7 ms·

So. The article starts with "I give it an estimate of 5 per cent chance..." and then explains: what if... Is this case really worth exploring? Or was the artic

So. The article starts with "I give it an estimate of 5 per cent chance..." and then explains: what if... Is this case really worth exploring? Or was the article written by a bored AI? I find it striking that there are still so many people downplaying the latest developments of AI. We all feel that we are at the verge of a next revolution on par or even greater than the emergence of the www, while some people just can't to seem to let it sink in.

Workaccount2 4y ago
It should be evident at this point that there are a lot of people who feel threatened by AI, and will click on anything that can give hope.
JohnFen 4y ago
> while some people just can't to seem to let it sink in. Just because people may have opinions different from yours doesn't mean they're denying reality. They just have a different opinion. The hard, cold truth is that nobody knows the future. Everybody is just guessing.
- B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
  > The hard, cold truth is that nobody knows the future. Probably, yes, especially after what happened to Cassandra. Still a fun counterfactual to develop. Lessee, you do know the future, but do not run your mouth off. Matter of fact, you pooh-pooh any such notion ...
- nuancebydefault 4y ago
  Yes that is the truth,nobody knows the future. But we you see something coming right at us, why still so much doubt?
  - johnfn 4y ago
    A lot of people saw crypto coming right at us as well.
    - nuancebydefault 4y ago
      It is easy to find such examples. A lot of people see aliens in the skies. A lot of people buy into get rich quick schemes.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - palata 4y ago
        That doesn't help your case :). Your intuition is not enough to say it's coming right at us. So where is the data? If there is no data, then it's just an intuition.
        nuancebydefault 4y ago
        Even with or without data, every prediction is intuition. Data, if you need them, are the current events. But remember the quote 'Lies, damn lies and statistics'. It is the interpretation of the data that is what counts and that interpretation is partly subjective. Otherwise we would not be having this rather fierce but interesting conversation in the first place.
        palata 4y ago
        Well, it can be more or less backed by facts. That's the difficult part: making the difference between what seems like a reasonable prediction and what is merely a belief. Climate change is coming at us. That's still a prediction (it hasn't happened yet), but not believing in it right now is irrational and dangerous. I don't think we can say that for AI. That AI will change the world is a belief. Doesn't mean that it won't.
    - wsgeorge 4y ago
      Crypto wasn't good enough as a currency, so what was coming in terms of that use case didn't pan out en masse. But it did work to an extent for some people. Crypto's value fluctuation made more sense as a speculative asset class, and it clearly saw most of its traction there. It's potential as a currency did lead to banks, financial institutions and governments taking a hard look at it. And CBDC's are an area of active investigation. So the hyper-optimists may have been off on some of their predictions, but something came out of it. AGI-agencent tools are more grounded. They don't threaten to tear down existing entrenched institutions. They do one thing simple: commoditize and scale some level of intelligence. And they're pretty good at it, hence the hype. Unless humanity develops a deep distaste for many things AI-made, the fascination will wear off and we'll be left with the cold hard truth of raw productivity increase and digital production on an unprecedented scale.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    Because it's hard to see with any clarity. The hype is so extreme that it makes it hard to see anything with any sort of confidence.
    - DennisAleynikov 4y ago
      basically this. the hype is real. the results are impressive. but the examples of success so far seem cherrypicked leading to serious skepticism. there will be a revolution, and its already in progress dethroning entire business models but the future is still very uncertain. what is humans role in this adventure into the singularity is even moreso clouded with more questions than answers
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    What are the top 3 things you’re seeing come right us? Bonus points for things that should cause us to make major adjustments (otherwise it doesn’t seem worth it to expend too much energy).
  - palata 4y ago
    Because it is not clear if it is coming right at us or not, precisely. Have you ever looked at predictions from big consulting companies like McKinsey and the likes? "This new field with unlock a market of 30 billions in the next 5 years", that kind of crap? In the fields where I worked, I used to take those predictions seriously (after all, they know better than I do, right?). What I realized is that they just don't have a damn clue. I can't blame them for failing: predicting the future is an unsolved problem. But making that kind of money by telling that kind of crap should honestly not be legal. All that to say, some things are clearly coming right at us (ahem, climate change), some aren't (AI, for instance).
    - marvin 4y ago
      This time it isn't a bunch of empty suits from McKinsey saying it. It's the technologists that built the Internet and smartphones. By all means keep your own estimates of what the world will look like in 10 years and act accordingly, but I'm trusting my own technologist's judgement on this one.
      - staticman2 4y ago
        Technologists predicted we'd have AGI by 1980. Assuming their claims are accurate is pretty naive.
