell you. My theory is that it's 95% based on the terminator movies and 5% on 'people will lose their jobs'. Oh and if you widen the definition of AIs to any algorithm, then you'll have to admit: AIs ARE trusted above humans. For the following paragraph AI means "algorithm", not necessarily deep learning. Humans cannot fly the vast majority of planes, boats, rockets without "AI" assistance. By this I mean a whole lot of vehicles, from any modern Passenger plane to quadcopters require control inputs that the human nervous system is fundamentally unable to generate. For example, because they're too fast. Modern boats, oil tankers, large container ships, require control inputs that humans can't generate because they're too slow (yes, you can calculate, on paper, and then give control inputs, but nobody does that. It's too hard). For passenger planes, AIs are more trusted than human pilots: there are "autolanding-only" weather conditions. There are no "human pilot only" weather conditions. There are now harbours that have high fines if you let a human control the ship for certain classes of ships. There are now passenger flights where the pilot's function is the checklist, closing up the plane, and turning on autopilot. Negotiating with ground control, taxiing, taking off, negotiating with ATC, flying the plane, Negotiating again with ground control, landing, taxiing and parking the plane are all done by AI. Some of these functions are even done by deep learning algorithms. So I contend: the problem with cars is that humans won't LET AIs control cars, and at the moment that describes 95% of the situation. That's still 5% inaccurate, and it will change. Not because Skynet will take over, but because we're building ever more cars that are safer, more performant, more helpful ... generally better because the human driver is surrounded by ever more algorithms. For instance, one example where people, even good drivers, generally agree Tesla's AI does better than themselves is parking. That's a case where people will gladly hand over the reins to AI. Those cases will grow, and grow and grow until humans are out, legislated out even, as is partly done in aviation today. And, frankly, the problem is not the question "how do we make an algorithm control the car better", but the answer to the question "if a human gets an AI to do something so difficult/stupid it fails, who pays for damages?". That's at least 50% of the problem, if not more. The transition from "humans do everything" to "AIs do everything" is quite a bit further along than the impression you're giving. I agree with the conclusion that we're not there yet, but we're pretty far along. And, finally, I'd like to reverse your argument. Let's say we're two AIs in the year 30000, discussing: > It's like saying "Humans can do your taxes". Sure, they can, if you put the correct numbers and formulas into a book and school them with that book for 18 years first. How does it make any sense? My taxes are due this year.
- mrjin 4y ago
  My gut still tells me you might be too optimistic about it. Sometimes it's just like a function f(x)=1/x. f(x) gets closer and closer to 0 when x grows, but it can never reach it in a finite scope.
  - ilaksh 4y ago
    It's especially like that for people who have a dualistic worldview. "Substance dualism is a philosophical position compatible with most theologies which claim that immortal souls occupy an independent realm of existence distinct from that of the physical world."
- kristiandupont 4y ago
  >It's been at least 70 years since AI is supposed to replace everything a human can do I am sure someone made a statement like that 70 years ago. The fact that that person was wrong doesn't mean that nothing has happened. You claim that it's "mostly shit as basically everything", even though the featured article shows that it's close to passing the bar exam.
- corford 4y ago
  As a counter to this, I found a recent Guardian article on ChatGPT did a nice job of cutting through some of the more optimistic hyperbole surrounding LLMs/AI at the moment and offered instead a more grounded perspective as to what ChatGPT is and what it is not: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/07/chatgpt-bot-excel-ai-chatbot-tech https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/07/chatgp...
  - Kostchei 4y ago
    try it. get on an use it. It is pretty remarkable. I have been using for all sorts of stuff. It is a brain extension- the ways it is limited at the moment are based on what the builders intended "no, I won't let you build a virtual environment, no I won't roll up a dnd character etc.." but when pressed/jail broken it most certainly can do those things.. I feel like I felt when explaining google search in 1999
    - corford 4y ago
      I have tried it and it's great. But, because it's so effective, it's easy to over extrapolate and anthropomorphise it. I think it's useful to keep in perspective (as the article and referenced paper - https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03551 https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03551 - talk about) that ChatGPT/LLMs are, ultimately, "just" extremely powerful statistical next-token prediction systems. That doesn't at all invalidate the achievement or belittle the impact such systems will have on society but, keeping this in mind does help to avoid blowing everything out of proportion (which is easy to do because, yep, ChatGPT is genuinely very cool and exciting tech).
