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Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal
- roenxi 3y ago> Study Deep Blue’s 1997 defeat of world chess champion Garry Kasparov, and your excitement about how quickly this technology would take over other cognitive work would wane as you learned just how much brute human force went into fine-tuning the software specifically to beat Kasparov. That was ~26 yeas ago. In the intervening 26 years humans have been curb-stomped so hard at chess that certain microwaves might be competitive against human grandmasters. Anyone who doesn't think that was an exciting moment for AI research has impossible standards, we're living in a tiny window of existence where humans were at the top of the intellectual food chain and are now dropping to also-ran status along with the rest of the meat-based animal kingdom. All these moments are the real deal. The idea that somehow this particular step change is even unexpected is missing the forest for the trees. The trends that have been observed since the beginning of computers are chugging away so quickly the whole process may well happen in a single generation.
- bombolo 3y agoWhen you have to manually input the scores for the various board positions, feels much less exciting.
- lawn 3y agoMonumental progress is very rarely done in one giant step, but with many incremental improvements.
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoThat is just the physical layer. Robotics is behind in making a 'human'. Even AlphaGo had a human moving the pieces, and nobody would say that was evidence of any 'lack' in the AI. It's just an interfacing issue, engineering will eventually solve. Edit> What I was getting at. Take Robots as the physical interface layer for the AI. AI advancements are currently outpacing advancements in Robotics. So potentially AI could use real humans as the 'hands and feet' to do things in the physical world, by giving directions. Something will be needed to bridge the gap until Industry can be done completely by robots. Until then, AI wont be able to manufacture itself.
- RunSet 3y agoPlenty of practically mint human bodies just sitting around waiting to be repurposed. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna9816703 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna9816703
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoThis is the scary scenario. What if AI does out pace humans, but the physical side does not, we don't succeed in making vast quantities of easy to build and maintain robots. Thus to keep industry going, the AI does need humans, and it gives the directions. If you have ever worked in a modern warehouse, it is very evident, the humans are just following instructions from the system. Now scale that up to a manufacturing facility, it is already happening. Everybody with an ear-piece or 'phone' type device, following instructions.
- ido 3y agoReminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel)
- crabmusket 3y agoThis is what Doctorow refers to as the "reverse centaur"
- johnnyworker 3y ago> The problem here isn't automation, it's power. The workers whom the robots could benefit are instead harnessed to the robot to the benefit of the shareholders. > Workplace democracy, AKA unionization, AKA the thing Amazon has pulled out every dirty trick to prevent, is the difference between centaur utopia and reverse-centaur dystopia. -- https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-...
- Analemma_ 3y agoAgain, your information is tremendously out of date. AlphaZero crushes grandmasters and had no human training whatsoever as to board evaluation functions.
- bombolo 3y agoAgain? When else? Also, we were talking about deep blue. Perhaps trying to not go OT would be beneficial to a productive discussion.
- ZiiS 3y agoThe are microwaves fully in on the curb-stomping https://www.tomsguide.com/news/ges-kitchen-hub-is-the-smartest-microwave-ive-ever-seen https://www.tomsguide.com/news/ges-kitchen-hub-is-the-smarte... My back of the envelope suggests most digital microwaves with a smart defrost but no connectivity are probably more in the 2000 ELO range (i.e. can beat most players but not grandmasters). Mainly due to not having enough storage for large opening/endgame books.
- guhidalg 3y agoI for one welcome measuring compute power in chess ELO over FLOPS. Let's me know which devices I can trounce and which ones to pay respect to.
- SonicScrub 3y agoAgreed. Although my ego might not be able to take it if it turns out I can be outplayed by my IKEA smart lamp.
- ZiiS 3y agoI can program an IKEA smart lamp to be better at chess then I am; I see this as a win.
- ChatGTP 3y agoCurious why you needed to inject the violent overtones in your comment, "curb stomped? We're building tools to help us augment our intelligence, I don't see anyone getting "curb stomped"? If intelligence leads to more violence, then I don't think it will be as useful as we'd have hoped.
- Plyphon_ 3y agoIt's just a turn of phrase that means you got 100% beaten without challenge.
- jjoonathan 3y agoNo, no it isn't. It's a very particular violent act designed to maximize ongoing physical pain and social disadvantage in the victim. Sort of like throwing sulfuric acid at someone's face.
- nyolfen 3y agowait until you hear such idioms as "punched in the gut", "made a killing", etc.
- ChatGTP 3y agoPunched in the gut vs curb stomped...hmmm
- thefurdrake 3y agovs made a killing, hmmm...