      - JohnFen 4y ago
        Historically speaking, technologists are no better at predicting the future than empty suits are.
        marvin 4y ago
        That’s obviously false; they built the future at every juncture, usually to protests from the status quo. I’m excluding the desk jockey pundits from the argument, of course.
        palata 4y ago
        I think you missed the point. We are talking about predicting the future, not building it.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    > But we you see something coming right at us examples? We haven't even seen a war coming right at us. My old eyes can't see perfectly anymore, so I would probably miss it - whatever it is - anyway, but if you're so sure, would you bet everything you own on it?
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    From TFA, a (somewhat infamous quote from Frank Rosenblatt): > “[It] revealed an embryo of an electronic computer that it expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence. Later perceptrons will be able to recognize people and call out their names and instantly translate speech in one language to speech and writing in another language, it was predicted” The section on "Past Winters" in TFA is a good part of the reason why you might want to not believe what you think you see coming right at us ....
- robwwilliams 4y ago
  What some are arguing is that the future is now. A 1-in-20 chance of another AI winter is not worth serious consideration given the enormous progress in last 5. The challenges do not involve hardware at this point.
  - woeirua 4y ago
    You cannot say that with any certainty. While GPT4 shows great promise it’s still not clear at all that the current architecture can keep scaling up. Presumably they’re already using all the data they have access to. So what’s left to improve performance? Changes in architecture, some of which could require significantly different hardware.
    - jbenjoseph 4y ago
      The massive amount of money going into AI could invariably lead to the development of new and even more successful architectures. Although speculating on what and when would be like perfectly predicting the development of the Transformer architecture while living in 2010 or something.
      - JohnFen 4y ago
        > The massive amount of money going into AI could invariably lead to the development of new and even more successful architectures. Money does not guarantee results, even if the amount of money is massive.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    > What some are arguing is that the future is now Yes, I know. But there's no way to know if these people are right, right now. That will only be possible to know in the future, looking back, so it's still "predicting the future".
majormajor 4y ago
> next revolution on par or even greater than the emergence of the www Is this something you can see so clearly that you can describe it in specific terms?
- nuancebydefault 4y ago
  The time between rather large steps in advancement is small. So small that we think, oh yet another AI advancement, I'm getting used to this. At first we were perplexed by a computer beating Karpov at chess. These days however we're not perplexed anymore that a lot of creative jobs have been replaced by AI. (I think those people will find another passion no doubt, that is another topic). Next thing is less creative jobs. But i'm already thinking about climate change and hunger mitigation. You could call me an idealist, only time can tell, of course.
danielmarkbruce 4y ago
For context - I was skeptical until GPT 4, and I've completely flipped. Let people play with GPT 4 for a bit.
- DennisAleynikov 4y ago
  GPT4 is clearly magic, no matter what mechanism backs it the fact that we managed to get rocks to think and reason about things in a convincing matter was absolutely unimaginable a few years ago even. but the future is very unclear.
  - marvin 4y ago
    The momentum of investment even in known techniques makes it pretty clear that there will be even more useful things than GPT-4 available very shortly. Never mind in 10 years, with global training & inference capacity increased by multiples. It's obvious at this point that we are figuring out how to create machines that think. While I agree that the future is unclear, in the sense that it's hard to make exact predictions, the trend is very clear. Significant efficiency improvements in many types of intellectual labor is almost certain. I don't think it's priced in yet; the somewhat independent-minded among tech people are currently the only ones who have front-row seats to what's going on. But in a few years it will be obvious. Honestly, I think the persistent exponential improvement in AI makes it obvious we're on track for superintelligent machines in a few decades as well (if that!), but the preceding paragraphs should at least be entering the realm of Overton.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mmphosis 4y ago
When I first ran NCSA Mosaic, I dismissed it. It was another 5 years until it started to sink in — this was before google. Other than the hype, what are the latest developments of AI? * generate digital images from natural language descriptions. ie. DALL-E * suggest code and entire functions. ie. Copilot * generate textual content: Generative Pre-trained Transformer. ie. ChatGPT The future may be in other important endeavors: * train on ... data and learn how to ... to automate ... I think that the creativity is in your idea and not in what is being automatically generated.
- wnkrshm 4y ago
