4 ms·

I think I first experienced ELIZA on a PDP-11 What's really going to get spooky is someday some ChatGPT descendant is going to write a better ChatGPT and where

by ck2 4y ago

I think I first experienced ELIZA on a PDP-11 What's really going to get spooky is someday some ChatGPT descendant is going to write a better ChatGPT and where does that sequence end?

bitwize 4y ago
Hello, I'm Ray Kurzweil and welcome to my TED talk!
idiotsecant 4y ago
>where does that sequence end? Technological singularity, hopefully!
jmull 4y ago
Well... even if some version of ChatGPT is able to write a better ChatGPT2, there's no particular reason ChatGPT2 should be able to write a better ChatGPT3. And if it can, there's no guarantee ChatGPT3 would be able to write a better ChatGPT4, and so on. Exponential phenomena tend to need the right environment to sustain, and, by their nature, quickly outgrow, disturb/ruin, or consume their environment. Not that there couldn't be an AI explosion (as far as I know), but there's really no particular reason to think one is imminent -- especially since we haven't seen step 1 yet.
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  Exponential growth with finite resources invariably yields a sigmoidal growth curve. I don't know how singularity crazed futurists still don't get that.
  - sebzim4500 4y ago
    Are there (effectively) finite resources when it comes to computation though? We are so unbelievably far from the limits arising from theoretical physics that we could probably have millenia of Moore's Law, without having the computer collapse into a black hole (or whatever other limits are known apply).
    - imtringued 4y ago
      Someone linked a very long winded article about how compute hardware as powerful as the human brain will cost 1 cent in 25 years... Come on... Also from a planar perspective we hit the end of the road for silicon transistors. All new designs must be three dimensional to increase density and a millennia of Moore's law would imply that somehow your computational resources grow faster than the speed of light. I mean you physically cannot travel fast enough to acquire interstellar resources for usage in computation when you are doubling every two years. You are talking about millions of galaxies filled with data centers by the end of the millenia, maybe the entire universe, I haven't checked the numbers. All I know is that even 3% growth over 2000 years gives illogical results like colonizing a dozen milky ways.
      - sebzim4500 4y ago
        Why do you think your computation resources have to grow faster than the speed of light? That isn't even a dimensionally consistent statement. Are you assuming that the FLOPs per unit volume per second will be constant? Or that the amount of energy per FLOP will be constant? I don't think either of these assumptions is reasonable.
zaphar 4y ago
I think it's more accurate to say that chatGPT was trained than written. The advancements in this space have been primarily pushingb the parameter sets of the model high enough that you hit a threshold where you unlock an order of magnitude more capability than before. It's mostly a matter of how much compute and training data you can throw at it.
- astrange 4y ago
  The advancements since GPT-3 version 1 have mostly been better training. (Well, RLHF is more data as well, but not in the same sense.) There's also this DeepMind paper (https://www.deepmind.com/publications/an-empirical-analysis-of-compute-optimal-large-language-model-training https://www.deepmind.com/publications/an-empirical-analysis-...) saying people need to focus on better training more than data. Of course, there's not much more freely available text available anyway.

by ck2 4y ago

I think I first experienced ELIZA on a PDP-11 What's really going to get spooky is someday some ChatGPT descendant is going to write a better ChatGPT and where does that sequence end?

bitwize 4y ago

Hello, I'm Ray Kurzweil and welcome to my TED talk!

idiotsecant 4y ago

>where does that sequence end? Technological singularity, hopefully!

jmull 4y ago

Well... even if some version of ChatGPT is able to write a better ChatGPT2, there's no particular reason ChatGPT2 should be able to write a better ChatGPT3. And if it can, there's no guarantee ChatGPT3 would be able to write a better ChatGPT4, and so on. Exponential phenomena tend to need the right environment to sustain, and, by their nature, quickly outgrow, disturb/ruin, or consume their environment. Not that there couldn't be an AI explosion (as far as I know), but there's really no particular reason to think one is imminent -- especially since we haven't seen step 1 yet.

CuriouslyC 4y ago
Exponential growth with finite resources invariably yields a sigmoidal growth curve. I don't know how singularity crazed futurists still don't get that.
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  Are there (effectively) finite resources when it comes to computation though? We are so unbelievably far from the limits arising from theoretical physics that we could probably have millenia of Moore's Law, without having the computer collapse into a black hole (or whatever other limits are known apply).
  - imtringued 4y ago
    Someone linked a very long winded article about how compute hardware as powerful as the human brain will cost 1 cent in 25 years... Come on... Also from a planar perspective we hit the end of the road for silicon transistors. All new designs must be three dimensional to increase density and a millennia of Moore's law would imply that somehow your computational resources grow faster than the speed of light. I mean you physically cannot travel fast enough to acquire interstellar resources for usage in computation when you are doubling every two years. You are talking about millions of galaxies filled with data centers by the end of the millenia, maybe the entire universe, I haven't checked the numbers. All I know is that even 3% growth over 2000 years gives illogical results like colonizing a dozen milky ways.
    - sebzim4500 4y ago
      Why do you think your computation resources have to grow faster than the speed of light? That isn't even a dimensionally consistent statement. Are you assuming that the FLOPs per unit volume per second will be constant? Or that the amount of energy per FLOP will be constant? I don't think either of these assumptions is reasonable.

zaphar 4y ago

I think it's more accurate to say that chatGPT was trained than written. The advancements in this space have been primarily pushingb the parameter sets of the model high enough that you hit a threshold where you unlock an order of magnitude more capability than before. It's mostly a matter of how much compute and training data you can throw at it.

astrange 4y ago
The advancements since GPT-3 version 1 have mostly been better training. (Well, RLHF is more data as well, but not in the same sense.) There's also this DeepMind paper (https://www.deepmind.com/publications/an-empirical-analysis-of-compute-optimal-large-language-model-training https://www.deepmind.com/publications/an-empirical-analysis-...) saying people need to focus on better training more than data. Of course, there's not much more freely available text available anyway.