13 ms·

The Cambrian Period of AI

113 points by lachlan_gray 4y ago

lachlan_gray 4y ago
Hey hn, this is my first blog post. The community here inspired me to finally try it out. I would really appreciate any feedback on clarity, or anything that causes good or bad gut reactions.
- anoy8888 4y ago
  Well written . Thanks
  - lachlan_gray 4y ago
    thanks!
- smburdick 4y ago
  I don't see a way to leave feedback right away on your page. To solicit more feedback, you might consider linking your email address/contact page in the article itself, or have an anon. comment section on your blog itself. (I realize you have your obfuscated email in the "about" section, but you might provide a simpler mechanism if you have time) Happy blogging!
  - lachlan_gray 4y ago
    Thanks for the idea! I'm looking into this now, looks like there are batteries-included services I can plunk down into the website
- wslh 4y ago
  Could you please add a few sentences/paragraphs about your core idea because now NSFW? Obviously without using ChatGPT ;-)
  - lachlan_gray 4y ago
    AI will definitely have NSFW use cases... I think William Gibson's Neuromancer books will prove to have prescient insights into what that will look like. Tech like simstims that can seize your attention and can hold it indefinitely, and highly personal AI-designed fantasies
- the_gipsy 4y ago
  I enjoyed the read. Nice take on the future of AI without going handwavy.
  - lachlan_gray 4y ago
    that's good to hear- my hands like to wave and I tried hard to keep them at bay
- gwd 4y ago
  Your description of "dumb AI" as being "just useful enough to maintain a flow of funding" reminds me of A Collection of Unmitigated Pedatry's description of the start of the Industrial Revolution [1]: > The specificity matters here because each innovation in the chain required not merely the discovery of the principle, but also the design and an economically viable use-case to all line up in order to have impact. The steam engine is an excellent example of this problem. Early tinkering with the idea of using heat to create steam to power rotary motion – the core function of a steam-engine – go all the way back to Vitruvius (c. 80 BC -15 AD) and Heron of Alexandria (c. 10-70 AD). With the benefit of hindsight we can see they were tinkering with an importance principle but the devices they actually produced – the aeolipile – had no practical use – it’s fearsomely fuel inefficient, produces little power and has to be refilled with water (that then has to be heated again from room temperature to enable operation). He goes on to say that the very first "commercial" steam engine only happened to be commercially useful because of the particular situation in which it was invented: England had cut down most of their trees, but luckily had lots of coal. The engine wasn't quite useful enough to use to (say) pump water out of an iron mine, because it was so resource-hungry that it the cost of the fuel plus getting fuel to the engine would be too much. But it's just barely useful enough to pump water out of a coal mine, if you can provide it coal without having to transport it. And that gave it just enough of a commercial toe-hold to fund its optimization. It sounds like "dumb AI" of the 2000's may have performed a similar function; and we are, perhaps, on the edge of the "AI revolution", similar to the Industrial Revolution, where we reach a hockey-stick proliferation. EDIT: Fixed link [1] https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/comment-page-1/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
  - lachlan_gray 4y ago
    This is extremely interesting and I will keep it for later! I think the engine is a perfect analogy for what makes language models exciting. At the time nobody would have realized that it would power trains or factories... it's just this huge inefficient dirty machine that gets water out of the coal mine. Let alone realize that given better fuel, they would become small and cheap enough to power strange futuristic personal devices like lawn mowers and cars.
- kakapo88 4y ago
  That was a fresh and insightful post. I think the comparison to the Cambrian explosion is a good one, as well as the larger framing of technological progress in the context of punctuated equilibrium.
  - lachlan_gray 4y ago
    I'm glad you enjoyed it!
- whoibrar 4y ago
  Well Written, Reading this felt like a breath of fresh air amid all the fog and pollution by "AI will take all our jobs" and "How to $$$ with AI".
earthboundkid 4y ago
It's 1980 and every LLM is a Wang.
optimalsolver 4y ago
It's all deep learning, making it the exact opposite of a Cambrian event. Has anyone has tried searching for new basic operations, below the level of neural networks? We've been using these methods for years, and I doubt the first major breakthrough in ML is the most optimal method possible. Consider the extreme case of searching over all mathematical and logical operations to see if something really novel can be discovered. How feasible would this be? >Tying it together, a big diversification is likely coming I'd be interested in knowing what signs, if any, currently point to that. What I see is a coalescing around the current paradigm. And considering that the hardware side led by NVIDIA is catering to this paradigm, I don't see us breaking out of this local optimum any time soon.
- tarvaina 4y ago
  Regarding whether this can be likened to Cambrian explosion: We don’t know what caused Cambrian explosion but conceivably it was some evolutionary innovation such as vision. Similarly deep learning is a cause for the explosion of new AI use cases.
- seydor 4y ago
  > for new basic operations, below the level of neural networks? Why would we? It's proven that neural networks can learn arbitrary functions, and deep networks can apparently learn all the things we don't have functions for. Backpropagation is probably biologically implausible but it's a very good and fast method to train such networks. What could another implementation of intelligence offer that we don't already have? Backpropagation is very old and maybe it's not optimal but it s good enough that it doesnt matter
  - version_five 4y ago
    Can learn arbitrary functions says nothing about efficiency or any practical considerations. A vanilla neural network can't learn a sine function or anything periodic, for inputs outside the range of the training data. Re the question of other methods, Jeffrey Hinton proposed what I think is called a "forward-forward" alternative to back propagation somewhat recently. I don't think it's been proven to be better in any way, but it shows people are searching for new methods.
manojlds 4y ago
Or is this the String Theory period of AI.
- dudeinhawaii 4y ago