  If code can be reliably generated and digital businesses deployed automatically, you can Monte-Carlo sample enterpreneurship. Automated ventures. Edit: That may the lesson of Stable Diffusion: ideas are very cheap, if you have a heuristic for what a good idea is. Generate a business, fix it by optimizing for measurable metrics, if it doesn't work, try again. Legal constraints can be interpreted by an LLM, fines are penalties for training. I think in terms of human ingenuity, the digital space is finished in the long run. It will all be on the level of infrastructure funneling data to corporations. The space to innovate with the low-hanging fruit still lies in engineering physical things, where implementation and testing is still a barrier to iterating quickly.
travisjungroth 4y ago
> Is this case really worth exploring? Yes! You’ve mentioned people downplaying, but this is someone who is 95% confident there won’t be an AI winter in the next seven years. That’s really quite confident. And the definition he gave makes it compatible with AI being the biggest thing since sliced bread. But if it gets funded at 3x bread and scales down to 1x bread, that will count. What cost was this exploration? A blog post? An HN discussion. I think it’s so valuable for people to consider the scenarios they think are unlikely. I find this analysis much more interesting than all the dismissive “my job is safe, AI can’t [friction-point-of-existing-system]” posts. It’s certainly worth the investment of a few hours of work.
- nuancebydefault 4y ago
  You are right, even if it only leads to this HN discussion, which provides us with a more nuanced view -- "Haven't looked at it that way" Thanks!
  - travisjungroth 4y ago
    Thanks. And I do share your surprise at the number of people downplaying it. It seems like some people are forecasting that things that happened last month won’t happen. That’s not a great way to get predictions right.
    - nuancebydefault 4y ago
      In one of the above comments I read that downplaying AI could be a coping strategy, for a typical - I've got things covered mentality - type of HN'er. If that's the case, I think those, like most people, are taking the advancements seriously. I would say to those people: don't worry too much. The impact will be big, but it doesn't have to mean people will not have a job anymore, the tools they use will be at another level.
      - travisjungroth 4y ago
        I'm actually fine with this argument. "I'll be fine, I can move up another abstraction level." is pretty solid. You've made me realize the difference between the arguments I find weak vs strong. The weak argument is I can do something that ChatGPT can't. "I have people skills!". The strong argument is that as ChatGPT grows, I will grow with it. The AI floodwaters are rising. People are climbing up the stairs when they should be building boats. If you seek shelter and are wrong about how far this goes, your attic will become a coffin.
waboremo 4y ago
Been noticing the same. There's this very unique flavor of comment, happening even on HN, where people downplay the level of impact of AI/MI/ML (whatever you're more comfortable with) not whether or not it will have any impact at all. Mind you, there are always a variety of possibilities that people see, that is true, but this unique flavor of comment is unique because I haven't seen it expressed before. Not during crypto (as others are bringing it up). It feels like there's a much more serious... insecurity? Maybe that's too aggressive of a word, but it's one that describes how this downplaying partially is rooted in this idea of a replacement, and lack of job security, and an uncertainty about what you should be spending your time on. All of this is so unique, nobody was feeling this way during crypto, not a single person. If you hated crypto, you were hating it because it sounds redundant, the "fans" were annoying, the environmental impact, etc - not a single one of these reasons came from this assumption that crypto will be the new norm. So I think that's what a lot of the other comments are missing right now. The downplaying feels totally different now. As if even the people who are downplaying realize what's happening, but don't want it to be true. I did like this blog post though, outside of what we're talking about.
- pixl97 4y ago
  >and lack of job security, A fair number of HN'ers are the "pull yourselves up by the bootstraps", "We don't need to stinking unions", "Social safety nets are for the weak" types. The potential for AGI causes a cognitive dissonance with them. They are intelligent enough to realize that AGI would nearly completely destroy their ability to make money, but at the same they don't want to release their ideals that "rugged individualism" is why they are better than everyone else, and they would need a more fair system to survive.
- atleastoptimal 4y ago
  They are coping. Crypto hate is based on facts. AI hate is based on what you said, insecurity.
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    Neither of these statements are true and time will show the ignorance of it. I'm a crypto and AI optimist, but a tempered optimist. I don't think either tech is imminently going to disrupt everything, but I think both technologies have their use cases. They are far more modest than their most ardent supporters would believe. However, over the course of decades, the tech can transform society, I still think that. However, as with the internet itself, which never did live up to its loftiest, most optimistic ambitions, it's not to downplay the impact at all. Just thay eventually you do find a point where you grapple with the tradeoffs inherent in the technology and those are often sticky and intractable.
aimor 4y ago
