3 ms·

- We don't have a "real AI" at all. Where's Skynet, where's HAL-9000? Where are the cute robotic butlers from the "I, Robot" movie? - Simple interpolation of t

- We don't have a "real AI" at all. Where's Skynet, where's HAL-9000? Where are the cute robotic butlers from the "I, Robot" movie? - Simple interpolation of the progress is exactly the problem here. Look at the historical graphs of AI funding and tell me with a straight face that we absolutely must use simple interpolation. - Nope, human-level intelligence is not even close. It remains as nebulous and out of reach as ever. ChatGPT's imitation of intelligent speech falls apart very quickly when you chat with it for more than a few questions.

K0balt 2y ago
To be fair, I’ve talked to a lot of people who cannot consistently perform at the mistral-12b level. I think we expect AGI to be much smarter than the average joe, and free of occasional stupidity. What we’ve got is an 85IQ generalist with unreliable savant capabilities, that can also talk to a million people at the same time without getting distracted. I don’t see how that isn’t absolutely a fundamental shift in capability. It’s just that we expect it to be spectacularly useful. Not like homeless joe, who lives down by the river. Unfortunately, nobody wants a 40 acre call center of homeless joes, but it’s hard to argue that HJ isn’t an intelligent entity. Obviously LLMs don’t yet have a control and supervision loop that gives them goal directed behaviour, but they also don’t have a drinking problem and debilitating PTSD with a little TBI thrown in from the last war. It’s not that we aren’t on the cusp of general intelligence, it’s that we have a distorted idea of how useful that should be.
- pdimitar 2y ago
  > What we’ve got is an 85IQ generalist with unreliable savant capabilities, that can also talk to a million people at the same time without getting distracted. I don’t see how that isn’t absolutely a fundamental shift in capability. Very shallow assessment, first of all it's not a generalist at all, it has zero concept of what it's talking about, secondly it gets confused easily unless you order it to keep context in memory, and thirdly it can't perform if it does not regularly swallow petabytes of human text. I get your optimism but it's uninformed. > To be fair, I’ve talked to a lot of people who cannot consistently perform at the mistral-12b level. I can find you an old-school bot that performs better than uneducated members of marginalized and super poor communities, what is your example even supposed to prove? > it’s hard to argue that HJ isn’t an intelligent entity. What's HJ? If it's not a human then it's extremely easy to argue that it's not an intelligent entity. We don't have intelligent machine entities, we have stochastic parrots and it's weird to pretend otherwise when the algorithms are well-known and it's very visible there's no self-optimization in there, there's no actual learning, there's only adjusting weights (and this is not what our actual neurons do btw), there's no motivation or self-drive to continue learning, there's barely anything that has been "taught" to combine segments of human speech and somehow that's a huge achievement. Sure. > It’s not that we aren’t on the cusp of general intelligence, it’s that we have a distorted idea of how useful that should be. Nah, we are on no cusp of general AGI at all. We're not even at 1%. Don't know about you but I have a very clear idea what would AGI look like and LLMs are nowhere near. Not even in the same ballpark. It helps that I am not in the area and I don't feel the need to pat myself on the back that I have managed to achieve the next AI plateau which the area will not soon recover from. Bookmark this comment and tell me I am wrong in 10 years, I dare you.
  - K0balt 2y ago
    HJ is Homeless Joe, an inference that a 12b stochastic text generator would not have missed lol. But sure, ill reflect in 10 years. TBH I hope im wrong, and that there is magic in HJ that makes him special in the universe in a way that GPT26 can never be. But increasingly, I doubt this premise. Not because of the "amazing capabilities of LLMs" which i think are frequently overstated and largely misunderstood, but more because of the dumbfounding shortcomings of intelligent creatures. We keep moving the bar for AGI, and now AGI is assumed to be what any rational accounting would classfy as ASI. Where we are really going to see the bloom of AI is in goal directed systems, and I think those will come naturally with robotics. I predict we are in for a very abrupt 2nd industrial revolution, and you and I will be able to have this discussion either over a 55 gallon barrel of burning trash, or in our robot manicured botanical gardens sometime in the near future lol. good times, maybe. Interesting times , for sure.