- goatlover 3y agoMichael Jordan was a stone-cold killer on the court.
- johnnyworker 3y ago
- somewhereoutth 3y agoExcept that human + computer beats either on their own, known as Centaur Chess.
- theonemind 3y agoeverything so far looks to me like improvements on the pocket calculator, bearing in mind that an order of magnitude difference in scale really still is a difference of kind, they're still orders of magnitude improvements on pocket calculators (which admittedly is something of a different kind). There's a very important particular kind of human intelligence that machines can't seem to do at all, like Einstein discovering general relativity or Fleming discovering antibotics...which sounds like I'm cherry-picking human intelligence at its best, but I'm really pointing out a kind of information synthesis on the basis of reacting to unexpected information. I have trouble articulating it, but I can see that LLMs and chess engines don't do the slightest hint of it. I'll be concerned when machines show the slightest hint of it, but we're playing a ball game in a sphere they can't even touch yet. I'm genuinely continually boggled that people are not seeing this difference and feeling threatened by machine "intelligence", although they are encroaching on something thought uniquely human, and I don't think the brain is doing some kind of information processing that can't be done in any other medium, but the number of connections and kind of processing in the human brain may make it hard with current technology. The number of connections in the brain is staggering, and we certainly can't simulate anything of its scale on the scale of computer we have now, so I don't know what it will take to get any bootstrap on the kind of intelligence computers aren't doing.
- aarong11 3y agoI mean you might think AI can't currently affect humanity but it really does. A lot of people are now using AI to write code and to answer questions they probably should be asking a doctor or lawyer. A lot of people seem to think it's some all knowing and psychic thing and will take its advice blindly.
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- apples_oranges 3y agoWhere on the S-shaped curve are we? I am curious if one day the paradigm that brought forth the current chatbots has to be abandoned because it's reached his limits, and a new approach will replace it. But certainly it has inspired the field of AI massively and I expect many new developments which will lead is into a future that resembles sci-fi books and movies. I am also interested in what good sci-fi will look like in the future? It looks like "the singularity" is defined by the limits of our imagination. We cannot imagine what comes after it, so this means we cannot write sci-fi on it, right?
- amelius 3y ago> Where on the S-shaped curve are we? Why do you think it's an S-shape? As you say, we're heading for a singularity!
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoYeah it sure would be convenient if this is the one time in all of nature that a curve that looked like it was going exponential before suddenly conforming to all past trends and becoming sigmoid was actually exponential after all because you really really want it to be.
- GuB-42 3y agoBecause exponentials will eventually break the laws of physics. For instance there is a relationship between information and energy, so a system processing an exponential amount of information will need an exponential amount of energy, which the universe will eventually run out of.
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- Thoeu388 3y agoThis is the Real Deal, but not in away you would imagine. So far "nigerian email spam" was easy to recognize. Grammar mistakes, bad translation, very bad wording... But now every fringe group, can generate gigabytes of text and arguments that make sense! This is the end of debate, consensus and interactive communication, as we know it! Similar moment was in Africa in 1960, after they got AK45 and other cheap weapons. It was easy to dominate Congo River Basin with a few Maxim machine guns mounted on boats, when opponents had only spears. But when every tiny village gets comparable fire power, there are no colonies!
- Kbelicius 3y ago> So far "nigerian email spam" was easy to recognize. Grammar mistakes, bad translation, very bad wording... But now every fringe group, can generate gigabytes of text and arguments that make sense! "nigerian email spam" contains grammar mistakes, bad translation, vary bad wording... by design. To weed out those unlikely to end up sending money. I don't know how you can make an argument that makes sense about being chosen by royalty of a country to help them in some way.
- Thoeu388 3y ago[dead]
- version_five 3y agoThey've been replaced with fashion mistakes
- rsynnott 3y agoIf someone is running an actual 419 scam in crypto, probably yes; they only want the really easy marks (because there's a non-zero incremental cost to each person engaging so they only want the ones who are likely to convert). Most crypto scams are either pump and dump schemes or some sort of Ponzi, though, and for those it really doesn't matter; there's no incentive to cut the number of participants.
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- optimalsolver 3y agoWhat's a large language model doing when it's not being queried? Am I correct that they only compute information when dealing with a prompt? If so, that seems like a fundamental flaw. An actual "thinking machine" would be constantly running computations on its accumulated experience in order to improve its future output.
- iinnPP 3y agoHooking an LLM up to a loop would solve that. Then you can find a way to include a described video feed and method of movement into the mix.
