5 ms·

People warning about a coming AI winter are almost as annoying as people doomsaying about AGI. It’s going to be somewhere in between. It can be disappointing an

by zcw100 2y ago

People warning about a coming AI winter are almost as annoying as people doomsaying about AGI. It’s going to be somewhere in between. It can be disappointing and revolutionary at the same time. We had the dot-com crash and yet out of that grew some of the largest corporations the world. Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, etc

threeseed 2y ago
Every one of those companies predates the dot com bomb by quite some time. And AGI is science fiction with no credible plan of how to get there. If you can even get everyone to agree on the same definition. An AI winter is something that can be measured and is factual eg. the lacklustre spending on AI products and the dry up in VC funding.
- archgoon 2y ago
  Microsoft and Apple preceded the dot com bomb by several decades. (Microsoft 1975, Apple 1976) Amazon was a company that was around and survived the dot com bomb (founded in 1994, roughly around the time of the beginning of the bubble) [though its stock took about 7 years to recover] Facebook was post dot com bomb. (founded 2004)
- janalsncm 2y ago
  Kind of depends on what you call “AI”. Large language models, maybe. AI is a lot more than that though. Deep learning isn’t going anywhere. The fact that VCs aren’t throwing millions of dollars after every CS undergrad who figured out how to make an API call to OpenAI means they are wising up. The main question is why it took this long.
- mindcrime 2y ago
  And AGI is science fiction with no credible plan of how to get there. I mean... you can't really have a (strict) plan for how to build something that nobody knows how to build (yet). But that doesn't necessarily mean it's "science fiction". There are credible reasons[1] to believe that AGI will happen - eventually. To me, the biggest question is around timeline, not "will it happen or not". Now granted, that allows for anything from "tomorrow" up to "the heat death of the universe" so you can accuse me of the dodging the issue if you'd like. But I'd bet money on it happening closer to "tomorrow" than "the heat death of the universe". [1]: among others - the progress on AI that's already been made. And while we may not have AGI, it's hard to deny that we have AI that's a far sight better than what we had in 1956. The other is that, unless you believe in magic, the human brain is an existence proof that human level AGI is achievable on a deterministic machine that operates according to the physical laws of the universe. It would seem to follow then that it should be possible (albeit perhaps very difficult) to achieve that same level of intelligence on some other deterministic machine. And note that even if "Penrose is right" about the brain relying on quantum mechanical phenomenon, there's no particular reason to think that those can't also be mirrored on a human created machine.
  - janalsncm 2y ago
    Part of the issue is people don’t even agree on what “intelligence” is or how to measure it. This isn’t like fusion power where we will definitely know when we have it and the goalposts aren’t moving.
    - mindcrime 2y ago
      That's a fair point. We certainly lack a measure of rigor in terms of defining intelligence and AGI - especially in the vernacular sense and among the lay public. But among people who work on this stuff, there are useful definitions that are widely used - if not universally accepted as "the" definition. I would say that the material from Chapter 4 of Engineering General Intelligence - Volume 1[1] by Ben Goertzel reflects a pretty spirited and useful attempt to capture the important details, at least vis-a-vis the discussion at hand. Excerpt: Many attempts to characterize general intelligence have been made; Legg and Hutter [LH07a] review over 70! Our preferred abstract characterization of intelligence is: the capability of a system to choose actions maximizing its goal-achievement, based on its perceptions and memories, and making reasonably efficient use of its computational resources [Goe10b]. A general intelligence is then understood as one that can do this for a variety of complex goals in a variety of complex environments. However, apart from positing definitions, it is difficult to say anything nontrivial about general intelligence in general. Marcus Hutter [Hut05a] has demonstrated, using a characterization of general intelligence similar to the one above, that a very simple algorithm called AIXI can demonstrate arbitrarily high levels of general intelligence, if given sufficiently immense computational resources. This is interesting because it shows that (if we assume the universe can effectively be modeled as a computational system) general intelligence is basically a problem of computational efficiency. The particular structures and dynamics that characterize real-world general intelligences like humans arise because of the need to achieve reasonable levels of intelligence using modest space and time resources. [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Engineering-General-Intelligence-Part-Cognitive/dp/9462390266 https://www.amazon.com/Engineering-General-Intelligence-Part...
  - threeseed 2y ago
    There are credible reasons to believe that anything will happen eventually. You could say that faster than light travel, curing every disease, etc are all possible because progress has been made.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
janalsncm 2y ago
The article is less about a winter for the field than a winter for AI boosters, who will soon move on to become “experts” in The Next Big Thing. For people working in the field, deep learning has already proven itself to be self-funding. It’s the main source of Google’s profits. It’s TikTok’s algorithm. Et cetera.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

by zcw100 2y ago

threeseed 2y ago

Every one of those companies predates the dot com bomb by quite some time. And AGI is science fiction with no credible plan of how to get there. If you can even get everyone to agree on the same definition. An AI winter is something that can be measured and is factual eg. the lacklustre spending on AI products and the dry up in VC funding.

