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Its funny seeing the goalposts move in real time. "Yes, AI can make human sounding sentences, but can it play chess?" "Well yes, it can play chess. But no com

Its funny seeing the goalposts move in real time. "Yes, AI can make human sounding sentences, but can it play chess?" "Well yes, it can play chess. But no computer can beat a human grandmaster at chess." "Well it beat Kasperov - but it has no hope of beating a human at Go." "Its funny - it can beat humans at go but still can't speak as well as a toddler." "Alright it can write simple problems, but it introduces bugs in anything nontrivial, and it can't fix those bugs!" I write bugs in anything nontrivial too! My human advantages are currently that I'm better at handling a large context, and I can iterate better than the computer can. But - seriously, do you think innovation will stop here? Did the improvements ever stop? It seems like a pretty trivial engineering problem to hook an AI up to a compiler / runtime so it can iterate just like we can. Anthropic is clearly already starting to try that. I agree with you, today. I used claude to help translate some rust code into typescript. I needed to go through the output with a fine toothed comb to fix a lot of obvious bugs and clean up the output. But the improvement over what was possible with GPT3.5 is totally insane. At the current rate of change, I give it 5-10 years before we can ask chatgpt to make a working compiler from scratch for a novel language.

wrtasfg 2y ago
Of course it can stop, once legislation catches up and forbids IP theft using a thinly disguised probabilistic and compressed database of other people's code.
- josephg 2y ago
  You really think those laws are coming? That the US and Chinese governments will force AI companies to put the genie back in the bottle? I think you're going to be very disappointed.
- edouard-harris 2y ago
  > a thinly disguised probabilistic and compressed database of other people's code Speaking as a software engineer, I feel seen.
simonw 2y ago
You may appreciate this quote about constantly moving the goalposts for AI: "There is superstition about creativity, and for that matter, about thinking in every sense, and it's part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something - play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems - there was a chorus of critics to say, but that's not thinking." That's from 1979! https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/13/pamela-mccorduck-in-1979/ https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/13/pamela-mccorduck-in-19...
- zahlman 2y ago
  I side with Roger Penrose on this one. I'm still not convinced it's "thinking", and don't expect I ever will be, any more than a book titled "I am Thinking" would convince me that it's thinking.
  - okwhatnow3773 2y ago
    I agree. Some people think Google is sentient I guess? Data retrieval and mangling is not all we do, luckily.
  - Eisenstein 2y ago
    Is there anything that a non-human could do that would cause you to accept that it was thinking?
    - zahlman 2y ago
      Of course. Animals demonstrate sapience, agency and will all the time.
      - Eisenstein 2y ago
        So, if a machine demonstrated sapience, agency, and will, then you would grant that it could think?
IshKebab 2y ago
Yeah I totally agree with you. Lots of goalpost moving, and it is absolutely insane what it can do today and it will only improve. It just can't translate the kinds of programs I write between languages on its own. Today.
danparsonson 2y ago
> Its funny seeing the goalposts move in real time. Another way to look at it is that we're refining our understanding of the capabilities of machine learning in real time. Otherwise one could make basically the same argument about any field that progresses - take our theories of gravity for example. Was Einstein moving the goalposts? Or was he building on previous work to ask deeper questions? Set against the backdrop of extraordinary claims about the abilities of LLMs, I don't think it's unreasonable to continue pushing for evidence.
okwhatnow3773 2y ago
Indeed, the constant goal shifting is tiresome. I mean, we first put up a ladder and we could reach the peaches! Next, we put a ladder next to the apple tree and we could pluck those. Now, in their incessant goal post moving people said, great, now setup a ladder to the moon. There is no reason to assume this won’t work. None at all. People are just complaining and being angry at losing their fancy jobs. More specific: it cannot learn, because it has no concept of learning from first principles. There is no way out, not even a theoretical one.
galaxyLogic 2y ago
> At the current rate of change, ... We've seen that the rate of change went up hugely when LLMs came around. But the rate of change was much lower before that. It could also be much slower for the foreseeable future. LLMs are only as good as their training materials. But a lot of what programmers do is not documented anywhere, it happens in their head, and it is in response to what they see around them, not in what they scrape from the web or books. Maybe what is needed is for organizations to start producing materials for AI to learn from, rather than assuming that all they need is what they find on the web? How much of the effort to "train" AI is just letting them consume the web, and how much is concsiously trying create new learning materials for AI?
- josephg 2y ago
  It could slow down again. We don’t know. But the people working at OpenAI seem to believe the models will keep improving for the foreseeable future. The “we’ll run out of training data” argument seems overblown.

