5 ms·

The premise of this is ridiculous. The smartest people I know personally and that I'm aware of generally are not attracted by AI. Person 1 was interested in fun

The premise of this is ridiculous. The smartest people I know personally and that I'm aware of generally are not attracted by AI. Person 1 was interested in fundamental physics (dark matter) but had to leave physics due to lack of job opportunities. Person 2 is Terrence Tao. Person 3 is Ed Witten, etc etc. This reflects the hubris of the tech world that overestimates its own intelligence....

themitigating 4y ago
"This reflects the hubris of the tech world that overestimates its own intelligence." This Medium blog post is not the PR person for the "tech world".
- javajosh 4y ago
  Moreover it's worrisome that someone who knows Witten and Tao personally doesn't have even grade-school media literacy.
  - buggy6257 4y ago
    Claims to know*
  - kgwgk 4y ago
    Maybe I don’t have the required level of literacy but I understand « The smartest people I know personally and that I'm aware of generally » as the union of the « know personally » and « aware of generally » sets.
    - nightpool 4y ago
      In most understandings of English, "and" is used as the conjunction operator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_conjunction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_conjunction (set intersection). If you were expressing a disjunction (a union), you'd use "or" or "as well as" or something similar. Obviously it's possible to eventually puzzle out from context what OP meant, but I made the same mistake as the person you're replying to when reading the comment quickly.
      - kgwgk 4y ago
        Is it so? What about “I want to thank both you and the original article author”? Should it be “or” instead of “and”?
      - digging 4y ago
        > In most understandings of English This seems a reach to me. I think your confusion is not unfounded and is not uncommon, but I think it's also extremely (and moreso?) common to read the sentence as the author intended. It took me 0ms to puzzle out the meaning because the intended meaning was the natural assumption of my brain. Besides that, it seems a bit absurd to me to say that "and" and "as well as" have entirely distinct meanings. They're not totally interchangeable, but there is overlap.
    - ckemere 4y ago
      Thanks! This is the sense in which I had intended the sentence. I wish that I knew Terrence Tao and Ed Witten! The smart people I know personally I wanted to keep anonymous....
mattgreenrocks 4y ago
Good catch. Also consider: if LLMs weren't as big as they were, would the people pursuing this still be the "smartest engineers?" Would their efforts still be as brilliant? If you answered no to any of those, why not?
lambic2 4y ago
I think by "smartest people" the article is referring to the top 1-3 percent smartest people, not the actual 1-3 smartest people in the world...
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  It still doesn't occur to me that the 1-3% smartest people in the world would be attracted to LLM/AI just because they're intelligent. The most intelligent people I know are variously uninterested in AI because AI threatens many of their beloved interests in which the confluence of their intelligence can be expressed, i.e creative activities like music, composition, visual art, interactive works like games, and writing.
  - v64 4y ago
    Perhaps I'm outing myself as a so-called unintelligent person here, but I don't see how AI is a threat to creative hobbies of mine like music and writing. AI isn't going to stop me from sitting down at the piano or writing a short story. There will always be people in the world better at those things than me, so what difference does it make if an AI may or may not be better at them too? And if I can't tell the difference between a human generated piece of art and an AI generated one, then I find that fascinating, not threatening. It says a lot about 1) your own tastes and perceptions, 2) the meaning of art in general, and 3) what exactly it means when activities previously considered solely human are mastered by programs, such as what happened in the past with chess engines, etc. I think these are all exciting developments, and I look forward to seeing how art will evolve in the way the emergence of chess engines changed strategy for humans moving forward.
    - digging 4y ago
      > AI isn't going to stop me from sitting down at the piano or writing a short story. There will always be people in the world better at those things than me, so what difference does it make if an AI may or may not be better at them too? The threat is that it will no longer be viable to make money from creative works. A completely trivial and laughable concern if you don't live in a society that believes you have to "earn a living".
bane 4y ago
AI/ML and LLMs definitely attract a certain cadre of very smart people. I think they enjoy the way that AI/ML sort of inverts the normal programming mindset and the strategies of handling lots of data. But I also agree that for many other smart people, what these things do is sort of an "obvious" result of doing bulk statistics on lots of data. The particulars can sometimes be surprising, but the aggregate result "thing that confidently generates false data" isn't. In between, there seems to be a very passionate, and very excited group of people who don't get it and think the AI magic is "thinking". Some of these people may also be smart, but they sure don't have a strong complete vertical understanding of the topic. These people are numerous, and provide lots of conflicting and confusing information at about the level of through of the latest popular science breakthrough article -- setting wrong expectations all along the way.
photochemsyn 4y ago
The very premise that 'smartness' is easily quantifiable is also flawed. Attempting to rank all human minds on some hierarchical scale is going to run into the same problems as with human bodies. Is it better to be able to run the fastest, or to lift the heaviest weights, or to have the best hand-eye coordination when it comes to throwing and catching objects? Will specialization in one area of mental skill inevitably create weaknesses in other areas of mental skill (e.g. the strongest weightlifters are never the fastest runners over long distances)? Not only that, there's the whole cult of intelligence issue, which attracts people who are very skilled at presenting themselves as uber-intelligent even if their greatest talents like in the realm of social engineering and bureaucratic manipulation (many highly successful academics fall into this category). This is a kind of 'smartness', but not necessarily the kind that helps one grasp complex maths. What we call 'smartness', or 'actual skill' is the product of some degree of native intelligence and the amound of time and energy spent developing that intelligence in a particular area via diligent effort.
- cevn 4y ago
  Exactly, 'smartness' is meaningless. You can accomplish x task with y practice, applies to any task.
  - lliamander 4y ago
    Except that smart people need less y to learn almost any x, which is part of what it means to be smart.
    - arethuza 4y ago
      I would add that some of the stupidest things I've seen people do were actually done by people who were, by any objective measure, extremely smart - either from hubris or general otherworldliness....
      - lliamander 4y ago
        Your anecdote doesn't really prove anything. "Intelligent" doesn't mean "free of character flaws" or "happy" or "wealthy". Meanwhile, intelligence research continues to be one of the more fruitful (and reliable) fields of the social sciences
agumonkey 4y ago
I don't know how many of the tech world now the math/phys world. We had a core set of classes in college around that, but I couldn't compare with computing at the time. After years in juggling with semi-advanced CS/FP ideas, whenever I get into "old" science, it get sobering fast.
dang 4y ago
Let's fix this by taking the superlative out of the title. I've done so now. The trouble with reacting to provocations like this, even if the indignation is genuine (it's basically always genuine) is that it leads to much less interesting discussions.
fuzzfactor 4y ago
>Paraphrasing Paul Graham, “the most ambitious challenges attract the smartest people”. What is said here could almost have the same logical outcome as saying "the most challenging problems have no brilliant solution until one of the smartest people come along". Nothing about attraction whatsoever, factored out instead. Still seems pretty sensible when it works. Now pick 3 top mathematical wizards. Would it have been possible to achieve that status unless they had already accepted (and overcome!) challenges that were too much for those who came before? And maybe still have their hands full with remaining challenges which were already accepted before AI came near enough to be considered within reach? It should be most obvious to those having the best numerical abilty, to figure that more than just 3 of the smartest people will be needed with the growing number of challenges that nobody has even tried to overcome, sometimes not even recognize.

