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Is cost really that much of a burden? Intelligence is the single most expensive resource on the planet. Hundreds of individuals have to be born, nurtured, and

by spaceman_2020 4y ago

Is cost really that much of a burden? Intelligence is the single most expensive resource on the planet. Hundreds of individuals have to be born, nurtured, and educated before you might get an exceptional 135+ IQ individual. Every intelligent person is produced at a great societal cost. If you can reduce the cost of replicating a 135 IQ, or heck, even a 115 IQ person to a few thousand dollars, you're beating biology by a massive margin.

yunwal 4y ago
But we're still nowhere near that, or even near surpassing the skill of an average person at a moderately complex information task, and GPT-4 supposedly took hundreds of millions to train. It also costs a decent amount more to run inference on it vs. 3.5. It probably makes sense to prove the concept that generative AI can be used for lots of real work before scaling that up by another order of magnitude for potentially marginal improvements. Also, just in terms of where to put your effort, if you think another direction (for example, fine-tuning the model to use digital tools, or researching how to predict confidence intervals) is going to have a better chance of success, why focus on scaling more?
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  There are a lot of employees at large tech consultancies that don't really do anything that can't be automated away by even current models. Sprinkle in some more specific training and I can totally see entire divisions at IBM and Accenture and TCS being made redundant. The incentive structures are perversely aligned for this future - the CEO who manages to reduce headcount while increasing revenue is going to be very handsomely rewarded by Wall Street.
  - esafak 4y ago
    How is that perverse? That is the logical incentive. The perverse one is that middle managers rise by hiring people needlessly and building fiefdoms.
  - skyechurch 4y ago
    Wall Street would be strongly incentivised to install an AI CEO.
jutrewag 4y ago
115 IQ isn’t all that high- that’s basically every Indian American or a healthy percentage of the Chinese population. Edit: I don’t understand the downvotes. I don’t mean this in any disparaging way, just that an AGI is probably going to be a lot higher than that.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  115 IQ is perfectly fine for the majority of human endeavors.
oezi 4y ago
Since IQ is just a normal distribution on a population it is a bit misleading to talk about it like that. Even if we don't expend any cost on education the number of people with IQ 135 stays the same.
dauertewigkeit 4y ago
Are intelligent people that valuable? There's lots of them at every university working for peanuts. They don't seem to be that valued by society, honestly.
- taylorius 4y ago
  IQ isn't all that. Mine is 140+ and I'm just a somewhat well paid software engineer. It's TOO abstract a metric in my view - for sure it doesn't always translate into real world success.
  - roflyear 4y ago
    Right were very much in the same boat. I'm good at pattern recognition I guess. I learn things quickly. What else? I don't have magic powers really. I still get headaches and eat junk food.
  - Aerbil313 4y ago
    Mine is 150-160 (varies by how much I’m sleep deprived during the IQ test) and I’m told that I’m exceptionally intelligent by teachers, friends, colleagues, most everyone I met since early childhood. I guess the more the difference to average, the more it stands out. From my experience, I believe higher IQ is nothing but better pattern recognition and being smart or genius means merely higher IQ + very good memory capability. I believe those two are interlinked [0]. By memory capability I mean not forgetting anything you’ve ever seen, not in the sense of being able to recall every minute of your entire life, but in the sense of reliably and always being able to recall all info regarding X if you’ve seen X only once in your life. Higher intelligence doesn’t mean you’re automatically better off than everyone also. It just means that you can be far ahead of everyone in any cognitive task with a far smaller amount of effort put in. Note that this doesn’t conflict with IQ being a reliable predictor of financial success, rather I believe this is the reason for it. [0]: https://saveall.ai/blog/learning-is-remembering https://saveall.ai/blog/learning-is-remembering
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  If you ask any Fortune 500 CEO if he could magically take all the 135 IQ artists and academics and vagabonds, erase all their past traumas, put them through business or tech school, and put them to work in their company, they would all say 100% yes. An equivalent AI won't have any agency and will be happy doing the boring work other 135 IQ humans won't.
asdfman123 4y ago
The reason we put everyone through school is we believe that it’s in society’s best interest to educate everyone to the peak of their abilities. It’s good for many different reasons. It would be much easier to identify gifted kids and only educate them, but I happen to agree that universal education is better.
- gowld 4y ago
  It would be much easier to identify gifted kids and only educate them Is it so easy?
  - asdfman123 4y ago
    There’s downsides and tradeoffs but yes, if we wanted to we could stop trying to teach kids with below average IQs calculus, unless they specifically wanted to.
roflyear 4y ago
My IQ is 140 and I'm far from exceptional.
astrange 4y ago
This only makes sense if you use "IQ" ignoring the actual definition of "IQ", in which case it's silly to use numbers in your post to make it look technical. IQ 1. can't be compared against generations of IQ tests 2. supposedly doesn't test education (of course, it actually does) 3. isn't real.

