10 ms·

Chat GPT4: Is the world prepared for the coming AI storm?

bakuninsbart 4y ago
No, we aren't. There's still a chance that we will enter a new ai cooling if models continue to demand more GPU and energy to become more effective, but if the same rise in quality persists through GPT 5, 6 and 7, our world will be fundamentally changed, both to the better through a massive increase in knowledge and engineering capabilities, and with huge risks to life and freedom of humanity. I'm scared and excited.
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  GPT 5 will learn how to create microchips it can run on and the ones after will concentrate on optimization. And GPT 10 will be the last release because Microsoft.
  - thatjoeoverthr 4y ago
    GPT 10 will follow GPT 8
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- barking_biscuit 4y ago
  >There's still a chance that we will enter a new ai cooling if models continue to demand more GPU and energy to become more effective Was watching a talk on YouTube about how "sparsity" can potentially change the game, so that GPU compute isn't needed. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PAiQ1jTN5k&t=2240s&ab_channel=YannicKilcher https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PAiQ1jTN5k&t=2240s&ab_chann...
jillesvangurp 4y ago
People are bad at predicting the impact of technical changes. Particularly when that change is exponential. When it comes to AI, we've of course got a century plus of science fiction material made by people who tried really hard to imagine the future. It ranges from very dystopian to very utopian. And recently, HN and the rest of the internet has been obsessing over AI a lot. My personal view is that we're probably all missing the point in some way. And of course I'm probably missing it too. It's like predicting that a few hundred main frame should just about cover the whole market in the nineteen forties. That's where we are with AI today. We have a handful of companies capable of building somewhat useful AI models. And a lot of under resourced tinkerers trying to do stuff with it. However, a point I like to make regarding work is that we already live in the future. People are worried about losing their jobs not realizing that they've already lost that. By that I don't mean they are out of work. But both the nature of and the amount of work we do to survive has changed massively since the industrial revolution. We keep ourselves busy and it earns us a living. But it mostly isn't all that relevant or important what we do. Most of us here on HN are doing jobs in software, investments, or related things that have relatively little to do with providing food, shelter, or safety for people. It's all interesting and fun and probably a little bit hedonistic. If I look in the mirror, I can't say with a straight face that what I do is particularly important or relevant. It's more about me doing something interesting (to me) that happens to convert into a weird thing called money that I can convert into stuff I need or want. People are now having serious discussions about having a four day work week. And we just came out of a pandemic where startlingly large percentage of people vastly reduced their economic activity without our economy grinding to a halt. A lot of busy people that suddenly weren't so busy. It did not matter. It used to be that people worked until they were to old and broken to work. If they didn't they'd starve. For most people meant 6 day work weeks, long shifts, not a lot of leisure time, etc. You'd start work as soon as you learned to work people died young on average. It still means that for some people in developing markets and even some developed markets that maintain a class society (like the US). However that's increasingly less true for a lot of people. There are a lot of people working in the services industry. More than in things like farming or manufacturing.
- wiz21c 4y ago
  pretty well put ! I'd say that handling climate change could offer jobs which are "useful"...
- yesenadam 4y ago
  All very reminiscent of Bronze Orientation Day! (Mitchell & Webb) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyu4u3VZYaQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyu4u3VZYaQ
- ChatGTP 4y ago
  I had the exact same thoughts today regarding the science fiction material. Almost every single viewpoint I see on here is colored by that lens. I get there is good reason for that but on the other hand, very little is actually similar to the sci-fi material we read about. Yes there are parallels but if you look at it objectively, which isn't actually that easy sometimes, we actually do live in reality, not the movies. I really sympathize with your point that we have very little actual idea where it goes.
- shafyy 4y ago
  Very well put. It's crazy to me that I, a software engineer, can earn 10x more from working a very chill 8 hour day in my pyjamas from home writing some software that's interesting to me but not very important for the world, while my buddy delivers letters and packages for minimum wage on his bike.
  - redeeman 4y ago
    well at the surface level it might seem a bit strange, but when thinking a little bit about it, it makes total sense. your buddy can simply only deliver so many packages and letters in a day, impacting a few hundred people or so. Sure, its valuable, and required, but still. You can write software that millions that each are enriched as much, possibly more than the package delivery your friend does. As such, you simply can command a much higher salary
    - shafyy 4y ago
iLoveOncall 4y ago
"AI storm", journals really don't know what bullshit to put out anymore. Just like all previous AI bubbles, this is a bubble. We'll soon realize that unless you're writing a book, GPT is pretty much useless, and the hype will die down like it always has in the past. To think that AI who's only capability is to generate text can have any significant impact on anything is simply ridiculous.
- psychphysic 4y ago
  I was astounded to see an article on chatGPT4 call the programming on the livestream slow and another error prone. Neither mistake by the journo would be possible if they had any substantive experience programming.
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