archgoon 2y ago
Microsoft and Apple preceded the dot com bomb by several decades. (Microsoft 1975, Apple 1976) Amazon was a company that was around and survived the dot com bomb (founded in 1994, roughly around the time of the beginning of the bubble) [though its stock took about 7 years to recover] Facebook was post dot com bomb. (founded 2004)
janalsncm 2y ago
Kind of depends on what you call “AI”. Large language models, maybe. AI is a lot more than that though. Deep learning isn’t going anywhere. The fact that VCs aren’t throwing millions of dollars after every CS undergrad who figured out how to make an API call to OpenAI means they are wising up. The main question is why it took this long.
mindcrime 2y ago
And AGI is science fiction with no credible plan of how to get there. I mean... you can't really have a (strict) plan for how to build something that nobody knows how to build (yet). But that doesn't necessarily mean it's "science fiction". There are credible reasons[1] to believe that AGI will happen - eventually. To me, the biggest question is around timeline, not "will it happen or not". Now granted, that allows for anything from "tomorrow" up to "the heat death of the universe" so you can accuse me of the dodging the issue if you'd like. But I'd bet money on it happening closer to "tomorrow" than "the heat death of the universe". [1]: among others - the progress on AI that's already been made. And while we may not have AGI, it's hard to deny that we have AI that's a far sight better than what we had in 1956. The other is that, unless you believe in magic, the human brain is an existence proof that human level AGI is achievable on a deterministic machine that operates according to the physical laws of the universe. It would seem to follow then that it should be possible (albeit perhaps very difficult) to achieve that same level of intelligence on some other deterministic machine. And note that even if "Penrose is right" about the brain relying on quantum mechanical phenomenon, there's no particular reason to think that those can't also be mirrored on a human created machine.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  Part of the issue is people don’t even agree on what “intelligence” is or how to measure it. This isn’t like fusion power where we will definitely know when we have it and the goalposts aren’t moving.
  - mindcrime 2y ago
    That's a fair point. We certainly lack a measure of rigor in terms of defining intelligence and AGI - especially in the vernacular sense and among the lay public. But among people who work on this stuff, there are useful definitions that are widely used - if not universally accepted as "the" definition. I would say that the material from Chapter 4 of Engineering General Intelligence - Volume 1[1] by Ben Goertzel reflects a pretty spirited and useful attempt to capture the important details, at least vis-a-vis the discussion at hand. Excerpt: Many attempts to characterize general intelligence have been made; Legg and Hutter [LH07a] review over 70! Our preferred abstract characterization of intelligence is: the capability of a system to choose actions maximizing its goal-achievement, based on its perceptions and memories, and making reasonably efficient use of its computational resources [Goe10b]. A general intelligence is then understood as one that can do this for a variety of complex goals in a variety of complex environments. However, apart from positing definitions, it is difficult to say anything nontrivial about general intelligence in general. Marcus Hutter [Hut05a] has demonstrated, using a characterization of general intelligence similar to the one above, that a very simple algorithm called AIXI can demonstrate arbitrarily high levels of general intelligence, if given sufficiently immense computational resources. This is interesting because it shows that (if we assume the universe can effectively be modeled as a computational system) general intelligence is basically a problem of computational efficiency. The particular structures and dynamics that characterize real-world general intelligences like humans arise because of the need to achieve reasonable levels of intelligence using modest space and time resources. [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Engineering-General-Intelligence-Part-Cognitive/dp/9462390266 https://www.amazon.com/Engineering-General-Intelligence-Part...
- threeseed 2y ago
  There are credible reasons to believe that anything will happen eventually. You could say that faster than light travel, curing every disease, etc are all possible because progress has been made.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

janalsncm 2y ago

The article is less about a winter for the field than a winter for AI boosters, who will soon move on to become “experts” in The Next Big Thing. For people working in the field, deep learning has already proven itself to be self-funding. It’s the main source of Google’s profits. It’s TikTok’s algorithm. Et cetera.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]