14 ms·

The Age of AI has begun

243 points by avonmach 4y ago

my-valhalla 4y ago
It’s the other way around: tests and materials which we believed made humans distinctive from AI and our “models” of human measurement or standardized tests, seem to fail when examined seriously. They are purported somewhat to prevent computer cheating because we enforce conditions that allow us to claim the results are accurate. Clearly that is not the case, and the tests or measurements themselves lack much or all value. What most people believe makes someone’s opinion valuable (economic production, social wanking, allowing and enforcing inequality) is ironically what prevents most of these people from being in a room with actually intelligent people. Take the case of Grigori Perelman: mathematical genius who created insights into fractal geometry and chaos mathematics who now contributes nothing but his personal disgust at the state of the world and how willing people are to cheat and steal. Bill Gates has made a lot of money, but he has never made any deep insights or valuable contributions. He can make more money but history will bury the man because he is nothing more than someone who became an exalted dung beetle of wealth. Mindless, brainless, and stacking that shit. I find this article in the same vein: mostly some shitty business crap that will extol it’s fecal values to the investors and businessmen who are now immune to their own stink.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
addisonl 4y ago
I’m more inclined to call it the Age of Disinformation
- extheat 4y ago
  Can you elaborate why you think this is the most notable feature as opposed to others?
- WhereIsTheTruth 4y ago
  That's indeed what i'd call it too AI was already a thing with robotics / games What's being promoted these days are AI assisted generative tools, i personally call it "AI assisted copy pasta"
  - asdff 4y ago
    They already had an ai assisted complete in gmail. I wonder how many managers operated by just hitting tab tab tab send and not writing any english at all the last few years?
- samstave 4y ago
  Why do you think this is coming from "GatesNotes" This guy needs to GTFO out of Humanity at this point. ANYTHING this guy says about AI is ging to be because he is going to fund AI-Malevolence-Protection-Racket then sell some pre-planned AI-cyber-storm solution that every computer on the planet will be mandated on installing.
- finikytou 4y ago
  open AI is the continuation of the liberal, neo democrat agenda. I thought we were in the age of disinformation with medias, social networks and censorship those past few years and thought with a slight relief that Elon Musk buying twitter would be the end of an era and that mankind will be brought back to a safe space where debates are seen as enriching, divergence of opinion as a strength but boy was I wrong. it was just the last sign of an old world trying to fight against a demon of smoke, revealing to all of us a new woke world where AI are agents of disinformation that will shape mankind through the woke agenda of the 1% for the good of no one but them. truly evil. and all the people praising what chatgpt can do will be the first one to tell us that they warned us back then.
- LouisSayers 4y ago
  It's funny because I was searching on Bing Chat earlier today and came across a linux command <(). I enquired about it, and it then referenced an article. At the bottom of the article was something along the lines of "This content was generated with ChatGPT.". It made me think, if people stop thinking for themselves and start making articles which contain slight errors, those errors will become pervasive, and then these AI's could enter a loop where they generate confidently sounding incorrect information. It'll then make sense to weight information sources - but then who is in charge of deciding what weights to give what sources? I guess in the end where we get our "facts" will be decided by our "Benevolent AI Dictator Overlords".
mym1990 4y ago
I’ve been thinking a lot about how AI can reduce some of the world’s worst inequities. But he fails to mention in the risks how AI can also be a cause of increase for some of the world's worst inequalities due to failure to have representative datasets, or simply by creating an ever increasing technological gap between classes(just 2 off the top of my head).
- theropost 4y ago
  Job displacement: AI could automate low-skilled jobs, leading to job losses for low-income workers while increasing demand for high-skilled workers, widening the income gap. Digital divide: Unequal access to advanced AI technologies could exacerbate existing inequalities between developed and developing nations, as well as between urban and rural populations. Concentration of wealth: As AI technologies are developed and controlled by a few large companies, wealth may become increasingly concentrated, leading to greater economic inequality. Education disparity: Access to high-quality education and training in AI-related fields may be limited to individuals with financial resources, further increasing income inequality. Biased AI systems: AI algorithms that inadvertently reinforce existing social biases can disproportionately affect disadvantaged populations, perpetuating and worsening economic inequality. Unequal access to benefits: The benefits of AI-driven productivity gains may not be equally distributed across society, leading to increased income disparities. Monopolistic behavior: AI-enabled companies with significant market power may use their technology to stifle competition, which could result in fewer opportunities for small businesses and entrepreneurs, contributing to economic inequality. Financial markets: AI-driven financial technologies may disproportionately benefit those with access to capital and financial knowledge, further widening the wealth gap. Healthcare: AI-powered diagnostics and treatments may not be accessible to everyone, especially those in low-income communities or developing nations, resulting in health disparities that could exacerbate economic inequality. Surveillance and privacy: AI-powered surveillance technologies may disproportionately impact vulnerable populations, limiting their economic opportunities and reinforcing existing inequalities.
  - motoxpro 4y ago
    ChatGPT comment
amelius 4y ago
Or it's the fall before the next AI Winter.
supermatt 4y ago
> AGI doesn’t exist yet I wouldn't be so sure about that! This "ground truth" model doing the rounds seems to be outperforming all other models in their respective papers! ;p
- ideonode 4y ago
  Do you have a reference for that?
  - BobbyJo 4y ago
    I believe this was a joke. Papers compare trained models to "ground truth" to determine accuracy. Ground truth refers simply to the correct answers, but, the way it's used grammatically, you can interpret it as another model called "ground truth" which has a 100% accuracy at all tasks.
- bqmjjx0kac 4y ago
  I think that “ground truth” typically satisfies GI, but not A.
- rikimaru0345 4y ago
  what ground truth model? is there some paper i can read? can you post a link to it?
capableweb 4y ago
> Philanthropy is my full-time job these days, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how—in addition to helping people be more productive—AI can reduce some of the world’s worst inequities. Globally, the worst inequity is in health: 5 million children under the age of 5 die every year. One great first step OpenAI can take towards this is by actually making their models open. As long as the models are intentionally kept back and intentionally profited from by already wealthy private citizens, inequality will grow, not shrink. Not to mention that people in poor countries (which as Gates cites as the "hotspots" for inequality in health) won't be able to use some HTTP API based in US/SF. Not just that latency will kill requests, some of the places don't even have internet connectivity. How is OpenAI supposed to help those communities if the "inequality fighter GPT-4" is gate-kept behind a centralized HTTP API?
- breck 4y ago
  > AI can reduce some of the world’s worst inequities. To reduce inequity abolish (c)opywrong laws. BG grew rich via (c)opywrong laws. That is the dilemma. Does he see it and just not connect the dots? Or can he connect the dots but doesn't really care? I am not sure.
  - eganist 4y ago
    What are "(c)opywrong" laws? I'm not being facetious. What specifically are you drawing objection to?
    - breck 4y ago
      Laws that make it illegal to use one's own property to share information. A correction of the copyright misnomer.
      - eganist 4y ago
        Got it, so you have a general aversion to copyright, the concept of intellectual property, and to an extent, the funding of knowledge work I'm assuming? You didn't carve out any exceptions, hence my assumption.
drumhead 4y ago
I like to think its more the age of the Genuine Personal Digital Assistant has begun. The LLMs are great at assisting you to do your job but they wont take over yet.
- celim307 4y ago
  Her is a forward looking movie in a lot of ways Kids born today will grow up with their phones/device being their best friend and pet, like a Pokémon. You will be incredibly socially shunned if you don’t have one, and corporations will have not only data but an emotional hook into you for life
  - Syonyk 4y ago
    I'm not sure that's true. Even among teenagers right now, there's widespread recognition of the downsides of social media/always connectedness/etc, and if there's one thing we can rely on kids to do, it's to poke and prod the "sacred cows" of their parents generation to find out if they're any good or not. The "always connected nature of cell phones" is pretty clearly not any good, and you can safely assume that most teenagers right now have watched at least one parent, grandparent, or relative get turned into something disgusting by being always connected - that one relative who's always on TwitFace railing about how evil Muskerberg is, or whatever the outrage of the day is. I've got a few. They're certain that Zuckerberg is a traitor, will be arrested Any Day Now, etc... and can't comprehend that by posting all about this on Facebook, all they're doing is helping out his yacht fund. It's been an utterly toxic last decade of consumer technology, from human-first perspective, and I'd wager that those being born today will have the long view back over that and see how awful it's really been. Remember: Last year, vinyl outsold CDs in "units moved" for the first time since the mid-1980s, and is showing no signs of slowing down any time soon. Instax cameras ("Polaroid, but newer") are quite popular. There's a rejection of modern digital/consumer tech going on.