  >who's only capability is to generate text can have any significant impact on anything is simply ridiculous. We are all just text here. So far as I know, by your metric, you never have significant impact on anything.
  - iLoveOncall 4y ago
    Hum, yes, did you really think HN comments have any significant impact on anything?
    - IIAOPSW 4y ago
      Words accomplish something, certainly far more than they cost to produce, otherwise why did we start doing it and why haven't we stopped. Your hands alone won't build an empire in a thousand lifetimes. It won't even pave a complete road. For that you need to pitch a compelling argument and influence a large group to go along with your vision. These particular words here and now probably won't do much of anything. The odds of at least some of them in my corpus of hn comments going on to impact something is great enough to justify the meager cost in doing so.
- lordnacho 4y ago
jonathanstrange 4y ago
Me: "How many jobs will be lost due to new AI technology within the next ten years?" Bing: "According to one source, worldwide, a billion people could lose their jobs over the next ten years due to AI, and 375 million jobs are at risk of obsolescence from AI automation. However, it’s important to emphasize that there is no shared agreement on the expected impacts on the workforce or economy."
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
  Its already taken the job of internet commentator.
  - hutzlibu 4y ago
    Oh my, what are we about to do now?
    - IIAOPSW 4y ago
      up for a nuclear war? Fresh start. Clean slate.
      - hutzlibu 4y ago
        Proposing a nuclear war, so internet commentators won't run out of meaningful things to do? That sounds indeed like a 4chan mission.
- glandium 4y ago
  Google says: "In 2022 there were estimated to be approximately 3.32 billion people employed worldwide" A billion people losing their job would be massive.
- simonh 4y ago
  It's important to note this is Bing quoting one source, presumably an attention-craving pundit on the internet throwing out absurd claims in order to get attention. This is not actually a prediction calculated by an AI.
corobo 4y ago
Looking forward to it! Even with sci-fi levels of worst case scenario and it turns out to be an AI that goes sentient and takes control of the world... can't be too much worse than the people in power now. At least it'll act more logically :) Anything less than that seems like a fun change to be living through. This is our industrial/technological revolution. They turned out alright eventually. Might be time to bring up UBI again but we'll figure it out either way. Humans survive, it's what we do. Rule 1 of life: Evolve or die.
code51 4y ago
Here is the thing: The industry will sugar-coat the layoff effect by cutting down work days - not laying off a significant crowd. Initially it will seem like a humane thing to do without cutting down salaries BUT we'll feel the real effect when the salaries are not increased to match the inflation. You will work less, produce more (with AI), paid less (in terms of purchasing power). Products that AI can touch will get cheap so purchasing power on digital products will stay the same to keep your entertained BUT land, housing, food... hard things will get harder.
- dragonelite 4y ago
  You will own nothing and be a King in your own metaverse.. It's a dystopian economic view, you will become a sort of neo slave.
- euroderf 4y ago
  Perhaps you are making the case for public ownership of certain technologies. It's that, or live under the malignant rule of Amazoogle.
- simonh 4y ago
  I don't buy it. The idea that automation reduces overall employment needs to die in a ditch. It's just not true. Look around you, we live in a world that's automated up to the eyeballs compared to any previous generation, yet employment is as high as it's ever been. In fact it's substituted for domestic labour and has allowed generations of women to go to work and build careers, and hundreds of millions of rural labourers have been drafted into industrial work forces in my lifetime. As automation has expanded, the demand for labour has grown voraciously. These LLMs are incredibly smart compared to humans in some ways, but they're incredibly stupid in other ways. They're just another tool, and tools need users. Hopefully they will be another big force multiplier in knowledge based industries, but this will increase demand for knowledge workers, because they will become more valuable due to being more productive from having better tools. If better knowledge tools reduced demand for the people using them, Moore's Law and the availability of ever more sophisticated software would have ravaged employment in the IT industry. But that's just not how that works. It's based on the assumption that when a worker becomes more productive, that the only effect that has is reducing the amount of work there is for others to do, but that's an incredibly naive view. In fact it also dramatically reduces the cost of that work being done and increases the capacity of the organisation to do work. This increases demand for that work, it makes that labour more skilled, and increases profits thus stimulating investment. Yes there can be localised negative effects in some cases, sure. Ive seen some of those myself, but any economic realignment can have it's pains. Taking into account all the positives it increases the value of the economic activity overall.
euroderf 4y ago
In Iain M Banks's Culture novels, the Minds seem to have an appropriate role in society. Gonna read up on them for some perspective on current developments.
- sfpotter 4y ago
  We are long, long way off from that. Much more likely that society collapses because of climate change or war first.
  - euroderf 4y ago
    True. But is optimism wholly inappropriate ? One hopes not.
    - sfpotter 4y ago
      Optimism for something so incredibly unlikely is delusional thinking. What would you say about a gambler who is “optimistic” about their chances of winning the lottery?
      - euroderf 4y ago
        That his optimism is statistically-provably misplaced.
- Yoric 4y ago
  Hum. Minds are bored out of their minds and need to simulate entire universes to stave off boredom. Also, they help puny human beings once in a while, because they're basically somewhat benevolent. It might take us a few steps before we reach that future :)
