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While I enjoyed the article, it’s just another in a line of the same article with different flavors and authors that all have the same fundamental error. The p

While I enjoyed the article, it’s just another in a line of the same article with different flavors and authors that all have the same fundamental error. The prevailing counterargument against AI consistently hinges on the present state of AI rather than the trajectory of its development: but what matters is not the capabilities of AI as they exist today, but the astonishing velocity at which those capabilities are evolving.

lawn 2y ago
It's getting old but there's an xkcd for your kind of reasoning: https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
- nsavage 2y ago
  Isn't this essentially the same argument as "there are only 10 covid cases in this area, nothing to worry about"? It's really missing the point, the point is whether or not exponential growth is happening or not. It doesn't with husbands, it does with covid, time will tell about AI.
  - SiempreViernes 2y ago
    No, because as you rightly point out we know exponential growth is very possible with Covid but we don't know if that will happen with AI. In fact, the only evidence we have for exponential growth in AI is the word of the people selling it to us.
  - namaria 2y ago
    Transformers have been around for 7 years, ChatGPT for 2. This isn't the first few samples of what could be exponential growth. These are several quarters of overpromise and underdelivery. The chatbot is cool and it outperforms what awful product search has become. But is it enough to support a 3.5 trillion dollar sized parts supplier?
  - lawn 2y ago
    The graph depicts linear growth, not exponential. And neither is the growth of AI.
bdndndndbve 2y ago
We've been through this song and dance before. AI researchers make legitimately impressive breakthroughs in specific tasks, people extrapolate linear growth, the air comes out of the balloon after a couple years when it turns out we couldn't just throw progressively larger models at the problem to emulate human cognition. I'm surprised that tech workers who should be the most skeptical about this kind of stuff end up being the most breathlessly hyperbolic. Everyone is so eager to get rich off the trend they discard any skepticism.
- palla89 2y ago
  This comment summarize my thought in the best way.
- glitchc 2y ago
  It's like con artists and management consultants. They are the most susceptible because they drink the koolaid.
- richardw 2y ago
  Two things can both be true. I keep arguing both sides because: 1 Unless you’re aware of near term limits you think AI is going to the stars next year. 2 Architectures change. The only thing that doesn’t change is that we generally push on, temporarily limits are usually overcome and there’s a lot riding on this. It’s not a smart move to bet against progress over the medium term. This is also where the real benefits and risks lie. Is AI in general more like going to space, or string theory? One is hard but doable. Other is a tar pit for money and talent. We are all currently placing our bets.
  - bangaroo 2y ago
    point 2 is the thing that i think is most important to point out: "architectures change" sure, that's a fact. let me apply this to other fields: "there could be a battery breakthrough that gives electric cars a 2,000 mile range." "researchers could discover a new way to build nanorobots that attacks cancer directly and effectively cures all versions of it." "we could invent a new sort of aviation engine that is 1,000x more fuel efficient than the current generation." i mean, yeah, sure. i guess. the current hype is built on LLMs, and being charitable "LLMs built with current architecture." there are other things in the works, but most of the current generation of AI hype are a limited number of algorithms and approaches, mixed and matched in different ways, with other features bolted on to try and corral them into behaving as we hope. it is much more realistic to expect that we are in the period of diminishing returns as far as investing in these approaches than it is to believe we'll continue to see earth-shattering growth. nothing has appeared that had the initial "wow" factor of the early versions of suno, or gpt, or dall-e, or sora, or whatever else. this is clearly and plainly a tech bubble. it's so transparently one, it's hard to understand how folks aren't seeing it. all these tools have been in the mainstream for a pretty substantial period of time (relatively) and the honest truth is they're just not moving the needle in many industries. the most frequent practical application of them in practice has been summarization, editing, and rewriting, which is a neat little parlor trick - but all the same, it's indicative of the fact that they largely model language, so that's primarily what they're good at. you can bet on something entirely new being discovered... but what? there just isn't anything inching closer to that general AI hype we're all hearing about that exists in the real world. i'm sure folks are cooking on things, but that doesn't mean they're near production-ready. saying "this isn't a bubble because one day someone might invent something that's actually good" is kind of giving away the game - the current generation isn't that good, and we can't point to the thing that's going to overtake it.
lukev 2y ago
But we don't know if AI development is following an exponential or sigmoid curve (actually we do kind of, now, but that's beside the point for this post.) A wise institution will make decisions based on current capabilities, not a prognostication.
- brabel 2y ago
  If investors didn't invest based on expected future performance, the share market would look completely different than it actually does today. So, I can't understand how anyone can claim that.
phreack 2y ago
I honestly believe this specific case is a Pareto situation where the first 80% came at breakneck speeds, and the final 20% just won't come in a satisfactory way. And the uncanny valley effect demands a percentage that's extremely close to 100% before it has any use. Neural networks are great at approximations, but an approximate person is just a nightmare.
nitwit005 2y ago
