7 ms·

I get the excitement, but folks, this is a model that excels only in things like software engineering/math. They basically used reinforcement learning to train

by fsndz 2y ago

I get the excitement, but folks, this is a model that excels only in things like software engineering/math. They basically used reinforcement learning to train the model to better remember which pattern to use to solve specific problems. This in no way generalises to open ended tasks in a way that makes human in the loop unnecessary. This basically makes assistants better (as soon as they figure out how to make it cheaper), but I wouldn't blindly trust the output of o3. Sam Altman is still wrong: https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-sam-altman-is-wrong https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-sam-altman-is-wrong

girvo 2y ago
Quite. And if it was right, those businesses deploying it and replacing humans need humans with jobs and money to pay for their products and services…
- fakedang 2y ago
  It will just keep bleeding the middle class on and on, till the point where either everyone is rich, homeless or a plumber or other such licensed worker. And then there will be such a glut in the latter (shrinking) market, that everyone in that group also becomes either rich or homeless.
  - palmfacehn 2y ago
    Productivity gains increase the standard of living for everyone. Products and services become cheaper. Leisure time increases. Scarce labor resources can be applied in other areas. I fail to see the difference between AI-employment-doom and other flavors of Luddism.
    - bayindirh 2y ago
      It also fuels the income inequality with a fatter pipe in every iteration. You get richer as you move up in the supply chain, period. Companies vertically integrate to drive costs down in the long run. As AI gets more prevalent, it'll drive the cost down for the companies supplying these services, so the former employees of said companies will be paid lower, or not at all. So, tell me, how paying fewer people less money will drive their standard of living upwards? I can understand the leisure time. Because, when you don't have a job, all day is leisure time. But you'll need money for that, so will these companies fund the masses via government to provide Universal Basic Income, so these people can both live a borderline miserable life while funding these companies to suck these people more and more?
      - CamperBob2 2y ago
        It also fuels the income inequality with a fatter pipe in every iteration Who cares? A rising tide lifts all boats. The wealthy people I know all have one thing in common: they focused more on their own bank accounts than on other people's. So, tell me, how paying fewer people less money will drive their standard of living upwards? Money is how we allocate limited resources. It will become less important as resources become less limited, less necessary, or (hopefully) both.
        danans 2y ago
        > Money is how we allocate limited resources. It will become less important as resources become less limited, less necessary, or (hopefully) both. Money is also how we exert power and leverage over others. As inequality increases, it enables the ever wealthier minority to exert power and therefore control over the majority.
        CamperBob2 2y ago
        If that's a problem, why does the progressive point of view typically argue in favor of giving more power over our lives to the ruling class? The problem isn't the money. The problem is the power.
        bayindirh 2y ago
        > why does the progressive point of view typically argue in favor of giving more power over our lives to the ruling class? Humans are interesting creatures. Many of them do not have conscience and don't understand the notion of ethics and "not doing of something because it's wrong to begin with". From my experience, esp. the people in US thinks that "if that's not illegal, then I can and will do this", which is wrong in many levels again. Many European people are similar, but bigger governments and harsher justice system makes them more orderly, and happier in general. Yes, they can't carry guns, but they don't need to begin with. Yes, they can't own Cybertrucks, but they can walk or use an actually working mass transportation system to begin with. Plus proper governments have checks and balances. A government can't rip people off like corporations for services most of the time. Many of the things Americans are afraid of (social health services for everyone) makes life more just and tolerable for all parts of the population. Big government is not a bad thing, and uncontrollable government is. We're entering the era of "corporate pleasing uncontrollable governments", and this will be fun in a tragic way.
    - EarthAmbassador 2y ago
      Utter nonsense. Productivity gains of the last 40 years have been captured by shareholders and top elites. Working class wages have been flat all of that time despite that gain. In 2012, Musk was worth $2 billion. He’s now worth 223 times that yet the minimum wage has barely budged in the last 12 years as productivity rises.
      - palmfacehn 2y ago
