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Hofstadter said, "Well, maybe as important as the wheel." If AI significantly surpasses humanity in cognitive ability, then I think it will have a much bigger

Hofstadter said, "Well, maybe as important as the wheel." If AI significantly surpasses humanity in cognitive ability, then I think it will have a much bigger impact than the wheel. (I loved GEB and DH's other writings.) LLMs have really improved a lot of the last two years and they have shown many unexpected capabilities. I am guessing that they will get some more good input (text mostly), a lot more compute, and algorithmic improvements, so that may very well be enough to become better than 99% of humans at tasks that involve only text. Tasks that require video or image processing may be a little bit more challenging. Having very smart AI's controlling robots may just be five years away. (I recently lost a bet about autonomous driving. Five years ago, I thought that autonomous cars would be better than human drivers by now.) I'm frightened by what AI will become over the next 10 years.

lolinder 3y ago
> I recently lost a bet about autonomous driving. Five years ago, I thought that autonomous cars would be better than human drivers by now. I think we're going to see something very similar with LLMs. The autonomous car hype was driven by seeing that they were 80% of the way there and concluding that at the rate they were going they'd make up the remaining 20% quickly. That turned out to be false: the last 20% has been much harder than the first 80%. LLMs are in a very similar place, even GPT-4. They're good, and they're going to be more and more useful (similar to adaptive cruise control/lane assist). But I predict that they're going to level out and stop improving as rapidly as they have in the past year, and we're going to end up at a new normal that is good but not good enough to cause the crises people are worried about.
- twic 3y ago
  This is my bet too. I think we're going to get some fantastic new tools for doing specific tasks that work like magic, and that we could never have imagined ten years ago. I don't think we're going to get Yud hijacking a B-52.
zerodensity 3y ago
But self driving cars have a much lower accident rate than humans. How did you lose the bet?
- lolinder 3y ago
  A lower accident rate in the extremely controlled conditions where they're currently allowed to operate. I'd be interested to see if anyone has done a comparison of human drivers vs autonomous cars that controls for driving conditions.
- irchans 3y ago
  About 5.5 years ago, I bet a friend that in 5 years you would be able to: 1 - enter a car 2 - type in an address that is far away, and then 3 - the car would drive to that other address and the passenger could just go to sleep, and 4 - this would be safe. Six months ago, I did not think that we had reached that level of reliability, so I paid my friend.
abrinz 3y ago
It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
Smaug123 3y ago
(Hofstadter was quoting Geoff Hinton when he said that. What he himself compared the advance to was "fire".)
- irchans 3y ago
  You are correct. I miss quoted. Thanks!

lolinder 3y ago

> I recently lost a bet about autonomous driving. Five years ago, I thought that autonomous cars would be better than human drivers by now. I think we're going to see something very similar with LLMs. The autonomous car hype was driven by seeing that they were 80% of the way there and concluding that at the rate they were going they'd make up the remaining 20% quickly. That turned out to be false: the last 20% has been much harder than the first 80%. LLMs are in a very similar place, even GPT-4. They're good, and they're going to be more and more useful (similar to adaptive cruise control/lane assist). But I predict that they're going to level out and stop improving as rapidly as they have in the past year, and we're going to end up at a new normal that is good but not good enough to cause the crises people are worried about.

twic 3y ago
This is my bet too. I think we're going to get some fantastic new tools for doing specific tasks that work like magic, and that we could never have imagined ten years ago. I don't think we're going to get Yud hijacking a B-52.

zerodensity 3y ago

But self driving cars have a much lower accident rate than humans. How did you lose the bet?

lolinder 3y ago
A lower accident rate in the extremely controlled conditions where they're currently allowed to operate. I'd be interested to see if anyone has done a comparison of human drivers vs autonomous cars that controls for driving conditions.
irchans 3y ago
About 5.5 years ago, I bet a friend that in 5 years you would be able to: 1 - enter a car 2 - type in an address that is far away, and then 3 - the car would drive to that other address and the passenger could just go to sleep, and 4 - this would be safe. Six months ago, I did not think that we had reached that level of reliability, so I paid my friend.

abrinz 3y ago

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

Smaug123 3y ago

(Hofstadter was quoting Geoff Hinton when he said that. What he himself compared the advance to was "fire".)

irchans 3y ago
You are correct. I miss quoted. Thanks!