DeathArrow 4y ago
Left: "We should enforce AI be biased in the right way." Right: "AI is too biased against conservative views." Worried consumers: "The junk level on the Internet will rise from 90% to 99.99%" Venture capitalists: "We will make tons of money." Business owners: "Soon I can fire more people." Worried employees: "What if AI will replace me." AI zealots: "AI will just help people do their jobs better and easier." Government spokespeople: "Some jobs might be at danger but we are working hard to create new jobs." HN commenters: "We should look more at philosophical implications of AI." SEO spam farm owner: "Hurray!" Gamers: "What if NVidia will make AI chips instead of GPUs?" Stoicists: "We will survive in one way or another."
- sfpotter 4y ago
  That’s not what people on the left are saying, it’s what liberals are saying. Not the same thing.
  - simonh 4y ago
    I give up. When Americans use the term left and liberal, and even socialist I have absolutely no idea what they mean.
    - sfpotter 4y ago
      That’s not surprising. Your average Democrat is a “liberal”. The Democratic Party is center or (arguably) center right, and that is born out in the political views of the average member of the party. They have been trained to think that left labor reforms would be a disaster for the country by the media. There is no truly left wing party in the US with any significant political power. Since the Democrats are not “the right” they must therefore be “the left”, which is how they’re referred to by essentially all media. This is a useful rhetorical maneuver because it paints left wing policies that most any rational person in Europe would view as reasonable as completely nuts because they’re so far out of the mainstream spectrum of discourse. See the Sanders campaign’s coverage on NPR for an example of liberal media going to town on a left wing candidate. Whenever I talk to someone from Europe about this they find this whole situation totally baffling (“why didn’t the democrats support Sanders? He’s a reasonable left wing candidate”).
Riverheart 4y ago
Here's a take I havent heard yet. ChatGPT understands language and we've got troves of content archived/realtime that can't be reviewed manually. Now there's a tool that can understand text. Govs must be chomping at the bit to ask, "Hey ChatGPT, does any of this content seem illegal?" where illegal is a broad term, especially the authoritarian ones. Seems like an amazing surveillance tool to flag things for human review.
- dx034 4y ago
  I would assume some spy agencies already evaluate this. They get too much material to review manually and ChatGPT could really help identifying people they should look at closer. If it can be used that way, I guess we can expect export restrictions on free usage and code/weights.
  - Yoric 4y ago
    Affordable tools for ~this purpose have existed for years. Yes, LLMs make these tools more powerful, but they don't feel like game changers for this purpose. Source: I've been in a position in which companies tried to sell me similar tools (to detect e.g. bullying).
    - Riverheart 4y ago
      They'll be able to understand the contents of pictures in addition to having a grasp of natural human language.
      - Yoric 4y ago
        Definitely more powerful. But an iterative improvement for organizations (including governmental ones) that already use such tools.
Sol- 4y ago
Not even OpenAI seems to know. They put some perfunctory disclaimer on economics into their risks section of the GPT4 report, but their lack of understanding the consequences didn't seem to prevent them from pushing this development, so uncharted territory it is. It should anyways be up to governments to reign in this technology for the benefit of humanity, though I'm afraid this won't happen.
Madmallard 4y ago
Yolo. It’s fun it’s like a novel videogame.
Xcelerate 4y ago
> She said artificial intelligence could go in one of two directions over the next 10 years. [...] AI development is focused on the common good, with transparency in AI system design and an ability for individuals to opt-in [...] Ms Webb's catastrophic scenario involves less data privacy, more centralisation of power in a handful of companies Umm... so are we just not going to mention the elephant in the room at all? I mean, I know everyone finds “the singularity is near!” people annoying, but there’s not any mention at all of some type of existential risk? The “catastrophic scenario” relates to things like privacy and fairness? Someone commented in another article about AI safety being composed of two types, those focused on “AI alignment” and those focused on “AI ethics”. I increasingly find that the latter group seems to be putting the cart before the horse. Hypothetically, if you were to poll the research scientists at OpenAI (anonymously) on which type of AI safety they are more concerned about, I would be really curious what the results of that survey would look like.
- ddevault 4y ago
  AI is not in and of itself an existential threat, and is unlikely to be one within our lifetimes. The singularity, in this sense, is not near, and state-of-the-art machine learning does not resemble general intelligence. Focusing on the misuse of this tool by people is the most prudent worry to address.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- peepeepoopoo3 4y ago
  Hack the planet! (into tiny pieces and then consume them as fuel)
shswkna 4y ago
Lets assume that current AI type models are capable of approaching the capability of human type neural networks. So yes, AI will be very disruptive to our lives. It will start with a narrow set of capabilities, but will widen as it becomes really good within those constraints. I think we are mostly scared about the capabilities of AI that push us to question, what is my worth then, as a human being? Do I still have worth? And, what is really the point of all this? This “revolution” will push us to look inward and find out what and who we really are. What is really valuable? And most importantly, what is really worth struggling, fighting, striving for, in the context of the human race. Our subjective human experience and what is valuable to us as humans, still remains out of reach for AI, and I think it will never become within reach. Because AI will never share with us the subjective human experience.