What is your time horizon? We're already at a date where people were saying these jobs would be gone. The people most optimistic about the trajectory of this technology were clearly wrong. If you tell me AI newscasters will be fully functional in 10 or 15 years, I'll believe it. But that far in the future, I'd also believe news will be totally transformed due to some other technology we aren't thinking about yet.
- NemoNobody 2y ago
  Who gives a shit about AI newscasters? AI allows us to see everything we track the data of rn - and see in a useful way and in real time. It also allows all the tedious and repetitive tasks done by everyone, no longer needs to be done by anyone - creating a static webpage or graphics for a mobile app, a mobile app, or game development - a of those are the easiest to do they ever have been. AI isn't for millennials or even Gen z - it's for Alpha, they will be the first to truly understand what AI is and to use it as it will be used forever after. Til they adopt it, none of this really matters.
  - nitwit005 2y ago
    You're declaring you don't give a shit about the current topic. Why are you here?
lolinder 2y ago
> The prevailing counterargument against AI consistently hinges on the present state of AI rather than the trajectory of its development: but what matters is not the capabilities of AI as they exist today, but the astonishing velocity at which those capabilities are evolving. No, the prevailing counter argument is that the prevailing argument in favor of AI taking over everything assumes that the acceleration will remain approximately constant, when in fact we don't know that it will do so and we have every reason to believe that it won't. No technology in history has ever maintained an exponential growth curve for very long. Every innovation has followed the same pattern: * There's a major scientific breakthrough which redefines what is possible. * That breakthrough leads to a rapid increase in technology along a certain axis. * We eventually see a plateau where we reach the limits of this new paradigm and begin to adapt to the new normal. AI hypists always talk as though we should extrapolate the last 2 years' growth curve out to 10 years and come to the conclusion that General Intelligence is inevitable, but to do so would be to assume that this particular technological curve will behave very differently than all previous curves. Instead, what I and many others argue is that we are already starting to see the plateau. We are now in the phase where we've hit the limits of what these models are capable of and we're moving on to adapting them to a variety of use cases. This will bring more change, but it will be slower and not as seismic as the hype would lead you to believe, because we've already gotten off the exponential train.
- NemoNobody 2y ago
  Moore's law is still going as far I'm aware - there may have been clarification of sorts recently but that's kept up exponentially rather well despite everyone knowing that it can't do that.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Moore's law would improve the speed of LLMs and improve their size, but in recent weeks [0] it's become apparent that we're hitting the limit of "just make them even bigger" being a viable strategy for improving the intelligence of LLMs. I'm excited for these things to get even cheaper, and that will enable more use cases, but we're not going to see the world-changing prophesies of some of AI's evangelists in this thread come true by dint of cheaper current-gen models. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42125888 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42125888
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
xanderlewis 2y ago
But you could also say: the prevailing argument for AI consistently hinges on the (imagined, projected based on naive assumptions) trajectory of AI rather than the present state. > the astonishing velocity at which those capabilities are evolving. This is what is repeated ad nauseam by AI companies desperate for investment and hype. Those who’ve been in the game since before this millennium tend not to be so impressed — recent gains have mostly been due to increased volume of computation and data with only a few real theoretical breakthroughs. Laymen (myself included) were indeed astonished by ChatGPT, but it’s quite clear that those in the know saw it coming. Remember that those who say otherwise might have reasons (other than an earnest interest in the truth) for doing so.
avs733 2y ago
the prevailing argument in favor of investing in AI is its potential. the prevailing argument against using AI is its current lack of potential. Those things are inherently in tension, think of it as hiring a new employee straight out of undergrad. You are hiring them based largely on the employee they will become...with increasing expectations over time balanced against increasing variability in outcomes over time. However, if one year in that employee continues to suck at their current job, their long term potential doesn't really matter. Moreso, the long term potential is no longer credibly evidenced by the inability to progress at doing the current job. This is an investment gone bad in the current state of things. It doesn't matter what might happen it matters what did. The investment was made based on the perception of astonishing velocity, and it seems that we may need to calibrate our spedometers.
danpalmer 2y ago
All S-curves look exponential at some point. It was unclear if the current wave of AI would be an exponential, or for how long, or if it would end up just being another S-curve. The potential upside hooked a lot of people into action on the VC-maths of "it doesn't matter if it's unlikely, because the upside is just too good". It is now becoming clear however that we aren't getting AGI. What we have now is fundamentally what we're likely to have in 5-10 years time. I do think we'll find better uses, figure our shit out, and have much more effective products in that time, I think we're entering the "LLM-era" in much the same way as the 2010s were the smartphone era that redefined a lot of things, but in still the same way, a phone of ~2010 isn't materially different to a phone of ~2020, they're still just internet connected, location aware, interfaces to content and services.
iotiotiotiot 2y ago
It amazes me how excited people are to see their livelihoods destroyed. I'm retired, but people designing AI in their 20's will be unemployed in a decade. Good luck dudes and dude-ettes, you're fucking yourselves.

