4 ms·
...you do realize that a year or two into the earliest investigations into nuclear reactions what you would have measured was less energy emission than a match
by cornel_io 3y ago
...you do realize that a year or two into the earliest investigations into nuclear reactions what you would have measured was less energy emission than a match being lit, right?
The question is, "Can you create a chain reaction that grows?", and the answer is unclear right now with AI, but it's hard to say with any confidence that the answer is "no". Most experts five years ago would have confidently declared that passing the Turing test was decades to centuries away, if it ever happened, but it turned out to just require beefing up an architecture that was already around and spending some serious cash. I have similarly low faith that the experts today have a good sense that e.g. you can't train an LLM to do meaningful LLM research. Once that's possible, the sky is the limit, and there's really no predicting what these systems could or could not do.
- __loam 3y agoIt seems like a very flawed line of reasoning to compare very early days nuclear science to an AI system that has already scaled up substantially. Regarding computing technology, I think the positive feedback you're describing happened with chip design and vlsi stuff, eg. better computers help design the next generation of chips or help lead to materials breakthroughs. I'm willing to believe LLMs have a macro effect on knowledge work in a similar way search engines, but as you said, it remains to be seen whether the models can feed back into their own development. From what I can tell, gpu speed and efficiency along with better data sets are the most important inputs for these things. Maybe synthetic data works out, who knows.
- Solvate8441 3y agoIt's a perfectly fine comparison to make until it is proven that AI has no potential to continuously improve upon itself.
- ethanbond 3y agoThe people who thought Trinity was “scaled up” were also wrong. The only reason we stopped making larger nuclear weapons is because they were way, way, way beyond useful for anything. There’s no reason to believe an upper bound exists in the physical universe (especially given how tiny and energy efficient the human brain is, we’re definitely nowhere near it) and there’s no reason to believe an upper bound exists on the usefulness of marginally more intelligence. Especially when you’re competing for resources with other nearly-as-intelligent superintelligences.
- kridsdale3 3y agoI think if it had turned out differently, and it had been possible to make an H-Bomb that produced no fallout, they would have continued to scale up. There were lots of plans for using nukes for large-scale engineering projects. - Make a protected harbor from a straight coastline - Get that mountain that's in the way of your railroad flattened - Add a freshwater lake to this plain - Mine an entire vein at once Reality got in the way and we found out that we don't want to be doing that. Maybe if we get practical antimatter bombs we'll revisit those plans.