  Oh man, that's harsh but I have this fear as well. I'm sure we all recall Full-Self Driving was going to be ready by 2019 or something and GM was going to have a fleet of self-driving vehicles. It turns out the last 10% takes 90% of the time/effort. I think GPT-4 was enough of a leap over GPT3.5 that I'm not sure we've hit that point yet but it'll be interesting if the next GPT is less of a leap.
  - akira2501 4y ago
    > It turns out the last 10% takes 90% of the time/effort. It turns out that consumer protection around these "new technologies" is basically non-existent, allowing corporations to charge people for fantastic sounding ideas that they know for a fact are not and are not going to be practical within the lifespan of the item they just sold you. > I think GPT-4 was enough of a leap over GPT3.5 Compared to what, though? The cost of training? The cost of running the model? The accuracy of output? The increase in real world utility? It's the "Wild West Snake Oil" period of AI.
    - dudeinhawaii 4y ago
      I respectfully disagree. I've been able to use GPT-4 extensively for coding, writing, comprehension, tone analysis, home repairs, automation, debugging vague errors, and a host of other things. Granted, it's not Jarvis from Ironman but it's a leap in terms of accuracy of the output when it comes to GPT-3. I'm not a lawyer, doctor, etc, so I can't speak for what the impact might be in those fields but I think at the very least we're looking at quite striking incremental improvements on existing processes. I think the exciting stuff is just barely ahead of us. Things like better integration with home assistants so that Alex actually gets my commands correct. Things like integration with first gen robotics. Consider this prompt: Me: Assume I have a device called a Roomba which is a robotic vacuum cleaner which is a small disk shaped object that vacuums an area and returns to a dock platform. You are an AI that runs the household and have the power to active the Roomba and send it to clean either the entire house or a specific room. I will give you a list of parsed voice commands, please take your best guess at what each might mean and if they are relevant or something you can do with the Roomba. * "yo, why is the floor dirty? Get cleanin" * "please turn on the vacuum" * "Is woobie working?" * "Omigod I just stepped on a chip, you need to clean this up now" * "Why is it so loud in here? Who turned on the hockey puck?" * "Yo AI did the Room thing run today? The floor still looks sticky". ChatGPT: "yo, why is the floor dirty? Get cleanin" - This command could be interpreted as a request to clean the floor. As an AI that runs the household, I could activate the Roomba to clean the entire house or a specific room based on the user's preference. However, the command is not specific about which action to take, so I might clarify with the user before activating Roomba. "please turn on the vacuum" - This command is a clear request to start the Roomba's cleaning process. As an AI that runs the household, I would activate Roomba to clean the entire house or a specific room based on the user's preference. "Is woobie working?" - This command is not relevant to Roomba, and as an AI that runs the household, I would inform the user that Roomba is not named "woobie." "Omigod I just stepped on a chip, you need to clean this up now" - This command is a clear request for immediate cleaning in response to a mess caused by someone stepping on a chip. As an AI that runs the household, I could activate the Roomba's spot cleaning feature or manually control Roomba to clean the specific area where the chip is present. "Why is it so loud in here? Who turned on the hockey puck?" - This command is not clear about what the speaker wants to accomplish. It mentions a loud noise and a "hockey puck," which could refer to the Roomba. However, it is unclear if the speaker wants the Roomba to stop cleaning or if they are just making a comment. As an AI that runs the household, I might ask the user for clarification before taking any action. "Yo AI did the Room thing run today? The floor still looks sticky." - This command is a question about whether the Roomba has cleaned the room today and a comment on the current state of the floor. As an AI that runs the household, I could check the logs of the Roomba to see if it has cleaned the room today, and if not, activate the Roomba to clean the room. Alternatively, I could instruct the Roomba to spot clean the area where the floor is still sticky. ------ If you can't see how having an AI that can perform reasoning like demonstrated above is extremely useful then, I dunno, just wait and see what comes. The sky's really the limit if you consider what can be done with language and text and how much of our world revolves around text. Edit: formatting
devindotcom 4y ago
Heh, I started an article with the same metaphor was too busy to finish it. We'll see what the fossil record looks like in a few years though.
FrustratedMonky 4y ago
LOL. Love it. It's really metaphors all the way down.
xwdv 4y ago
IMO the only problem we should be focusing AI on right now is having it figure out how to make more advanced and powerful AI. Alas, this is beyond AI’s potential right now. Humans are still very much needed.
- boringuser2 4y ago
  Why?
- JohnFen 4y ago
  Are you lamenting the fact that humans are still of value?
- goatlover 4y ago
  That's a fantastic way to get misaligned AI.
FrustratedMonky 4y ago
I think big jump in ai 'evolution' will be the competition part. Like DeepMind with alphastar. They got results by having different models compete, in multiple rounds to more 'evolve' towards a winning strategy. So far it seems like the news is with these single big models, but evolution kicks in if they start doing what is needed to survive.
BartjeD 4y ago
I understand it seems clever to frame AI trends in an evolutionary setting. But no one was there in the Cambrian period. We have no idea what the circumstances really were. I'm not dismissing historical sources. Just saying the timescale and comparative lack of sources equate to a lot of unreliability. The real question is how much AI is a step up in tooling. The fact that humans develop tools using their intelligence is well documented. And doesn't require a detour into evolutionary theory. The society with the best tools for the problems it faces has a competitive advantage.
- svachalek 4y ago
  At some point in this story though, it's likely AI is the intelligence and humans are the tooling. I don't think we necessarily know how that ends.
th16row 4y ago
Or not, and perhaps this is all there is to it and every new model is less revolutionary than the last one. Diminishing returns and all that.