- ranting-moth 4y ago
  It can be tricky to grasp exponential growth. Water trickles into a big pool. The flow was slow to start with but flow rate increases exponentially so that the amount of water in the pool doubles every year. Now, it started flowing 100 years ago when the pool was empty. It's now half full. When will it be full? Remember it's been flowing for 100 years and it's only half full.
  - ctrwu2843 4y ago
    Useful analogy but what makes you think what we're dealing with is exponential ? Human intelligence isn't growing exponentially and moores law is said to be breaking down.
    - ranting-moth 4y ago
      https://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns https://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns
      - imtringued 4y ago
        Where is my human brain capability for $1000 by 2023?
        BizarroLand 4y ago
        Looks like with the NVIDIA 4090 we're about 1/200th of the way there for $1600, but that's with a lot of commercial markup. I think if you had the credentials you could probably rent a server farm or a cluster of 160 Tesla v100s that would meet that requirement, although how long you would have access to that for $1,000 may be very disappointing.
  - lm28469 4y ago
    > It can be tricky to grasp exponential growth. It can also be tricky to determine if something is growing exponentially, or if you're full of wishful thinking. We landed on the moon in 69, basically haven't done anything since then. All our passenger planes are shrink down or blown up version of a boing 707 from 1957. You car isn't much different than cars in the 70s, and it certainly isn't flying as we were expecting them to be back then. Musk promised fully autonomous cars "in two years" in 2012. I'd say the pool isn't being filled any faster than it was back then, if anything it looks like someone is pumping water out of it, straight in the sewers
andrewinardeer 4y ago
The release of GPT-3 I believe will be looked back along the lines of a monumental advancement in line with the Trinity nuclear test. Legislation and policy has mainly kept nuclear weapons under check, however, nuclear technology does provide us with a reasonably clean energy which is beneficial for the masses. Perhaps regulation at some point will need to be crafted to ensure that only crippled AI or AI within a defined scope can be used for commercial purposes.
- ranting-moth 4y ago
  With nuclear weapons, we can very much see and feel the power and destruction they can unleash. A proof is trivial, dig it in the ground and hold your ears when it goes off. With AI we have to debate how destructive it is. The debate itself has been weaponized. You'll be debating against deniers and AI using all the logical fallacies and information overload it can feed you. I, being the greatest armchair expert in human behavior I know, say it will destroy democracy as we know it.
  - happythebob 4y ago
    >I, being the greatest armchair expert in human behavior I know, say it will destroy democracy as we know it. What's left of it after social media?

lm28469 4y ago

It's been at least 70 years since AI is supposed to replace everything a human can do. It's still mostly shit at basically everything besides playing chess and go, I don't think 100 years is unrealistic, especially given the other very important issues we face and will face as humanity

ilaksh 4y ago
AI can play chess, Go, Jeopardy, StarCraft, Minecraft, Atari games, write essays, summarize text, answer almost any question, drive a car, do above average on a SAT test, fool many people into wondering on Twitter if there were real people typing answers, write chapters of books, act as a dungeon master, write code to spec, win programming competitions, act as a therapist, fold proteins, provide medical diagnosis, visualize any image you describe, visualize any video clip you describe, animate characters, understand spoken language, take drive-thru orders, translate, tell jokes on any topic on demand (vastly funnier than you, would bet anything on that), write songs (music and lyrics), recreate a scene from any angle based on some photos, impersonate any person speaking in video and/or audio, impersonate any person's writing style, imitate any art style. It's quite possible that AI and robotics will fully surpass humans in all tasks in the next several years and you will still be in denial. Along with millions of others. EDIT: not permitted to reply, but the comments below are examples of denial or lack of information. In fact leading edge systems have been driving without human assistance for years. The new OpenAI models certainly don't need any help to answer their prompts. It's going to be interesting to see how far the denial goes. I assume some people will deny that artificial entities have any "real" intelligence somehow forever, even after they are literally talking to them face to face on a daily basis as they provide superior professional advice or services. Or even when there are many autonomous agents that take control of the planet.
- newaccount74 4y ago
  Aside from games, AI can do all these things only with human assistance. It's like saying "Excel can do your taxes". Sure, it can, if you put the correct numbers and formulas into the cells first.