    - pdimitar 2y ago
      > Not because of the "amazing capabilities of LLMs" which i think are frequently overstated and largely misunderstood We have found common ground. > but more because of the dumbfounding shortcomings of intelligent creatures Yes, a lot of us utilize defective judgments, myself included, fairly often. My point was that LLMs, for all their praise, can't even reach 10% of an average semi-intelligent organic being. > We keep moving the bar for AGI, and now AGI is assumed to be what any rational accounting would classfy as ASI. I don't know who is "we" (and I wish people stopped pretending that "we" are all a homogenous mass) but I've known what an AGI should be ever since I've watched movies about Skynet and HAL-9000. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Secondly, it's the so-called "AI practitioners" who constantly move the goal posts (now there's "ASI"? -- you know what, I actually don't want to know) because they're periodically being called out and can't hide the fact that they have nearly nothing again. So what's better than obfuscating that fact by having 100+ acronyms? It's a nice cover and apparently there are still investors who are buying it. I get it, we have to learn to say the right things to get funding. > Where we are really going to see the bloom of AI is in goal directed systems, and I think those will come naturally with robotics. I agree. Physical feedback is needed if we want an electronic entity to "evolve" similarly to us. > I predict we are in for a very abrupt 2nd industrial revolution, and you and I will be able to have this discussion either over a 55 gallon barrel of burning trash, or in our robot manicured botanical gardens sometime in the near future lol. I agree this is 100% inevitable but I don't think it's coming as soon as you say. The LLMs are hopelessly stuck even today and the whole AI area will suffer for it for a while after the bubble bursts... which is the event that I am certain is coming soon.
- dartos 2y ago
  > I’ve talked to a lot of people who cannot consistently perform at the mistral-12b level This is honestly one of the most gpt-2 things I’ve ever read.
- petra 2y ago
  I don't think they'll use LLM's for customer service. But it's a building block. And when used well it may be possible to get to zero hallucinations and good accuracy in question answering for limited domains - like the call center.
  - pdimitar 2y ago
    If the current LLMs manage to achieve even only that it would be an enormous win. Alas they still have not.
adastra22 2y ago
> We don't have a "real AI" at all. Where's Skynet, where's HAL-9000? Where are the cute robotic butlers from the "I, Robot" movie? You shouldn’t use science fiction as your reference point. It’s like saying “where is my flying car?” (Helicopters exist)
- pdimitar 2y ago
  Why shouldn't I? Humans developed this intelligence naturally (as far as we know). Many people claim we're intelligent enough to repeat the process with artificial organisms, and guide it, and perfect it. I want to see it. And btw in the Terminator novelizations it was clearly stated that Skynet was a very good optimization machine but lacked creativity. So it's actually a good benchmark: can we create an intelligent machine that needs no supervision but still has limitations (i.e. it cannot dramatically reformulate its strategy in case it cannot win, which is exactly what happened in the books)?
  - adastra22 2y ago
    Just because someone can tell a convincing story, doesn’t mean reality (once technology catches up) will resemble the devices of that story. Science fiction is fiction, and unconstrained by the annoying restrictions of physical reality. That’s the point of my flying car comparison. We HAVE flying cars: they’re called helicopters. Because as it turns out there is just no physical way to make a vehicle in the form factor of a car fly, except by rotary wing. But people will still say “where’s my flying car?” because they are hung up on reality resembling science fantasy, as you are. We have AI. We even already have AGI. It just doesn’t resemble the Terminator, because The Terminator is a made up story disconnected from reality.
    - pdimitar 2y ago
      > We even already have AGI. And this is why, I feel, I can never discuss with the AI fans. They are happy to invent their own fiction while berating popular fiction in the same breath. No, we really don't have AGI. Feel free to point out some of humanity's pressing problems being trivially solved today with it, please. I'll start: elderly people care, and fully automated logistics.