- TheRoque 3y agoNot really, because it would hit a moment where it runs out of context. It can't really learn anything for now.
- gmerc 3y agoNot really, hook up external sensors to keep shoveling data , feedback data into continuous lora and performance comparison,
- danaris 3y agoHow? What kind of data? You think you can just hook up a firehose of visual or auditory data to ChatGPT and have that produce anything meaningful? That's not even the basic format that ChatGPT operates in. Furthermore, isn't part of the point of the dataset an LLM is trained on that it has to be at least moderately structured and tagged, or you end up with garbage in the output?
- flangola7 3y agoMeta has an LLM trained on multiple senses, including images, sound, video, physical motion, heat, and lidar depth.
- vwcx 3y agoSide note: this publication, The New Atlantis, has been a very satisfying subscription. It's not too technical to casually read and consistently mixes together an interesting collection of essays, opinions, reviews, etc. I've passed every copy I receive to friends and then regret not having them around six months later when the ideas I read are still lodged in my brain.
- copperx 3y agoDo you find it to be a conservative publication?
- m3kw9 3y agoJust current LLM itself is a very useful tool. One of those rare first of its kind tools that is massively adopted.
- SoftTalker 3y agoIn case you were wondering (as I was) about the qualifications of the author to write about AI, here is what I found on the "New Atlantis" website: Ari Schulman is editor of The New Atlantis, as well as editor of TheNewAtlantis.com and of the New Atlantis Books series. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Hedgehog Review, Commentary, First Things, and Slate. He has previously been a research assistant in the Opinion department at the New York Times, an ontological engineer at Cycorp, and has degrees in computer science and English from the University of Texas at Austin. I'm still not certain. I have a degree in computer science, but it had no AI focus, and even if it had, it was so long ago as to be mostly irrelevant to what is currently called AI if I had not been keeping up independently in the field.
- agentultra 3y ago... ChatGPT is a bigger, fancier mechanical turk. It's still aligned by the manual labour of underpaid people given no benefits for their work. They get exposed to some of the most horrible content on the Internet every day as part of their job. It's trained on data mined from other humans. It regurgitates that content and if it's too close to verbatim with the training data we have manual labour fixing that. There's an army of people that are trying to make it look like they're keeping SkyNET in a box... just don't look in the box. See God in it if you want. Believe that it has feelings. Believe that it can think for itself and develop agency over it's future... one day. People believe all kinds of things about the natural universe that make no sense but it makes them feel something. LLM's are what they are. No more, no less. Don't believe the hype, stick to the science.
- Andrex 3y agoCombine an LLM with long-term memory formation/recollection and a protracted (~18 year?) incubation period where it interacts with the outside world, and... the line between AI and consciousness would be pretty blurry at that point.
- curiousllama 3y ago> the line between AI and consciousness would be pretty blurry at that point This is like saying the difference between Cillian Murphy and Oppenheimer is pretty blurry because, look, we can watch Murphy do do all the same things Oppenheimer did! For some reason with "AI" we get all mystical and act like imitation = the real thing. Just because I can convince you I'm a doctor doesn't make me one
- Andrex 3y ago> Just because I can convince you I'm a doctor doesn't make me one Because our society has decided you need to become certified to be a doctor, and to do that you have to be a human being. There's no reason to think an AI couldn't have the same level of skill as a human doctor. The film comparison doesn't work for me, Cillian and Robert are real people. I think at the end of the day it's how you view the philosophy of the human soul. For me, it follows that if brains are matter and can produce the illusion of consciousness, so can electronics.
- mercurialsolo 3y agoIt's not combining an LLM with data/memory recollection and infinite agency that will lead to leaps in cognition. Complex systems still can do that and still not have self-awareness / cognition. We will need to take some more fundamental leaps to synthesize memory, agency and prediction to operate within a single system where self-awareness resides in the entity and not in the building blocks. LLM's represent a building block towards that cognitive unit, but the real deal is still some ways away
- danryan 3y agoBingo.
- strikelaserclaw 3y agoAlthough i fundamentally agree with you, i will say that it is impossible to know which "tricks" will lead to a leap in cognition, even looking evolutionarily, the difference in genome between a monkey and human is very small percentage wise, yet the effects of that small difference are stark.