  - candiodari 4y ago
    You forget that a lot of these are moving the goal posts. AI beat the top players at all those games, but new rules were introduced until AI researchers mostly abandoned those efforts. For instance, the starcraft AI found a really good build order that let it quickly build "Stalkers", a versatile but relatively weak unit. I will note that that build order had several factors that humans found very surprising (consistently oversaturating resource collection by a lot), then controlled those stalker units so well even world-champion level players couldn't match them, with double the APM (meaning the human was allowed 2 actions for every 1 action the AI could take). In chess the rules have become ... almost ridiculous. Due to cheating, in chess championships you now are "only allowed to play the moves any of the top 3 AIs would play twice in a match, after the first 5 moves". In other words the rules are utterly dependent on humans being worse than AIs. Like in starcraft, btw, AIs have gotten so confident beating human players that a general critique of AI players is that they've gotten "agressive, to the point it's insulting to human players", as one Youtube video put it. AIs ... beat the average human at driving cars, hell, even Tesla's autopilot beats something like the 98% percentile driver in safety, and Waymo's "chauffeur" is apparently much better than that. I've used chauffeur, and driven behind/around a car controlled by chauffeur. You know what my main comment is? Waymo's chauffeur religiously follows traffic laws (speed limit, stopping at "stop" signs, taking excessive time to manoeuvre around footpaths, ...), it's incredibly irritating to share the road with it. And safe? I've never had an accident, but it's blatantly obvious to me: Waymo's chauffeur is a much safer driver than I am. And that's with people reacting very aggressive towards it. The conclusion from people? "It's not safe enough". Somehow that argument does not mean we're taking away 98% of people's driving licenses ... it's a double standard, in other words. Exactly what that's based on, I can't tell you. My theory is that it's 95% based on the terminator movies and 5% on 'people will lose their jobs'. Oh and if you widen the definition of AIs to any algorithm, then you'll have to admit: AIs ARE trusted above humans. For the following paragraph AI means "algorithm", not necessarily deep learning. Humans cannot fly the vast majority of planes, boats, rockets without "AI" assistance. By this I mean a whole lot of vehicles, from any modern Passenger plane to quadcopters require control inputs that the human nervous system is fundamentally unable to generate. For example, because they're too fast. Modern boats, oil tankers, large container ships, require control inputs that humans can't generate because they're too slow (yes, you can calculate, on paper, and then give control inputs, but nobody does that. It's too hard). For passenger planes, AIs are more trusted than human pilots: there are "autolanding-only" weather conditions. There are no "human pilot only" weather conditions. There are now harbours that have high fines if you let a human control the ship for certain classes of ships. There are now passenger flights where the pilot's function is the checklist, closing up the plane, and turning on autopilot. Negotiating with ground control, taxiing, taking off, negotiating with ATC, flying the plane, Negotiating again with ground control, landing, taxiing and parking the plane are all done by AI. Some of these functions are even done by deep learning algorithms. So I contend: the problem with cars is that humans won't LET AIs control cars, and at the moment that describes 95% of the situation. That's still 5% inaccurate, and it will change. Not because Skynet will take over, but because we're building ever more cars that are safer, more performant, more helpful ... generally better because the human driver is surrounded by ever more algorithms. For instance, one example where people, even good drivers, generally agree Tesla's AI does better than themselves is parking. That's a case where people will gladly hand over the reins to AI. Those cases will grow, and grow and grow until humans are out, legislated out even, as is partly done in aviation today. And, frankly, the problem is not the question "how do we make an algorithm control the car better", but the answer to the question "if a human gets an AI to do something so difficult/stupid it fails, who pays for damages?". That's at least 50% of the problem, if not more. The transition from "humans do everything" to "AIs do everything" is quite a bit further along than the impression you're giving. I agree with the conclusion that we're not there yet, but we're pretty far along. And, finally, I'd like to reverse your argument. Let's say we're two AIs in the year 30000, discussing: > It's like saying "Humans can do your taxes". Sure, they can, if you put the correct numbers and formulas into a book and school them with that book for 18 years first. How does it make any sense? My taxes are due this year.
mrjin 4y ago
My gut still tells me you might be too optimistic about it. Sometimes it's just like a function f(x)=1/x. f(x) gets closer and closer to 0 when x grows, but it can never reach it in a finite scope.