  - otabdeveloper4 4y ago
    Talking to ChatGPT is like talking to a marketing ad copy robot. (Not surprising, because that's basically what it is.) I couldn't imagine something more square and unhip for kids-these-days. It can't even parrot this year's memes!
system16 4y ago
> In my lifetime, I’ve seen two demonstrations of technology that struck me as revolutionary. > The first time was in 1980, when I was introduced to a graphical user interface > The second big surprise came just last year. I’d been meeting with the team from OpenAI I guess it's not surprising since Microsoft was late to the game with IE, but it's interesting he never mentions "the internet" in this list.
- flyinglizard 4y ago
  The internet evolved, it wasn't just useful all at once (as in "a demonstration that struck me"). Early users struggled every day to grow its utility and find more uses, all the way from a glorified BBS to what it is today.
  - kenjackson 4y ago
    The first time someone demo'ed the web to me, my first thought was -- why would I use this when I have ftp, gopher, archie, etc... The web definitely didn't seem revolutionary to me. And for me my introduction to the internet was even more mundane -- it was just email and the ability to telnet so I could do my programming assignments.
    - basch 4y ago
      The web felt like both a simultaneous step forward and backward from HyperCard. I think the web would have evolved quite differently had their been a good PowerPoint like gui design tool for building sites, one that wasn’t focused on the backside.
  - qorrect 4y ago
    And a lot of people here helped it to become what it is today. Cheers!
- capableweb 4y ago
  Maybe he doesn't mention it because he didn't think it was revolutionary when it first appeared. From https://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/14/news/skeptics-cite-overload-of-useless-information-internet-arrives-at-a.html https://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/14/news/skeptics-cite-overlo... (https://archive.is/r4F8T https://archive.is/r4F8T) > Even Bill Gates, the founder and chairman of Microsoft Corp. and widely regarded as the crown prince of the World Wide Web, was taken unawares by the Internet's grassroots acceptance. > In his book, "The Road Ahead" (not available on-line), Mr. Gates admitted that he believed the technology for "killer applications" was inadequate to lure consumers to the Internet. Of course, like any smart person at the time, he changed his views as the internet became more popular and eventually mainstream.
what-no-tests 4y ago
What would Daddy Marx say?
- 1attice 4y ago
  He would say that we are witnessing a collapse wavefront moving through the labour market, yielding a concentration of capital that has never before been seen, and that will almost certainly foment a revolution. He'd be right, too. But with an eye to Jan 6, I fear it won't be the revolution he wanted.
deathanatos 4y ago
Oh please. This is such a trope at this point. We asked ChatGPT a question about a system the other day. Its response was, > That number is equivalent to [another number]. That number controls $thing, and that number is the recommended value for thing according to $standard. It relates to $unrelated_thing. It did the math wrong when converting the number from one unit to another. (From days to seconds.) While it got the gist of the number right in the first half of its response, and it even cites essentially the right source, the claim it says the citation backs … is not backed by the citation. It then goes on to equate it to something that it isn't related to. It's words, strung together: i.e., bullshit. The higher-level reasoning (like that the math needs to work out, or the citation should actually have the cited claim) are utterly absent, and will never be present in these models no matter how much data you train them on. The response is at best wrong, and at worst, fools someone into believing that it knows what it is talking about. But yeah, this is going to replace me. The actual article is … pretty long-winded, and really lacks specific, concrete examples as to how AI will actually move a needle somewhere. Take this chunk, > Computers haven’t had the effect on education that many of us in the industry have hoped. There have been some good developments, including educational games and online sources of information like Wikipedia, but they haven’t had a meaningful effect on any of the measures of students’ achievement. (Wikipedia hasn't had a meaningful effect?! [citation needed] there. Wikipedia affected my own achievements, and it has been a while since I was in school. I can only think that such a high quality encyclopedia is of immense value to students, particularly if you're not lucky enough … old enough? … to have an actual encyclopedia — even the use of the word actual here exposes how much effect Wikipedia has had!) > But I think in the next five to 10 years, AI-driven software will finally deliver on the promise of revolutionizing the way people teach and learn. It will know your interests and your learning style so it can tailor content that will keep you engaged. It will measure your understanding, notice when you’re losing interest, and understand what kind of motivation you respond to. It will give immediate feedback. We've been saying this about ads for decades. The last ad I remember seeing was "The Mandela Effect: In Queen's 'We Are The Champtions (sic)' He Doesn't Say '…Of The World'" ((sic: the ad title is factually inaccurate) ; … this is no more related to my interests than any of the many Taboola and Taboola-like junk ads at the bottom of half the Internet now. I have no idea where that ad ponzi scheme even ends.) > There are many ways that AIs can assist teachers and administrators, including assessing a student’s understanding of a subject and giving advice on career planning. Teachers are already using tools like ChatGPT to provide comments on their students’ writing assignments. And we're 3 paras in with very little meat here: the only example is "comments on student papers". Given the inability to reason … no, I don't think AI will be evaluating papers anytime soon. (The whole passage … if not the article … feels like a human vaguely touched up the output from GPT.) And the entire idea of trying to help poor unfortunate souls in desperate places with AI feels very much like God vomit from a Cory Doctorow tale.
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
I thought this was a pretty good post, but I'm still pretty shocked that people as intelligent as Gates don't spend more time on the potential downsides. To be clear, he does highlight some of the downsides, but his responses are just "handwavy" in my opinion. What is most baffling to me is that the highlight of this post is that Gates talks about the potential for AI to reduce worldwide inequality, where in all honesty I see the exact opposite being more likely. Our current economic systems just fundamentally can't deal with ever larger swaths of the population being unable to compete with AI. And despite all the answers I've seen of "well, duh, that's because our current economic systems are so broken!", I have yet to see any sort of plausible answer that addresses how we get from our current version of capitalism to something else where all the spoils just don't go to the few people that control the strongest AI implementations (that doesn't involve massive amounts of strife and despair). Perhaps technologists, even ones as smart as Gates, are just too siloed in their worldview of technology being an ever increasing force for good. I actually find this particularly surprising from Gates, given how he's seen first hand that large swaths of the world blame him for the pandemic, or for wanting to vaccinate us with "microchips", due to the power of propaganda through social media.
- drawBr0 4y ago
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  - megaman821 4y ago
    Ah yes. The founder of one of the top tech firms in the world really just doesn't know much about tech. Thanks for your analysis. You must be swimming in the millions from your genius investments.
    - drawBr0 4y ago
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      - megaman821 4y ago
        [flagged]
xg15 4y ago
Title did remind me of this: https://youtu.be/R1x4JkZTfPs https://youtu.be/R1x4JkZTfPs
moelf 4y ago
>I’ve been thinking a lot about how AI can reduce some of the world’s worst inequities. huh, closeAI is certainly not helping at this moment in time.
pphysch 4y ago
> I picked AP Bio because the test is more than a simple regurgitation of scientific facts—it asks you to think critically about biology. Of course, the LLM is just regurgitating the facts from the textbooks as well as thousands or millions of test samples. It's certainly possible to formulate a biology question that a decent student would be able to answer easily, but LLM would be helpless at (by carefully choosing heterodox wording & structure). The Age of Bullshit continues unabated.
- bob1029 4y ago
  > Of course, the LLM is just regurgitating the facts from the textbooks as well as thousands or millions of test samples. Indeed. For some of us in the world of business, this is actually a very compelling "just". Most use cases are indeed still bullshit, but I think we are getting to a point where maybe there exists at least one that isn't, and many of us don't want to be left holding the bag when the threshold hits 50%.
- chadash 4y ago
  > Of course, the LLM is just regurgitating the facts from the textbooks as well as thousands or millions of test samples. Sure, it is regurgitating facts. What's impressive is that it knows which facts to regurgitate.