wrtasfg 2y ago

Of course it can stop, once legislation catches up and forbids IP theft using a thinly disguised probabilistic and compressed database of other people's code.

josephg 2y ago
You really think those laws are coming? That the US and Chinese governments will force AI companies to put the genie back in the bottle? I think you're going to be very disappointed.
edouard-harris 2y ago
> a thinly disguised probabilistic and compressed database of other people's code Speaking as a software engineer, I feel seen.

simonw 2y ago

You may appreciate this quote about constantly moving the goalposts for AI: "There is superstition about creativity, and for that matter, about thinking in every sense, and it's part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something - play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems - there was a chorus of critics to say, but that's not thinking." That's from 1979! https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/13/pamela-mccorduck-in-1979/ https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/13/pamela-mccorduck-in-19...

zahlman 2y ago
I side with Roger Penrose on this one. I'm still not convinced it's "thinking", and don't expect I ever will be, any more than a book titled "I am Thinking" would convince me that it's thinking.
- okwhatnow3773 2y ago
  I agree. Some people think Google is sentient I guess? Data retrieval and mangling is not all we do, luckily.
- Eisenstein 2y ago
  Is there anything that a non-human could do that would cause you to accept that it was thinking?
  - zahlman 2y ago
    Of course. Animals demonstrate sapience, agency and will all the time.
    - Eisenstein 2y ago
      So, if a machine demonstrated sapience, agency, and will, then you would grant that it could think?

IshKebab 2y ago

Yeah I totally agree with you. Lots of goalpost moving, and it is absolutely insane what it can do today and it will only improve. It just can't translate the kinds of programs I write between languages on its own. Today.

danparsonson 2y ago

> Its funny seeing the goalposts move in real time. Another way to look at it is that we're refining our understanding of the capabilities of machine learning in real time. Otherwise one could make basically the same argument about any field that progresses - take our theories of gravity for example. Was Einstein moving the goalposts? Or was he building on previous work to ask deeper questions? Set against the backdrop of extraordinary claims about the abilities of LLMs, I don't think it's unreasonable to continue pushing for evidence.

okwhatnow3773 2y ago

Indeed, the constant goal shifting is tiresome. I mean, we first put up a ladder and we could reach the peaches! Next, we put a ladder next to the apple tree and we could pluck those. Now, in their incessant goal post moving people said, great, now setup a ladder to the moon. There is no reason to assume this won’t work. None at all. People are just complaining and being angry at losing their fancy jobs. More specific: it cannot learn, because it has no concept of learning from first principles. There is no way out, not even a theoretical one.

galaxyLogic 2y ago

> At the current rate of change, ... We've seen that the rate of change went up hugely when LLMs came around. But the rate of change was much lower before that. It could also be much slower for the foreseeable future. LLMs are only as good as their training materials. But a lot of what programmers do is not documented anywhere, it happens in their head, and it is in response to what they see around them, not in what they scrape from the web or books. Maybe what is needed is for organizations to start producing materials for AI to learn from, rather than assuming that all they need is what they find on the web? How much of the effort to "train" AI is just letting them consume the web, and how much is concsiously trying create new learning materials for AI?

josephg 2y ago
It could slow down again. We don’t know. But the people working at OpenAI seem to believe the models will keep improving for the foreseeable future. The “we’ll run out of training data” argument seems overblown.