themitigating 4y ago

"This reflects the hubris of the tech world that overestimates its own intelligence." This Medium blog post is not the PR person for the "tech world".

javajosh 4y ago
Moreover it's worrisome that someone who knows Witten and Tao personally doesn't have even grade-school media literacy.
- buggy6257 4y ago
  Claims to know*
- kgwgk 4y ago
  Maybe I don’t have the required level of literacy but I understand « The smartest people I know personally and that I'm aware of generally » as the union of the « know personally » and « aware of generally » sets.
  - nightpool 4y ago
    In most understandings of English, "and" is used as the conjunction operator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_conjunction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_conjunction (set intersection). If you were expressing a disjunction (a union), you'd use "or" or "as well as" or something similar. Obviously it's possible to eventually puzzle out from context what OP meant, but I made the same mistake as the person you're replying to when reading the comment quickly.
    - kgwgk 4y ago
      Is it so? What about “I want to thank both you and the original article author”? Should it be “or” instead of “and”?
    - digging 4y ago
      > In most understandings of English This seems a reach to me. I think your confusion is not unfounded and is not uncommon, but I think it's also extremely (and moreso?) common to read the sentence as the author intended. It took me 0ms to puzzle out the meaning because the intended meaning was the natural assumption of my brain. Besides that, it seems a bit absurd to me to say that "and" and "as well as" have entirely distinct meanings. They're not totally interchangeable, but there is overlap.
  - ckemere 4y ago
    Thanks! This is the sense in which I had intended the sentence. I wish that I knew Terrence Tao and Ed Witten! The smart people I know personally I wanted to keep anonymous....

mattgreenrocks 4y ago

Good catch. Also consider: if LLMs weren't as big as they were, would the people pursuing this still be the "smartest engineers?" Would their efforts still be as brilliant? If you answered no to any of those, why not?

lambic2 4y ago

I think by "smartest people" the article is referring to the top 1-3 percent smartest people, not the actual 1-3 smartest people in the world...