I was recently in a work meeting with some higher ups where we discussed the near-term future of AI. The idea that this is the interface revolution on-par with GUIs and the WWW was mentioned, and attributed to Bill Gates (I guess he must have talked about this recently). I've been dwelling on everyone's expectations for a few days and I see the hype cycle. A good reason to consider "what if" is that it's still going to take a lot of effort to get from where we are to where expectations are. There's been many false starts recently: self-driving cars, 3D printing, VR/AR, crypto. 10 years on and they're all real technologies anyone can use and making progress every day, but the wild expectations hit reality. When we get there with AI (and we will, because expectations are a moving goalpost) it's good to have considered what we want to do about it. We don't want to waste years of resources on insurmountable roadblocks, we want ideas about why what worked before stopped and what easier paths forward might exist. That is, I don't see many people downplaying AI but I do see people with lots of unanswerable questions about how long this current boom will last and where we'll wind up when it's over.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Bill Gates AI episode on the Microsoft Youtube channel recently https://youtu.be/bHb_eG46v2c https://youtu.be/bHb_eG46v2c
  - Symmetry 4y ago
    He also wrote his thoughts out longform. https://www.gatesnotes.com/The-Age-of-AI-Has-Begun https://www.gatesnotes.com/The-Age-of-AI-Has-Begun
- kurthr 4y ago
  I agree and I find some of the statements a bit odd (not thought out?). I think Moore’s Law could keep going for decades.[2] But even if it doesn’t... If 1e35 FLOP is enough to train a transformative AI (henceforth, TAI) system, which seems plausible, I think we could get TAI by 2040... First, I don't see Moore's Law going sub-atomic without a complete change in methodology, which would delay the results. Wafer/die stacking are cool, but stop-gap measures. In particular he acknowledges that power consumption hasn't scaled since 2005 (in fact chiplets help by only sqrt2!). The challenge is that it doesn't help that much to increase the number of transistors, if their latency/power/cost don't fall as well. We're approaching that even ignoring any geopolitical issues. Second, power consumption is not improving except by going to 8&16 bit... there's not a lot of room there. Currently, we get <1000GFlOPs/W and even if we get 100x up to 100TFLOPs/W, you still need 10^17kWhr. OK algorithms get us another 10,000x... and it costs $1T to train 1 transformative AI. How many proof of concepts trials will be do at only $100B a pop? It all just seems a bit flip and hopeful like Feb 2000. The 10^35 number seems like its just pulled out to be a number, when it could orders of magnitude up/dn. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354573934_Compute_and_Energy_Consumption_Trends_in_Deep_Learning_Inference/figures?lo=1 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354573934_Compute_a...
mcphage 4y ago
> I find it striking that there are still so many people downplaying the latest developments of AI. 5-7 years ago the progress with self driving cars seemed enormous, and the end of driving was just around the corner. And then all progress seemed to stall or recede, and it turned out that what seemed like huge progress was mostly hot air. Maybe that’s not what happening now, but I don’t think a cautious approach is unwarranted.
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  Progress is sigmoidal approaching a limit. If the minimum acceptable performance is into the logarithmic portion of the curve, you'll see progress seem to stall out in that manner. Keep in mind that SoTA self driving AI has a better track record than people outside of rare corner cases, but the liability issue is crippling, so it won't see widespread adoption divorced from autopilot until it's "perfect." Unlike full self driving, I don't think applications of AI have a functional floor that is well into diminishing returns.
  - mcphage 4y ago
    > Progress is sigmoidal approaching a limit. Yep, but a lot of the current hype for GPT is that we're in the near-vertical segment of the sigmoid, and so people are like "woah, if that's where we are now, where will we be in 5-10 years?!". And the answer to that might be, pretty much where we are now. And maybe not, maybe it'll be better, but you can't assume linear improvements on a sigmoid curve.
    - CuriouslyC 4y ago
      Considering that AI is just "taking off" now, I'd say we're still pretty early in the growth curve (the alternate hypothesis, that people have been oblivious for a while, seems unlikely). Regardless, I think even if we were well into the linear portion of the curve, we could still do a lot with layers of tooling on top of marginal improvements on current models and technology.
      - 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
noncoml 4y ago
I taught my dog to bark twice when I ask him how much is one plus one, and thrice when I ask him one plus two. Doesn’t mean my dog is “intelligent”
- edgyquant 4y ago
  Yes? Dogs are conscious beings capable of learning words and actions that also have emotional intelligence, who would argue they aren’t?
- waboremo 4y ago
  That's silly, why would you dismiss his intelligence based on whether or not he could understand a language that was not taught to him?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lumost 4y ago
I agree with you.. but we're also seeing a lot of money get thrown at things which will ultimately be - Redundant due to winner takes all dynamics. - Useless - Way to expensive for what it does. - Produced off of sky-high seed rounds at 150 MM. This same dynamic happened with the www leading to an eventual crash - the mobile and social versions would have been more noticeable had it not happened in private markets and simultaneously with the valuation spike of the late teens. It would be almost more surprising if there wasn't a pull back eventually. This also doesn't say anything about the people who work in AI. It's not a given that the legions of research scientists populating corporate labs will be the right people for new startups. Similarly it may turn out that prompt engineering is the dominant method for talking to LLMs rather than code.

