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> with beliefs at times seemingly rooted in the realm of science fiction I don’t know how you can look at the development of generative AI tools in the past fe

> with beliefs at times seemingly rooted in the realm of science fiction I don’t know how you can look at the development of generative AI tools in the past few years and write so dismissively about “science fiction” becoming reality

tovej 3y ago
Easy, you recognize the ability for the generative model to copy facets of data from its corpus as useful but boring in the AI sense, and wonder why people are even talking about sentience and AGI.
- lyu07282 3y ago
  I suppose if this widely believed perception is true there can't possibly be any danger in scaling the model up a few thousand times. Except of course all those logical reasoning datasets the model is acing, but I guess it just memorized them all. Its only autocomplete on steroids why are all these people smarter than me worried about it, I don't understand.
  - tovej 3y ago
    There was just a post on this website where GPT4 failed to perform basic reasoning tasks better than minimum paid mechanical turk "microworkers".
    - andybak 3y ago
      And the comments section pointed out multiple flaws in that article.
      - tovej 3y ago
        it didn't really. There were no fundamental flaws that I could see. Perhaps the only salient critique was the textual representation of the problem, but I think it was presented in a way where the model was given all the help it could get. You forget the result of the paper was actually improving the model's performance and still failing to get anywhere near decent results.
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  Yeah stuff this went from “oh shit!” to “meh” in a hurry once I actually started using these things rather than just reading reports about them.
- sensanaty 3y ago
  I don't believe that we're gonna have Skynet on our hands (at least not within my lifetime). What I do believe is that as the hype grows for this AI stuff, more and more people are going to be displaced and put out of work for the sake of making some rich assholes even richer. I wasn't a huge fan of "Open"AI as a company, but I sure as fuck would take them over fucking Microsoft, the literal comic-book tier evil megacorporation being at the helm of this mass displacement. Yet, many of these legitimate concerns are just swatted away by AI sycophants with no actual answers to these issues. You get branded a Luddite (and mind you the Luddites weren't even wrong) and a sensationalist. Shit, you've already got psychopathic C-suites talking about replacing entire teams with current-day AIs, what the fuck are people supposed to do in the future when they get better? What, we're suddenly going to go full-force into a mystical UBI utopia? Overnight?
jimsimmons 3y ago
Didn't read it as dismissive. Frames it as ambitious even
ShamelessC 3y ago
Most science fiction has to do with robots (almost always robots) being (essentially) a superior counterfactual version of humans. With that context it's almost a natural assumption that such beings would revolt. On the other hand, the realm of non-fiction has been predicting the automation of intelligent processes by computational processes since Alan Turing first suggested it in Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Probably before then, as well. The only exception I can think of for fiction is the movie "Her," which as far as I can tell effectively predicted the future. Not really, of course, but every inch of that movie down to how people work pre and post AI, how people play video games pre and post AI, and how people socialize pre and post AI, are starting to look eerily accurate.
- truculent 3y ago
  The fashion, too!
- wilsonnb3 3y ago
  > The only exception I can think of for fiction is the movie "Her," I think there is a wealth of fiction out there that features AI without robot bodies. The sequel to Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, comes to mind immediately (because I re-read it last week). 2001: A Space Odyssey, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Neuromancer (I think, haven't read it in a while), I think some of of the short stories from Ray Bradbury and Ted Chiang, etc, etc
  - ShamelessC 3y ago
    I’ll have to add some of those things to the reading list. 2001 (the movie) was indeed a great depiction of an AI that isn’t exactly embodied and also isn’t effectively a human in robot skin. It does run into the similar tropes I was getting at though where AI feels it knows what is best for us even if that involves disobeying us.
  - tkgally 3y ago
    The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein has as one of its central plot elements a mainframe computer that becomes sentient and able to converse with humans. It’s been more than fifty years since I last read the book, but it has returned to my mind often since the release of ChatGPT.
aunty_helen 3y ago
It’s literally a PR piece.
Satam 3y ago
Agreed. If you build an AI that's very useful on a vast array of diverse tasks, it is naturally also going to have a large capacity for harm. A blunt knife cuts nothing, but a sharp one slices both through our food and our fingers. I'm pro-AI but it feels like a lot of people are lost in the weeds discussing concepts like consciousness and forgo pragmatic logic completely.
yeck 3y ago
Aspects of this article were surprisingly good. This part was not one of them, though. What's already been released publicly is feels "rooted in the realm of science fiction".
elboru 3y ago
So many commenters dismiss AI risks so easily, acting like they actually know what will happen the next decade.