  - ewhanley 4y ago
    It also makes me question how different this is from what we (humans) do. We learn a bunch of information from a variety of sources and experiences and synthesize that into answers. Sometimes we are correct and sometimes we are not. I suppose the difference is that we can extrapolate from our synthesized information vs simply formulating answers, but what the best LLMs do doesn't seem radically different than the average person.
    - asdff 4y ago
      The difference is that we are reading and comprehending information, while the model is making a prediction of what word is most likely to come next based on a huge dataset of words. As such, there have been many documented cases of the model seeming correct at first glance, maybe even second glance, but its actually totally wrong in a way that a human isn't totally wrong. Like chatgpt will give you a summary and a title and an author and a year and be entirely confident that this is the truth, whereas the title was written by a different author in a related field perhaps or was made up entirely. A human would not behave like this at all. If I asked you for some info you hardly knew, you wouldn't word vomit a paragraph like this, you'd reply with a confidence score, "I don't know," or "I know about this but not that," perhaps. Seems that if there is any money or time on the line, you'd rather use the human.
wankle 4y ago
AI is little better today than in the early 1990's, mostly it's a barn broadside hitting dung fest.
- BigCryo 4y ago
  Yeah all this stuff is just advanced chatbots, stuff we've had for a long time
rf15 4y ago
Considering everything, it sounds more like another big wegde hammered into the divide. This will just make the rich richer, because now they can even save on artists, writers and other "expenses", all of which they can just add to their bonus now. All while you of course will still pay full price for whatever they offer. Admittedly I write this in frustration, from the perspective of someone who has friends who did not get contract extensions because of AI, stock photo sites that are just flooded with AI content, and managers clearly using gpt to write half their mails.
- cactusplant7374 4y ago
  I can see it working for ghost writing. One could use Chat GPT to generate unlimited Hardy Boy's novels. But I'm not sure it's going to fool readers looking for quality.
- akomtu 4y ago
  AI will take the "means of production" from knowledge workers: their brains.
  - pg_1234 4y ago
    Well ... for now we can take the bullshit argument beloved by management: "work cheap now, it's a learning/growth opportunity that will pay off later" ... and throw it back in their face saying: since AI is going to take our jobs (yes that argument you were just using to try an convince us we are worth less) we'll just have to get all the money we can earn right now ... so pay up because there is no "later".
- hackerlight 4y ago
  > This will just make the rich richer Wealth isn't zero-sum. Your friends who got laid off had their jobs automated. Now what will happen, is they will go to other parts of the economy and add value where they are more needed. Total economic output has just increased and the world economy is now slightly more productive (same number of people making more stuff). You can't protest against your friends losing their jobs in this instance and not do the same for every previous technological invention going back to the wheel, all of which put someone out of a job. Because what you'd be advocating for is a lot of suffering and misery, in the form of material poverty. If you want to protest against a lack of social policies contributing to wealth inequality, then just do that. > All while you of course will still pay full price for whatever they offer. It's far cheaper.
favourable 4y ago
> it raises hard questions about the workforce, the legal system, privacy, bias, and more Privacy is the least talked about aspect of our current AI systems from what I've gathered. Perhaps we're sleepwalking into yet another surveillance capitalism nightmare and handing over data blindly to these systems, where they learn our preferences, private thoughts, habits, etc (And store all that forever). Anyone reluctant to 'feed the beast' as it were, and starve these AI systems of personal data that could be potentially weaponized at a future date for nefarious purposes?
1attice 4y ago
A few paragraphs in, we get this: > The rise of AI will free people up to do things that software never will—teaching, caring for patients, and supporting the elderly, for example. First, he's already shown how teaching jobs can be easily eliminated by AI, just a few paragraphs above. And 'caring for patients' and 'supporting the elderly' sound sort ok, until you realize that these joblines are all sharply constrained by available funding. Further competition will drive wages down further. Not to mention that an out-of-work software engineer would probably make a terrible nurse, even if working under the watchful eye of HospitalAI or whatever. Moreover, these are all already underfunded pink-collar jobs -- which means you're going to have a lot of men that, for reasons of identity or machismo or inclination or what-have-you, simply don't want to do. We already have a crisis in college & career performance with men, especially young men. Telling them that they will be helping dress their grandparents for $16/h, with zero opportunity to advance, is probably not going to go down great. Statistically, this is precisely the demographic most inclined to cause political unrest. Further declines in opportunity will therefore probably lead to a rise in, for example, far-right militias, QAnon-like phenomena, and attempted coups. [aside: Jan 6 will probably be seen as a 'Columbine moment' -- a singular event that spawned countless imitations, to which we will become so inured that they will become part of the fabric of the evening news.(Perhaps the Onion will make an article for coups that it recycles every coup.)] So, once again, we have an AI-celebratory article that sounds great until you press it on the question of: what will we be doing with our time, and how will any of us make a living doing it? Billg has no coherent idea. Socioeconomically, we're the proverbial racetrack greyhound that caught the mechanical rabbit. The game is over, the greyhound is confused, and everybody is checking their losses, wondering if there will be another race any time soon. EDIT: light revision for clarity (broke out the paragraph beginning 'Jan 6' as an aside, removed the word 'ever' in front of 'any time soon', and cut redundant/reiterative first paragraph) at 13:32PDT Mar 21
milansuk 4y ago
> Risks and problems with AI One of the biggest risks right now is viruses created by transformers trained on known viruses and anti-virus binaries and databases. Humans created relatively simple viruses which took down hospitals, etc.. Transformer can make new "super" viruses and keep fighting the anti-viruses/firewalls in real-time with high-quality custom attacks.
- zer0tonin 4y ago
  Anti-virus have been trivially bypassed for decades without the need of AI
newaccount2023 4y ago
Bill also said most meetings would be happening in the metaverse in two years
- buzzert 4y ago
  Most meetings likely do happen over Zoom/WebEx/Jitsi/FaceTime at this point, so that would make him correct (minus the VR part, but I think the sentiment was "virtual meetings").
lancesells 4y ago
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mromanuk 4y ago
> The rise of AI will free people up to do things that software never will—teaching, caring for patients, and supporting the elderly, for example. Every sci-fi movie show any of those jobs as replaced by AI (or robots). Probably they will not achieve the same level of connection (mostly because they will lack a human body to make expressions, at least at the beginning). Those jobs will be replaced, not because there is a human that will be replaced, but because there is no human doing them. There are plenty of people in need of education, caring or just loneliness.
- hau 4y ago
  I don't understand his reasoning behind this point. Previous productivity advancements in history didn't free us, because technology seemingly has little to do with this. Let's say AI will do your job - will you be free from responsibility of daunting task or free from opportunity to afford next rent payment? What's the difference? Why would we spend more time on X if X becomes cheaper? Is there even a single living person who got freedom through his job being automated except automata owners?
- letrowekwel 4y ago
  I'm not holding my breath while waiting for an AI based solution that can go to elderly patient's home, give them medicine, clean their house and help them with other daily activities. This would require highly advanced robotics and ability to maneuver in varying physical environments, so far we have nothing even close to that. I believe AI might instead replace a lot of work done by journalists, software devs, managers and other office workers who mainly produce and manipulate text. Then there people may be re-educated to become care workers.
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    What is the profit motive to make a robot with that capability today without the AI to drive it? None. But as soon as you have that AI suddenly the profit motive changes.
peresthe 4y ago
The comments here are particularly disappointing. Relitigating old Microsoft debates (all the way down to adolescent insults — instead of Micro$oft we have (c)opywrong), blaming Microsoft for global inequality (!), multiple references to AI being “bullshit” because a model didn’t perform up to snuff on a particular task on a particular try. HN used to (this is a new account, but I am not new to HN) embrace technology, optimism, and the intersection of the two. Now it’s a race to see who can demonstrate their bona fides by sneering enough or affecting enough disillusionment. It’s really disappointing! And yes, I realize I’m not being the change I want to see, but it is so disheartening to see so many grumpy people racing to tear others down.