No, we aren't. There's still a chance that we will enter a new ai cooling if models continue to demand more GPU and energy to become more effective, but if the same rise in quality persists through GPT 5, 6 and 7, our world will be fundamentally changed, both to the better through a massive increase in knowledge and engineering capabilities, and with huge risks to life and freedom of humanity. I'm scared and excited.

UncleEntity 4y ago
GPT 5 will learn how to create microchips it can run on and the ones after will concentrate on optimization. And GPT 10 will be the last release because Microsoft.
- thatjoeoverthr 4y ago
  GPT 10 will follow GPT 8
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
barking_biscuit 4y ago
>There's still a chance that we will enter a new ai cooling if models continue to demand more GPU and energy to become more effective Was watching a talk on YouTube about how "sparsity" can potentially change the game, so that GPU compute isn't needed. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PAiQ1jTN5k&t=2240s&ab_channel=YannicKilcher https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PAiQ1jTN5k&t=2240s&ab_chann...

jillesvangurp 4y ago

People are bad at predicting the impact of technical changes. Particularly when that change is exponential. When it comes to AI, we've of course got a century plus of science fiction material made by people who tried really hard to imagine the future. It ranges from very dystopian to very utopian. And recently, HN and the rest of the internet has been obsessing over AI a lot. My personal view is that we're probably all missing the point in some way. And of course I'm probably missing it too. It's like predicting that a few hundred main frame should just about cover the whole market in the nineteen forties. That's where we are with AI today. We have a handful of companies capable of building somewhat useful AI models. And a lot of under resourced tinkerers trying to do stuff with it. However, a point I like to make regarding work is that we already live in the future. People are worried about losing their jobs not realizing that they've already lost that. By that I don't mean they are out of work. But both the nature of and the amount of work we do to survive has changed massively since the industrial revolution. We keep ourselves busy and it earns us a living. But it mostly isn't all that relevant or important what we do. Most of us here on HN are doing jobs in software, investments, or related things that have relatively little to do with providing food, shelter, or safety for people. It's all interesting and fun and probably a little bit hedonistic. If I look in the mirror, I can't say with a straight face that what I do is particularly important or relevant. It's more about me doing something interesting (to me) that happens to convert into a weird thing called money that I can convert into stuff I need or want. People are now having serious discussions about having a four day work week. And we just came out of a pandemic where startlingly large percentage of people vastly reduced their economic activity without our economy grinding to a halt. A lot of busy people that suddenly weren't so busy. It did not matter. It used to be that people worked until they were to old and broken to work. If they didn't they'd starve. For most people meant 6 day work weeks, long shifts, not a lot of leisure time, etc. You'd start work as soon as you learned to work people died young on average. It still means that for some people in developing markets and even some developed markets that maintain a class society (like the US). However that's increasingly less true for a lot of people. There are a lot of people working in the services industry. More than in things like farming or manufacturing.

