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There are some good points and some stuff I think is hyperbole. I do wonder if he's so dismissive of the potential of AI why he's concerned about it's "misuse".

There are some good points and some stuff I think is hyperbole. I do wonder if he's so dismissive of the potential of AI why he's concerned about it's "misuse". Is the hypothesis that it will only be good for bad things but otherwise not yield commercial value. That aside, we're obviously in a bubble, that's the easiest claim in the world to make. We're also in a real estate bubble, etc. The only claim that matters is predicting when it will pop, otherwise it's just hot air.

zarzavat 3y ago
I don’t think we’re in an AI bubble. AI has hardly any penetration into society. If you compare with smartphones then we are pretty much in the late 1980s brick phone era where the technology is just starting to be adopted by society. The key technology, AGI, has not even been invented yet. It’s possible we may see a mini bubble if AGI takes a while to be developed, but I think it’s more likely that we won’t because even the current generation of AI has a lot further to run.
- JimtheCoder 3y ago
  "AI has hardly any penetration into society." To clarify, I assume you are talking about Gen AI when you say "AI"?
  - oceanplexian 3y ago
    I think penetration into society is a really nebulous statement. It’s possible AI (Even Generative AI) will penetrate society long before we know about it. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me that Wall Street is already using it to trade some non-insignificant fraction of the US economy. Similar to how Linux is probably holding modern civilization together behind the scenes but most people are completely oblivious.
  - zarzavat 3y ago
    Sorry yes, I meant generative AI since we were talking about a “bubble”. Obviously there are other forms of AI that are more mature and deployed, but that’s not what the hype is about.
- robotresearcher 3y ago
  > AI has hardly any penetration into society. > If you compare with smartphones Every smartphone runs multiple AI systems in it. Some are used multiple times a day, most just working and keeping out of your way. Unless you exclude from AI the stuff we used to call AI until it started working really well.
  - PartiallyTyped 3y ago
    If you have an iphone, you can open your images and search for cat / dog and the program will just show relevant pics of cats and dogs. It also searches in text inside of said images.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - Nullabillity 3y ago
      Except for the half the time that it can't even guess the location from the already-embedded GPS data.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
- berniedurfee 3y ago
  I don’t think generative AI is a stepping stone to AGI. I think they’re quite different. I understand generative AI as a million monkeys on a million typewriters, but we figured out how to rig the typewriters to generate convincing and sometimes correct output. Neither monkeys individually or collectively understand anything about how they responded. They just get a treat for doing well. AGI is something very different IMO. Language and speech will be emergent in AGI without requiring massive inputs, like how a child learns. LLMs seem like sort of a (very impressive) parlor trick. Neat, useful and terrifying, but not a pathway to AGI.
  - paxcoder 3y ago
    [dead]
- nextaccountic 3y ago
  > If you compare with smartphones then we are pretty much in the late 1980s brick phone era where the technology is just starting to be adopted by society. ChatGPT was the largest growing site in the history of the Internet, reaching 100 millions users in two months. This seems more than 1980 brick phones
  - gmerc 3y ago
    How much of that is a function of distributed and hype infrastructures being in place though. It’s disingenuous comparing the way Facebook scaled to ChatGPT which scales primarily along social media vectors with massive distribution.
Legend2440 3y ago
Because he's Gary Marcus. The man has made his entire media personality about dissing AI, and he's been doing it a lot longer than LLMs have been around.
- user_named 3y ago
  So far he's been right every time.
resolutebat 3y ago
Generative AI is excellent at churning out prose good enough for targeted scams, fake news and search engine optimization, and there is plenty of commercial value in all three of those. However, none of those three will transform humanity as we know it, they'll just make life a bit worse for everybody.
- seanhunter 3y ago
  It's also really excellent at a bunch of other things. For example I am currently doing self-directed study in maths. It turns out chatgpt is very good at explaining lots of things if you prompt correctly. You need to check things yourself and be on the lookout for plausible but wrong explanations, but it's like having a patient pure maths friend to work on things with - your friend won't get everything right either after all. Something with real commercial potential is what microsoft released (I think today) [1] which is a sort of wizard thing that accellerates various azure gpt-powered standard deployments that do things like set up private ephemeral instances that connect to your enterprise data sources behind your firewall. This has enormous potential given how difficult it is in most large enterprises to actually join data sources together, find basic information etc. Think of an automated helpdesk that can draw on all of the stuff in all of the various disjointed systems in most big companies. That has the potential to be quite transformative to the workplace for a lot of people. In general I think this bar of "transforming humanity" is just arbitrary and way too high for any technology. You could look at the map on your phone and say "that's all very well but will it transform humanity?" well no. It won't make toast either, but it's quite useful sometimes. Just as overinflated expectations and hype are unhelpful I think it's easy to be cynical and miss important tech developments just because we impose arbitrary standards on them that other technologies didn't have to meet on their way to adoption. [1] https://github.com/microsoft/azurechatgpt https://github.com/microsoft/azurechatgpt
  - seanhunter 3y ago
    Here's an example of this kind of self-study chat btw (so you can see the pros and cons) https://chat.openai.com/share/d1428952-84e6-42be-9e0a-2ce62b132068 https://chat.openai.com/share/d1428952-84e6-42be-9e0a-2ce62b... It's interesting that in the final matrix example it somehow messed up the Latex by forgetting to put \begin{bmatrix} at the front which is why the formatting goes bonkers. It's also kind of cheesy that it chose a diagonal matrix rather than having to find the roots of the characteristic polynomial but any case you get the idea hopefully and can see how this would be helpful when you're trying to learn this stuff yourself? I'm certainly finding it great as I work through textbooks etc to chat through concepts in this way to check my understanding and drill into things.
aaron695 3y ago
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zarzavat 3y ago

I don’t think we’re in an AI bubble. AI has hardly any penetration into society. If you compare with smartphones then we are pretty much in the late 1980s brick phone era where the technology is just starting to be adopted by society. The key technology, AGI, has not even been invented yet. It’s possible we may see a mini bubble if AGI takes a while to be developed, but I think it’s more likely that we won’t because even the current generation of AI has a lot further to run.