pawelduda 4y ago
It looks like AI is having self-driving hype moment. It works neatly on simple roads while you keep your hands on the steering wheel and watch the car. There are wowzers but the whole Internet feels like ChatGPT is about to disrupt the very fabric of the Universe. Wonder what will be equivalent stories of careless people turning autopilot on and going to sleep while the car happily drives them off the highway.
- bsaul 4y ago
  I think the types of error chatgpt makes are indeed very similar to the ones a tesla autopilot does ( probably due to the nature of NN) There is one big difference though : there are TONS of tasks chatgpt can do that don't require 100% accuracy to be useful and actually replace humans.
  - asdff 4y ago
    What are some of those tasks humans are doing today where they need information but it doesn't have to be accurate information? Brainstorming for sitcoms?
    - hackerlight 4y ago
      Anything low stakes like learning a new language or writing some code/creating some art for a landing page for a new idea.
      - asdff 4y ago
        We've seen things like it spitting out incorrect code that looks correct. I would think that would set you up for failure if you tried to use this unreliable highly confident teacher to learn the fundamentals of anything. Maybe you can create some art but I guess that depends on how good you prompt, so its probably easier to iterate quickly with an artist you hired on fiver.
        hackerlight 4y ago
krautt 4y ago
given all the world's pain and suffering that has been caused by the GUI, i fear AI for the first time...
- asdff 4y ago
  My controversial opinion is that the gui was a leap back to the stoneage. Teach a person to fish? Nah, lets teach them nothing about the rod, the line, the water, the hook, or even the fish, and sell them fish sticks since they can barely handle a microwave. Abstraction is distraction.
zh3 4y ago
I just had my first assistance from ChatGPT today, courtesy of a "junior" (I would prefer "less-experienced") engineer. He wanted to click a web button as part of his work on improving our steam engine (ok, calibration system) so I worked out the URL for the button and the appropriate curl incantation to trigger it. Gave him the URL and suggest he twiddled some python to do it. About an hour later he came back, told me he'd asked ChatGPT to write the code for him and yes, it did work. Anyway, thing is it really made me think about how much of the grunt/support work can potentially be offloaded like this; in this case it really did save us both some time. On the other hand, when I've played with it before, it got stuff really badly wrong (ever tried ego-surfing with it?).
- nico 4y ago
  > Probably they will not achieve the same level of connection (mostly because they will lack a human body to make expressions, at least at the beginning). What is ego-surfing?
  - zh3 4y ago
    Searching the internet for information about yourself personally. It was very flattering what it said about me (and in fact was mostly wrong) so I tried it on some co-workers as well and they also found it flattering but inaccurate.
epups 4y ago
I like Bill Gates - out of the major iconic tech personas, he is one of the most interesting to me. Yes he kind of didn't see internet or phones coming, so it's not like he is an oracle, but he is right on many issues too. I think he is right on this one as well. The most intriguing prediction was the medical one. He envisions training "medical AIs" that can act as a source of knowledge in poorer countries. Honestly, sounds madness to tell someone to rely on a LLM for medical advice today, although I can kind of imagine it happening over time as we get better at taming them.
- wizofaus 4y ago
  I would think an LLM trained on an accurate description of virtually every medical diagnosis ever made (along with a description of the treatment and outcome) would be far more capable of diagnosing almost any newly described condition better than any human doctor. What I'd expect is a good deal further off is a AI- controlled surgical robots, but we'll likely see them used within our lifetimes.
  - WA 4y ago
    Only if you can provide an accurate description of the condition someone is suffering from. Without it, an LLM would probably recommend some average treatment. Basically, prompt engineering for medical conditions.
    - wizofaus 4y ago
      Absolutely, and clearly in many cases such an accurate description couldn't be supplied purely by the patient self-describing their symptoms. But for others it seems fairly plausible. I'd still expect to see qualified professionals to be required to actually approve the recommended treatment (including prescribing medications etc.).
  - hackerlight 4y ago
    You'd probably start by using the LLM as a filter, not for the final diagnosis. If the LLM thinks something is strange (say, 5% of the time) --> refer to human doctor to ensure it isn't a false positive. If the problem is a shortage of doctors, this is one solution.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I guess one of my own issues with AI, is seeing how the tools we already have, have been twisted by greedy, ruthless people (many of whom are on this very venue). I was one of the people that started off in tech with dreams of a digital Nirvana. I ignored the "negative naysayers," and sallied forth, with an open heart, and hope for the future. I'm really quite disappointed in what we've done with these marvelous tools. As I've gotten older, wiser, and a lot more cynical, I can tell you that, if I had known, then, about human nature, what I know now, it would have been entirely predictable. I think we'll be seeing AI-driven scammers, calling and messaging us, almost incessantly, I think we'll be seeing AI-generated political manipulation, like fake videos and audio, of politicians and public figures, I think we'll be seeing AI-driven promotional campaigns, and almost undetectably subtle media manipulation, like corporations seeding news stories with their talking points. I also think that we'll be seeing AI-driven workplaces, where it will be hard to be simply human, and AI-driven surveillance, by authoritarian regimes (and people right here, will happily sell it to them). I want to believe that we'll do good, but bad pays so well, and there's outright scorn for doing stuff for any reason other than pure, personal profit.
- bovermyer 4y ago
  I wonder if humans would behave better - or at least, be more reigned-in - if we could only interact with people we are physically close to.
  - paxys 4y ago
    You have thousands of years of human history to look back on to figure out whether that is true or not. I'm going to go ahead and say that the answer is a pretty clear "no".
    - bovermyer 4y ago
      I'm not so sure about that. We have more information at our fingertips than ever before, and we can talk to people on the other side of the planet in real time. However, all it takes is a couple minutes of browsing social media or playing an online game to see that humanity has some pretty poor ideas of what constitutes acceptable social behavior. I don't think we've advanced socially all that much. I've read a fair number of history books (my degree is in history), and while our data on daily social behavior of the common person is woefully incomplete, I haven't seen much evidence that we're all that much more polite than our ancient Babylonian cousins.
pipeline_peak 4y ago
Is it a breakthrough in AI or affordable hardware?
anodari 4y ago
Unlike Bill Gates, I believe that this AI is the most revolutionary technology in human history, but at the same time, I am also concerned about its impact. The potential for AI to automate a significant number of jobs in a short period of time is alarming and unprecedented. It is ironic that the jobs we once believed to be the most difficult for AI to replace, such as those requiring high levels of human intelligence and creativity, are now at risk of being taken over.
allanrbo 4y ago
"will seem as distant as the days when using a computer meant typing at a C:> prompt". Isn't it "C:\>"? Did bill really write this post? :-)
neilobremski 4y ago
I think Gates is right that AI is the next era (obvious) and wrong about its positive improvements. More convenient productivity has brought about more garbage output and done nothing to release modern anxiety. If anything, AI is going to cause us to waste time in even more stupendously meaningless things because it's doing all our thinking. And anyway it can waste an infinite amount of our time by having us read or watch its infinite output.
f0ld 4y ago
UBI, UBI, UBI ! Then who’s going to clean the toilet? yes that’s exactly what needs to happen right now. Less supply of workforce, high demand for automation. Less carbon footprint, long term. Whoever has better Ai will win any major future global conflict. They will be fought by drones and robot spiders. I feel like every piece of puzzle is coming together. Look around. Everyone’s getting old. No babies being born. Yes we are at THAT point.
- jacooper 4y ago
  The transition would probably not be very smooth or peaceful.
jeisc 4y ago
AI when it becomes powerful enough will be used as tool by the world leaders; the same as the atom bomb was used as a weapon to end WW2 by beating the advisory into the ground. This is the same repeating story throughout written history why should it change now because Mr. Gates and some other philanthropists are optimists about human nature.
g3rald 4y ago
My primary concern with recent advances in AI is the imbalance it will create. Most optimistic views on AI come from people already employed by the major players (OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, etc.), and one their main arguments is that while they acknowledge AI will displace numerous jobs, it will also generate superior ones. However, the main problem arises when these "better" jobs replace the lost ones, but are performed by fewer individuals. One developer will be capable of accomplishing the work of at least three, and the same applies to lawyers, analysts, and so on.

