7 ms·

The doors on intelligence are getting blown wide open, what a time to be alive

ninetyninenine 2y ago
Just a year ago everyone was saying LLMs aren't intelligent and everything is regurgitation. A lot of people on HN "knew" this and defended this perspective vehemently. It's quite embarrassing how wrong they are. That being said, I don't think it's quite blown that wide open yet. But for sure the trendlines are pointing at AGI within our lifetimes.
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  Just a year ago everyone was saying LLMs aren't intelligent and everything is regurgitation. A lot of people on HN "knew" this and defended this perspective vehemently. It's quite embarrassing how wrong they are. Plenty of people who should know better are still saying that on HN now. They're not just wrong, they evidently don't mind being wrong. So there's not much point arguing with them. You show these people a talking dog, and all they'll do is correct its grammar.
  - daveguy 2y ago
    No, if you show these people a talking dog, they'll look for the speaker.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - ninetyninenine 2y ago
      But the dog is actually talking and the speaker can’t be found. You can hear and smell the sound and talk coming from the dogs hot breath. To them the dog can never ever talk. Because that’s a violation of the sanctity of human intelligence. There pride as a programmer can’t be attacked by another thing other than human being more intelligent. It’s now clear that LLMs reason and it’s kind of embarrassing how wrong they were.
- visarga 2y ago
  This idea was championed by the Stochastic Parrots paper. They assumed LLMs are just pattern learning, which doesn't make sense. - the simple-to-hard RL method recently discovered is one argument against it, the models can reason their way out on harder and harder problems - zero shot translation shows the models really develop an interlingua, a semantic representation, otherwise they wouldn't be able to translate between unseen pairs of languages - the human in the room is also important. LLMs are like pianos, we play prompts on the keyboard to them, and they play back language to us. The quality and originality of the output aren't solely inherent to the model, but are co-created in the dialogue with the prompter. It's not just about the instrument, but also the 'musician' playing it.
  - ninetyninenine 2y ago
    >- the human in the room is also important. LLMs are like pianos, we play prompts on the keyboard to them, and they play back language to us. The quality and originality of the output aren't solely inherent to the model, but are co-created in the dialogue with the prompter. It's not just about the instrument, but also the 'musician' playing it. I mean isn't that what humans are as well? You can get two LLMs talking to each other and suddenly the musician in the room doesn't matter.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    > - the human in the room is also important. LLMs are like pianos, we play prompts on the keyboard to them, and they play back language to us. The quality and originality of the output aren't solely inherent to the model, but are co-created in the dialogue with the prompter. It's not just about the instrument, but also the 'musician' playing it. So you agree they aren't reasoning? Otherwise why would you need a human to do skillful prompting? Why can't the AI just solve it on its own?
    - ben_w 2y ago
      > So you agree they aren't reasoning? Otherwise why would you need a human to do skillful prompting? Why can't the AI just solve it on its own? That's the argument kings used to justify looking down on peasants. AI, as it is currently, has no motivation of its own; it is just as "happy" to solve a business problem as it is to write Chinese poetry about Swiss software engineers taking their dogs on a ride up the Adliswil-Felsenegg cable car. Good communication skills are still important to get what you want, otherwise we merely descent into a particular SMBC comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3576 https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3576 (This isn't to say the AI we have now are "people", nobody knows how to even test for that yet; I hope we figure this question out some time soon, preferably before we need to know the answer…)
- ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago
  A year ago I was a believer, and I am more of a believer now. This isnt stopping, I think we have a generalized method to learn from data. It's just a matter of getting the data into it.
  - dyauspitr 2y ago
    If you can strap visual, audio and touch sensors onto them and they can genuinely start improving themselves based on the that raw input, then we have a general intelligence.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- suraci 2y ago
  I used to look down on ChatGPT and other LLMs because they're crazy expensive to train and need special tuning like SFT/RLHF. I thought their "intelligence" was limited and economically impractical — good for assisting but not replacing humans. At best, they might take over some customer service, translator or teaching jobs. But now, with R1 out there, I'm getting a little nervous, kinda like when Go players saw AlphaGo. Sure, AlphaGo didn't replace humans, but Go is a game, not work. Companies won't hire AI to play games, but they'll absolutely use bots to code software and build cars.
  - ninetyninenine 2y ago
    Clearly AI at it's current state can't replace humans. Everyone on the face of the earth knows this. What people are generally hyped about is the trendline into the future. Look at the progress of all of AI up till now. LLMs are a precursor to an AGI that exists in the future.
    - suraci 2y ago
      I'm not saying how advanced R1 is—in fact, it doesn't outperform O1 by much. What really surprised me is how it was built with pure RL without SFT, which I thought was impossible before. And it makes me wonder if human thoughts are synthesizable I hope this is just a misunderstanding stemming from my incomplete knowledge

Just a year ago everyone was saying LLMs aren't intelligent and everything is regurgitation. A lot of people on HN "knew" this and defended this perspective vehemently. It's quite embarrassing how wrong they are. That being said, I don't think it's quite blown that wide open yet. But for sure the trendlines are pointing at AGI within our lifetimes.