lawn 2y ago

It's getting old but there's an xkcd for your kind of reasoning: https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/

nsavage 2y ago
Isn't this essentially the same argument as "there are only 10 covid cases in this area, nothing to worry about"? It's really missing the point, the point is whether or not exponential growth is happening or not. It doesn't with husbands, it does with covid, time will tell about AI.
- SiempreViernes 2y ago
  No, because as you rightly point out we know exponential growth is very possible with Covid but we don't know if that will happen with AI. In fact, the only evidence we have for exponential growth in AI is the word of the people selling it to us.
- namaria 2y ago
  Transformers have been around for 7 years, ChatGPT for 2. This isn't the first few samples of what could be exponential growth. These are several quarters of overpromise and underdelivery. The chatbot is cool and it outperforms what awful product search has become. But is it enough to support a 3.5 trillion dollar sized parts supplier?
- lawn 2y ago
  The graph depicts linear growth, not exponential. And neither is the growth of AI.

bdndndndbve 2y ago

We've been through this song and dance before. AI researchers make legitimately impressive breakthroughs in specific tasks, people extrapolate linear growth, the air comes out of the balloon after a couple years when it turns out we couldn't just throw progressively larger models at the problem to emulate human cognition. I'm surprised that tech workers who should be the most skeptical about this kind of stuff end up being the most breathlessly hyperbolic. Everyone is so eager to get rich off the trend they discard any skepticism.