243 points by avonmach 4y ago

It’s the other way around: tests and materials which we believed made humans distinctive from AI and our “models” of human measurement or standardized tests, seem to fail when examined seriously. They are purported somewhat to prevent computer cheating because we enforce conditions that allow us to claim the results are accurate. Clearly that is not the case, and the tests or measurements themselves lack much or all value. What most people believe makes someone’s opinion valuable (economic production, social wanking, allowing and enforcing inequality) is ironically what prevents most of these people from being in a room with actually intelligent people. Take the case of Grigori Perelman: mathematical genius who created insights into fractal geometry and chaos mathematics who now contributes nothing but his personal disgust at the state of the world and how willing people are to cheat and steal. Bill Gates has made a lot of money, but he has never made any deep insights or valuable contributions. He can make more money but history will bury the man because he is nothing more than someone who became an exalted dung beetle of wealth. Mindless, brainless, and stacking that shit. I find this article in the same vein: mostly some shitty business crap that will extol it’s fecal values to the investors and businessmen who are now immune to their own stink.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

addisonl 4y ago

I’m more inclined to call it the Age of Disinformation

extheat 4y ago
Can you elaborate why you think this is the most notable feature as opposed to others?
WhereIsTheTruth 4y ago
That's indeed what i'd call it too AI was already a thing with robotics / games What's being promoted these days are AI assisted generative tools, i personally call it "AI assisted copy pasta"
- asdff 4y ago
  They already had an ai assisted complete in gmail. I wonder how many managers operated by just hitting tab tab tab send and not writing any english at all the last few years?
samstave 4y ago
Why do you think this is coming from "GatesNotes" This guy needs to GTFO out of Humanity at this point. ANYTHING this guy says about AI is ging to be because he is going to fund AI-Malevolence-Protection-Racket then sell some pre-planned AI-cyber-storm solution that every computer on the planet will be mandated on installing.
finikytou 4y ago
open AI is the continuation of the liberal, neo democrat agenda. I thought we were in the age of disinformation with medias, social networks and censorship those past few years and thought with a slight relief that Elon Musk buying twitter would be the end of an era and that mankind will be brought back to a safe space where debates are seen as enriching, divergence of opinion as a strength but boy was I wrong. it was just the last sign of an old world trying to fight against a demon of smoke, revealing to all of us a new woke world where AI are agents of disinformation that will shape mankind through the woke agenda of the 1% for the good of no one but them. truly evil. and all the people praising what chatgpt can do will be the first one to tell us that they warned us back then.
LouisSayers 4y ago
It's funny because I was searching on Bing Chat earlier today and came across a linux command <(). I enquired about it, and it then referenced an article. At the bottom of the article was something along the lines of "This content was generated with ChatGPT.". It made me think, if people stop thinking for themselves and start making articles which contain slight errors, those errors will become pervasive, and then these AI's could enter a loop where they generate confidently sounding incorrect information. It'll then make sense to weight information sources - but then who is in charge of deciding what weights to give what sources? I guess in the end where we get our "facts" will be decided by our "Benevolent AI Dictator Overlords".

mym1990 4y ago

I’ve been thinking a lot about how AI can reduce some of the world’s worst inequities. But he fails to mention in the risks how AI can also be a cause of increase for some of the world's worst inequalities due to failure to have representative datasets, or simply by creating an ever increasing technological gap between classes(just 2 off the top of my head).

theropost 4y ago
Job displacement: AI could automate low-skilled jobs, leading to job losses for low-income workers while increasing demand for high-skilled workers, widening the income gap. Digital divide: Unequal access to advanced AI technologies could exacerbate existing inequalities between developed and developing nations, as well as between urban and rural populations. Concentration of wealth: As AI technologies are developed and controlled by a few large companies, wealth may become increasingly concentrated, leading to greater economic inequality. Education disparity: Access to high-quality education and training in AI-related fields may be limited to individuals with financial resources, further increasing income inequality. Biased AI systems: AI algorithms that inadvertently reinforce existing social biases can disproportionately affect disadvantaged populations, perpetuating and worsening economic inequality. Unequal access to benefits: The benefits of AI-driven productivity gains may not be equally distributed across society, leading to increased income disparities. Monopolistic behavior: AI-enabled companies with significant market power may use their technology to stifle competition, which could result in fewer opportunities for small businesses and entrepreneurs, contributing to economic inequality. Financial markets: AI-driven financial technologies may disproportionately benefit those with access to capital and financial knowledge, further widening the wealth gap. Healthcare: AI-powered diagnostics and treatments may not be accessible to everyone, especially those in low-income communities or developing nations, resulting in health disparities that could exacerbate economic inequality. Surveillance and privacy: AI-powered surveillance technologies may disproportionately impact vulnerable populations, limiting their economic opportunities and reinforcing existing inequalities.
- motoxpro 4y ago
  ChatGPT comment

amelius 4y ago

Or it's the fall before the next AI Winter.

supermatt 4y ago

> AGI doesn’t exist yet I wouldn't be so sure about that! This "ground truth" model doing the rounds seems to be outperforming all other models in their respective papers! ;p

ideonode 4y ago
Do you have a reference for that?
- BobbyJo 4y ago
  I believe this was a joke. Papers compare trained models to "ground truth" to determine accuracy. Ground truth refers simply to the correct answers, but, the way it's used grammatically, you can interpret it as another model called "ground truth" which has a 100% accuracy at all tasks.
bqmjjx0kac 4y ago
I think that “ground truth” typically satisfies GI, but not A.
rikimaru0345 4y ago
what ground truth model? is there some paper i can read? can you post a link to it?

capableweb 4y ago

> Philanthropy is my full-time job these days, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how—in addition to helping people be more productive—AI can reduce some of the world’s worst inequities. Globally, the worst inequity is in health: 5 million children under the age of 5 die every year. One great first step OpenAI can take towards this is by actually making their models open. As long as the models are intentionally kept back and intentionally profited from by already wealthy private citizens, inequality will grow, not shrink. Not to mention that people in poor countries (which as Gates cites as the "hotspots" for inequality in health) won't be able to use some HTTP API based in US/SF. Not just that latency will kill requests, some of the places don't even have internet connectivity. How is OpenAI supposed to help those communities if the "inequality fighter GPT-4" is gate-kept behind a centralized HTTP API?

breck 4y ago
> AI can reduce some of the world’s worst inequities. To reduce inequity abolish (c)opywrong laws. BG grew rich via (c)opywrong laws. That is the dilemma. Does he see it and just not connect the dots? Or can he connect the dots but doesn't really care? I am not sure.
- eganist 4y ago
  What are "(c)opywrong" laws? I'm not being facetious. What specifically are you drawing objection to?
  - breck 4y ago
    Laws that make it illegal to use one's own property to share information. A correction of the copyright misnomer.
    - eganist 4y ago
      Got it, so you have a general aversion to copyright, the concept of intellectual property, and to an extent, the funding of knowledge work I'm assuming? You didn't carve out any exceptions, hence my assumption.

drumhead 4y ago

I like to think its more the age of the Genuine Personal Digital Assistant has begun. The LLMs are great at assisting you to do your job but they wont take over yet.

celim307 4y ago
Her is a forward looking movie in a lot of ways Kids born today will grow up with their phones/device being their best friend and pet, like a Pokémon. You will be incredibly socially shunned if you don’t have one, and corporations will have not only data but an emotional hook into you for life
- Syonyk 4y ago
  I'm not sure that's true. Even among teenagers right now, there's widespread recognition of the downsides of social media/always connectedness/etc, and if there's one thing we can rely on kids to do, it's to poke and prod the "sacred cows" of their parents generation to find out if they're any good or not. The "always connected nature of cell phones" is pretty clearly not any good, and you can safely assume that most teenagers right now have watched at least one parent, grandparent, or relative get turned into something disgusting by being always connected - that one relative who's always on TwitFace railing about how evil Muskerberg is, or whatever the outrage of the day is. I've got a few. They're certain that Zuckerberg is a traitor, will be arrested Any Day Now, etc... and can't comprehend that by posting all about this on Facebook, all they're doing is helping out his yacht fund. It's been an utterly toxic last decade of consumer technology, from human-first perspective, and I'd wager that those being born today will have the long view back over that and see how awful it's really been. Remember: Last year, vinyl outsold CDs in "units moved" for the first time since the mid-1980s, and is showing no signs of slowing down any time soon. Instax cameras ("Polaroid, but newer") are quite popular. There's a rejection of modern digital/consumer tech going on.
- otabdeveloper4 4y ago
  Talking to ChatGPT is like talking to a marketing ad copy robot. (Not surprising, because that's basically what it is.) I couldn't imagine something more square and unhip for kids-these-days. It can't even parrot this year's memes!

