9 ms·

The best analogy for LLMs (up to and including AGI) is the internet + google search. Imagine explaining the internet/google to someone in 1950. That person migh

• jerpint 3y ago
  The internet has allowed us to interact in ways that were inconceivable at the time; think communication and speed of information for one. When agents start being more reliable I think we will start seeing applications we couldn’t possibly anticipate today
• arketyp 3y ago
  My take on this is that much of work and problem solving is about understanding the problem. So I think human abilities will remain the bottleneck. I pose this thought experiment: Is it possible to design an AI system for a monkey which gives it super-monkey abilities?
  • red75prime 3y ago
    For a monkey it's impossible to design... pretty much anything beside a few simple tools. So, no. A monkey cannot design a bow, a loom, a tractor, a computer, or an AI of any kind. We had designed many tools that beat us in various aspects. This is an invalid analogy.
• bee_rider 3y ago
  The internet did change things pretty dramatically. Productivity at information communication tasks just isn’t the entire economy. I think we are massively more productive. Some of the biggest new companies are ad companies (Google, Facebook), or spend a ton of their time designing devices that can’t be modified by their users (Apple, Microsoft). Even old fashioned companies like tractor and train companies have time to waste on preventing users from performing maintenance. And then the economy has leftover effort to jailbreak all this stuff. We’re very productive, we’ve just found room for unlimited zero or negative sum behavior.
  • imachine1980_ 3y ago
    I feel you are mixing value capture with value generation. If GM produces cars with the same level of margins as Facebook or Google, things will be different. LVMH (Louis Vuitton Group) holds a value equivalent to that of Toyota, Volkswagen, and two-thirds of Ford combined. Louis Vuitton alone was valued more than Red Hat a few months ago. This doesn't mean that Louis Vuitton is more valuable than Red Hat, but rather that it captures Value more effectively than Red Hat.
    • eru 3y ago
      > This doesn't mean that Louis Vuitton is more valuable than Red Hat, but rather that it captures Value more effectively than Red Hat. What definition of 'valuable' are you using here?
      • bee_rider 3y ago
        Probably something like market cap (although I guess it would have to be based on the past now that Red Hat has been bought), or there are nebulous measures of brand value out there. I think it is a fair point TBH, my original comment could have been more clear about this aspect.
    • bee_rider 3y ago
      I think I may have just skipped a step or not expressed myself very well. What I’m saying is, I suspect information technology has made classic production companies vastly more efficient and productive. To the point where we can afford to have massive companies like Facebook that are almost entirely based on value capture. That’s my speculation at least. Your example puts me in a tough spot, in the sense that Louis Vuitton is pretty old and pretty big. I’d have to know more about the company to quibble, and I don’t feel like researching it. I wonder if the proportion of their value that comes from pointless fashion branding was originally smaller. Or if the whole pointless fashion branding segment was originally just smaller itself. But I’m just spitballing. In the past we also had mercenary companies and the like to capture value without producing much, so I could just be wrong.
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• _a_a_a_ 3y ago
  > but we're living in the same world with the same general patterns and limitations seems odd. What 'patterns' and 'limitations' do you still see? Because I see so much has changed.
• lysecret 3y ago
  Good point to me the internet was just "other people", what differentiated is not the 4 people you know but literally (almost) and potentially all other people. With AI, the way I see it, it is just virtual other people. Of course, a bit stranger but more simillar than you think.
  • david_allison 3y ago
    There's currently little to no learning or feedback loop due to the relatively small context window sizes. I've done many language exchanges with people using Google Translate and the lack of improvement/memory of past conversations is a real motivation killer; I'm concerned this will move on to general discourse on the internet with the proliferation of LLMs. I'm sure many people have already gone around in circles with rules-based customer support. AI can make this worse.
• herval 3y ago
  > And yet, 70 years later, things have certainly changed, but we're living in the same world with the same general patterns and limitations. With LLMs I expect something similar. Not a singularity, just a new, better tool that, yes, changes things, increases productivity, but leaves human societies more or less the same. by what criteria do you see the world as the same today vs 70 years ago?
  • ketzo 3y ago
    I mean, very broad strokes, but I can see GP’s point. - people eat plants and animals - people pay money for goods and services - there are countries, sometimes they fight, sometimes they work together - men and women come together to create children, and often raise those children together etc, etc, etc The “bones” of what make up a capital-S Society are pretty much the same. None of these things had to stay the same, but they have so far.