- unshavedyak 3y agoI'm always on the position that at some point (i make no prediction of when) "AI" will still be labeled as not-intelligent, but to external observers it won't be possible to know. Ie we will be able to describe how a function of `add(1,2)` is most clearly definitely not intelligent. We will understand the internal makeup of these neurons better, the whole system will be deterministic and understood - just a very large `add(1,2)` .. so it's definitely not intelligent, of course. Yet it will still produce output that is fully and truly turing-proof. If you let it run, it retains, stores, "behaves", etc. It's clearly just `add(1,2)` in a loop after all.. we will understand it so well that it's obviously just a trick of our mind that it seems real. The conclusion in that space will not be one of the machine .. but of us. If we can't tell it apart from us.. and if we know it is most definitely not alive or even mysterious.. what does that say about us? The existential crisis will be neat.
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- seydor 3y ago"understands" is a loaded word
- balnaphone 3y agoAm I misreading this? > How tall was the president when JFK was born? I infer that "JFK" is being referred to as "the president", regardless of what stage of life he's at. Therefore the correct answer would be the length of his body as a newborn, with nothing to do with who was the president at the moment of his birth. For example, given the headline: "Was the president strong at writing essays when JFK was a high school freshman? Read this essay to find out!", would you expect an essay from Herbert Hoover while he was in office, or an essay from JFK when he was in grade 9?
- kzrdude 3y agoIt is ambiguous. Very ambiguous. You could reasonably ask: president of what?
- mikub 3y agoAs an non native english speaker i read: > How tall was the president when JFK was born? as, How tall was the "reigning" president, (which in the year 1917, Kennedys birth year, was Thomas Woodrow Wilson) on the day that JFK was born."
- pessimizer 3y agoLet's talk about Biden, then. How tall was the president when he was born?
- balnaphone 3y agoHa! Perfect example!
- pessimizer 3y agoA lot of exposés of LLM weaknesses involve abusing the ambiguities of English with questions that are impossible for humans to give a satisfactory answer to, because they can be read in multiple ways. Part of my bullishness on LLMs is that a lot of the criticism is so bad, and if they weren't the real deal there would be more low hanging fruit to attack them on. Cryptocurrency was having real problems from the first moment people realized how much data they would have to download to initialize a node.
- nologic01 3y agoI wish people would stop with the bizarre AI-latry that has gripped them en masse and realize that if its a "moment" at all, its a human moment. The impressive feat is the ability of researchers to manipulate a generic statistical model paradigm to fit large amounts data and be reused for something apparently useful. Whether that path has a future depends not on AI bootstraping itself but on said researchers to keep building on this paradigm. The black box and inscrutable nature of these algorithms works against them. I.e. reaching the next level in some purposeful manner requires more understanding. Human understanding.
- mbgerring 3y agoSomething I’ve realized in the midst of all this hype is that many, many people seem to actually want to build AGI, for its own sake, and many take for granted that this is a goal. I don’t understand why. It seems like we’re racing right past using the tools we already have to solve humanity’s many very real and solvable problems, in favor of trying to invent something just because it sounds neat.
- c_crank 3y agoAGI sounds neat because the hype says that it will solve all human problems at once. That's obviously fake and wrong, but so is the idea of solving current human problems with current tools.
- hodgesrm 3y ago> That's obviously fake and wrong, but so is the idea of solving current human problems with current tools. There are easily stated problems like "Reduce US car accidents by 50%" that should be solvable with AI as it stands today. This seems like a useful and achievable goal that would save money and lives. I've never understood why full self-driving was the problem most people chose to solve instead. But perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point.
- oneayy4 3y agothis is how you know the AI moment is not real. its all marketing for the likes of capitalistic shit like Tesla and self-driving as its some kind of savior for humanity instead of some marketing gimmick for some car dealer. like bro trains exists.
- c_crank 3y agoSolving some percentage car accidents with AI requires a law or a common agreement by car companies to put AI in cars. That's an investment of time and money that isn't going to solving some other problem. Everything is a trade off, and some problems simply come with the territory of being human. The appeal of self-driving is usually just financial.
- push-to-prod 3y agoFrom the last paragraph in the article: "It is too early to say that the new AI class is an inherently antihuman technological paradigm, as social media has proven itself to be. But it is not too early to suspect that AIs will dwarf social media in their power to disrupt modern life. If that is so, we had better learn some new and unfamiliar ways of interrogating this technology, and fast. Whatever these entities are — they’re here." -Ari Schulman People that mistake an large language model (LLM) for anything other than a LLM make some fundamentally broken assumptions. Are ChatGPT, Midjourney, etc. a fundamental leap in the state of the art when it comes to allowing computer systems to understand what people mean and return something useful based on it? 100% Is ChatGPT or the like going to become self-aware, compromise other computer systems, etc? No more than your shoe is going to take over your foot. There's far too many people worried about "AI" that don't have enough context to realize they're fearing a non-sentient tool that has zero agency, and will not for the foreseeable future. Somebody wake me up when the panic is over.