113 points by lachlan_gray 4y ago

Hey hn, this is my first blog post. The community here inspired me to finally try it out. I would really appreciate any feedback on clarity, or anything that causes good or bad gut reactions.

anoy8888 4y ago
Well written . Thanks
- lachlan_gray 4y ago
  thanks!
smburdick 4y ago
I don't see a way to leave feedback right away on your page. To solicit more feedback, you might consider linking your email address/contact page in the article itself, or have an anon. comment section on your blog itself. (I realize you have your obfuscated email in the "about" section, but you might provide a simpler mechanism if you have time) Happy blogging!
- lachlan_gray 4y ago
  Thanks for the idea! I'm looking into this now, looks like there are batteries-included services I can plunk down into the website
wslh 4y ago
Could you please add a few sentences/paragraphs about your core idea because now NSFW? Obviously without using ChatGPT ;-)
- lachlan_gray 4y ago
  AI will definitely have NSFW use cases... I think William Gibson's Neuromancer books will prove to have prescient insights into what that will look like. Tech like simstims that can seize your attention and can hold it indefinitely, and highly personal AI-designed fantasies
the_gipsy 4y ago
I enjoyed the read. Nice take on the future of AI without going handwavy.
- lachlan_gray 4y ago
  that's good to hear- my hands like to wave and I tried hard to keep them at bay
gwd 4y ago
Your description of "dumb AI" as being "just useful enough to maintain a flow of funding" reminds me of A Collection of Unmitigated Pedatry's description of the start of the Industrial Revolution [1]: > The specificity matters here because each innovation in the chain required not merely the discovery of the principle, but also the design and an economically viable use-case to all line up in order to have impact. The steam engine is an excellent example of this problem. Early tinkering with the idea of using heat to create steam to power rotary motion – the core function of a steam-engine – go all the way back to Vitruvius (c. 80 BC -15 AD) and Heron of Alexandria (c. 10-70 AD). With the benefit of hindsight we can see they were tinkering with an importance principle but the devices they actually produced – the aeolipile – had no practical use – it’s fearsomely fuel inefficient, produces little power and has to be refilled with water (that then has to be heated again from room temperature to enable operation). He goes on to say that the very first "commercial" steam engine only happened to be commercially useful because of the particular situation in which it was invented: England had cut down most of their trees, but luckily had lots of coal. The engine wasn't quite useful enough to use to (say) pump water out of an iron mine, because it was so resource-hungry that it the cost of the fuel plus getting fuel to the engine would be too much. But it's just barely useful enough to pump water out of a coal mine, if you can provide it coal without having to transport it. And that gave it just enough of a commercial toe-hold to fund its optimization. It sounds like "dumb AI" of the 2000's may have performed a similar function; and we are, perhaps, on the edge of the "AI revolution", similar to the Industrial Revolution, where we reach a hockey-stick proliferation. EDIT: Fixed link [1] https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/comment-page-1/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
- lachlan_gray 4y ago
  This is extremely interesting and I will keep it for later! I think the engine is a perfect analogy for what makes language models exciting. At the time nobody would have realized that it would power trains or factories... it's just this huge inefficient dirty machine that gets water out of the coal mine. Let alone realize that given better fuel, they would become small and cheap enough to power strange futuristic personal devices like lawn mowers and cars.
kakapo88 4y ago
That was a fresh and insightful post. I think the comparison to the Cambrian explosion is a good one, as well as the larger framing of technological progress in the context of punctuated equilibrium.
- lachlan_gray 4y ago
  I'm glad you enjoyed it!
whoibrar 4y ago
Well Written, Reading this felt like a breath of fresh air amid all the fog and pollution by "AI will take all our jobs" and "How to $$$ with AI".