Workaccount2 4y ago

It should be evident at this point that there are a lot of people who feel threatened by AI, and will click on anything that can give hope.

JohnFen 4y ago

> while some people just can't to seem to let it sink in. Just because people may have opinions different from yours doesn't mean they're denying reality. They just have a different opinion. The hard, cold truth is that nobody knows the future. Everybody is just guessing.

B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
> The hard, cold truth is that nobody knows the future. Probably, yes, especially after what happened to Cassandra. Still a fun counterfactual to develop. Lessee, you do know the future, but do not run your mouth off. Matter of fact, you pooh-pooh any such notion ...
nuancebydefault 4y ago
Yes that is the truth,nobody knows the future. But we you see something coming right at us, why still so much doubt?
- johnfn 4y ago
  A lot of people saw crypto coming right at us as well.
  - nuancebydefault 4y ago
    It is easy to find such examples. A lot of people see aliens in the skies. A lot of people buy into get rich quick schemes.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - palata 4y ago
      That doesn't help your case :). Your intuition is not enough to say it's coming right at us. So where is the data? If there is no data, then it's just an intuition.
      - nuancebydefault 4y ago
        Even with or without data, every prediction is intuition. Data, if you need them, are the current events. But remember the quote 'Lies, damn lies and statistics'. It is the interpretation of the data that is what counts and that interpretation is partly subjective. Otherwise we would not be having this rather fierce but interesting conversation in the first place.
        palata 4y ago
        Well, it can be more or less backed by facts. That's the difficult part: making the difference between what seems like a reasonable prediction and what is merely a belief. Climate change is coming at us. That's still a prediction (it hasn't happened yet), but not believing in it right now is irrational and dangerous. I don't think we can say that for AI. That AI will change the world is a belief. Doesn't mean that it won't.
  - wsgeorge 4y ago
    Crypto wasn't good enough as a currency, so what was coming in terms of that use case didn't pan out en masse. But it did work to an extent for some people. Crypto's value fluctuation made more sense as a speculative asset class, and it clearly saw most of its traction there. It's potential as a currency did lead to banks, financial institutions and governments taking a hard look at it. And CBDC's are an area of active investigation. So the hyper-optimists may have been off on some of their predictions, but something came out of it. AGI-agencent tools are more grounded. They don't threaten to tear down existing entrenched institutions. They do one thing simple: commoditize and scale some level of intelligence. And they're pretty good at it, hence the hype. Unless humanity develops a deep distaste for many things AI-made, the fascination will wear off and we'll be left with the cold hard truth of raw productivity increase and digital production on an unprecedented scale.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  Because it's hard to see with any clarity. The hype is so extreme that it makes it hard to see anything with any sort of confidence.
  - DennisAleynikov 4y ago
    basically this. the hype is real. the results are impressive. but the examples of success so far seem cherrypicked leading to serious skepticism. there will be a revolution, and its already in progress dethroning entire business models but the future is still very uncertain. what is humans role in this adventure into the singularity is even moreso clouded with more questions than answers
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- andsoitis 4y ago
  What are the top 3 things you’re seeing come right us? Bonus points for things that should cause us to make major adjustments (otherwise it doesn’t seem worth it to expend too much energy).
- palata 4y ago
  Because it is not clear if it is coming right at us or not, precisely. Have you ever looked at predictions from big consulting companies like McKinsey and the likes? "This new field with unlock a market of 30 billions in the next 5 years", that kind of crap? In the fields where I worked, I used to take those predictions seriously (after all, they know better than I do, right?). What I realized is that they just don't have a damn clue. I can't blame them for failing: predicting the future is an unsolved problem. But making that kind of money by telling that kind of crap should honestly not be legal. All that to say, some things are clearly coming right at us (ahem, climate change), some aren't (AI, for instance).
  - marvin 4y ago
    This time it isn't a bunch of empty suits from McKinsey saying it. It's the technologists that built the Internet and smartphones. By all means keep your own estimates of what the world will look like in 10 years and act accordingly, but I'm trusting my own technologist's judgement on this one.
    - staticman2 4y ago
      Technologists predicted we'd have AGI by 1980. Assuming their claims are accurate is pretty naive.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      Historically speaking, technologists are no better at predicting the future than empty suits are.
      - marvin 4y ago
        That’s obviously false; they built the future at every juncture, usually to protests from the status quo. I’m excluding the desk jockey pundits from the argument, of course.
        palata 4y ago
        I think you missed the point. We are talking about predicting the future, not building it.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > But we you see something coming right at us examples? We haven't even seen a war coming right at us. My old eyes can't see perfectly anymore, so I would probably miss it - whatever it is - anyway, but if you're so sure, would you bet everything you own on it?
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  From TFA, a (somewhat infamous quote from Frank Rosenblatt): > “[It] revealed an embryo of an electronic computer that it expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence. Later perceptrons will be able to recognize people and call out their names and instantly translate speech in one language to speech and writing in another language, it was predicted” The section on "Past Winters" in TFA is a good part of the reason why you might want to not believe what you think you see coming right at us ....
robwwilliams 4y ago
What some are arguing is that the future is now. A 1-in-20 chance of another AI winter is not worth serious consideration given the enormous progress in last 5. The challenges do not involve hardware at this point.
- woeirua 4y ago
  You cannot say that with any certainty. While GPT4 shows great promise it’s still not clear at all that the current architecture can keep scaling up. Presumably they’re already using all the data they have access to. So what’s left to improve performance? Changes in architecture, some of which could require significantly different hardware.
  - jbenjoseph 4y ago
    The massive amount of money going into AI could invariably lead to the development of new and even more successful architectures. Although speculating on what and when would be like perfectly predicting the development of the Transformer architecture while living in 2010 or something.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      > The massive amount of money going into AI could invariably lead to the development of new and even more successful architectures. Money does not guarantee results, even if the amount of money is massive.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > What some are arguing is that the future is now Yes, I know. But there's no way to know if these people are right, right now. That will only be possible to know in the future, looking back, so it's still "predicting the future".

