4 ms·

> Extrapolating from the last two years Therein lies the error. People forget reality is finite and just because it improved now doesn't mean it will continue

by Ygg2 4y ago

> Extrapolating from the last two years Therein lies the error. People forget reality is finite and just because it improved now doesn't mean it will continue indefinitely. An exponential curve is just a sigmoid curve in disguise. Most AI I've seen suffer from catastrophic errors in the tail end (famous example of two near identical cat pictures classified as cat and dog respectively).

dwaltrip 4y ago
Why do you believe there will be no significant improvements beyond SOTA in the coming years / decades? That's an incredibly strong stance... I’d love to hear your assessment of the improvements from gpt-3.5 to gpt-4. Do you not think it is a large jump?
jacquesm 4y ago
Why is that an error? This is very new tech, if anything the rate of change is accelerating and nowhere near slowing down. That it will flatten at some point goes without saying (you'd hope!), but for the time being it looks like we're on the increasing first derivative part of the sigmoid, not on the flattening part, and from two years to a decade takes you roughly from '2 kg luggable' to 'iphone' and that was a sea change.
- Ygg2 4y ago
  > Why is that an error? First. It seems like these AI models depend on the underlying hardware acceleration doubling, which is not really the case anymore. Second. All AI's I've seen suffer from the same works fine until it just flips the fuck out behavior (and starts hallucinating). You wouldn't tollerate a programmer that worked fine except he would ocassionally come to work high enough on bath salts to start claiming the sky is red and aliens have inflitrated the Wall of China. AI's that don't suffer from this aren't general purpose. Third. I'm not convinced in we'll make AI whose job will be to make smarter AI which will make smarter AI argument. A smart enough AI could just rewire its reward mechanism to get reward without work (or collude with other AIs meant to monitor it to just do nothing).
  - zirgs 4y ago
    I bought my GPU back in 2021. I had the same computing power as I have now, but back then it could only generate crappy pictures. AI image generation has improved massively in a few months without increasing hw requirements.
HDThoreaun 4y ago
What are the odds scaling continues to lead to massive AI improvements? No one is saying 100%, you seem to be arguing that they are. If you're willing to put a confidence interval on the odds with evidence we can have an actual conversation about what the best course of action is, but just talking past each other with "it might continue scaling" "no it won't" doesn't seem particularly helpful. I think the important thing here though is the difficulty in creating an accurate confidence interval that isn't [0-100]. We are truly in uncharted territory.
- Ygg2 4y ago
  > No one is saying 100% Points at AI moratorium. I think people are arguing its inevitable. Putting error bars on gut feeling. Interesting idea. I'd say in 10-20 years we'll not see anything revolutionary, as in AI smart enough to continue working on improving AI. So in 10-20 years I don't expect fully self driving cars (Unsupervised, any terrain, better driver than 99.9% humans). AI might see use in industry, but I doubt they will be unsupervised, unless we start living in Idiocracy and decide highly risque tech is better than average person.
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    Not at all. They're saying the current probability is high enough to warrant a cease research agreement because the risks outweigh the rewards.
  - jabradoodle 4y ago
    Your definition of what would be revolutionary is likely the last thing humans will achieve, there is a lot of revolutionary things to happen between here and there. I'm not sure what you are using as a definition of AI but I would say it is already being used massively in industry, and a lot of harm can be done even if it isn't autonomous.
  - barking_biscuit 4y ago
    >I'd say in 10-20 years we'll not see anything revolutionary, as in AI smart enough to continue working on improving AI You do realize we've just at least doubled the amount of cognitive bandwidth on earth right? For every one brain, there are now two. A step-wise change in bandwidth is most definitely going to have some very interesting implications and probably much sooner than 10 years.

by Ygg2 4y ago

dwaltrip 4y ago

Why do you believe there will be no significant improvements beyond SOTA in the coming years / decades? That's an incredibly strong stance... I’d love to hear your assessment of the improvements from gpt-3.5 to gpt-4. Do you not think it is a large jump?

jacquesm 4y ago

Why is that an error? This is very new tech, if anything the rate of change is accelerating and nowhere near slowing down. That it will flatten at some point goes without saying (you'd hope!), but for the time being it looks like we're on the increasing first derivative part of the sigmoid, not on the flattening part, and from two years to a decade takes you roughly from '2 kg luggable' to 'iphone' and that was a sea change.

Ygg2 4y ago
> Why is that an error? First. It seems like these AI models depend on the underlying hardware acceleration doubling, which is not really the case anymore. Second. All AI's I've seen suffer from the same works fine until it just flips the fuck out behavior (and starts hallucinating). You wouldn't tollerate a programmer that worked fine except he would ocassionally come to work high enough on bath salts to start claiming the sky is red and aliens have inflitrated the Wall of China. AI's that don't suffer from this aren't general purpose. Third. I'm not convinced in we'll make AI whose job will be to make smarter AI which will make smarter AI argument. A smart enough AI could just rewire its reward mechanism to get reward without work (or collude with other AIs meant to monitor it to just do nothing).
- zirgs 4y ago
  I bought my GPU back in 2021. I had the same computing power as I have now, but back then it could only generate crappy pictures. AI image generation has improved massively in a few months without increasing hw requirements.

HDThoreaun 4y ago

What are the odds scaling continues to lead to massive AI improvements? No one is saying 100%, you seem to be arguing that they are. If you're willing to put a confidence interval on the odds with evidence we can have an actual conversation about what the best course of action is, but just talking past each other with "it might continue scaling" "no it won't" doesn't seem particularly helpful. I think the important thing here though is the difficulty in creating an accurate confidence interval that isn't [0-100]. We are truly in uncharted territory.

Ygg2 4y ago
> No one is saying 100% Points at AI moratorium. I think people are arguing its inevitable. Putting error bars on gut feeling. Interesting idea. I'd say in 10-20 years we'll not see anything revolutionary, as in AI smart enough to continue working on improving AI. So in 10-20 years I don't expect fully self driving cars (Unsupervised, any terrain, better driver than 99.9% humans). AI might see use in industry, but I doubt they will be unsupervised, unless we start living in Idiocracy and decide highly risque tech is better than average person.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  Not at all. They're saying the current probability is high enough to warrant a cease research agreement because the risks outweigh the rewards.
- jabradoodle 4y ago
  Your definition of what would be revolutionary is likely the last thing humans will achieve, there is a lot of revolutionary things to happen between here and there. I'm not sure what you are using as a definition of AI but I would say it is already being used massively in industry, and a lot of harm can be done even if it isn't autonomous.
- barking_biscuit 4y ago
  >I'd say in 10-20 years we'll not see anything revolutionary, as in AI smart enough to continue working on improving AI You do realize we've just at least doubled the amount of cognitive bandwidth on earth right? For every one brain, there are now two. A step-wise change in bandwidth is most definitely going to have some very interesting implications and probably much sooner than 10 years.