        >>Productivity gains increase the standard of living for everyone. >Productivity gains of the last 40 years have been captured by shareholders and top elites. Working class wages have been flat... Wages do not determine the standard of living. The products and services purchased with wages determine the standard of living. "Top elites" in 1984 could already afford cellular phones, such as the Motorola DynaTAC: >A full charge took roughly 10 hours, and it offered 30 minutes of talk time. It also offered an LED display for dialing or recall of one of 30 phone numbers. It was priced at US$3,995 in 1984, its commercial release year, equivalent to $11,716 in 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_DynaTAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_DynaTAC Unfortunately, touch screen phones with gigabytes of ram were not available for the masses 40 years ago.
        DAGdug 2y ago
        What a patently absurd POV! A phone doesn’t compensate for the inability to solve for basic needs - housing, healthy food, healthcare. Or being unable to invest in skill development for themselves or their offspring, save for retirement.
        runarberg 2y ago
        It is also highly likely that the cost of that phone was externalized onto a worker in a poorer country that doesn’t even have basic necessity like a running water, 24 hour electricity, food security, etc.
        Jensson 2y ago
    - DAGdug 2y ago
      Leisure time hasn’t increased in the last 100 years except for the lower income class which doesn’t have steady employment. But yes, I see your point that the homeless person who might have had a home if he had a (now automated) factory job should surely feel good about having a phone that only the ultra rich had 40 years ago.
      - ethbr1 2y ago
        It's not worth tossing away in sarcasm. The availability of cheaply priced smartphones and cellular data plans has absolutely made being homeless suck less. As you noted though, a home would probably be a preferable alternative.
        danans 2y ago
        > As you noted though, a home would probably be a preferable alternative. The problem is that the preferable option (housing) won't happen because unlike a smartphone, it requires that land be effectively distributed more broadly (through building housing) in areas where people desire to live. Look at the uproar by the VC guys in Menlo Park when the government tried to pursue greater housing density in their wealthy hamlet. It also requires infrastructure investment which, while it has returns for society at large, doesn't have good returns for investors. Only government makes those kinds of investments. Better to build a wall around the desirable places, hire a few poorer-than-you folks as security guards, and give the other people outside your wall ... cheap smartphones to sate themselves.
        Agentus 2y ago
        wall isnt necessary just need the police, security guards and legislation to chase out / make homeless miserable.
        danans 2y ago
        Indeed, all physical walls in our world are ultimately psychological walls.
    - Yoric 2y ago
      Just to clarify: the Luddites were being automated out of a job. From what I understand of history, while industrial revolutions have generally increased living standards and employment in the long term, they have also caused massive unemployment/starvation in the short term. In the case of textile, I seem to recall that it took ~40 years for employment to return to its previous level. I don't know about you guys, but I'm far from certain that I can survive 40 years without a job.
      - litam 2y ago
        And among the few who found a job back, most of the time it was some coal mining job, to feed the machines who replaced them... Maybe the future of (some of) nowadays' office workers is to feed (train) the models replacing them?
      - seabass-labrax 2y ago
        In addition, although the Luddite uprisings were themselves crushed, the political elite were not blind to the circumstances that led to them, and did eventually bring in the legislation that introduced modern workers rights, legalized unions and sowed the seeds of the modern secular welfare state in Britain. That is a pattern that appears throughout history and especially in Britain, where the government cannot be seen to yield to violent protest but quietly does so anyway.
      - SideQuark 2y ago
        I cannot find a place industrial revolutions caused massive starvation. Care to provide one? The other things you state are not even close. First, lowered employment for X years does not imply one cannot get a job in X years - that's simply fear mongering. Unemployment over that period seems to have fluctuated very little, and massive external economic issues were causes (wars with Napoleon, the US, changing international fortunes), not Luddites. Next, there was inflation and unemployment during the TWO years surrounding the Luddites, in 1810-1812 (starting right before the Luddite movement) due to wars with Napoleon and the US [1]. Somehow attributing this to tech increases or Luddites is numerology of the worst sort. If you look at academic literature about the economy of the era, such as [2] (read on scihub if you must), you'll find there was incredible population growth, and that wages grew even faster. While many academics at the at the time thought all this automation would displace workers, those academics were forced to admit they were wrong. There's plenty of literature on this. Simply dig through Google scholar. As to starvation in this case, I can find no "massive starvation". [3] forExample points out that "Among the industrial and mining families, around 18 per cent of writers recollected having experienced hunger. In the agricultural families this figure was more than twice as large — 42 per cent". So yes there was hunger, as there always had been, but it quickly reduced due to the industrial revolution and benefited those working in industry more quickly than those not in industry. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite#:~:text=The%20movement%20began%20in%20Arnold,of%20high%20unemployment%20and%20inflation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite#:~:text=The%20movement.... [2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2599511 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2599511 [3] https://academic.oup.com/past/article/239/1/71/4794719 https://academic.oup.com/past/article/239/1/71/4794719
    - runarberg 2y ago
      I think the backlash to this post can summarized as such: Perhaps there is a theory in which productivity gains increase the standard of living for everyone, however that is not the lived reality for most people of the working classes. If productivity gains are indeed increasing the standards of living to everyone, it certainly does not increase evenly, and the standard of living increases for the working poor are at best marginal, while the standard of living increases for the already richest of the rich are astronomical.
      - Jensson 2y ago
        > and the standard of living increases for the working poor are at best marginal Not if you count the global poor, the global poors standard of living has increased tremendously the past 30 years.
        runarberg 2y ago
        Has it really? I’ve seen a lot of people claiming this since Hans Rosling’s famous TED talks, but I’ve never actually seen any data that backs this up. Particularly since Hans Rosling’s talk was 15 years ago, but the number always remains “past 30 years”. Off course any graph can choose to show which ever stat is convenient for the message, that doesn’t necessarily reflect the lived reality of the individual members of the global poor. And as I recall it most standard of living improvements for the global poor came in the decades after decolonization in the 1960s-1990s where infrastructure was being built that actually served people’s need as opposed for resource extraction in the decades past. If Hans Rosling said in 2007 that the standard of living has improved tremendously in the past 30 years, he would be correct, but not for the reason you gave. The story of decolonization was that the correct infrastructure, such as hospitals, water lines, sewage, garbage disposal plants, roads, harbors, airports, schools, etc. that improved the standard of living not productivity gains. And case in point, the colonial period saw a tremendous growth in productivity in the colonies. But the standard of living in the colonies quite often saw the opposite. That is because the infrastructure only served to extract resources and exploitation of the colonized.
        2y ago
    - dartos 2y ago
      > Productivity gains increase the standard of living for everyone This just isn’t true, necessarily. Productivity has gone up in the US since the 80s, but wages have not. Costs have, though. What increases standards of living for everyone is social programs like public health and education. Affordable housing and adult-education and job hunting programs. Not the rate at which money is gathered by corporations.
  - szundi 2y ago
    Never happened with neither big technology advancement
    - bayindirh 2y ago
      Wealth has bled from landlords to warlords and now bleeding to techlords. Warlords are still rich, but both money and war is flowing towards tech. You can get a piece from that pie if you're doing questionable things (adtech, targeting, data collection, brokering, etc.), but if you're a run of the mill, normal person, your circumstances are getting harder and harder, because you're slowly squeezed out of the system like a toothpaste.
      - nyokodo 2y ago
        > you're slowly squeezed out of the system like a toothpaste. AI could theoretically solve production but not consumption. If AI blows away every comparative advantage that normal humans have then consumption will collapse and there won’t be any rich humans.
robwwilliams 2y ago
In your blog you say: > deep learning doesn't allow models to generalize properly to out-of-distribution data—and that is precisely what we need to build artificial general intelligence. I think even (or especially) people like Altman accept this as a fact. I do. Hassabis has been saying this for years. The foundational models are just a foundation. Now start building the AGI superstructure. And this is also where most of the still human intellectual energy is now.
- dartos 2y ago
  You lost me at the end there. These statistical models don’t generalize well to out of distribution data. If you accept that as a fact, then you must accept that these statistical models are not the path to AGI.