system16 4y ago

> In my lifetime, I’ve seen two demonstrations of technology that struck me as revolutionary. > The first time was in 1980, when I was introduced to a graphical user interface > The second big surprise came just last year. I’d been meeting with the team from OpenAI I guess it's not surprising since Microsoft was late to the game with IE, but it's interesting he never mentions "the internet" in this list.

flyinglizard 4y ago
The internet evolved, it wasn't just useful all at once (as in "a demonstration that struck me"). Early users struggled every day to grow its utility and find more uses, all the way from a glorified BBS to what it is today.
- kenjackson 4y ago
  The first time someone demo'ed the web to me, my first thought was -- why would I use this when I have ftp, gopher, archie, etc... The web definitely didn't seem revolutionary to me. And for me my introduction to the internet was even more mundane -- it was just email and the ability to telnet so I could do my programming assignments.
  - basch 4y ago
    The web felt like both a simultaneous step forward and backward from HyperCard. I think the web would have evolved quite differently had their been a good PowerPoint like gui design tool for building sites, one that wasn’t focused on the backside.
- qorrect 4y ago
  And a lot of people here helped it to become what it is today. Cheers!
capableweb 4y ago
Maybe he doesn't mention it because he didn't think it was revolutionary when it first appeared. From https://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/14/news/skeptics-cite-overload-of-useless-information-internet-arrives-at-a.html https://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/14/news/skeptics-cite-overlo... (https://archive.is/r4F8T https://archive.is/r4F8T) > Even Bill Gates, the founder and chairman of Microsoft Corp. and widely regarded as the crown prince of the World Wide Web, was taken unawares by the Internet's grassroots acceptance. > In his book, "The Road Ahead" (not available on-line), Mr. Gates admitted that he believed the technology for "killer applications" was inadequate to lure consumers to the Internet. Of course, like any smart person at the time, he changed his views as the internet became more popular and eventually mainstream.

what-no-tests 4y ago

What would Daddy Marx say?

1attice 4y ago
He would say that we are witnessing a collapse wavefront moving through the labour market, yielding a concentration of capital that has never before been seen, and that will almost certainly foment a revolution. He'd be right, too. But with an eye to Jan 6, I fear it won't be the revolution he wanted.

deathanatos 4y ago

Oh please. This is such a trope at this point. We asked ChatGPT a question about a system the other day. Its response was, > That number is equivalent to [another number]. That number controls $thing, and that number is the recommended value for thing according to $standard. It relates to $unrelated_thing. It did the math wrong when converting the number from one unit to another. (From days to seconds.) While it got the gist of the number right in the first half of its response, and it even cites essentially the right source, the claim it says the citation backs … is not backed by the citation. It then goes on to equate it to something that it isn't related to. It's words, strung together: i.e., bullshit. The higher-level reasoning (like that the math needs to work out, or the citation should actually have the cited claim) are utterly absent, and will never be present in these models no matter how much data you train them on. The response is at best wrong, and at worst, fools someone into believing that it knows what it is talking about. But yeah, this is going to replace me. The actual article is … pretty long-winded, and really lacks specific, concrete examples as to how AI will actually move a needle somewhere. Take this chunk, > Computers haven’t had the effect on education that many of us in the industry have hoped. There have been some good developments, including educational games and online sources of information like Wikipedia, but they haven’t had a meaningful effect on any of the measures of students’ achievement. (Wikipedia hasn't had a meaningful effect?! [citation needed] there. Wikipedia affected my own achievements, and it has been a while since I was in school. I can only think that such a high quality encyclopedia is of immense value to students, particularly if you're not lucky enough … old enough? … to have an actual encyclopedia — even the use of the word actual here exposes how much effect Wikipedia has had!) > But I think in the next five to 10 years, AI-driven software will finally deliver on the promise of revolutionizing the way people teach and learn. It will know your interests and your learning style so it can tailor content that will keep you engaged. It will measure your understanding, notice when you’re losing interest, and understand what kind of motivation you respond to. It will give immediate feedback. We've been saying this about ads for decades. The last ad I remember seeing was "The Mandela Effect: In Queen's 'We Are The Champtions (sic)' He Doesn't Say '…Of The World'" ((sic: the ad title is factually inaccurate) ; … this is no more related to my interests than any of the many Taboola and Taboola-like junk ads at the bottom of half the Internet now. I have no idea where that ad ponzi scheme even ends.) > There are many ways that AIs can assist teachers and administrators, including assessing a student’s understanding of a subject and giving advice on career planning. Teachers are already using tools like ChatGPT to provide comments on their students’ writing assignments. And we're 3 paras in with very little meat here: the only example is "comments on student papers". Given the inability to reason … no, I don't think AI will be evaluating papers anytime soon. (The whole passage … if not the article … feels like a human vaguely touched up the output from GPT.) And the entire idea of trying to help poor unfortunate souls in desperate places with AI feels very much like God vomit from a Cory Doctorow tale.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

I thought this was a pretty good post, but I'm still pretty shocked that people as intelligent as Gates don't spend more time on the potential downsides. To be clear, he does highlight some of the downsides, but his responses are just "handwavy" in my opinion. What is most baffling to me is that the highlight of this post is that Gates talks about the potential for AI to reduce worldwide inequality, where in all honesty I see the exact opposite being more likely. Our current economic systems just fundamentally can't deal with ever larger swaths of the population being unable to compete with AI. And despite all the answers I've seen of "well, duh, that's because our current economic systems are so broken!", I have yet to see any sort of plausible answer that addresses how we get from our current version of capitalism to something else where all the spoils just don't go to the few people that control the strongest AI implementations (that doesn't involve massive amounts of strife and despair). Perhaps technologists, even ones as smart as Gates, are just too siloed in their worldview of technology being an ever increasing force for good. I actually find this particularly surprising from Gates, given how he's seen first hand that large swaths of the world blame him for the pandemic, or for wanting to vaccinate us with "microchips", due to the power of propaganda through social media.

drawBr0 4y ago
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- megaman821 4y ago
  Ah yes. The founder of one of the top tech firms in the world really just doesn't know much about tech. Thanks for your analysis. You must be swimming in the millions from your genius investments.
  - drawBr0 4y ago
    [dead]
    - megaman821 4y ago
      [flagged]

xg15 4y ago

Title did remind me of this: https://youtu.be/R1x4JkZTfPs https://youtu.be/R1x4JkZTfPs

moelf 4y ago

>I’ve been thinking a lot about how AI can reduce some of the world’s worst inequities. huh, closeAI is certainly not helping at this moment in time.

pphysch 4y ago

> I picked AP Bio because the test is more than a simple regurgitation of scientific facts—it asks you to think critically about biology. Of course, the LLM is just regurgitating the facts from the textbooks as well as thousands or millions of test samples. It's certainly possible to formulate a biology question that a decent student would be able to answer easily, but LLM would be helpless at (by carefully choosing heterodox wording & structure). The Age of Bullshit continues unabated.