JimtheCoder 3y ago
"AI has hardly any penetration into society." To clarify, I assume you are talking about Gen AI when you say "AI"?
- oceanplexian 3y ago
  I think penetration into society is a really nebulous statement. It’s possible AI (Even Generative AI) will penetrate society long before we know about it. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me that Wall Street is already using it to trade some non-insignificant fraction of the US economy. Similar to how Linux is probably holding modern civilization together behind the scenes but most people are completely oblivious.
- zarzavat 3y ago
  Sorry yes, I meant generative AI since we were talking about a “bubble”. Obviously there are other forms of AI that are more mature and deployed, but that’s not what the hype is about.
robotresearcher 3y ago
> AI has hardly any penetration into society. > If you compare with smartphones Every smartphone runs multiple AI systems in it. Some are used multiple times a day, most just working and keeping out of your way. Unless you exclude from AI the stuff we used to call AI until it started working really well.
- PartiallyTyped 3y ago
  If you have an iphone, you can open your images and search for cat / dog and the program will just show relevant pics of cats and dogs. It also searches in text inside of said images.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - Nullabillity 3y ago
    Except for the half the time that it can't even guess the location from the already-embedded GPS data.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
berniedurfee 3y ago
I don’t think generative AI is a stepping stone to AGI. I think they’re quite different. I understand generative AI as a million monkeys on a million typewriters, but we figured out how to rig the typewriters to generate convincing and sometimes correct output. Neither monkeys individually or collectively understand anything about how they responded. They just get a treat for doing well. AGI is something very different IMO. Language and speech will be emergent in AGI without requiring massive inputs, like how a child learns. LLMs seem like sort of a (very impressive) parlor trick. Neat, useful and terrifying, but not a pathway to AGI.
- paxcoder 3y ago
  [dead]
nextaccountic 3y ago
> If you compare with smartphones then we are pretty much in the late 1980s brick phone era where the technology is just starting to be adopted by society. ChatGPT was the largest growing site in the history of the Internet, reaching 100 millions users in two months. This seems more than 1980 brick phones
- gmerc 3y ago
  How much of that is a function of distributed and hype infrastructures being in place though. It’s disingenuous comparing the way Facebook scaled to ChatGPT which scales primarily along social media vectors with massive distribution.

Legend2440 3y ago

Because he's Gary Marcus. The man has made his entire media personality about dissing AI, and he's been doing it a lot longer than LLMs have been around.

user_named 3y ago
So far he's been right every time.

resolutebat 3y ago

Generative AI is excellent at churning out prose good enough for targeted scams, fake news and search engine optimization, and there is plenty of commercial value in all three of those. However, none of those three will transform humanity as we know it, they'll just make life a bit worse for everybody.

seanhunter 3y ago
It's also really excellent at a bunch of other things. For example I am currently doing self-directed study in maths. It turns out chatgpt is very good at explaining lots of things if you prompt correctly. You need to check things yourself and be on the lookout for plausible but wrong explanations, but it's like having a patient pure maths friend to work on things with - your friend won't get everything right either after all. Something with real commercial potential is what microsoft released (I think today) [1] which is a sort of wizard thing that accellerates various azure gpt-powered standard deployments that do things like set up private ephemeral instances that connect to your enterprise data sources behind your firewall. This has enormous potential given how difficult it is in most large enterprises to actually join data sources together, find basic information etc. Think of an automated helpdesk that can draw on all of the stuff in all of the various disjointed systems in most big companies. That has the potential to be quite transformative to the workplace for a lot of people. In general I think this bar of "transforming humanity" is just arbitrary and way too high for any technology. You could look at the map on your phone and say "that's all very well but will it transform humanity?" well no. It won't make toast either, but it's quite useful sometimes. Just as overinflated expectations and hype are unhelpful I think it's easy to be cynical and miss important tech developments just because we impose arbitrary standards on them that other technologies didn't have to meet on their way to adoption. [1] https://github.com/microsoft/azurechatgpt https://github.com/microsoft/azurechatgpt
- seanhunter 3y ago
  Here's an example of this kind of self-study chat btw (so you can see the pros and cons) https://chat.openai.com/share/d1428952-84e6-42be-9e0a-2ce62b132068 https://chat.openai.com/share/d1428952-84e6-42be-9e0a-2ce62b... It's interesting that in the final matrix example it somehow messed up the Latex by forgetting to put \begin{bmatrix} at the front which is why the formatting goes bonkers. It's also kind of cheesy that it chose a diagonal matrix rather than having to find the roots of the characteristic polynomial but any case you get the idea hopefully and can see how this would be helpful when you're trying to learn this stuff yourself? I'm certainly finding it great as I work through textbooks etc to chat through concepts in this way to check my understanding and drill into things.

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]