    • majkinetor 3y ago
      VERY broad strokes. We also still have a Sun, and the stars. Internet and the last 30 years tech did change things dramatically. I bet that most people would feel handicapped if they were teleported just 50 years back. We got into this type of life progressively, so people didn't notice the change, even though it was dramatic. The same phenomena with gradient changes happen on physiological level too, this is not different.
      • goatlover 3y ago
        It's dramatic, but there are plenty of things in society that are similar to what they were 50 years ago. It's not like people from 50 years ago would be incapable of understanding those changes if you explained them. Which is a bit different than 500 years ago. At least if we're using the technological singularity was what constitutes fundamental societal change in unpredictable ways. The singularity people think AGI is going to fundamentally change everything, even more than what the past 500 years has done. Certainly many magnitudes of order more than the last 50 years. And they think it will happen much faster.
• HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
  I think AGI can change the world once it gets way beyond human level both in terms of types of beyond-human "senses" and pattern matching/prediction (i.e. intelligence), but we are nowhere near that yet. On their current trajectory LLMs are just expert systems that will let certain types of simple job be automated. A potential productivity amplifier similar to having a personal assistant that you can assign tasks too. Handy (more so for people doing desk-bound jobs than others), but not a game changer. An AGI far beyond human capability could certainly accelerate scientific advance and let us understand the world (e.g. how to combat climate change, how to address international conflicts, how to handle pandemics) so be very beneficial, but what that would feel like to us is hard to guess. We get used to slowly introduced (or even not so slowly) changes very quickly and just accept them, even though today's tech would look like science fiction 100 years ago. What would certainly be a game changer, and presumably will eventually come (maybe only in hundreds of years?) would be if humans eventually relinquish control of government, industry, etc to AGIs. Maybe our egos will cause us to keep pretending we're in control - we're the ones asking the oracle, we could pull the plug anytime (we'll tell ourselves) etc, but it'll be a different world if all the decisions are nonetheless coming from something WAY more intelligent than ourselves.
  • HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
    Odd to see this down-voted... I guess my prediction of the future has rubbed someone the wrong way, but if you disagree then why not just reply ?!
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• cultureswitch 3y ago
  The internet did change things dramatically, but the change wasn't as dramatic as industrialization. And that one matured over two centuries.
• Aerbil313 3y ago
  Technology is the one force that drives modern human societies, Western ones even more. The world has changed dramatically, especially with smartphones. I suggest reading Ted Kaczynski.
• hardwaregeek 3y ago
  It's important to remember that the internet is still very very new. Like the generation of digital natives are barely in adulthood. Sure, it's existed in some form for about 40 years, but most of the world didn't have access for the longest time. I wouldn't be surprised if we see massive changes in the next 20 years from the people who grew up on the web (specifically people outside the United States and Europe, where access was harder for a long time)
  • Jensson 3y ago
    "Digital native" are the people who grew up with computers. Many kids born in 1980's and later grew up with computers in their earliest memories. I'd call the current generation "Social media natives", because that is the biggest difference from the previous generation. 90s kids grew up with games and communication, but they were free from facebook, youtube and instagram.
    • hardwaregeek 3y ago
      Many kids in the US and Europe grew up with computers[1]. There's a large large population of people from Africa, South America, Asia, etc. who just got internet access in the last 10-20 years. [1]: Or came from wealthy families elsewhere.
• throwup238 3y ago
  By that standard, nothing has meaningfully changed since agriculture and domesticated animals. We're still killing each other, forming hierarchical societies, passing down stories, eating, drinking, sleeping, and making families - except now we're killing each other from afar with gunpowder, forming those hierarchies using the guise of democracy or whatever, passing down stories in print rather than speech, can use condoms to control when we make families, and so on. Human civilization has accumulated many layers of systems since then and the internet changed all of them to the point that many are barely recognizable. Just ask someone who's been in prison since before the internet was a thing - there are plenty of them! They have extreme difficulty adapting to the outside world after they've been gone for forty or fifty years.
  • BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago
    Yeah in a real sense nothing has changed. I wonder if they finally will when we start modifying our bodies and minds to extreme degrees, that’d be my guess for when the model breaks down.
