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That's a really good comment and insight, but understandably I think it is aimed at this forum and a technical audience. It landed well for me in terms of the n
by throwaway5752 2y ago
That's a really good comment and insight, but understandably I think it is aimed at this forum and a technical audience. It landed well for me in terms of the near team impact of LLMs and other models. But outside this forum, I think our field is in a crisis from being very substantially oversold and undersold at the same time.
We have a very limited ability to define human intelligence, so it is almost impossible to know how near or far we are from simulating it. Everyone here knows how much a challenge it is to match average human cognitive abilities in some areas, and human brains run at 20 watts. There are people in power that may take technologists and technology executives at their word and move very large amounts of capital on promises that cannot be fulfilled. There was already an AI Winter 50 years ago, and there are extremely unethical figures in technology right now who can ruin the reputation of our field for a generation.
On the other hand, we have very large numbers of people around the world on the wrong end of a large and increasing wealth gap. Many of those people are just hanging on doing jobs that are actually threatened by AI. They know this, they fear this, and of course they will fight for their and their families lifestyles. This is a setup for large scale violence and instability. If there isn't a policy plan right now, AI will be suffering populist blowback.
Aside from those things, it looks like Sam has lost it. The recent stories about the TSMC meeting, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41668824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41668824, was a huge problem. Asking for $7T shows a staggering lack of grounding in reality and how people, businesses, and supply chains work. I wasn't in the room and I don't know if he really sounded like a "podcasting bro", but to make an ask of companies like that with their own capital is insulting to them. There are potential dangers of applying this technology; there are dangers of overpromising the benefits; and neither of them are well served when relatively important people in related industries thing there is a credibility problem in AI.
- cheschire 2y agoLLMs aren't really simulating intelligence so much as echoing intelligence. The problem is when the hype machine causes the echoes to replace the original intelligence that spawned the echoes, and eventually those echoes fade into background noise and we have to rebuild the original human intelligence again.
- throwaway5752 2y agoI appreciate this, that is why I said, "LLMs and other models". Knowing the probability relations between words, tokens, or concepts/though vectors is important, and can be supplemented by smaller embedded special purpose models/inference engines and domain knowledge in those areas. As I said, it is overhyped in some areas and underhyped in others.
- wkat4242 2y agoYes, basically this phenomenon: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y