bob1029 4y ago
> Of course, the LLM is just regurgitating the facts from the textbooks as well as thousands or millions of test samples. Indeed. For some of us in the world of business, this is actually a very compelling "just". Most use cases are indeed still bullshit, but I think we are getting to a point where maybe there exists at least one that isn't, and many of us don't want to be left holding the bag when the threshold hits 50%.
chadash 4y ago
> Of course, the LLM is just regurgitating the facts from the textbooks as well as thousands or millions of test samples. Sure, it is regurgitating facts. What's impressive is that it knows which facts to regurgitate.
- ewhanley 4y ago
  It also makes me question how different this is from what we (humans) do. We learn a bunch of information from a variety of sources and experiences and synthesize that into answers. Sometimes we are correct and sometimes we are not. I suppose the difference is that we can extrapolate from our synthesized information vs simply formulating answers, but what the best LLMs do doesn't seem radically different than the average person.
  - asdff 4y ago
    The difference is that we are reading and comprehending information, while the model is making a prediction of what word is most likely to come next based on a huge dataset of words. As such, there have been many documented cases of the model seeming correct at first glance, maybe even second glance, but its actually totally wrong in a way that a human isn't totally wrong. Like chatgpt will give you a summary and a title and an author and a year and be entirely confident that this is the truth, whereas the title was written by a different author in a related field perhaps or was made up entirely. A human would not behave like this at all. If I asked you for some info you hardly knew, you wouldn't word vomit a paragraph like this, you'd reply with a confidence score, "I don't know," or "I know about this but not that," perhaps. Seems that if there is any money or time on the line, you'd rather use the human.

wankle 4y ago

AI is little better today than in the early 1990's, mostly it's a barn broadside hitting dung fest.

BigCryo 4y ago
Yeah all this stuff is just advanced chatbots, stuff we've had for a long time

rf15 4y ago

Considering everything, it sounds more like another big wegde hammered into the divide. This will just make the rich richer, because now they can even save on artists, writers and other "expenses", all of which they can just add to their bonus now. All while you of course will still pay full price for whatever they offer. Admittedly I write this in frustration, from the perspective of someone who has friends who did not get contract extensions because of AI, stock photo sites that are just flooded with AI content, and managers clearly using gpt to write half their mails.

cactusplant7374 4y ago
I can see it working for ghost writing. One could use Chat GPT to generate unlimited Hardy Boy's novels. But I'm not sure it's going to fool readers looking for quality.
akomtu 4y ago
AI will take the "means of production" from knowledge workers: their brains.
- pg_1234 4y ago
  Well ... for now we can take the bullshit argument beloved by management: "work cheap now, it's a learning/growth opportunity that will pay off later" ... and throw it back in their face saying: since AI is going to take our jobs (yes that argument you were just using to try an convince us we are worth less) we'll just have to get all the money we can earn right now ... so pay up because there is no "later".
hackerlight 4y ago
> This will just make the rich richer Wealth isn't zero-sum. Your friends who got laid off had their jobs automated. Now what will happen, is they will go to other parts of the economy and add value where they are more needed. Total economic output has just increased and the world economy is now slightly more productive (same number of people making more stuff). You can't protest against your friends losing their jobs in this instance and not do the same for every previous technological invention going back to the wheel, all of which put someone out of a job. Because what you'd be advocating for is a lot of suffering and misery, in the form of material poverty. If you want to protest against a lack of social policies contributing to wealth inequality, then just do that. > All while you of course will still pay full price for whatever they offer. It's far cheaper.

favourable 4y ago

> it raises hard questions about the workforce, the legal system, privacy, bias, and more Privacy is the least talked about aspect of our current AI systems from what I've gathered. Perhaps we're sleepwalking into yet another surveillance capitalism nightmare and handing over data blindly to these systems, where they learn our preferences, private thoughts, habits, etc (And store all that forever). Anyone reluctant to 'feed the beast' as it were, and starve these AI systems of personal data that could be potentially weaponized at a future date for nefarious purposes?

1attice 4y ago

A few paragraphs in, we get this: > The rise of AI will free people up to do things that software never will—teaching, caring for patients, and supporting the elderly, for example. First, he's already shown how teaching jobs can be easily eliminated by AI, just a few paragraphs above. And 'caring for patients' and 'supporting the elderly' sound sort ok, until you realize that these joblines are all sharply constrained by available funding. Further competition will drive wages down further. Not to mention that an out-of-work software engineer would probably make a terrible nurse, even if working under the watchful eye of HospitalAI or whatever. Moreover, these are all already underfunded pink-collar jobs -- which means you're going to have a lot of men that, for reasons of identity or machismo or inclination or what-have-you, simply don't want to do. We already have a crisis in college & career performance with men, especially young men. Telling them that they will be helping dress their grandparents for $16/h, with zero opportunity to advance, is probably not going to go down great. Statistically, this is precisely the demographic most inclined to cause political unrest. Further declines in opportunity will therefore probably lead to a rise in, for example, far-right militias, QAnon-like phenomena, and attempted coups. [aside: Jan 6 will probably be seen as a 'Columbine moment' -- a singular event that spawned countless imitations, to which we will become so inured that they will become part of the fabric of the evening news.(Perhaps the Onion will make an article for coups that it recycles every coup.)] So, once again, we have an AI-celebratory article that sounds great until you press it on the question of: what will we be doing with our time, and how will any of us make a living doing it? Billg has no coherent idea. Socioeconomically, we're the proverbial racetrack greyhound that caught the mechanical rabbit. The game is over, the greyhound is confused, and everybody is checking their losses, wondering if there will be another race any time soon. EDIT: light revision for clarity (broke out the paragraph beginning 'Jan 6' as an aside, removed the word 'ever' in front of 'any time soon', and cut redundant/reiterative first paragraph) at 13:32PDT Mar 21

milansuk 4y ago

> Risks and problems with AI One of the biggest risks right now is viruses created by transformers trained on known viruses and anti-virus binaries and databases. Humans created relatively simple viruses which took down hospitals, etc.. Transformer can make new "super" viruses and keep fighting the anti-viruses/firewalls in real-time with high-quality custom attacks.

zer0tonin 4y ago
Anti-virus have been trivially bypassed for decades without the need of AI

newaccount2023 4y ago

Bill also said most meetings would be happening in the metaverse in two years

buzzert 4y ago
Most meetings likely do happen over Zoom/WebEx/Jitsi/FaceTime at this point, so that would make him correct (minus the VR part, but I think the sentiment was "virtual meetings").

lancesells 4y ago

For only $29.99 a month, you too can get yourself out of abject poverty. Sign up today!

mromanuk 4y ago

> The rise of AI will free people up to do things that software never will—teaching, caring for patients, and supporting the elderly, for example. Every sci-fi movie show any of those jobs as replaced by AI (or robots). Probably they will not achieve the same level of connection (mostly because they will lack a human body to make expressions, at least at the beginning). Those jobs will be replaced, not because there is a human that will be replaced, but because there is no human doing them. There are plenty of people in need of education, caring or just loneliness.

hau 4y ago
I don't understand his reasoning behind this point. Previous productivity advancements in history didn't free us, because technology seemingly has little to do with this. Let's say AI will do your job - will you be free from responsibility of daunting task or free from opportunity to afford next rent payment? What's the difference? Why would we spend more time on X if X becomes cheaper? Is there even a single living person who got freedom through his job being automated except automata owners?
letrowekwel 4y ago
I'm not holding my breath while waiting for an AI based solution that can go to elderly patient's home, give them medicine, clean their house and help them with other daily activities. This would require highly advanced robotics and ability to maneuver in varying physical environments, so far we have nothing even close to that. I believe AI might instead replace a lot of work done by journalists, software devs, managers and other office workers who mainly produce and manipulate text. Then there people may be re-educated to become care workers.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  What is the profit motive to make a robot with that capability today without the AI to drive it? None. But as soon as you have that AI suddenly the profit motive changes.

peresthe 4y ago

The comments here are particularly disappointing. Relitigating old Microsoft debates (all the way down to adolescent insults — instead of Micro$oft we have (c)opywrong), blaming Microsoft for global inequality (!), multiple references to AI being “bullshit” because a model didn’t perform up to snuff on a particular task on a particular try. HN used to (this is a new account, but I am not new to HN) embrace technology, optimism, and the intersection of the two. Now it’s a race to see who can demonstrate their bona fides by sneering enough or affecting enough disillusionment. It’s really disappointing! And yes, I realize I’m not being the change I want to see, but it is so disheartening to see so many grumpy people racing to tear others down.

