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The point of the singularity is that at that point it's not us making the further technological advances, it's AIs, so the rate and type of advance is both opaq
by simonh 4y ago
The point of the singularity is that at that point it's not us making the further technological advances, it's AIs, so the rate and type of advance is both opaque to us, and beyond our control. That's why there's a horizon we can't see beyond. An AI helping us write chunks of code still has us in the loop.
- XorNot 4y agoNo it's not: the point of the singularity is that you can't meaningfully speculate past it. We're not there yet, but it's reasonable to think we might've crossed an event horizon.
- WithinReason 4y agoI have no clue where LLMs will lead in 6 months, so we're pretty much there already.
- throwaway4aday 4y agoExactly, we're seeing the time horizon shrink rapidly. There have already been numerous threads ruminating on the fact that even a few months of not paying attention will result in you lagging behind in this technology. I can't wait to see what happens when state space models are developed further[0]. If the prompt and output length can be increased significantly then large chunks of the work of building software could be offloaded to these tools. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.14052 https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.14052
- simonh 4y agoPlenty of people have not known where technology would take us in six months, for the last 200 years or more. AI researchers have been predicting systems like ChatGPT for many years now, and even successfully predicting their failure modes and pathologies.
- WithinReason 4y agoYou really don't see a difference between today and 200 years ago?
- canoebuilder 4y ago>AI researchers have been predicting systems like ChatGPT for many years now, and even successfully predicting their failure modes and pathologies. Any particular examples you are thinking of here that you could point to? I’d be interested to read.
- danaris 4y agoThe reason it's a singularity is not because we can't predict past it: it's because it represents a point of rapidly accelerating growth in capability of AI, enabled by the fact that the AI itself is either modifying its own code, or creating the next generation of AI, which will be smarter, and able to create a smarter next generation, etc. Humans not being able to accurately predict what comes next technologically isn't the singularity; it's just a basic truism, and has been for decades.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- simonh 4y agoYes, I said as much, but I also said why can't we meaningfully speculate past it.
- meinheld111 4y agoDebatable whether crossing the event horizon is distinguishable from beeing there