PuppyTailWags 4y ago
It still doesn't occur to me that the 1-3% smartest people in the world would be attracted to LLM/AI just because they're intelligent. The most intelligent people I know are variously uninterested in AI because AI threatens many of their beloved interests in which the confluence of their intelligence can be expressed, i.e creative activities like music, composition, visual art, interactive works like games, and writing.
- v64 4y ago
  Perhaps I'm outing myself as a so-called unintelligent person here, but I don't see how AI is a threat to creative hobbies of mine like music and writing. AI isn't going to stop me from sitting down at the piano or writing a short story. There will always be people in the world better at those things than me, so what difference does it make if an AI may or may not be better at them too? And if I can't tell the difference between a human generated piece of art and an AI generated one, then I find that fascinating, not threatening. It says a lot about 1) your own tastes and perceptions, 2) the meaning of art in general, and 3) what exactly it means when activities previously considered solely human are mastered by programs, such as what happened in the past with chess engines, etc. I think these are all exciting developments, and I look forward to seeing how art will evolve in the way the emergence of chess engines changed strategy for humans moving forward.
  - digging 4y ago
    > AI isn't going to stop me from sitting down at the piano or writing a short story. There will always be people in the world better at those things than me, so what difference does it make if an AI may or may not be better at them too? The threat is that it will no longer be viable to make money from creative works. A completely trivial and laughable concern if you don't live in a society that believes you have to "earn a living".

bane 4y ago

AI/ML and LLMs definitely attract a certain cadre of very smart people. I think they enjoy the way that AI/ML sort of inverts the normal programming mindset and the strategies of handling lots of data. But I also agree that for many other smart people, what these things do is sort of an "obvious" result of doing bulk statistics on lots of data. The particulars can sometimes be surprising, but the aggregate result "thing that confidently generates false data" isn't. In between, there seems to be a very passionate, and very excited group of people who don't get it and think the AI magic is "thinking". Some of these people may also be smart, but they sure don't have a strong complete vertical understanding of the topic. These people are numerous, and provide lots of conflicting and confusing information at about the level of through of the latest popular science breakthrough article -- setting wrong expectations all along the way.

photochemsyn 4y ago

The very premise that 'smartness' is easily quantifiable is also flawed. Attempting to rank all human minds on some hierarchical scale is going to run into the same problems as with human bodies. Is it better to be able to run the fastest, or to lift the heaviest weights, or to have the best hand-eye coordination when it comes to throwing and catching objects? Will specialization in one area of mental skill inevitably create weaknesses in other areas of mental skill (e.g. the strongest weightlifters are never the fastest runners over long distances)? Not only that, there's the whole cult of intelligence issue, which attracts people who are very skilled at presenting themselves as uber-intelligent even if their greatest talents like in the realm of social engineering and bureaucratic manipulation (many highly successful academics fall into this category). This is a kind of 'smartness', but not necessarily the kind that helps one grasp complex maths. What we call 'smartness', or 'actual skill' is the product of some degree of native intelligence and the amound of time and energy spent developing that intelligence in a particular area via diligent effort.

cevn 4y ago
Exactly, 'smartness' is meaningless. You can accomplish x task with y practice, applies to any task.
- lliamander 4y ago
  Except that smart people need less y to learn almost any x, which is part of what it means to be smart.
  - arethuza 4y ago
    I would add that some of the stupidest things I've seen people do were actually done by people who were, by any objective measure, extremely smart - either from hubris or general otherworldliness....
    - lliamander 4y ago
      Your anecdote doesn't really prove anything. "Intelligent" doesn't mean "free of character flaws" or "happy" or "wealthy". Meanwhile, intelligence research continues to be one of the more fruitful (and reliable) fields of the social sciences

agumonkey 4y ago

I don't know how many of the tech world now the math/phys world. We had a core set of classes in college around that, but I couldn't compare with computing at the time. After years in juggling with semi-advanced CS/FP ideas, whenever I get into "old" science, it get sobering fast.

dang 4y ago

Let's fix this by taking the superlative out of the title. I've done so now. The trouble with reacting to provocations like this, even if the indignation is genuine (it's basically always genuine) is that it leads to much less interesting discussions.

fuzzfactor 4y ago

>Paraphrasing Paul Graham, “the most ambitious challenges attract the smartest people”. What is said here could almost have the same logical outcome as saying "the most challenging problems have no brilliant solution until one of the smartest people come along". Nothing about attraction whatsoever, factored out instead. Still seems pretty sensible when it works. Now pick 3 top mathematical wizards. Would it have been possible to achieve that status unless they had already accepted (and overcome!) challenges that were too much for those who came before? And maybe still have their hands full with remaining challenges which were already accepted before AI came near enough to be considered within reach? It should be most obvious to those having the best numerical abilty, to figure that more than just 3 of the smartest people will be needed with the growing number of challenges that nobody has even tried to overcome, sometimes not even recognize.