palla89 2y ago
This comment summarize my thought in the best way.
glitchc 2y ago
It's like con artists and management consultants. They are the most susceptible because they drink the koolaid.
richardw 2y ago
Two things can both be true. I keep arguing both sides because: 1 Unless you’re aware of near term limits you think AI is going to the stars next year. 2 Architectures change. The only thing that doesn’t change is that we generally push on, temporarily limits are usually overcome and there’s a lot riding on this. It’s not a smart move to bet against progress over the medium term. This is also where the real benefits and risks lie. Is AI in general more like going to space, or string theory? One is hard but doable. Other is a tar pit for money and talent. We are all currently placing our bets.
- bangaroo 2y ago
  point 2 is the thing that i think is most important to point out: "architectures change" sure, that's a fact. let me apply this to other fields: "there could be a battery breakthrough that gives electric cars a 2,000 mile range." "researchers could discover a new way to build nanorobots that attacks cancer directly and effectively cures all versions of it." "we could invent a new sort of aviation engine that is 1,000x more fuel efficient than the current generation." i mean, yeah, sure. i guess. the current hype is built on LLMs, and being charitable "LLMs built with current architecture." there are other things in the works, but most of the current generation of AI hype are a limited number of algorithms and approaches, mixed and matched in different ways, with other features bolted on to try and corral them into behaving as we hope. it is much more realistic to expect that we are in the period of diminishing returns as far as investing in these approaches than it is to believe we'll continue to see earth-shattering growth. nothing has appeared that had the initial "wow" factor of the early versions of suno, or gpt, or dall-e, or sora, or whatever else. this is clearly and plainly a tech bubble. it's so transparently one, it's hard to understand how folks aren't seeing it. all these tools have been in the mainstream for a pretty substantial period of time (relatively) and the honest truth is they're just not moving the needle in many industries. the most frequent practical application of them in practice has been summarization, editing, and rewriting, which is a neat little parlor trick - but all the same, it's indicative of the fact that they largely model language, so that's primarily what they're good at. you can bet on something entirely new being discovered... but what? there just isn't anything inching closer to that general AI hype we're all hearing about that exists in the real world. i'm sure folks are cooking on things, but that doesn't mean they're near production-ready. saying "this isn't a bubble because one day someone might invent something that's actually good" is kind of giving away the game - the current generation isn't that good, and we can't point to the thing that's going to overtake it.

lukev 2y ago

But we don't know if AI development is following an exponential or sigmoid curve (actually we do kind of, now, but that's beside the point for this post.) A wise institution will make decisions based on current capabilities, not a prognostication.

brabel 2y ago
If investors didn't invest based on expected future performance, the share market would look completely different than it actually does today. So, I can't understand how anyone can claim that.

phreack 2y ago

I honestly believe this specific case is a Pareto situation where the first 80% came at breakneck speeds, and the final 20% just won't come in a satisfactory way. And the uncanny valley effect demands a percentage that's extremely close to 100% before it has any use. Neural networks are great at approximations, but an approximate person is just a nightmare.

nitwit005 2y ago

What is your time horizon? We're already at a date where people were saying these jobs would be gone. The people most optimistic about the trajectory of this technology were clearly wrong. If you tell me AI newscasters will be fully functional in 10 or 15 years, I'll believe it. But that far in the future, I'd also believe news will be totally transformed due to some other technology we aren't thinking about yet.

NemoNobody 2y ago
Who gives a shit about AI newscasters? AI allows us to see everything we track the data of rn - and see in a useful way and in real time. It also allows all the tedious and repetitive tasks done by everyone, no longer needs to be done by anyone - creating a static webpage or graphics for a mobile app, a mobile app, or game development - a of those are the easiest to do they ever have been. AI isn't for millennials or even Gen z - it's for Alpha, they will be the first to truly understand what AI is and to use it as it will be used forever after. Til they adopt it, none of this really matters.
- nitwit005 2y ago
  You're declaring you don't give a shit about the current topic. Why are you here?