by fsndz 2y ago

girvo 2y ago

Quite. And if it was right, those businesses deploying it and replacing humans need humans with jobs and money to pay for their products and services…

fakedang 2y ago
It will just keep bleeding the middle class on and on, till the point where either everyone is rich, homeless or a plumber or other such licensed worker. And then there will be such a glut in the latter (shrinking) market, that everyone in that group also becomes either rich or homeless.
- palmfacehn 2y ago
  Productivity gains increase the standard of living for everyone. Products and services become cheaper. Leisure time increases. Scarce labor resources can be applied in other areas. I fail to see the difference between AI-employment-doom and other flavors of Luddism.
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    It also fuels the income inequality with a fatter pipe in every iteration. You get richer as you move up in the supply chain, period. Companies vertically integrate to drive costs down in the long run. As AI gets more prevalent, it'll drive the cost down for the companies supplying these services, so the former employees of said companies will be paid lower, or not at all. So, tell me, how paying fewer people less money will drive their standard of living upwards? I can understand the leisure time. Because, when you don't have a job, all day is leisure time. But you'll need money for that, so will these companies fund the masses via government to provide Universal Basic Income, so these people can both live a borderline miserable life while funding these companies to suck these people more and more?
    - CamperBob2 2y ago
      It also fuels the income inequality with a fatter pipe in every iteration Who cares? A rising tide lifts all boats. The wealthy people I know all have one thing in common: they focused more on their own bank accounts than on other people's. So, tell me, how paying fewer people less money will drive their standard of living upwards? Money is how we allocate limited resources. It will become less important as resources become less limited, less necessary, or (hopefully) both.
      - danans 2y ago
        > Money is how we allocate limited resources. It will become less important as resources become less limited, less necessary, or (hopefully) both. Money is also how we exert power and leverage over others. As inequality increases, it enables the ever wealthier minority to exert power and therefore control over the majority.
        CamperBob2 2y ago
        If that's a problem, why does the progressive point of view typically argue in favor of giving more power over our lives to the ruling class? The problem isn't the money. The problem is the power.
        bayindirh 2y ago
        > why does the progressive point of view typically argue in favor of giving more power over our lives to the ruling class? Humans are interesting creatures. Many of them do not have conscience and don't understand the notion of ethics and "not doing of something because it's wrong to begin with". From my experience, esp. the people in US thinks that "if that's not illegal, then I can and will do this", which is wrong in many levels again. Many European people are similar, but bigger governments and harsher justice system makes them more orderly, and happier in general. Yes, they can't carry guns, but they don't need to begin with. Yes, they can't own Cybertrucks, but they can walk or use an actually working mass transportation system to begin with. Plus proper governments have checks and balances. A government can't rip people off like corporations for services most of the time. Many of the things Americans are afraid of (social health services for everyone) makes life more just and tolerable for all parts of the population. Big government is not a bad thing, and uncontrollable government is. We're entering the era of "corporate pleasing uncontrollable governments", and this will be fun in a tragic way.
  - EarthAmbassador 2y ago
    Utter nonsense. Productivity gains of the last 40 years have been captured by shareholders and top elites. Working class wages have been flat all of that time despite that gain. In 2012, Musk was worth $2 billion. He’s now worth 223 times that yet the minimum wage has barely budged in the last 12 years as productivity rises.
    - palmfacehn 2y ago
      >>Productivity gains increase the standard of living for everyone. >Productivity gains of the last 40 years have been captured by shareholders and top elites. Working class wages have been flat... Wages do not determine the standard of living. The products and services purchased with wages determine the standard of living. "Top elites" in 1984 could already afford cellular phones, such as the Motorola DynaTAC: >A full charge took roughly 10 hours, and it offered 30 minutes of talk time. It also offered an LED display for dialing or recall of one of 30 phone numbers. It was priced at US$3,995 in 1984, its commercial release year, equivalent to $11,716 in 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_DynaTAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_DynaTAC Unfortunately, touch screen phones with gigabytes of ram were not available for the masses 40 years ago.