pawelduda 4y ago

It looks like AI is having self-driving hype moment. It works neatly on simple roads while you keep your hands on the steering wheel and watch the car. There are wowzers but the whole Internet feels like ChatGPT is about to disrupt the very fabric of the Universe. Wonder what will be equivalent stories of careless people turning autopilot on and going to sleep while the car happily drives them off the highway.

bsaul 4y ago
I think the types of error chatgpt makes are indeed very similar to the ones a tesla autopilot does ( probably due to the nature of NN) There is one big difference though : there are TONS of tasks chatgpt can do that don't require 100% accuracy to be useful and actually replace humans.
- asdff 4y ago
  What are some of those tasks humans are doing today where they need information but it doesn't have to be accurate information? Brainstorming for sitcoms?
  - hackerlight 4y ago
    Anything low stakes like learning a new language or writing some code/creating some art for a landing page for a new idea.
    - asdff 4y ago
      We've seen things like it spitting out incorrect code that looks correct. I would think that would set you up for failure if you tried to use this unreliable highly confident teacher to learn the fundamentals of anything. Maybe you can create some art but I guess that depends on how good you prompt, so its probably easier to iterate quickly with an artist you hired on fiver.
      - hackerlight 4y ago

krautt 4y ago

given all the world's pain and suffering that has been caused by the GUI, i fear AI for the first time...

asdff 4y ago
My controversial opinion is that the gui was a leap back to the stoneage. Teach a person to fish? Nah, lets teach them nothing about the rod, the line, the water, the hook, or even the fish, and sell them fish sticks since they can barely handle a microwave. Abstraction is distraction.

zh3 4y ago

I just had my first assistance from ChatGPT today, courtesy of a "junior" (I would prefer "less-experienced") engineer. He wanted to click a web button as part of his work on improving our steam engine (ok, calibration system) so I worked out the URL for the button and the appropriate curl incantation to trigger it. Gave him the URL and suggest he twiddled some python to do it. About an hour later he came back, told me he'd asked ChatGPT to write the code for him and yes, it did work. Anyway, thing is it really made me think about how much of the grunt/support work can potentially be offloaded like this; in this case it really did save us both some time. On the other hand, when I've played with it before, it got stuff really badly wrong (ever tried ego-surfing with it?).

nico 4y ago
> Probably they will not achieve the same level of connection (mostly because they will lack a human body to make expressions, at least at the beginning). What is ego-surfing?
- zh3 4y ago
  Searching the internet for information about yourself personally. It was very flattering what it said about me (and in fact was mostly wrong) so I tried it on some co-workers as well and they also found it flattering but inaccurate.

epups 4y ago

I like Bill Gates - out of the major iconic tech personas, he is one of the most interesting to me. Yes he kind of didn't see internet or phones coming, so it's not like he is an oracle, but he is right on many issues too. I think he is right on this one as well. The most intriguing prediction was the medical one. He envisions training "medical AIs" that can act as a source of knowledge in poorer countries. Honestly, sounds madness to tell someone to rely on a LLM for medical advice today, although I can kind of imagine it happening over time as we get better at taming them.

wizofaus 4y ago
I would think an LLM trained on an accurate description of virtually every medical diagnosis ever made (along with a description of the treatment and outcome) would be far more capable of diagnosing almost any newly described condition better than any human doctor. What I'd expect is a good deal further off is a AI- controlled surgical robots, but we'll likely see them used within our lifetimes.
- WA 4y ago
  Only if you can provide an accurate description of the condition someone is suffering from. Without it, an LLM would probably recommend some average treatment. Basically, prompt engineering for medical conditions.
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    Absolutely, and clearly in many cases such an accurate description couldn't be supplied purely by the patient self-describing their symptoms. But for others it seems fairly plausible. I'd still expect to see qualified professionals to be required to actually approve the recommended treatment (including prescribing medications etc.).
- hackerlight 4y ago
  You'd probably start by using the LLM as a filter, not for the final diagnosis. If the LLM thinks something is strange (say, 5% of the time) --> refer to human doctor to ensure it isn't a false positive. If the problem is a shortage of doctors, this is one solution.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

I guess one of my own issues with AI, is seeing how the tools we already have, have been twisted by greedy, ruthless people (many of whom are on this very venue). I was one of the people that started off in tech with dreams of a digital Nirvana. I ignored the "negative naysayers," and sallied forth, with an open heart, and hope for the future. I'm really quite disappointed in what we've done with these marvelous tools. As I've gotten older, wiser, and a lot more cynical, I can tell you that, if I had known, then, about human nature, what I know now, it would have been entirely predictable. I think we'll be seeing AI-driven scammers, calling and messaging us, almost incessantly, I think we'll be seeing AI-generated political manipulation, like fake videos and audio, of politicians and public figures, I think we'll be seeing AI-driven promotional campaigns, and almost undetectably subtle media manipulation, like corporations seeding news stories with their talking points. I also think that we'll be seeing AI-driven workplaces, where it will be hard to be simply human, and AI-driven surveillance, by authoritarian regimes (and people right here, will happily sell it to them). I want to believe that we'll do good, but bad pays so well, and there's outright scorn for doing stuff for any reason other than pure, personal profit.

bovermyer 4y ago
I wonder if humans would behave better - or at least, be more reigned-in - if we could only interact with people we are physically close to.
- paxys 4y ago
  You have thousands of years of human history to look back on to figure out whether that is true or not. I'm going to go ahead and say that the answer is a pretty clear "no".
  - bovermyer 4y ago
    I'm not so sure about that. We have more information at our fingertips than ever before, and we can talk to people on the other side of the planet in real time. However, all it takes is a couple minutes of browsing social media or playing an online game to see that humanity has some pretty poor ideas of what constitutes acceptable social behavior. I don't think we've advanced socially all that much. I've read a fair number of history books (my degree is in history), and while our data on daily social behavior of the common person is woefully incomplete, I haven't seen much evidence that we're all that much more polite than our ancient Babylonian cousins.

pipeline_peak 4y ago

Is it a breakthrough in AI or affordable hardware?

anodari 4y ago

Unlike Bill Gates, I believe that this AI is the most revolutionary technology in human history, but at the same time, I am also concerned about its impact. The potential for AI to automate a significant number of jobs in a short period of time is alarming and unprecedented. It is ironic that the jobs we once believed to be the most difficult for AI to replace, such as those requiring high levels of human intelligence and creativity, are now at risk of being taken over.

allanrbo 4y ago

"will seem as distant as the days when using a computer meant typing at a C:> prompt". Isn't it "C:\>"? Did bill really write this post? :-)

neilobremski 4y ago

I think Gates is right that AI is the next era (obvious) and wrong about its positive improvements. More convenient productivity has brought about more garbage output and done nothing to release modern anxiety. If anything, AI is going to cause us to waste time in even more stupendously meaningless things because it's doing all our thinking. And anyway it can waste an infinite amount of our time by having us read or watch its infinite output.

f0ld 4y ago

UBI, UBI, UBI ! Then who’s going to clean the toilet? yes that’s exactly what needs to happen right now. Less supply of workforce, high demand for automation. Less carbon footprint, long term. Whoever has better Ai will win any major future global conflict. They will be fought by drones and robot spiders. I feel like every piece of puzzle is coming together. Look around. Everyone’s getting old. No babies being born. Yes we are at THAT point.

jacooper 4y ago
The transition would probably not be very smooth or peaceful.

jeisc 4y ago

AI when it becomes powerful enough will be used as tool by the world leaders; the same as the atom bomb was used as a weapon to end WW2 by beating the advisory into the ground. This is the same repeating story throughout written history why should it change now because Mr. Gates and some other philanthropists are optimists about human nature.

g3rald 4y ago

My primary concern with recent advances in AI is the imbalance it will create. Most optimistic views on AI come from people already employed by the major players (OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, etc.), and one their main arguments is that while they acknowledge AI will displace numerous jobs, it will also generate superior ones. However, the main problem arises when these "better" jobs replace the lost ones, but are performed by fewer individuals. One developer will be capable of accomplishing the work of at least three, and the same applies to lawyers, analysts, and so on.