majormajor 4y ago

> next revolution on par or even greater than the emergence of the www Is this something you can see so clearly that you can describe it in specific terms?

nuancebydefault 4y ago
The time between rather large steps in advancement is small. So small that we think, oh yet another AI advancement, I'm getting used to this. At first we were perplexed by a computer beating Karpov at chess. These days however we're not perplexed anymore that a lot of creative jobs have been replaced by AI. (I think those people will find another passion no doubt, that is another topic). Next thing is less creative jobs. But i'm already thinking about climate change and hunger mitigation. You could call me an idealist, only time can tell, of course.

danielmarkbruce 4y ago

For context - I was skeptical until GPT 4, and I've completely flipped. Let people play with GPT 4 for a bit.

DennisAleynikov 4y ago
GPT4 is clearly magic, no matter what mechanism backs it the fact that we managed to get rocks to think and reason about things in a convincing matter was absolutely unimaginable a few years ago even. but the future is very unclear.
- marvin 4y ago
  The momentum of investment even in known techniques makes it pretty clear that there will be even more useful things than GPT-4 available very shortly. Never mind in 10 years, with global training & inference capacity increased by multiples. It's obvious at this point that we are figuring out how to create machines that think. While I agree that the future is unclear, in the sense that it's hard to make exact predictions, the trend is very clear. Significant efficiency improvements in many types of intellectual labor is almost certain. I don't think it's priced in yet; the somewhat independent-minded among tech people are currently the only ones who have front-row seats to what's going on. But in a few years it will be obvious. Honestly, I think the persistent exponential improvement in AI makes it obvious we're on track for superintelligent machines in a few decades as well (if that!), but the preceding paragraphs should at least be entering the realm of Overton.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mmphosis 4y ago

When I first ran NCSA Mosaic, I dismissed it. It was another 5 years until it started to sink in — this was before google. Other than the hype, what are the latest developments of AI? * generate digital images from natural language descriptions. ie. DALL-E * suggest code and entire functions. ie. Copilot * generate textual content: Generative Pre-trained Transformer. ie. ChatGPT The future may be in other important endeavors: * train on ... data and learn how to ... to automate ... I think that the creativity is in your idea and not in what is being automatically generated.

wnkrshm 4y ago
If code can be reliably generated and digital businesses deployed automatically, you can Monte-Carlo sample enterpreneurship. Automated ventures. Edit: That may the lesson of Stable Diffusion: ideas are very cheap, if you have a heuristic for what a good idea is. Generate a business, fix it by optimizing for measurable metrics, if it doesn't work, try again. Legal constraints can be interpreted by an LLM, fines are penalties for training. I think in terms of human ingenuity, the digital space is finished in the long run. It will all be on the level of infrastructure funneling data to corporations. The space to innovate with the low-hanging fruit still lies in engineering physical things, where implementation and testing is still a barrier to iterating quickly.