- bilekas 3y ago> Is ChatGPT or the like going to become self-aware, compromise other computer systems, etc? No more than your shoe is going to take over your foot. Agreed. It's strange though, to be honest I don't see much if any worry about self awareness, i think anyone who knows anything understands that's not the issue. The "issue" if you can call it that is how it will impact society from a labor and content perspective. How much synthetic content will be perceived as true and assumed to be correct simply because we haven't had time to adapt to the fact that the rate of synthetic content is exponential now.
- __loam 3y agoMy main concern about this technology is the amount of bullshit that's going to end up on the internet because of it
- push-to-prod 3y ago> How much synthetic content will be perceived as true and assumed to be correct simply because we haven't had time to adapt to the fact that the rate of synthetic content is exponential now. That will be a problem for sure. But people believe all sorts of easy to debunk things already and that list is ever-expanding, so I don't know if there's any cure for it. As far as content goes, I think human beings writing out boilerplate anything is something that's not long for this world. Labor is a trickier one to judge, but I'm not too worried about a large negative impact in the immediate future. People thought that modern appliances would usher in a new age of leisure, and the truth was that while they removed a lot of drudgery, work expanded to fill the vacuum and the percentage of the week spent laboring didn't significantly decrease. On a positive note, I think the kind of work people are subject to now is better because of modern appliances, so I wouldn't be surprised if the same holds true for all the labor problems that can be handled by neural net / LLMs.
- thomastjeffery 3y agoLLMs do not understand language. They simulate language. Does language understand itself? Some of it does, and some of it doesn't. Remember, LLMs aren't the person writing.
- janalsncm 3y agoWhat does it mean to understand language, and can you test your definition? I say this because statements like yours are a bit like saying calculators don’t understand arithmetic. In some sense maybe they don’t. But in another sense, they actually understand arithmetic better than anyone on the planet. So maybe ChatGPT does understand language. Maybe it understands language better than anyone. What it doesn’t have are real-world experiences.
- thomastjeffery 3y agoPerformance is not understanding. The difference is objectivity: a calculator does not think about arithmetic, it performs it. A large language model is a collection of relationships between "tokens" (arbitrary groups of characters, similar to words). This is intended to exist in the same conceptual place that language does; language being defined as a collection of relationships between words and punctuation.
- janalsncm 3y agoYes, this is why I asked you how you would test your definition. All of our tests of understanding are performances.
- ikrenji 3y agoPersonally I don't think we will succeed building a true AGI based on the current computer architecture. The computing units of the only intelligent beings we know of so far - us and maybe some animals to an extent - work very different from how a CPU works. I suspect we will need to build a computer that more closely resembles a neuron and the way it performs calculations...
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago>> 2. It can understand natural language. That entire section is one big confused contradiction. The author argues that CYC (Doug Lenat's project to hand-code a gigantic database of logic rules encoding common sense knowledge) "can do deep reasoning" because it can answer this question correctly: How tall was the president when JFK was born? Unlike Google and WolframAlpha who can only find the closest association (the elevation of the town were JFK was born). Still, the author says, CYC would never "challenge humanity’s unique rational status, any more than computers that could solve equations did" because it doesn't understand natural language, only logic formulae. And yet, the author seems to be arguing that ChatGPT does understand natural language because... it can answer the same question as CYC; albeit in natural language, unlike CYC. I think the author has confused the ability to return results in natural language with the ability to understand natural language. By that token, ELIZA (mentioned at the start of the article) must have also been able to understand natural language, even if it didn't have CYC's ability for "deep reasoning", just because it could parrot its user's input in natural language. That doesn't make sense. Understanding is clearly something that needs to happen before utterances are formed. Just looking at the output of a system doesn't tell you anything about the internal workings of the system, that's an error that many people keep making in this entire discussion about "AI"s. Look at the sky: the sun looks like it's turning around the Earth. Well, we know it isn't. What we see on the surface is rarely enough to explain what is going on "inside" (or outside, as the case may be, for the sun).
- piocaidsn 3y agoI find the emphasis on the combination of big data, powerful computing, and advances in machine learning to be a compelling argument for the current AI momentum. The idea that these factors are creating a synergy that propels AI development forward and contributes to tangible progress in various fields is really encouraging.