tovej 3y ago

Easy, you recognize the ability for the generative model to copy facets of data from its corpus as useful but boring in the AI sense, and wonder why people are even talking about sentience and AGI.

lyu07282 3y ago
I suppose if this widely believed perception is true there can't possibly be any danger in scaling the model up a few thousand times. Except of course all those logical reasoning datasets the model is acing, but I guess it just memorized them all. Its only autocomplete on steroids why are all these people smarter than me worried about it, I don't understand.
- tovej 3y ago
  There was just a post on this website where GPT4 failed to perform basic reasoning tasks better than minimum paid mechanical turk "microworkers".
  - andybak 3y ago
    And the comments section pointed out multiple flaws in that article.
    - tovej 3y ago
      it didn't really. There were no fundamental flaws that I could see. Perhaps the only salient critique was the textual representation of the problem, but I think it was presented in a way where the model was given all the help it could get. You forget the result of the paper was actually improving the model's performance and still failing to get anywhere near decent results.
hotnfresh 3y ago
Yeah stuff this went from “oh shit!” to “meh” in a hurry once I actually started using these things rather than just reading reports about them.
sensanaty 3y ago
I don't believe that we're gonna have Skynet on our hands (at least not within my lifetime). What I do believe is that as the hype grows for this AI stuff, more and more people are going to be displaced and put out of work for the sake of making some rich assholes even richer. I wasn't a huge fan of "Open"AI as a company, but I sure as fuck would take them over fucking Microsoft, the literal comic-book tier evil megacorporation being at the helm of this mass displacement. Yet, many of these legitimate concerns are just swatted away by AI sycophants with no actual answers to these issues. You get branded a Luddite (and mind you the Luddites weren't even wrong) and a sensationalist. Shit, you've already got psychopathic C-suites talking about replacing entire teams with current-day AIs, what the fuck are people supposed to do in the future when they get better? What, we're suddenly going to go full-force into a mystical UBI utopia? Overnight?

jimsimmons 3y ago

Didn't read it as dismissive. Frames it as ambitious even

ShamelessC 3y ago

Most science fiction has to do with robots (almost always robots) being (essentially) a superior counterfactual version of humans. With that context it's almost a natural assumption that such beings would revolt. On the other hand, the realm of non-fiction has been predicting the automation of intelligent processes by computational processes since Alan Turing first suggested it in Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Probably before then, as well. The only exception I can think of for fiction is the movie "Her," which as far as I can tell effectively predicted the future. Not really, of course, but every inch of that movie down to how people work pre and post AI, how people play video games pre and post AI, and how people socialize pre and post AI, are starting to look eerily accurate.

truculent 3y ago
The fashion, too!
wilsonnb3 3y ago
> The only exception I can think of for fiction is the movie "Her," I think there is a wealth of fiction out there that features AI without robot bodies. The sequel to Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, comes to mind immediately (because I re-read it last week). 2001: A Space Odyssey, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Neuromancer (I think, haven't read it in a while), I think some of of the short stories from Ray Bradbury and Ted Chiang, etc, etc
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  I’ll have to add some of those things to the reading list. 2001 (the movie) was indeed a great depiction of an AI that isn’t exactly embodied and also isn’t effectively a human in robot skin. It does run into the similar tropes I was getting at though where AI feels it knows what is best for us even if that involves disobeying us.
- tkgally 3y ago
  The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein has as one of its central plot elements a mainframe computer that becomes sentient and able to converse with humans. It’s been more than fifty years since I last read the book, but it has returned to my mind often since the release of ChatGPT.

aunty_helen 3y ago

It’s literally a PR piece.

Satam 3y ago

Agreed. If you build an AI that's very useful on a vast array of diverse tasks, it is naturally also going to have a large capacity for harm. A blunt knife cuts nothing, but a sharp one slices both through our food and our fingers. I'm pro-AI but it feels like a lot of people are lost in the weeds discussing concepts like consciousness and forgo pragmatic logic completely.

yeck 3y ago

Aspects of this article were surprisingly good. This part was not one of them, though. What's already been released publicly is feels "rooted in the realm of science fiction".

elboru 3y ago

So many commenters dismiss AI risks so easily, acting like they actually know what will happen the next decade.