yunwal 4y ago

But we're still nowhere near that, or even near surpassing the skill of an average person at a moderately complex information task, and GPT-4 supposedly took hundreds of millions to train. It also costs a decent amount more to run inference on it vs. 3.5. It probably makes sense to prove the concept that generative AI can be used for lots of real work before scaling that up by another order of magnitude for potentially marginal improvements. Also, just in terms of where to put your effort, if you think another direction (for example, fine-tuning the model to use digital tools, or researching how to predict confidence intervals) is going to have a better chance of success, why focus on scaling more?

spaceman_2020 4y ago
There are a lot of employees at large tech consultancies that don't really do anything that can't be automated away by even current models. Sprinkle in some more specific training and I can totally see entire divisions at IBM and Accenture and TCS being made redundant. The incentive structures are perversely aligned for this future - the CEO who manages to reduce headcount while increasing revenue is going to be very handsomely rewarded by Wall Street.
- esafak 4y ago
  How is that perverse? That is the logical incentive. The perverse one is that middle managers rise by hiring people needlessly and building fiefdoms.
- skyechurch 4y ago
  Wall Street would be strongly incentivised to install an AI CEO.

jutrewag 4y ago

115 IQ isn’t all that high- that’s basically every Indian American or a healthy percentage of the Chinese population. Edit: I don’t understand the downvotes. I don’t mean this in any disparaging way, just that an AGI is probably going to be a lot higher than that.

spaceman_2020 4y ago
115 IQ is perfectly fine for the majority of human endeavors.

oezi 4y ago

Since IQ is just a normal distribution on a population it is a bit misleading to talk about it like that. Even if we don't expend any cost on education the number of people with IQ 135 stays the same.

dauertewigkeit 4y ago

Are intelligent people that valuable? There's lots of them at every university working for peanuts. They don't seem to be that valued by society, honestly.

taylorius 4y ago
IQ isn't all that. Mine is 140+ and I'm just a somewhat well paid software engineer. It's TOO abstract a metric in my view - for sure it doesn't always translate into real world success.
- roflyear 4y ago
  Right were very much in the same boat. I'm good at pattern recognition I guess. I learn things quickly. What else? I don't have magic powers really. I still get headaches and eat junk food.
- Aerbil313 4y ago
  Mine is 150-160 (varies by how much I’m sleep deprived during the IQ test) and I’m told that I’m exceptionally intelligent by teachers, friends, colleagues, most everyone I met since early childhood. I guess the more the difference to average, the more it stands out. From my experience, I believe higher IQ is nothing but better pattern recognition and being smart or genius means merely higher IQ + very good memory capability. I believe those two are interlinked [0]. By memory capability I mean not forgetting anything you’ve ever seen, not in the sense of being able to recall every minute of your entire life, but in the sense of reliably and always being able to recall all info regarding X if you’ve seen X only once in your life. Higher intelligence doesn’t mean you’re automatically better off than everyone also. It just means that you can be far ahead of everyone in any cognitive task with a far smaller amount of effort put in. Note that this doesn’t conflict with IQ being a reliable predictor of financial success, rather I believe this is the reason for it. [0]: https://saveall.ai/blog/learning-is-remembering https://saveall.ai/blog/learning-is-remembering
spaceman_2020 4y ago
If you ask any Fortune 500 CEO if he could magically take all the 135 IQ artists and academics and vagabonds, erase all their past traumas, put them through business or tech school, and put them to work in their company, they would all say 100% yes. An equivalent AI won't have any agency and will be happy doing the boring work other 135 IQ humans won't.

asdfman123 4y ago

The reason we put everyone through school is we believe that it’s in society’s best interest to educate everyone to the peak of their abilities. It’s good for many different reasons. It would be much easier to identify gifted kids and only educate them, but I happen to agree that universal education is better.

gowld 4y ago
It would be much easier to identify gifted kids and only educate them Is it so easy?
- asdfman123 4y ago
  There’s downsides and tradeoffs but yes, if we wanted to we could stop trying to teach kids with below average IQs calculus, unless they specifically wanted to.

roflyear 4y ago

My IQ is 140 and I'm far from exceptional.

astrange 4y ago

This only makes sense if you use "IQ" ignoring the actual definition of "IQ", in which case it's silly to use numbers in your post to make it look technical. IQ 1. can't be compared against generations of IQ tests 2. supposedly doesn't test education (of course, it actually does) 3. isn't real.