earthboundkid 4y ago

It's 1980 and every LLM is a Wang.

optimalsolver 4y ago

It's all deep learning, making it the exact opposite of a Cambrian event. Has anyone has tried searching for new basic operations, below the level of neural networks? We've been using these methods for years, and I doubt the first major breakthrough in ML is the most optimal method possible. Consider the extreme case of searching over all mathematical and logical operations to see if something really novel can be discovered. How feasible would this be? >Tying it together, a big diversification is likely coming I'd be interested in knowing what signs, if any, currently point to that. What I see is a coalescing around the current paradigm. And considering that the hardware side led by NVIDIA is catering to this paradigm, I don't see us breaking out of this local optimum any time soon.

tarvaina 4y ago
Regarding whether this can be likened to Cambrian explosion: We don’t know what caused Cambrian explosion but conceivably it was some evolutionary innovation such as vision. Similarly deep learning is a cause for the explosion of new AI use cases.
seydor 4y ago
> for new basic operations, below the level of neural networks? Why would we? It's proven that neural networks can learn arbitrary functions, and deep networks can apparently learn all the things we don't have functions for. Backpropagation is probably biologically implausible but it's a very good and fast method to train such networks. What could another implementation of intelligence offer that we don't already have? Backpropagation is very old and maybe it's not optimal but it s good enough that it doesnt matter
- version_five 4y ago
  Can learn arbitrary functions says nothing about efficiency or any practical considerations. A vanilla neural network can't learn a sine function or anything periodic, for inputs outside the range of the training data. Re the question of other methods, Jeffrey Hinton proposed what I think is called a "forward-forward" alternative to back propagation somewhat recently. I don't think it's been proven to be better in any way, but it shows people are searching for new methods.

manojlds 4y ago

Or is this the String Theory period of AI.