lolinder 2y ago

> The prevailing counterargument against AI consistently hinges on the present state of AI rather than the trajectory of its development: but what matters is not the capabilities of AI as they exist today, but the astonishing velocity at which those capabilities are evolving. No, the prevailing counter argument is that the prevailing argument in favor of AI taking over everything assumes that the acceleration will remain approximately constant, when in fact we don't know that it will do so and we have every reason to believe that it won't. No technology in history has ever maintained an exponential growth curve for very long. Every innovation has followed the same pattern: * There's a major scientific breakthrough which redefines what is possible. * That breakthrough leads to a rapid increase in technology along a certain axis. * We eventually see a plateau where we reach the limits of this new paradigm and begin to adapt to the new normal. AI hypists always talk as though we should extrapolate the last 2 years' growth curve out to 10 years and come to the conclusion that General Intelligence is inevitable, but to do so would be to assume that this particular technological curve will behave very differently than all previous curves. Instead, what I and many others argue is that we are already starting to see the plateau. We are now in the phase where we've hit the limits of what these models are capable of and we're moving on to adapting them to a variety of use cases. This will bring more change, but it will be slower and not as seismic as the hype would lead you to believe, because we've already gotten off the exponential train.

NemoNobody 2y ago
Moore's law is still going as far I'm aware - there may have been clarification of sorts recently but that's kept up exponentially rather well despite everyone knowing that it can't do that.
- lolinder 2y ago
  Moore's law would improve the speed of LLMs and improve their size, but in recent weeks [0] it's become apparent that we're hitting the limit of "just make them even bigger" being a viable strategy for improving the intelligence of LLMs. I'm excited for these things to get even cheaper, and that will enable more use cases, but we're not going to see the world-changing prophesies of some of AI's evangelists in this thread come true by dint of cheaper current-gen models. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42125888 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42125888

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

xanderlewis 2y ago

But you could also say: the prevailing argument for AI consistently hinges on the (imagined, projected based on naive assumptions) trajectory of AI rather than the present state. > the astonishing velocity at which those capabilities are evolving. This is what is repeated ad nauseam by AI companies desperate for investment and hype. Those who’ve been in the game since before this millennium tend not to be so impressed — recent gains have mostly been due to increased volume of computation and data with only a few real theoretical breakthroughs. Laymen (myself included) were indeed astonished by ChatGPT, but it’s quite clear that those in the know saw it coming. Remember that those who say otherwise might have reasons (other than an earnest interest in the truth) for doing so.

avs733 2y ago

the prevailing argument in favor of investing in AI is its potential. the prevailing argument against using AI is its current lack of potential. Those things are inherently in tension, think of it as hiring a new employee straight out of undergrad. You are hiring them based largely on the employee they will become...with increasing expectations over time balanced against increasing variability in outcomes over time. However, if one year in that employee continues to suck at their current job, their long term potential doesn't really matter. Moreso, the long term potential is no longer credibly evidenced by the inability to progress at doing the current job. This is an investment gone bad in the current state of things. It doesn't matter what might happen it matters what did. The investment was made based on the perception of astonishing velocity, and it seems that we may need to calibrate our spedometers.

danpalmer 2y ago

All S-curves look exponential at some point. It was unclear if the current wave of AI would be an exponential, or for how long, or if it would end up just being another S-curve. The potential upside hooked a lot of people into action on the VC-maths of "it doesn't matter if it's unlikely, because the upside is just too good". It is now becoming clear however that we aren't getting AGI. What we have now is fundamentally what we're likely to have in 5-10 years time. I do think we'll find better uses, figure our shit out, and have much more effective products in that time, I think we're entering the "LLM-era" in much the same way as the 2010s were the smartphone era that redefined a lot of things, but in still the same way, a phone of ~2010 isn't materially different to a phone of ~2020, they're still just internet connected, location aware, interfaces to content and services.

iotiotiotiot 2y ago

It amazes me how excited people are to see their livelihoods destroyed. I'm retired, but people designing AI in their 20's will be unemployed in a decade. Good luck dudes and dude-ettes, you're fucking yourselves.