15 ms·

Three Observations

192 points by davidbarker 2y ago

belter 2y ago
> Systems that start to point to AGI* are coming into view And my coffee machine is plotting the Singularity...Let it be for the record in the future, AGI will be known as A Grand Illusion.
imjonse 2y ago
"as we get closer to achieving AGI, we believe that trending more towards individual empowerment is important; the other likely path we can see is AI being used by authoritarian governments to control their population through mass surveillance and loss of autonomy." The AI being controlled by megacorps scenario conveniently left out.
- DiscourseFan 2y ago
  Currently, OpenAI is the only real big corporation that controls it, but DeepSeek and the myriad academic researchers working on making the models even more efficient are smaller scale and fairly disruptive.
  - pithanyChan 2y ago
    > even more efficient are smaller scale and fairly disruptive. your tiny powerful PC "against" data centers running tickytackytock style brainwashing, priming rythms over days, weeks, months, personalized and perfectly timed with all that IoT you pass every day everywhere, just for the sale, the vote, disrupting your cognitive processes, watching you react and act, testing and quantifying your interactions and their (crawling:) psycho-social envelopment of your development... berry undisruptive, if you ask me, all while you think you're so very normal, thank you very much. not much to hope for except "uuuuh you can makes animes and animations for bluestergram and threats" and ADverse content for le Tube and run automated companies whose supply chains will be just that and maybe maybe maybe train a wAIfu to post on XXX to hopefully find an accelerating ( or exhilarating) and adequately perverted one made of flesh and so on ...
    - chairmansteve 2y ago
      Yep. There's a big difference between personal truth and statiscal truth. In the short term, an individual can avoid the megacorp manipulations. But society will change and those changes will affect the individual.
    - coderenegade 2y ago
      At this stage, it's looking entirely possible that large closed models aren't viable as a moat, because, by virtue of making the model available for use, you open yourself up to having your weights distilled. AI, like anything else, will hit diminishing returns, because there's only so far ahead you can look without error bars exploding, and beyond a certain point, writing "better" code is an academic exercise. Under these circumstances, it would be reasonable to expect that the average person could have a decent amount of useful intelligence at their fingertips. The cynic in me suspects that the result will be zero public access, and a b2b AI service model only from the big players. The optimist in me hopes that the genie has already been unbottled, and open weights (if not necessarily open source) has enough momentum to ensure that people can host this stuff on their own if they so choose. In both cases, training data will be so locked down it'll make breaking into the Pentagon look like an excursion to the sand pit.
  - NewJazz 2y ago
    Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft have considerable control over state of the art models.
- Analemma_ 2y ago
  Even pointing that out is kind of a distraction from the real issue: DOGE is currently an excellent demonstration that the distinction between authoritarian governments and megacorps is a mostly-artificial one, which can and will be blurred to irrelevance if doing so is convenient for the powers that be.
  - snozolli 2y ago
    "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." — Benito Mussolini
    - Gys 2y ago
      https://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/02/07/fake-quote-files-mussolini-on-fascism-and-corporatism/ https://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/02/07/fake-quote-...
      - snozolli 2y ago
        Yeah, I've seen the two sites that claim that it's a fake quote. The link you posted contains a bunch of doublespeak in an attempt to avoid the fact that fascism leans very heavily into corporatism.
        wat10000 2y ago
        Whether it's fake or not is missing the point. Either way, Italian fascism was corporatist. But "corporatism" doesn't mean what people think it means. It refers to dealing with society in terms of different fields, professions, and industries, with "corporation" referring to groups that represented the common interests of those. It's not used here in the common sense of "legally recognized business" and it doesn't refer to rule by said businesses.
        card_zero 2y ago
        So just say that and don't post a fake quote, jeez. Wikiquote has it under "misattributed": https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini#Misattributed https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini#Misattributed "You won't win anyone over with fake quotes" -- Joan of Arc
zazazache 2y ago
lol, lmao even 1) give me more money and i will make you rich 2) don’t look at deepseek 3) I repeat: there is no reason to not keep giving me EXPONENTIALLY more money to boil all of the oceans
llamaimperative 2y ago
> Over time, in fits and starts, the steady march of human innovation [alongside monumental efforts of risk mitigation of each new innovation] has brought previously unimaginable levels of prosperity and improvements to almost every aspect of people’s lives. Anyway, AI/AGI will not yield economic liberation for the masses. We already produce more than enough for economic liberation all over the world, many times over. It hasn't happened. Why? Snuck in here: > the price of... a few inherently limited resources like land may rise even more dramatically. This is really the crux of it. The price of land will skyrocket, driving the "cost of living" (cost of land) wedge further between the haves and have-nots.
- derektank 2y ago
  Can you define what you mean by economic liberation? For most of economic history, I think the definition would have been freedom from famine and slavery and I think on both counts we've been wildly successful. Both basically only occur in failed states, where there's either no government at all (Somalia, Sudan, parts of Iraq and Syria) or the government is an authoritarian dictatorship (North Korea, Venezuela) I ask, because I think you might be overestimating the ability of the current global system to produce "economic liberation", depending upon what you mean. A rough estimate of GDP per capita would put it at ~$20K if you adjust for purchasing power, less than $15K if you don't. That's well below what most people in the developed world would consider to be free of burden or worry and it assumes a completely equal distribution of all production, which is obviously unreasonable. We need to continue to push the ball forward in growing wealth by continuing to improve productivity, which is going to require continued advancements in technology like mass adoption of AI.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    Oh sure, I'm not one of those "the world is so awful" people. We've made immense progress on a lot of very important dimensions. Fair point on the current output not producing enough to really give people their time back. And yes I agree, we should continue pushing productivity forward. My point is only that productivity growth by itself does not necessarily yield anything close to the optimal distribution of its benefits. In fact we have good reason to believe that higher tiers of technology which produce more technological leverage owned by fewer and fewer people are naturally antagonistic to optimal distribution of its benefits. I'll take a fairly expansive definition of "optimal distribution" here to just say we should shoot at least for a distribution of wealth that is socially and politically stable for a free society in the long run.