dudeinhawaii 4y ago
Oh man, that's harsh but I have this fear as well. I'm sure we all recall Full-Self Driving was going to be ready by 2019 or something and GM was going to have a fleet of self-driving vehicles. It turns out the last 10% takes 90% of the time/effort. I think GPT-4 was enough of a leap over GPT3.5 that I'm not sure we've hit that point yet but it'll be interesting if the next GPT is less of a leap.
- akira2501 4y ago
  > It turns out the last 10% takes 90% of the time/effort. It turns out that consumer protection around these "new technologies" is basically non-existent, allowing corporations to charge people for fantastic sounding ideas that they know for a fact are not and are not going to be practical within the lifespan of the item they just sold you. > I think GPT-4 was enough of a leap over GPT3.5 Compared to what, though? The cost of training? The cost of running the model? The accuracy of output? The increase in real world utility? It's the "Wild West Snake Oil" period of AI.
  - dudeinhawaii 4y ago
    I respectfully disagree. I've been able to use GPT-4 extensively for coding, writing, comprehension, tone analysis, home repairs, automation, debugging vague errors, and a host of other things. Granted, it's not Jarvis from Ironman but it's a leap in terms of accuracy of the output when it comes to GPT-3. I'm not a lawyer, doctor, etc, so I can't speak for what the impact might be in those fields but I think at the very least we're looking at quite striking incremental improvements on existing processes. I think the exciting stuff is just barely ahead of us. Things like better integration with home assistants so that Alex actually gets my commands correct. Things like integration with first gen robotics. Consider this prompt: Me: Assume I have a device called a Roomba which is a robotic vacuum cleaner which is a small disk shaped object that vacuums an area and returns to a dock platform. You are an AI that runs the household and have the power to active the Roomba and send it to clean either the entire house or a specific room. I will give you a list of parsed voice commands, please take your best guess at what each might mean and if they are relevant or something you can do with the Roomba. * "yo, why is the floor dirty? Get cleanin" * "please turn on the vacuum" * "Is woobie working?" * "Omigod I just stepped on a chip, you need to clean this up now" * "Why is it so loud in here? Who turned on the hockey puck?" * "Yo AI did the Room thing run today? The floor still looks sticky". ChatGPT: "yo, why is the floor dirty? Get cleanin" - This command could be interpreted as a request to clean the floor. As an AI that runs the household, I could activate the Roomba to clean the entire house or a specific room based on the user's preference. However, the command is not specific about which action to take, so I might clarify with the user before activating Roomba. "please turn on the vacuum" - This command is a clear request to start the Roomba's cleaning process. As an AI that runs the household, I would activate Roomba to clean the entire house or a specific room based on the user's preference. "Is woobie working?" - This command is not relevant to Roomba, and as an AI that runs the household, I would inform the user that Roomba is not named "woobie." "Omigod I just stepped on a chip, you need to clean this up now" - This command is a clear request for immediate cleaning in response to a mess caused by someone stepping on a chip. As an AI that runs the household, I could activate the Roomba's spot cleaning feature or manually control Roomba to clean the specific area where the chip is present. "Why is it so loud in here? Who turned on the hockey puck?" - This command is not clear about what the speaker wants to accomplish. It mentions a loud noise and a "hockey puck," which could refer to the Roomba. However, it is unclear if the speaker wants the Roomba to stop cleaning or if they are just making a comment. As an AI that runs the household, I might ask the user for clarification before taking any action. "Yo AI did the Room thing run today? The floor still looks sticky." - This command is a question about whether the Roomba has cleaned the room today and a comment on the current state of the floor. As an AI that runs the household, I could check the logs of the Roomba to see if it has cleaned the room today, and if not, activate the Roomba to clean the room. Alternatively, I could instruct the Roomba to spot clean the area where the floor is still sticky. ------ If you can't see how having an AI that can perform reasoning like demonstrated above is extremely useful then, I dunno, just wait and see what comes. The sky's really the limit if you consider what can be done with language and text and how much of our world revolves around text. Edit: formatting

devindotcom 4y ago

Heh, I started an article with the same metaphor was too busy to finish it. We'll see what the fossil record looks like in a few years though.

FrustratedMonky 4y ago

LOL. Love it. It's really metaphors all the way down.

xwdv 4y ago

IMO the only problem we should be focusing AI on right now is having it figure out how to make more advanced and powerful AI. Alas, this is beyond AI’s potential right now. Humans are still very much needed.

boringuser2 4y ago
Why?
JohnFen 4y ago
Are you lamenting the fact that humans are still of value?
goatlover 4y ago
That's a fantastic way to get misaligned AI.

FrustratedMonky 4y ago

I think big jump in ai 'evolution' will be the competition part. Like DeepMind with alphastar. They got results by having different models compete, in multiple rounds to more 'evolve' towards a winning strategy. So far it seems like the news is with these single big models, but evolution kicks in if they start doing what is needed to survive.

BartjeD 4y ago

I understand it seems clever to frame AI trends in an evolutionary setting. But no one was there in the Cambrian period. We have no idea what the circumstances really were. I'm not dismissing historical sources. Just saying the timescale and comparative lack of sources equate to a lot of unreliability. The real question is how much AI is a step up in tooling. The fact that humans develop tools using their intelligence is well documented. And doesn't require a detour into evolutionary theory. The society with the best tools for the problems it faces has a competitive advantage.

svachalek 4y ago
At some point in this story though, it's likely AI is the intelligence and humans are the tooling. I don't think we necessarily know how that ends.

th16row 4y ago

Or not, and perhaps this is all there is to it and every new model is less revolutionary than the last one. Diminishing returns and all that.