K0balt 2y ago

To be fair, I’ve talked to a lot of people who cannot consistently perform at the mistral-12b level. I think we expect AGI to be much smarter than the average joe, and free of occasional stupidity. What we’ve got is an 85IQ generalist with unreliable savant capabilities, that can also talk to a million people at the same time without getting distracted. I don’t see how that isn’t absolutely a fundamental shift in capability. It’s just that we expect it to be spectacularly useful. Not like homeless joe, who lives down by the river. Unfortunately, nobody wants a 40 acre call center of homeless joes, but it’s hard to argue that HJ isn’t an intelligent entity. Obviously LLMs don’t yet have a control and supervision loop that gives them goal directed behaviour, but they also don’t have a drinking problem and debilitating PTSD with a little TBI thrown in from the last war. It’s not that we aren’t on the cusp of general intelligence, it’s that we have a distorted idea of how useful that should be.

pdimitar 2y ago
> What we’ve got is an 85IQ generalist with unreliable savant capabilities, that can also talk to a million people at the same time without getting distracted. I don’t see how that isn’t absolutely a fundamental shift in capability. Very shallow assessment, first of all it's not a generalist at all, it has zero concept of what it's talking about, secondly it gets confused easily unless you order it to keep context in memory, and thirdly it can't perform if it does not regularly swallow petabytes of human text. I get your optimism but it's uninformed. > To be fair, I’ve talked to a lot of people who cannot consistently perform at the mistral-12b level. I can find you an old-school bot that performs better than uneducated members of marginalized and super poor communities, what is your example even supposed to prove? > it’s hard to argue that HJ isn’t an intelligent entity. What's HJ? If it's not a human then it's extremely easy to argue that it's not an intelligent entity. We don't have intelligent machine entities, we have stochastic parrots and it's weird to pretend otherwise when the algorithms are well-known and it's very visible there's no self-optimization in there, there's no actual learning, there's only adjusting weights (and this is not what our actual neurons do btw), there's no motivation or self-drive to continue learning, there's barely anything that has been "taught" to combine segments of human speech and somehow that's a huge achievement. Sure. > It’s not that we aren’t on the cusp of general intelligence, it’s that we have a distorted idea of how useful that should be. Nah, we are on no cusp of general AGI at all. We're not even at 1%. Don't know about you but I have a very clear idea what would AGI look like and LLMs are nowhere near. Not even in the same ballpark. It helps that I am not in the area and I don't feel the need to pat myself on the back that I have managed to achieve the next AI plateau which the area will not soon recover from. Bookmark this comment and tell me I am wrong in 10 years, I dare you.
- K0balt 2y ago
  HJ is Homeless Joe, an inference that a 12b stochastic text generator would not have missed lol. But sure, ill reflect in 10 years. TBH I hope im wrong, and that there is magic in HJ that makes him special in the universe in a way that GPT26 can never be. But increasingly, I doubt this premise. Not because of the "amazing capabilities of LLMs" which i think are frequently overstated and largely misunderstood, but more because of the dumbfounding shortcomings of intelligent creatures. We keep moving the bar for AGI, and now AGI is assumed to be what any rational accounting would classfy as ASI. Where we are really going to see the bloom of AI is in goal directed systems, and I think those will come naturally with robotics. I predict we are in for a very abrupt 2nd industrial revolution, and you and I will be able to have this discussion either over a 55 gallon barrel of burning trash, or in our robot manicured botanical gardens sometime in the near future lol. good times, maybe. Interesting times , for sure.
  - pdimitar 2y ago
    > Not because of the "amazing capabilities of LLMs" which i think are frequently overstated and largely misunderstood We have found common ground. > but more because of the dumbfounding shortcomings of intelligent creatures Yes, a lot of us utilize defective judgments, myself included, fairly often. My point was that LLMs, for all their praise, can't even reach 10% of an average semi-intelligent organic being. > We keep moving the bar for AGI, and now AGI is assumed to be what any rational accounting would classfy as ASI. I don't know who is "we" (and I wish people stopped pretending that "we" are all a homogenous mass) but I've known what an AGI should be ever since I've watched movies about Skynet and HAL-9000. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Secondly, it's the so-called "AI practitioners" who constantly move the goal posts (now there's "ASI"? -- you know what, I actually don't want to know) because they're periodically being called out and can't hide the fact that they have nearly nothing again. So what's better than obfuscating that fact by having 100+ acronyms? It's a nice cover and apparently there are still investors who are buying it. I get it, we have to learn to say the right things to get funding. > Where we are really going to see the bloom of AI is in goal directed systems, and I think those will come naturally with robotics. I agree. Physical feedback is needed if we want an electronic entity to "evolve" similarly to us. > I predict we are in for a very abrupt 2nd industrial revolution, and you and I will be able to have this discussion either over a 55 gallon barrel of burning trash, or in our robot manicured botanical gardens sometime in the near future lol. I agree this is 100% inevitable but I don't think it's coming as soon as you say. The LLMs are hopelessly stuck even today and the whole AI area will suffer for it for a while after the bubble bursts... which is the event that I am certain is coming soon.
dartos 2y ago
> I’ve talked to a lot of people who cannot consistently perform at the mistral-12b level This is honestly one of the most gpt-2 things I’ve ever read.
petra 2y ago
I don't think they'll use LLM's for customer service. But it's a building block. And when used well it may be possible to get to zero hallucinations and good accuracy in question answering for limited domains - like the call center.
- pdimitar 2y ago
  If the current LLMs manage to achieve even only that it would be an enormous win. Alas they still have not.

adastra22 2y ago

> We don't have a "real AI" at all. Where's Skynet, where's HAL-9000? Where are the cute robotic butlers from the "I, Robot" movie? You shouldn’t use science fiction as your reference point. It’s like saying “where is my flying car?” (Helicopters exist)

pdimitar 2y ago
Why shouldn't I? Humans developed this intelligence naturally (as far as we know). Many people claim we're intelligent enough to repeat the process with artificial organisms, and guide it, and perfect it. I want to see it. And btw in the Terminator novelizations it was clearly stated that Skynet was a very good optimization machine but lacked creativity. So it's actually a good benchmark: can we create an intelligent machine that needs no supervision but still has limitations (i.e. it cannot dramatically reformulate its strategy in case it cannot win, which is exactly what happened in the books)?
- adastra22 2y ago
  Just because someone can tell a convincing story, doesn’t mean reality (once technology catches up) will resemble the devices of that story. Science fiction is fiction, and unconstrained by the annoying restrictions of physical reality. That’s the point of my flying car comparison. We HAVE flying cars: they’re called helicopters. Because as it turns out there is just no physical way to make a vehicle in the form factor of a car fly, except by rotary wing. But people will still say “where’s my flying car?” because they are hung up on reality resembling science fantasy, as you are. We have AI. We even already have AGI. It just doesn’t resemble the Terminator, because The Terminator is a made up story disconnected from reality.
  - pdimitar 2y ago
    > We even already have AGI. And this is why, I feel, I can never discuss with the AI fans. They are happy to invent their own fiction while berating popular fiction in the same breath. No, we really don't have AGI. Feel free to point out some of humanity's pressing problems being trivially solved today with it, please. I'll start: elderly people care, and fully automated logistics.