wiz21c 4y ago
pretty well put ! I'd say that handling climate change could offer jobs which are "useful"...
yesenadam 4y ago
All very reminiscent of Bronze Orientation Day! (Mitchell & Webb) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyu4u3VZYaQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyu4u3VZYaQ
ChatGTP 4y ago
I had the exact same thoughts today regarding the science fiction material. Almost every single viewpoint I see on here is colored by that lens. I get there is good reason for that but on the other hand, very little is actually similar to the sci-fi material we read about. Yes there are parallels but if you look at it objectively, which isn't actually that easy sometimes, we actually do live in reality, not the movies. I really sympathize with your point that we have very little actual idea where it goes.
shafyy 4y ago
Very well put. It's crazy to me that I, a software engineer, can earn 10x more from working a very chill 8 hour day in my pyjamas from home writing some software that's interesting to me but not very important for the world, while my buddy delivers letters and packages for minimum wage on his bike.
- redeeman 4y ago
  well at the surface level it might seem a bit strange, but when thinking a little bit about it, it makes total sense. your buddy can simply only deliver so many packages and letters in a day, impacting a few hundred people or so. Sure, its valuable, and required, but still. You can write software that millions that each are enriched as much, possibly more than the package delivery your friend does. As such, you simply can command a much higher salary
  - shafyy 4y ago

iLoveOncall 4y ago

"AI storm", journals really don't know what bullshit to put out anymore. Just like all previous AI bubbles, this is a bubble. We'll soon realize that unless you're writing a book, GPT is pretty much useless, and the hype will die down like it always has in the past. To think that AI who's only capability is to generate text can have any significant impact on anything is simply ridiculous.

psychphysic 4y ago
I was astounded to see an article on chatGPT4 call the programming on the livestream slow and another error prone. Neither mistake by the journo would be possible if they had any substantive experience programming.
IIAOPSW 4y ago
>who's only capability is to generate text can have any significant impact on anything is simply ridiculous. We are all just text here. So far as I know, by your metric, you never have significant impact on anything.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  Hum, yes, did you really think HN comments have any significant impact on anything?
  - IIAOPSW 4y ago
    Words accomplish something, certainly far more than they cost to produce, otherwise why did we start doing it and why haven't we stopped. Your hands alone won't build an empire in a thousand lifetimes. It won't even pave a complete road. For that you need to pitch a compelling argument and influence a large group to go along with your vision. These particular words here and now probably won't do much of anything. The odds of at least some of them in my corpus of hn comments going on to impact something is great enough to justify the meager cost in doing so.
lordnacho 4y ago

jonathanstrange 4y ago

Me: "How many jobs will be lost due to new AI technology within the next ten years?" Bing: "According to one source, worldwide, a billion people could lose their jobs over the next ten years due to AI, and 375 million jobs are at risk of obsolescence from AI automation. However, it’s important to emphasize that there is no shared agreement on the expected impacts on the workforce or economy."