travisjungroth 4y ago

> Is this case really worth exploring? Yes! You’ve mentioned people downplaying, but this is someone who is 95% confident there won’t be an AI winter in the next seven years. That’s really quite confident. And the definition he gave makes it compatible with AI being the biggest thing since sliced bread. But if it gets funded at 3x bread and scales down to 1x bread, that will count. What cost was this exploration? A blog post? An HN discussion. I think it’s so valuable for people to consider the scenarios they think are unlikely. I find this analysis much more interesting than all the dismissive “my job is safe, AI can’t [friction-point-of-existing-system]” posts. It’s certainly worth the investment of a few hours of work.

nuancebydefault 4y ago
You are right, even if it only leads to this HN discussion, which provides us with a more nuanced view -- "Haven't looked at it that way" Thanks!
- travisjungroth 4y ago
  Thanks. And I do share your surprise at the number of people downplaying it. It seems like some people are forecasting that things that happened last month won’t happen. That’s not a great way to get predictions right.
  - nuancebydefault 4y ago
    In one of the above comments I read that downplaying AI could be a coping strategy, for a typical - I've got things covered mentality - type of HN'er. If that's the case, I think those, like most people, are taking the advancements seriously. I would say to those people: don't worry too much. The impact will be big, but it doesn't have to mean people will not have a job anymore, the tools they use will be at another level.
    - travisjungroth 4y ago
      I'm actually fine with this argument. "I'll be fine, I can move up another abstraction level." is pretty solid. You've made me realize the difference between the arguments I find weak vs strong. The weak argument is I can do something that ChatGPT can't. "I have people skills!". The strong argument is that as ChatGPT grows, I will grow with it. The AI floodwaters are rising. People are climbing up the stairs when they should be building boats. If you seek shelter and are wrong about how far this goes, your attic will become a coffin.

waboremo 4y ago

Been noticing the same. There's this very unique flavor of comment, happening even on HN, where people downplay the level of impact of AI/MI/ML (whatever you're more comfortable with) not whether or not it will have any impact at all. Mind you, there are always a variety of possibilities that people see, that is true, but this unique flavor of comment is unique because I haven't seen it expressed before. Not during crypto (as others are bringing it up). It feels like there's a much more serious... insecurity? Maybe that's too aggressive of a word, but it's one that describes how this downplaying partially is rooted in this idea of a replacement, and lack of job security, and an uncertainty about what you should be spending your time on. All of this is so unique, nobody was feeling this way during crypto, not a single person. If you hated crypto, you were hating it because it sounds redundant, the "fans" were annoying, the environmental impact, etc - not a single one of these reasons came from this assumption that crypto will be the new norm. So I think that's what a lot of the other comments are missing right now. The downplaying feels totally different now. As if even the people who are downplaying realize what's happening, but don't want it to be true. I did like this blog post though, outside of what we're talking about.

pixl97 4y ago
>and lack of job security, A fair number of HN'ers are the "pull yourselves up by the bootstraps", "We don't need to stinking unions", "Social safety nets are for the weak" types. The potential for AGI causes a cognitive dissonance with them. They are intelligent enough to realize that AGI would nearly completely destroy their ability to make money, but at the same they don't want to release their ideals that "rugged individualism" is why they are better than everyone else, and they would need a more fair system to survive.
atleastoptimal 4y ago
They are coping. Crypto hate is based on facts. AI hate is based on what you said, insecurity.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  Neither of these statements are true and time will show the ignorance of it. I'm a crypto and AI optimist, but a tempered optimist. I don't think either tech is imminently going to disrupt everything, but I think both technologies have their use cases. They are far more modest than their most ardent supporters would believe. However, over the course of decades, the tech can transform society, I still think that. However, as with the internet itself, which never did live up to its loftiest, most optimistic ambitions, it's not to downplay the impact at all. Just thay eventually you do find a point where you grapple with the tradeoffs inherent in the technology and those are often sticky and intractable.

aimor 4y ago

I was recently in a work meeting with some higher ups where we discussed the near-term future of AI. The idea that this is the interface revolution on-par with GUIs and the WWW was mentioned, and attributed to Bill Gates (I guess he must have talked about this recently). I've been dwelling on everyone's expectations for a few days and I see the hype cycle. A good reason to consider "what if" is that it's still going to take a lot of effort to get from where we are to where expectations are. There's been many false starts recently: self-driving cars, 3D printing, VR/AR, crypto. 10 years on and they're all real technologies anyone can use and making progress every day, but the wild expectations hit reality. When we get there with AI (and we will, because expectations are a moving goalpost) it's good to have considered what we want to do about it. We don't want to waste years of resources on insurmountable roadblocks, we want ideas about why what worked before stopped and what easier paths forward might exist. That is, I don't see many people downplaying AI but I do see people with lots of unanswerable questions about how long this current boom will last and where we'll wind up when it's over.