- ilaksh 4y ago
  It's especially like that for people who have a dualistic worldview. "Substance dualism is a philosophical position compatible with most theologies which claim that immortal souls occupy an independent realm of existence distinct from that of the physical world."
kristiandupont 4y ago
>It's been at least 70 years since AI is supposed to replace everything a human can do I am sure someone made a statement like that 70 years ago. The fact that that person was wrong doesn't mean that nothing has happened. You claim that it's "mostly shit as basically everything", even though the featured article shows that it's close to passing the bar exam.
corford 4y ago
As a counter to this, I found a recent Guardian article on ChatGPT did a nice job of cutting through some of the more optimistic hyperbole surrounding LLMs/AI at the moment and offered instead a more grounded perspective as to what ChatGPT is and what it is not: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/07/chatgpt-bot-excel-ai-chatbot-tech https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/07/chatgp...
- Kostchei 4y ago
  try it. get on an use it. It is pretty remarkable. I have been using for all sorts of stuff. It is a brain extension- the ways it is limited at the moment are based on what the builders intended "no, I won't let you build a virtual environment, no I won't roll up a dnd character etc.." but when pressed/jail broken it most certainly can do those things.. I feel like I felt when explaining google search in 1999
  - corford 4y ago
    I have tried it and it's great. But, because it's so effective, it's easy to over extrapolate and anthropomorphise it. I think it's useful to keep in perspective (as the article and referenced paper - https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03551 https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03551 - talk about) that ChatGPT/LLMs are, ultimately, "just" extremely powerful statistical next-token prediction systems. That doesn't at all invalidate the achievement or belittle the impact such systems will have on society but, keeping this in mind does help to avoid blowing everything out of proportion (which is easy to do because, yep, ChatGPT is genuinely very cool and exciting tech).
ranting-moth 4y ago
It can be tricky to grasp exponential growth. Water trickles into a big pool. The flow was slow to start with but flow rate increases exponentially so that the amount of water in the pool doubles every year. Now, it started flowing 100 years ago when the pool was empty. It's now half full. When will it be full? Remember it's been flowing for 100 years and it's only half full.
- ctrwu2843 4y ago
  Useful analogy but what makes you think what we're dealing with is exponential ? Human intelligence isn't growing exponentially and moores law is said to be breaking down.
  - ranting-moth 4y ago
    https://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns https://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns
    - imtringued 4y ago
      Where is my human brain capability for $1000 by 2023?
      - BizarroLand 4y ago
        Looks like with the NVIDIA 4090 we're about 1/200th of the way there for $1600, but that's with a lot of commercial markup. I think if you had the credentials you could probably rent a server farm or a cluster of 160 Tesla v100s that would meet that requirement, although how long you would have access to that for $1,000 may be very disappointing.
- lm28469 4y ago
  > It can be tricky to grasp exponential growth. It can also be tricky to determine if something is growing exponentially, or if you're full of wishful thinking. We landed on the moon in 69, basically haven't done anything since then. All our passenger planes are shrink down or blown up version of a boing 707 from 1957. You car isn't much different than cars in the 70s, and it certainly isn't flying as we were expecting them to be back then. Musk promised fully autonomous cars "in two years" in 2012. I'd say the pool isn't being filled any faster than it was back then, if anything it looks like someone is pumping water out of it, straight in the sewers

andrewinardeer 4y ago

The release of GPT-3 I believe will be looked back along the lines of a monumental advancement in line with the Trinity nuclear test. Legislation and policy has mainly kept nuclear weapons under check, however, nuclear technology does provide us with a reasonably clean energy which is beneficial for the masses. Perhaps regulation at some point will need to be crafted to ensure that only crippled AI or AI within a defined scope can be used for commercial purposes.

ranting-moth 4y ago
With nuclear weapons, we can very much see and feel the power and destruction they can unleash. A proof is trivial, dig it in the ground and hold your ears when it goes off. With AI we have to debate how destructive it is. The debate itself has been weaponized. You'll be debating against deniers and AI using all the logical fallacies and information overload it can feed you. I, being the greatest armchair expert in human behavior I know, say it will destroy democracy as we know it.
- happythebob 4y ago
  >I, being the greatest armchair expert in human behavior I know, say it will destroy democracy as we know it. What's left of it after social media?