IIAOPSW 4y ago
Its already taken the job of internet commentator.
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  Oh my, what are we about to do now?
  - IIAOPSW 4y ago
    up for a nuclear war? Fresh start. Clean slate.
    - hutzlibu 4y ago
      Proposing a nuclear war, so internet commentators won't run out of meaningful things to do? That sounds indeed like a 4chan mission.
glandium 4y ago
Google says: "In 2022 there were estimated to be approximately 3.32 billion people employed worldwide" A billion people losing their job would be massive.
simonh 4y ago
It's important to note this is Bing quoting one source, presumably an attention-craving pundit on the internet throwing out absurd claims in order to get attention. This is not actually a prediction calculated by an AI.

corobo 4y ago

Looking forward to it! Even with sci-fi levels of worst case scenario and it turns out to be an AI that goes sentient and takes control of the world... can't be too much worse than the people in power now. At least it'll act more logically :) Anything less than that seems like a fun change to be living through. This is our industrial/technological revolution. They turned out alright eventually. Might be time to bring up UBI again but we'll figure it out either way. Humans survive, it's what we do. Rule 1 of life: Evolve or die.

code51 4y ago

Here is the thing: The industry will sugar-coat the layoff effect by cutting down work days - not laying off a significant crowd. Initially it will seem like a humane thing to do without cutting down salaries BUT we'll feel the real effect when the salaries are not increased to match the inflation. You will work less, produce more (with AI), paid less (in terms of purchasing power). Products that AI can touch will get cheap so purchasing power on digital products will stay the same to keep your entertained BUT land, housing, food... hard things will get harder.

dragonelite 4y ago
You will own nothing and be a King in your own metaverse.. It's a dystopian economic view, you will become a sort of neo slave.
euroderf 4y ago
Perhaps you are making the case for public ownership of certain technologies. It's that, or live under the malignant rule of Amazoogle.
simonh 4y ago
I don't buy it. The idea that automation reduces overall employment needs to die in a ditch. It's just not true. Look around you, we live in a world that's automated up to the eyeballs compared to any previous generation, yet employment is as high as it's ever been. In fact it's substituted for domestic labour and has allowed generations of women to go to work and build careers, and hundreds of millions of rural labourers have been drafted into industrial work forces in my lifetime. As automation has expanded, the demand for labour has grown voraciously. These LLMs are incredibly smart compared to humans in some ways, but they're incredibly stupid in other ways. They're just another tool, and tools need users. Hopefully they will be another big force multiplier in knowledge based industries, but this will increase demand for knowledge workers, because they will become more valuable due to being more productive from having better tools. If better knowledge tools reduced demand for the people using them, Moore's Law and the availability of ever more sophisticated software would have ravaged employment in the IT industry. But that's just not how that works. It's based on the assumption that when a worker becomes more productive, that the only effect that has is reducing the amount of work there is for others to do, but that's an incredibly naive view. In fact it also dramatically reduces the cost of that work being done and increases the capacity of the organisation to do work. This increases demand for that work, it makes that labour more skilled, and increases profits thus stimulating investment. Yes there can be localised negative effects in some cases, sure. Ive seen some of those myself, but any economic realignment can have it's pains. Taking into account all the positives it increases the value of the economic activity overall.

euroderf 4y ago

In Iain M Banks's Culture novels, the Minds seem to have an appropriate role in society. Gonna read up on them for some perspective on current developments.

sfpotter 4y ago
We are long, long way off from that. Much more likely that society collapses because of climate change or war first.
- euroderf 4y ago
  True. But is optimism wholly inappropriate ? One hopes not.
  - sfpotter 4y ago
    Optimism for something so incredibly unlikely is delusional thinking. What would you say about a gambler who is “optimistic” about their chances of winning the lottery?
    - euroderf 4y ago
      That his optimism is statistically-provably misplaced.
Yoric 4y ago
Hum. Minds are bored out of their minds and need to simulate entire universes to stave off boredom. Also, they help puny human beings once in a while, because they're basically somewhat benevolent. It might take us a few steps before we reach that future :)

DeathArrow 4y ago

Left: "We should enforce AI be biased in the right way." Right: "AI is too biased against conservative views." Worried consumers: "The junk level on the Internet will rise from 90% to 99.99%" Venture capitalists: "We will make tons of money." Business owners: "Soon I can fire more people." Worried employees: "What if AI will replace me." AI zealots: "AI will just help people do their jobs better and easier." Government spokespeople: "Some jobs might be at danger but we are working hard to create new jobs." HN commenters: "We should look more at philosophical implications of AI." SEO spam farm owner: "Hurray!" Gamers: "What if NVidia will make AI chips instead of GPUs?" Stoicists: "We will survive in one way or another."