pixl97 4y ago
Bill Gates AI episode on the Microsoft Youtube channel recently https://youtu.be/bHb_eG46v2c https://youtu.be/bHb_eG46v2c
- Symmetry 4y ago
  He also wrote his thoughts out longform. https://www.gatesnotes.com/The-Age-of-AI-Has-Begun https://www.gatesnotes.com/The-Age-of-AI-Has-Begun
kurthr 4y ago
I agree and I find some of the statements a bit odd (not thought out?). I think Moore’s Law could keep going for decades.[2] But even if it doesn’t... If 1e35 FLOP is enough to train a transformative AI (henceforth, TAI) system, which seems plausible, I think we could get TAI by 2040... First, I don't see Moore's Law going sub-atomic without a complete change in methodology, which would delay the results. Wafer/die stacking are cool, but stop-gap measures. In particular he acknowledges that power consumption hasn't scaled since 2005 (in fact chiplets help by only sqrt2!). The challenge is that it doesn't help that much to increase the number of transistors, if their latency/power/cost don't fall as well. We're approaching that even ignoring any geopolitical issues. Second, power consumption is not improving except by going to 8&16 bit... there's not a lot of room there. Currently, we get <1000GFlOPs/W and even if we get 100x up to 100TFLOPs/W, you still need 10^17kWhr. OK algorithms get us another 10,000x... and it costs $1T to train 1 transformative AI. How many proof of concepts trials will be do at only $100B a pop? It all just seems a bit flip and hopeful like Feb 2000. The 10^35 number seems like its just pulled out to be a number, when it could orders of magnitude up/dn. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354573934_Compute_and_Energy_Consumption_Trends_in_Deep_Learning_Inference/figures?lo=1 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354573934_Compute_a...

mcphage 4y ago

> I find it striking that there are still so many people downplaying the latest developments of AI. 5-7 years ago the progress with self driving cars seemed enormous, and the end of driving was just around the corner. And then all progress seemed to stall or recede, and it turned out that what seemed like huge progress was mostly hot air. Maybe that’s not what happening now, but I don’t think a cautious approach is unwarranted.

CuriouslyC 4y ago
Progress is sigmoidal approaching a limit. If the minimum acceptable performance is into the logarithmic portion of the curve, you'll see progress seem to stall out in that manner. Keep in mind that SoTA self driving AI has a better track record than people outside of rare corner cases, but the liability issue is crippling, so it won't see widespread adoption divorced from autopilot until it's "perfect." Unlike full self driving, I don't think applications of AI have a functional floor that is well into diminishing returns.
- mcphage 4y ago
  > Progress is sigmoidal approaching a limit. Yep, but a lot of the current hype for GPT is that we're in the near-vertical segment of the sigmoid, and so people are like "woah, if that's where we are now, where will we be in 5-10 years?!". And the answer to that might be, pretty much where we are now. And maybe not, maybe it'll be better, but you can't assume linear improvements on a sigmoid curve.
  - CuriouslyC 4y ago
    Considering that AI is just "taking off" now, I'd say we're still pretty early in the growth curve (the alternate hypothesis, that people have been oblivious for a while, seems unlikely). Regardless, I think even if we were well into the linear portion of the curve, we could still do a lot with layers of tooling on top of marginal improvements on current models and technology.
    - 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

noncoml 4y ago

I taught my dog to bark twice when I ask him how much is one plus one, and thrice when I ask him one plus two. Doesn’t mean my dog is “intelligent”

edgyquant 4y ago
Yes? Dogs are conscious beings capable of learning words and actions that also have emotional intelligence, who would argue they aren’t?
waboremo 4y ago
That's silly, why would you dismiss his intelligence based on whether or not he could understand a language that was not taught to him?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

lumost 4y ago

I agree with you.. but we're also seeing a lot of money get thrown at things which will ultimately be - Redundant due to winner takes all dynamics. - Useless - Way to expensive for what it does. - Produced off of sky-high seed rounds at 150 MM. This same dynamic happened with the www leading to an eventual crash - the mobile and social versions would have been more noticeable had it not happened in private markets and simultaneously with the valuation spike of the late teens. It would be almost more surprising if there wasn't a pull back eventually. This also doesn't say anything about the people who work in AI. It's not a given that the legions of research scientists populating corporate labs will be the right people for new startups. Similarly it may turn out that prompt engineering is the dominant method for talking to LLMs rather than code.