3 ms·

A toddler capable of walking is still miles away from the topic at hand, a LLM capable of processing relatively complex text. It is well know that humans have

by lynx23 3y ago

A toddler capable of walking is still miles away from the topic at hand, a LLM capable of processing relatively complex text. It is well know that humans have a particularily long training period compared to other animals. So I dont understand why you are bringing up the walking-training. It seems quite unrelated.

pdimitar 3y ago
Because humans learn from much less samples sizes than "AI". The overly optimistic point of view on "AI" is over-represented in HN and that makes the discussion unbalanced and puts nearly everyone in it in a filter bubble. That's not OK.
- pixl97 3y ago
  Again, as per my previous response, you're missing the optimization timeline and how long it took nature to do it. "Walking" at least on dry land has been around 420 million years or so. The locomotion part of the learning algorithms has been around a very, very long time, and it's going to be very hard to duplicate the efficiency that nature brute forced. Nature has not hype optimized human level intelligence. Really human intelligence is at the limits of birth. Our heads can't be any larger at birth or we'll kill the mother too much of the time. Then the human body has a power budget that's been the defining factor of human/animal survival for just about forever. Humans were already 'smart' before we invented agriculture and excess fuel storage. AI takes that a step further. We're not using reversible computing so the heat generated is pretty high. We've not been doing it very long and our algorithms are not optimal in any sense. But what we do have that nature does not is nearly unlimited energy, nearly unlimited cooling capacity, and a lot of computer systems working on the problem at once. In an evolutionary sense we're doing closer to the bacteria method, we have a lot of different experiments going on at once and at least a few of them are likely to be fruitful. Personally I hope the AI development is no insanely rapid. Rapid and powerful changes in society can cause as many problems as they find fixes for, and the pace of society change is not that fast.
  - pdimitar 3y ago
    I can't disagree with almost anything you said except maybe one thing: in the physical nature there are objective and physical criteria about whether a certain organism will procreate and thus propagate its (presumably) successful genes. Not sure if the AI area, represented by human supervisors, does so in such an objective and ruthless manner as nature does. If there's no fitness function and natural selection then the AI area might be doomed to meander and go in circles for centuries.
- lynx23 3y ago
  Well, let me tell you a story. I have early beta access to GPT-4 with the ability to add pictures to the chat. This is rolled out as part of BeMyEyes, a volunteer-based app which lets volunteers have access to the camera for helping blind people. Now, BeMyAI lets me take a picture, send it to the AI, and have it describe the picture to me. Including OCR and text translation. And I can ask questions, interrogating the AI about the current picture. I can also add more pictures to the "chat", and the AI can see all of them, and even compare differences. I am 100% blind. After a few days of testing, I already know the AI is better then most humans I'd randomly ask to help me with pictures or scene descriptions. And it is more capable, as it can translate between every language I've encountered so far. If you ask me, the AI-will-kill-the-world crowd has a overly pessimistic view when it comes to AI, or they have been cought in the recent alarmism movement, or something. GPT-4 with picture integration is such a powerful feature, I'd say we haven't had anything equivant in terms of flexibility in the assistive technology market since, what, 30 years? This feature will liberate a few millions of blind people from the barriers put in fromt of them by society. And guess what, society didn't really solve them so far, OpenAI solved them as a side effect. But IT-activist still insist on seeing evil and demise everywhere.
  - pdimitar 3y ago
    Well that's just super wholesome to read, thank you for sharing! These and exactly these are the tech advancements that I imagined as a teenager would improve people's lives! I just feel that 99% of the technology nowadays does not improve almost anyone's life. It gets easier and easier to be jaded and lose hope. But your story is very reassuring and nice to read. Thanks for sharing!

by lynx23 3y ago

pdimitar 3y ago

Because humans learn from much less samples sizes than "AI". The overly optimistic point of view on "AI" is over-represented in HN and that makes the discussion unbalanced and puts nearly everyone in it in a filter bubble. That's not OK.

pixl97 3y ago
Again, as per my previous response, you're missing the optimization timeline and how long it took nature to do it. "Walking" at least on dry land has been around 420 million years or so. The locomotion part of the learning algorithms has been around a very, very long time, and it's going to be very hard to duplicate the efficiency that nature brute forced. Nature has not hype optimized human level intelligence. Really human intelligence is at the limits of birth. Our heads can't be any larger at birth or we'll kill the mother too much of the time. Then the human body has a power budget that's been the defining factor of human/animal survival for just about forever. Humans were already 'smart' before we invented agriculture and excess fuel storage. AI takes that a step further. We're not using reversible computing so the heat generated is pretty high. We've not been doing it very long and our algorithms are not optimal in any sense. But what we do have that nature does not is nearly unlimited energy, nearly unlimited cooling capacity, and a lot of computer systems working on the problem at once. In an evolutionary sense we're doing closer to the bacteria method, we have a lot of different experiments going on at once and at least a few of them are likely to be fruitful. Personally I hope the AI development is no insanely rapid. Rapid and powerful changes in society can cause as many problems as they find fixes for, and the pace of society change is not that fast.
- pdimitar 3y ago
  I can't disagree with almost anything you said except maybe one thing: in the physical nature there are objective and physical criteria about whether a certain organism will procreate and thus propagate its (presumably) successful genes. Not sure if the AI area, represented by human supervisors, does so in such an objective and ruthless manner as nature does. If there's no fitness function and natural selection then the AI area might be doomed to meander and go in circles for centuries.
lynx23 3y ago
Well, let me tell you a story. I have early beta access to GPT-4 with the ability to add pictures to the chat. This is rolled out as part of BeMyEyes, a volunteer-based app which lets volunteers have access to the camera for helping blind people. Now, BeMyAI lets me take a picture, send it to the AI, and have it describe the picture to me. Including OCR and text translation. And I can ask questions, interrogating the AI about the current picture. I can also add more pictures to the "chat", and the AI can see all of them, and even compare differences. I am 100% blind. After a few days of testing, I already know the AI is better then most humans I'd randomly ask to help me with pictures or scene descriptions. And it is more capable, as it can translate between every language I've encountered so far. If you ask me, the AI-will-kill-the-world crowd has a overly pessimistic view when it comes to AI, or they have been cought in the recent alarmism movement, or something. GPT-4 with picture integration is such a powerful feature, I'd say we haven't had anything equivant in terms of flexibility in the assistive technology market since, what, 30 years? This feature will liberate a few millions of blind people from the barriers put in fromt of them by society. And guess what, society didn't really solve them so far, OpenAI solved them as a side effect. But IT-activist still insist on seeing evil and demise everywhere.
- pdimitar 3y ago
  Well that's just super wholesome to read, thank you for sharing! These and exactly these are the tech advancements that I imagined as a teenager would improve people's lives! I just feel that 99% of the technology nowadays does not improve almost anyone's life. It gets easier and easier to be jaded and lose hope. But your story is very reassuring and nice to read. Thanks for sharing!