      - DAGdug 2y ago
        What a patently absurd POV! A phone doesn’t compensate for the inability to solve for basic needs - housing, healthy food, healthcare. Or being unable to invest in skill development for themselves or their offspring, save for retirement.
        runarberg 2y ago
        It is also highly likely that the cost of that phone was externalized onto a worker in a poorer country that doesn’t even have basic necessity like a running water, 24 hour electricity, food security, etc.
        Jensson 2y ago
  - DAGdug 2y ago
    Leisure time hasn’t increased in the last 100 years except for the lower income class which doesn’t have steady employment. But yes, I see your point that the homeless person who might have had a home if he had a (now automated) factory job should surely feel good about having a phone that only the ultra rich had 40 years ago.
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      It's not worth tossing away in sarcasm. The availability of cheaply priced smartphones and cellular data plans has absolutely made being homeless suck less. As you noted though, a home would probably be a preferable alternative.
      - danans 2y ago
        > As you noted though, a home would probably be a preferable alternative. The problem is that the preferable option (housing) won't happen because unlike a smartphone, it requires that land be effectively distributed more broadly (through building housing) in areas where people desire to live. Look at the uproar by the VC guys in Menlo Park when the government tried to pursue greater housing density in their wealthy hamlet. It also requires infrastructure investment which, while it has returns for society at large, doesn't have good returns for investors. Only government makes those kinds of investments. Better to build a wall around the desirable places, hire a few poorer-than-you folks as security guards, and give the other people outside your wall ... cheap smartphones to sate themselves.
        Agentus 2y ago
        wall isnt necessary just need the police, security guards and legislation to chase out / make homeless miserable.
        danans 2y ago
        Indeed, all physical walls in our world are ultimately psychological walls.
  - Yoric 2y ago
    Just to clarify: the Luddites were being automated out of a job. From what I understand of history, while industrial revolutions have generally increased living standards and employment in the long term, they have also caused massive unemployment/starvation in the short term. In the case of textile, I seem to recall that it took ~40 years for employment to return to its previous level. I don't know about you guys, but I'm far from certain that I can survive 40 years without a job.
    - litam 2y ago
      And among the few who found a job back, most of the time it was some coal mining job, to feed the machines who replaced them... Maybe the future of (some of) nowadays' office workers is to feed (train) the models replacing them?
    - seabass-labrax 2y ago
      In addition, although the Luddite uprisings were themselves crushed, the political elite were not blind to the circumstances that led to them, and did eventually bring in the legislation that introduced modern workers rights, legalized unions and sowed the seeds of the modern secular welfare state in Britain. That is a pattern that appears throughout history and especially in Britain, where the government cannot be seen to yield to violent protest but quietly does so anyway.
    - SideQuark 2y ago
      I cannot find a place industrial revolutions caused massive starvation. Care to provide one? The other things you state are not even close. First, lowered employment for X years does not imply one cannot get a job in X years - that's simply fear mongering. Unemployment over that period seems to have fluctuated very little, and massive external economic issues were causes (wars with Napoleon, the US, changing international fortunes), not Luddites. Next, there was inflation and unemployment during the TWO years surrounding the Luddites, in 1810-1812 (starting right before the Luddite movement) due to wars with Napoleon and the US [1]. Somehow attributing this to tech increases or Luddites is numerology of the worst sort. If you look at academic literature about the economy of the era, such as [2] (read on scihub if you must), you'll find there was incredible population growth, and that wages grew even faster. While many academics at the at the time thought all this automation would displace workers, those academics were forced to admit they were wrong. There's plenty of literature on this. Simply dig through Google scholar. As to starvation in this case, I can find no "massive starvation". [3] forExample points out that "Among the industrial and mining families, around 18 per cent of writers recollected having experienced hunger. In the agricultural families this figure was more than twice as large — 42 per cent". So yes there was hunger, as there always had been, but it quickly reduced due to the industrial revolution and benefited those working in industry more quickly than those not in industry. