8 ms·

Your premise is wrong. This has nothing to do with 10x-ing parameters. One could argue the current parameter sizes are good enough as we observe "large breadth,

Your premise is wrong. This has nothing to do with 10x-ing parameters. One could argue the current parameter sizes are good enough as we observe "large breadth, shallow depth" behavior from LLM and to some extent, diffusion models. This suggests the problem is the depth of inference, which is single pass "hot takes" for all language models right now, due to cost of inference and our limited understanding of what makes a model's response high quality. Yes, you don't need more parameters to increase the depth. You need to iterate, instead. Loop. Imagine programming if looping was not allowed, nor recursion, or not even defining functions and calling them. Everything you write runs at most once during program execution and that's it. This is what an AI model is right now during inference. One big flat, single-pass, directed acyclic graph. And soon it won't be. Research into Chain of Thought, Tree of Thought reveals this dimension. This means you can take existing models and make them perform much more complex tasks with much better precision, though various ways of letting them iterate. Think of how you'd perform if you always had exactly 5 seconds to answer a question. Now imagine if you have 5 minutes. 5 hours. 5 days. Lo and behold, turns out an AI isn't different in that aspect. We also need more iterations of training (on the same amount of data), we need larger context windows, and we need new architectures, like Meta's MEGABYTE, for example. Parameter count and data size could hypothetically have already hit a hard wall (they haven't) and AI will keep exponentially improving regardless. There's too much low hanging fruit and more grows by the nanosecond.

Henk0 3y ago
This. So much this. I'm completely dumbfounded by obviously highly intelligent people consistently not getting this, and dismissing current generation AI systems as not being intelligent because they can't reliably solve massively complex problems in one go. Like anyone would expect a human programmer or researcher to just intuitively come up with a complex program, or the correct answer for a hard problem every time, instantly Human thinking and problem solving involves a lot of trial and error, iterative thinking, and sharing and discussing the problem with other humans. Processes that AI researchers are just now beginning to explore, with results like increasing reasoning ability by 900% in a recent paper. Every thinking human runs a near constant loop of thought, with no conscious control of which thought will appear next (we're very good at fooling ourselves that we have control though) We do have super-intelligences already, but they're severely handicapped by lacking a bunch of these - apparently fairly straightforward to implement - abilities, plus a few senses and the ability to directly effect change in the physical world (which really isn't needed if they can get access to human agents who will do their bidding, wittingly or unwittingly), and to self-improve. With regards to self-improvement, the increasing coding skills combined with iterative 'thought' loops should get there in very little time considering the current rate of progress There's also the idea that a single AI model should be able to do everything our human brains do, when our brains actually contain a number of specialised subunits that handle different aspects of our behavioural repertoire. It reasonable to allow for the same thing with an AI system, where specialised sub-networks handle input, output and other subtasks. AI systems also have the advantage of being able to add any arbitrary number of subunits to increase its capacity to solve various problems We seem to suffer from a species-wide narcissism with regards to our own intelligence and capabilities, and there's this huge focus on the number of connections in the human brain – most of which deal with things that are by no means necessary to act on the world unless one has a meat body and the need to navigate social situations, make friends and mate. Fact is, we have terrible short-term memory (worse than chimpanzees), slow processing time, lots of cognitive heuristics, many of which cause more harm than good in the modern world. We are emotional and easily fooled. Even the most intelligent people historically have believed in what we now consider fairy tales. We are slow to take in information, bad at storing it, and generally bad at transmitting it. A few of us can generate great ideas – building on accumulated knowledge from our forebears and peers – but most of us are just not that great at coming up with anything original or useful I've been actively looking for good arguments against AGI being much closer than we should be comfortable with, and reasons why we should not fear systems that surpass us in intelligence. All I've come across so far is some combination of the above, often expressed with a dismissive attitude, disparaging current LLM:s as parrots (that can apparently reason on the level of university level humans, but much more quickly), and pejorative terms like fearmongerers and doomers to describe those of us who really don't think its a good idea to pursue more intelligent systems. My guess is these people will act surprised when the arms race inevitably leads to some very bad unintended consequences. I don't see a way to stop it though, so I'm just strapped in for the ride along with the rest of humankind Again, if you have good arguments against any of the points above, please do share them with me
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  "Processes that AI researchers are just now beginning to explore, with results like increasing reasoning ability by 900% in a recent paper" Would you happen to have a link to that paper?
  - Henk0 3y ago
    Explanatory blog post with link to the paper: https://www.aibloggs.com/post/tree-of-thoughts-supercharging-gpt-4 https://www.aibloggs.com/post/tree-of-thoughts-supercharging...
- laratied 3y ago
  I would add to your amazing list that we are really good at denial as a coping mechanism with change. I am not a fan of the concept of AGI though. This means so many different things to people that it seems pointless to debate something when most likely we are not talking about the same thing. François Chollet has said that he believes all intelligence is specialized intelligence. From that perspective, whatever people mean by AGI, we are already there in the world of art. The doomer argument though is coming from defending our highly affluent and privileged life as we sit at the top of 7.8 billion people when it comes to wealth and lifestyle. It would have been better for the priest class too if the printing press had been shut down at the start. Of course, it is better for my friends and I to live in a society that we can read while most of society is illiterate but it is not better for society and humanity as a whole. The printing press was an apocalyptic development for the priest class in the same way all of this is an apocalyptic development for the "digital nomad". An apocalyptic development for the US nerd that makes 2X the median salary working 15 hours a week in between posting on here and their social media. To extend this out to humanity as a whole though is such bullshit. Humanity will benefit enormously from this huge increase in the availability of intelligence. Smart people are just in denial that their monopoly on higher than average intelligence is over. US devs kids born in 2023 aren't going to make 2x the median US salary while living in a poorer country with 5X less the GDP per capita. To say this is the end of the world though is simply an egocentric view of things.
  - 3y ago