• beebmam 3y ago
  > leaves human societies more or less the same My mom, who is 70 years old, regularly tells me how profoundly transformative the internet has been for society.
• amelius 3y ago
  Imagine explaining to someone from 1950 that we now all have a TV-set on our office desks, with 1000+ channels ... I bet their reaction would be a facepalm.
• lnxg33k1 3y ago
  Imagine telling those same people in the 50s that all those changes in productivity would come for the benefit of no one since the work week would be the same and purchasing power would decline
  • Xelynega 3y ago
    Don't have to imagine, same thing is happening right now with LLMs. I see "AI safety" brought up as a laughable attempt at stopping the progress of LLMs, when in reality the people talking about "AI safety" are the people trying to say that the majority will not benefit from this technology.
    • goatlover 3y ago
      I think the AI safety people are saying that whatever benefits LLMs bring to the masses might be outweighed by the costs. We've seen this with social media. And on the extreme end, there's the existential concern. If we do ever get to AGI, all bets are off from where we stand right now, because nobody has the faintest clue how a human-level (or beyond) intelligence will play out in society.
    • Frost1x 3y ago
      There's certainly pockets of the AI Safety movement that is about creating strategic motes to protect their private enterprises, but there are also legitimate concerns out there about these new search techniques can lead rise to concerns that may effect daily life. I think most people realize there are some gains to be had here, the trick is to do so in a way that doesn't, yet again, massively redistribute wealth and power to a select few and instead share some of those gains. Right now there's not enough legitimate competition to keep things in check and that should be concerning. I'm all for rewarding the early successors who invested and took risk but let's not pretend those investments weren't captured through all sorts of other unequitable approaches to begin with.
  • qudat 3y ago
    Such a wild take. Would you want to live in the 50s? I definitely would not.
• yashap 3y ago
  Depends on the quality of the AGI. If it’s legitimately as good or better than humans at almost everything, while being cost effective, it will utterly and completely change society. Humans will be obsolete at almost every job - why pay a human if an AGI can do it as good or better, for free(-ish)? Best case scenario, the AGI is benevolent, traditional work is gone, but we find some post-capitalism system, and new ways to keep life interesting/meaningful. Worst case scenario, pure sci-fi dystopia. If it’s closer to a midpoint between GPT-4 and true human intelligence, then sure, I agree with you, it’s a significant change to society but not an overhaul. But if it’s actually a human level (or better) general intelligence, it’ll be the biggest change to human society maybe ever.
• qudat 3y ago
  What do you think would need to be different for it to be considered meaningful to you?
• Frost1x 3y ago
  If we ignore technology for the sake of technology and look at daily life, things we need like food, shelter, healthcare, transportation, socialization, etc. then I'd say technology has definitely improved some of these aspects. Food distribution has improved as have most logistics in general. These efficiencies have somewhat been shared with the general public but in a lot of cases, those gains were captured by private enterprise. Healthcare has improved a little bit, iterative progress can be made more quickly, shared, and moved into translational medicine as practice. Drug discovery has improved quite a bit, as have logistics around getting said drugs in the hands of people who need them and doing so affordably. This improved lives and longevity. Socially we can communicate far easier. It remains to be seen to me if thise is always an improvement. Humans seem to be designed for much smaller social circles and don't seem to be capable of taking much advantage in their daily lives of increases frequency, scale, and reach of socialization. The list goes on. It's not exactly linearly correlated with technology growth because ultimately it boils down to actionable information. Just because we have more information or more processing capability around information doesn't mean we get direct returns from that or that we don't reach limits where we simply don't have use for the additional gains. Information has to be actionable in some way, otherwise it's just intermediate data products that may or may not benefit us. I know can ready daily news from some small town in Southern Japan if I wanted to. That doesn't improve my life mostly, but it's there. We have piles and piles of scientific literature we could share and iterate on towards new discoveries for humanity. That doesn't mean in my daily need for survival and balance with recreation I have time to contribute to things I find interesting or necessary, after all I am to some degree a slave of my needs within the economic system I'm entrenched in. I have bills, I have to earn money, and I have to work. Even if that wasn't the case maybe or maybe not would I be able to contribute more back to society than I do now at my paid profession. Currently I'd say I do pretty well in this department in terms of reach. Without that I might struggle.