CamperBob2 2y ago
Just a year ago everyone was saying LLMs aren't intelligent and everything is regurgitation. A lot of people on HN "knew" this and defended this perspective vehemently. It's quite embarrassing how wrong they are. Plenty of people who should know better are still saying that on HN now. They're not just wrong, they evidently don't mind being wrong. So there's not much point arguing with them. You show these people a talking dog, and all they'll do is correct its grammar.
- daveguy 2y ago
  No, if you show these people a talking dog, they'll look for the speaker.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - ninetyninenine 2y ago
    But the dog is actually talking and the speaker can’t be found. You can hear and smell the sound and talk coming from the dogs hot breath. To them the dog can never ever talk. Because that’s a violation of the sanctity of human intelligence. There pride as a programmer can’t be attacked by another thing other than human being more intelligent. It’s now clear that LLMs reason and it’s kind of embarrassing how wrong they were.
visarga 2y ago
This idea was championed by the Stochastic Parrots paper. They assumed LLMs are just pattern learning, which doesn't make sense. - the simple-to-hard RL method recently discovered is one argument against it, the models can reason their way out on harder and harder problems - zero shot translation shows the models really develop an interlingua, a semantic representation, otherwise they wouldn't be able to translate between unseen pairs of languages - the human in the room is also important. LLMs are like pianos, we play prompts on the keyboard to them, and they play back language to us. The quality and originality of the output aren't solely inherent to the model, but are co-created in the dialogue with the prompter. It's not just about the instrument, but also the 'musician' playing it.
- ninetyninenine 2y ago
  >- the human in the room is also important. LLMs are like pianos, we play prompts on the keyboard to them, and they play back language to us. The quality and originality of the output aren't solely inherent to the model, but are co-created in the dialogue with the prompter. It's not just about the instrument, but also the 'musician' playing it. I mean isn't that what humans are as well? You can get two LLMs talking to each other and suddenly the musician in the room doesn't matter.
- Jensson 2y ago
  > - the human in the room is also important. LLMs are like pianos, we play prompts on the keyboard to them, and they play back language to us. The quality and originality of the output aren't solely inherent to the model, but are co-created in the dialogue with the prompter. It's not just about the instrument, but also the 'musician' playing it. So you agree they aren't reasoning? Otherwise why would you need a human to do skillful prompting? Why can't the AI just solve it on its own?
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > So you agree they aren't reasoning? Otherwise why would you need a human to do skillful prompting? Why can't the AI just solve it on its own? That's the argument kings used to justify looking down on peasants. AI, as it is currently, has no motivation of its own; it is just as "happy" to solve a business problem as it is to write Chinese poetry about Swiss software engineers taking their dogs on a ride up the Adliswil-Felsenegg cable car. Good communication skills are still important to get what you want, otherwise we merely descent into a particular SMBC comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3576 https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3576 (This isn't to say the AI we have now are "people", nobody knows how to even test for that yet; I hope we figure this question out some time soon, preferably before we need to know the answer…)
ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago
A year ago I was a believer, and I am more of a believer now. This isnt stopping, I think we have a generalized method to learn from data. It's just a matter of getting the data into it.
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  If you can strap visual, audio and touch sensors onto them and they can genuinely start improving themselves based on the that raw input, then we have a general intelligence.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
suraci 2y ago
I used to look down on ChatGPT and other LLMs because they're crazy expensive to train and need special tuning like SFT/RLHF. I thought their "intelligence" was limited and economically impractical — good for assisting but not replacing humans. At best, they might take over some customer service, translator or teaching jobs. But now, with R1 out there, I'm getting a little nervous, kinda like when Go players saw AlphaGo. Sure, AlphaGo didn't replace humans, but Go is a game, not work. Companies won't hire AI to play games, but they'll absolutely use bots to code software and build cars.
- ninetyninenine 2y ago
  Clearly AI at it's current state can't replace humans. Everyone on the face of the earth knows this. What people are generally hyped about is the trendline into the future. Look at the progress of all of AI up till now. LLMs are a precursor to an AGI that exists in the future.
  - suraci 2y ago
    I'm not saying how advanced R1 is—in fact, it doesn't outperform O1 by much. What really surprised me is how it was built with pure RL without SFT, which I thought was impossible before. And it makes me wonder if human thoughts are synthesizable I hope this is just a misunderstanding stemming from my incomplete knowledge