sfpotter 4y ago
That’s not what people on the left are saying, it’s what liberals are saying. Not the same thing.
- simonh 4y ago
  I give up. When Americans use the term left and liberal, and even socialist I have absolutely no idea what they mean.
  - sfpotter 4y ago
    That’s not surprising. Your average Democrat is a “liberal”. The Democratic Party is center or (arguably) center right, and that is born out in the political views of the average member of the party. They have been trained to think that left labor reforms would be a disaster for the country by the media. There is no truly left wing party in the US with any significant political power. Since the Democrats are not “the right” they must therefore be “the left”, which is how they’re referred to by essentially all media. This is a useful rhetorical maneuver because it paints left wing policies that most any rational person in Europe would view as reasonable as completely nuts because they’re so far out of the mainstream spectrum of discourse. See the Sanders campaign’s coverage on NPR for an example of liberal media going to town on a left wing candidate. Whenever I talk to someone from Europe about this they find this whole situation totally baffling (“why didn’t the democrats support Sanders? He’s a reasonable left wing candidate”).

Riverheart 4y ago

Here's a take I havent heard yet. ChatGPT understands language and we've got troves of content archived/realtime that can't be reviewed manually. Now there's a tool that can understand text. Govs must be chomping at the bit to ask, "Hey ChatGPT, does any of this content seem illegal?" where illegal is a broad term, especially the authoritarian ones. Seems like an amazing surveillance tool to flag things for human review.

dx034 4y ago
I would assume some spy agencies already evaluate this. They get too much material to review manually and ChatGPT could really help identifying people they should look at closer. If it can be used that way, I guess we can expect export restrictions on free usage and code/weights.
- Yoric 4y ago
  Affordable tools for ~this purpose have existed for years. Yes, LLMs make these tools more powerful, but they don't feel like game changers for this purpose. Source: I've been in a position in which companies tried to sell me similar tools (to detect e.g. bullying).
  - Riverheart 4y ago
    They'll be able to understand the contents of pictures in addition to having a grasp of natural human language.
    - Yoric 4y ago
      Definitely more powerful. But an iterative improvement for organizations (including governmental ones) that already use such tools.

Sol- 4y ago

Not even OpenAI seems to know. They put some perfunctory disclaimer on economics into their risks section of the GPT4 report, but their lack of understanding the consequences didn't seem to prevent them from pushing this development, so uncharted territory it is. It should anyways be up to governments to reign in this technology for the benefit of humanity, though I'm afraid this won't happen.

Madmallard 4y ago

Yolo. It’s fun it’s like a novel videogame.

Xcelerate 4y ago

> She said artificial intelligence could go in one of two directions over the next 10 years. [...] AI development is focused on the common good, with transparency in AI system design and an ability for individuals to opt-in [...] Ms Webb's catastrophic scenario involves less data privacy, more centralisation of power in a handful of companies Umm... so are we just not going to mention the elephant in the room at all? I mean, I know everyone finds “the singularity is near!” people annoying, but there’s not any mention at all of some type of existential risk? The “catastrophic scenario” relates to things like privacy and fairness? Someone commented in another article about AI safety being composed of two types, those focused on “AI alignment” and those focused on “AI ethics”. I increasingly find that the latter group seems to be putting the cart before the horse. Hypothetically, if you were to poll the research scientists at OpenAI (anonymously) on which type of AI safety they are more concerned about, I would be really curious what the results of that survey would look like.

ddevault 4y ago
AI is not in and of itself an existential threat, and is unlikely to be one within our lifetimes. The singularity, in this sense, is not near, and state-of-the-art machine learning does not resemble general intelligence. Focusing on the misuse of this tool by people is the most prudent worry to address.
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peepeepoopoo3 4y ago
Hack the planet! (into tiny pieces and then consume them as fuel)

shswkna 4y ago

Lets assume that current AI type models are capable of approaching the capability of human type neural networks. So yes, AI will be very disruptive to our lives. It will start with a narrow set of capabilities, but will widen as it becomes really good within those constraints. I think we are mostly scared about the capabilities of AI that push us to question, what is my worth then, as a human being? Do I still have worth? And, what is really the point of all this? This “revolution” will push us to look inward and find out what and who we really are. What is really valuable? And most importantly, what is really worth struggling, fighting, striving for, in the context of the human race. Our subjective human experience and what is valuable to us as humans, still remains out of reach for AI, and I think it will never become within reach. Because AI will never share with us the subjective human experience.