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite#:~:text=The%20movement%20began%20in%20Arnold,of%20high%20unemployment%20and%20inflation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite#:~:text=The%20movement.... [2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2599511 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2599511 [3] https://academic.oup.com/past/article/239/1/71/4794719 https://academic.oup.com/past/article/239/1/71/4794719
  - runarberg 2y ago
    I think the backlash to this post can summarized as such: Perhaps there is a theory in which productivity gains increase the standard of living for everyone, however that is not the lived reality for most people of the working classes. If productivity gains are indeed increasing the standards of living to everyone, it certainly does not increase evenly, and the standard of living increases for the working poor are at best marginal, while the standard of living increases for the already richest of the rich are astronomical.
    - Jensson 2y ago
      > and the standard of living increases for the working poor are at best marginal Not if you count the global poor, the global poors standard of living has increased tremendously the past 30 years.
      - runarberg 2y ago
        Has it really? I’ve seen a lot of people claiming this since Hans Rosling’s famous TED talks, but I’ve never actually seen any data that backs this up. Particularly since Hans Rosling’s talk was 15 years ago, but the number always remains “past 30 years”. Off course any graph can choose to show which ever stat is convenient for the message, that doesn’t necessarily reflect the lived reality of the individual members of the global poor. And as I recall it most standard of living improvements for the global poor came in the decades after decolonization in the 1960s-1990s where infrastructure was being built that actually served people’s need as opposed for resource extraction in the decades past. If Hans Rosling said in 2007 that the standard of living has improved tremendously in the past 30 years, he would be correct, but not for the reason you gave. The story of decolonization was that the correct infrastructure, such as hospitals, water lines, sewage, garbage disposal plants, roads, harbors, airports, schools, etc. that improved the standard of living not productivity gains. And case in point, the colonial period saw a tremendous growth in productivity in the colonies. But the standard of living in the colonies quite often saw the opposite. That is because the infrastructure only served to extract resources and exploitation of the colonized.
        2y ago
  - dartos 2y ago
    > Productivity gains increase the standard of living for everyone This just isn’t true, necessarily. Productivity has gone up in the US since the 80s, but wages have not. Costs have, though. What increases standards of living for everyone is social programs like public health and education. Affordable housing and adult-education and job hunting programs. Not the rate at which money is gathered by corporations.
- szundi 2y ago
  Never happened with neither big technology advancement
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    Wealth has bled from landlords to warlords and now bleeding to techlords. Warlords are still rich, but both money and war is flowing towards tech. You can get a piece from that pie if you're doing questionable things (adtech, targeting, data collection, brokering, etc.), but if you're a run of the mill, normal person, your circumstances are getting harder and harder, because you're slowly squeezed out of the system like a toothpaste.
    - nyokodo 2y ago
      > you're slowly squeezed out of the system like a toothpaste. AI could theoretically solve production but not consumption. If AI blows away every comparative advantage that normal humans have then consumption will collapse and there won’t be any rich humans.

robwwilliams 2y ago

In your blog you say: > deep learning doesn't allow models to generalize properly to out-of-distribution data—and that is precisely what we need to build artificial general intelligence. I think even (or especially) people like Altman accept this as a fact. I do. Hassabis has been saying this for years. The foundational models are just a foundation. Now start building the AGI superstructure. And this is also where most of the still human intellectual energy is now.

dartos 2y ago
You lost me at the end there. These statistical models don’t generalize well to out of distribution data. If you accept that as a fact, then you must accept that these statistical models are not the path to AGI.