Henk0 3y ago

This. So much this. I'm completely dumbfounded by obviously highly intelligent people consistently not getting this, and dismissing current generation AI systems as not being intelligent because they can't reliably solve massively complex problems in one go. Like anyone would expect a human programmer or researcher to just intuitively come up with a complex program, or the correct answer for a hard problem every time, instantly Human thinking and problem solving involves a lot of trial and error, iterative thinking, and sharing and discussing the problem with other humans. Processes that AI researchers are just now beginning to explore, with results like increasing reasoning ability by 900% in a recent paper. Every thinking human runs a near constant loop of thought, with no conscious control of which thought will appear next (we're very good at fooling ourselves that we have control though) We do have super-intelligences already, but they're severely handicapped by lacking a bunch of these - apparently fairly straightforward to implement - abilities, plus a few senses and the ability to directly effect change in the physical world (which really isn't needed if they can get access to human agents who will do their bidding, wittingly or unwittingly), and to self-improve. With regards to self-improvement, the increasing coding skills combined with iterative 'thought' loops should get there in very little time considering the current rate of progress There's also the idea that a single AI model should be able to do everything our human brains do, when our brains actually contain a number of specialised subunits that handle different aspects of our behavioural repertoire. It reasonable to allow for the same thing with an AI system, where specialised sub-networks handle input, output and other subtasks. AI systems also have the advantage of being able to add any arbitrary number of subunits to increase its capacity to solve various problems We seem to suffer from a species-wide narcissism with regards to our own intelligence and capabilities, and there's this huge focus on the number of connections in the human brain – most of which deal with things that are by no means necessary to act on the world unless one has a meat body and the need to navigate social situations, make friends and mate. Fact is, we have terrible short-term memory (worse than chimpanzees), slow processing time, lots of cognitive heuristics, many of which cause more harm than good in the modern world. We are emotional and easily fooled. Even the most intelligent people historically have believed in what we now consider fairy tales. We are slow to take in information, bad at storing it, and generally bad at transmitting it. A few of us can generate great ideas – building on accumulated knowledge from our forebears and peers – but most of us are just not that great at coming up with anything original or useful I've been actively looking for good arguments against AGI being much closer than we should be comfortable with, and reasons why we should not fear systems that surpass us in intelligence. All I've come across so far is some combination of the above, often expressed with a dismissive attitude, disparaging current LLM:s as parrots (that can apparently reason on the level of university level humans, but much more quickly), and pejorative terms like fearmongerers and doomers to describe those of us who really don't think its a good idea to pursue more intelligent systems. My guess is these people will act surprised when the arms race inevitably leads to some very bad unintended consequences. I don't see a way to stop it though, so I'm just strapped in for the ride along with the rest of humankind Again, if you have good arguments against any of the points above, please do share them with me

pmoriarty 3y ago
"Processes that AI researchers are just now beginning to explore, with results like increasing reasoning ability by 900% in a recent paper" Would you happen to have a link to that paper?
- Henk0 3y ago
  Explanatory blog post with link to the paper: https://www.aibloggs.com/post/tree-of-thoughts-supercharging-gpt-4 https://www.aibloggs.com/post/tree-of-thoughts-supercharging...
laratied 3y ago
I would add to your amazing list that we are really good at denial as a coping mechanism with change. I am not a fan of the concept of AGI though. This means so many different things to people that it seems pointless to debate something when most likely we are not talking about the same thing. François Chollet has said that he believes all intelligence is specialized intelligence. From that perspective, whatever people mean by AGI, we are already there in the world of art. The doomer argument though is coming from defending our highly affluent and privileged life as we sit at the top of 7.8 billion people when it comes to wealth and lifestyle. It would have been better for the priest class too if the printing press had been shut down at the start. Of course, it is better for my friends and I to live in a society that we can read while most of society is illiterate but it is not better for society and humanity as a whole. The printing press was an apocalyptic development for the priest class in the same way all of this is an apocalyptic development for the "digital nomad". An apocalyptic development for the US nerd that makes 2X the median salary working 15 hours a week in between posting on here and their social media. To extend this out to humanity as a whole though is such bullshit. Humanity will benefit enormously from this huge increase in the availability of intelligence. Smart people are just in denial that their monopoly on higher than average intelligence is over. US devs kids born in 2023 aren't going to make 2x the median US salary while living in a poorer country with 5X less the GDP per capita. To say this is the end of the world though is simply an egocentric view of things.
- 3y ago