talles 2y ago
TLDR: 1. The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it. 2. The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. 3. The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature.
- DiscourseFan 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 2y ago
    "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - DiscourseFan 2y ago
      With all due respect, I wouldn’t be surprised if Sam Altman uses his own software to help him write his blog.
- bambax 2y ago
  The only true part is 2. 1 is plainly false. Enormous ressources have been poured into models since the end 2023 and the "intelligence" (for lack of a better term) has stayed roughly the same, around the level of GPT-4. Nothing has happened since then. 3 is a philosophical opinion, not based on any falsifiable evidence. All in all: mostly FUD, as per the usual MO.
  - uluyol 2y ago
    How is 1 false? Log improvement means for 10x the cost the model is 2x as good. For 100x the cost, the model is 3x as good. Not a curve to be happy about TBH. You need to simultaneously find big efficiency wins and drive up costs substantially to get 4-5x improvements, and it is probably impossible to maintain good year on year improvements after the first 2-3 years when you get all the low hanging fruit.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
gloflo 2y ago
"as we get closer to achieving AGI" AGI as defined by OpenAI as s "AI systems that can generate at least $100 billion in profits", right? Because what they are doing has very little to do with actual AGI.
- csmpltn 2y ago
  > "AI systems that can generate at least $100 billion in profits" Like... a calculator? or Python?
  - graypegg 2y ago
    Linear Regression could be the world's first AGI /sarcasm
fsndz 2y ago
The chief hype officer is back at it again. Altman is defending exponential progress when everything points to incremental progress with signs of diminishing returns. Altman thinks benefits will naturally trickle down when everything points to corporation replacing employees with AI to boost their profit margins. I now understand why some people say Sama might be wrong: https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-sam-altman-is-wrong https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-sam-altman-is-wrong
- bwfan123 2y ago
  "assume the sale" is the marketing tactic. ie, in every pitch, project that agi (whatever that means) is here, and is a persistent threat. unfortunately, ai is not search or social. there are no network-effects here. so, get-big-fast is not going to work. and slowly the masses start waking up and asking what the hell is this good for except as a fancy auto-complete.
  - EA-3167 2y ago
    Unfortunately there is essentially a loose federation of quasi-religious "cults" that have emerged around the topic of AI. For an otherwise mostly secular group of people, the lure of reinventing Abrahamic religion in their own image was inescapable. I feel like most sensible people took the off ramp by the time Roko's Basilisk popped up, but as we saw with the Zizians that's not always the case. So there's this thread of taking two assumptions at face value I see a lot here and elsewhere: 1. What we call "AI" now is actually some kind of AI, and the rest is just scaling up. 2. It's inevitable that AGI would conform to sci-fi tropes. Meanwhile we've been watching BILLIONS spent on data centers, power for data centers, water for data centers... all of that going in one end, and LLM's coming out the other. As long as the future AI overlord requires enough power and water to run a city, and the best it can manage amounts to a fun show, I'll keep my alarmism in check. But Altman, man he really know his audience, and he's going to sell sell sell, to an audience that's been primed on fiction and religion to believe in him like some kind of blank-faced prophet.
- csomar 2y ago
  > Altman thinks benefits will naturally trickle down when everything points to corporation replacing employees with AI to boost their profit margins. That's not what he is saying. He is saying that this investment in AI will yield incredible returns and power. The investor will dominate the next decade(s) and thus you should invest. Of course, he has to say it in a careful way not to alarm politically correct people. But, in essence, he is trying to create investor FOMO to drive his next round.
bambax 2y ago
The very term "AGI" is a confession that the I in AI doesn't stand for intelligence. What is even the opposite of "general intelligence"? Specialized intelligence? But AI already has a large spectrum. It's not an expert system in this or that. It's quite general. But it's not actually intelligent. We should replace "AGI" with "AAI": Actual Artificial Intelligence.
- wat10000 2y ago
  "AGI" because computers beat humans in many specific areas of intelligence. Chess playing used to be considered AI, for example. It wasn't too long ago that top human-level Go play was considered out of reach for computers, now computers exceed humans. But there isn't a system that matches or exceeds human intelligence in all aspects. That's what the G is for.
edding4500 2y ago
> In some sense, AGI is just another tool in this ever-taller scaffolding of human progress we are building together. In another sense, it is the beginning of something for which it’s hard not to say “this time it’s different”; the economic growth in front of us looks astonishing, and we can now imagine a world where we cure all diseases, have much more time to enjoy with our families, and can fully realize our creative potential yeah, right. What world is this guy living in? An idealistic one? Will AI equally spread the profits of that economic growth he is talking about? I only see companies getting by on less menpower and doing fine, while poor people stay poor. Bravo. Well thought trhough, guy who now sells "AI".
FloatArtifact 2y ago
"Anyone in 2035 should be able to marshall the intellectual capacity equivalent to everyone in 2025" There's a lot to unpack there. Maintain an internal 10-year technological lead compared to what's public with OpenAI?
qwertox 2y ago
> 2. The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. You can see this in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024, where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period. Moore’s law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger. This is so exciting. I guess NVIDIA's Project DIGITS [0] will be the starting point for a bit more serious home lab usage of local LLMs, while still being a bit like what Quadro used to be in the pro/prosumer market in the 00s/10s. Now it's all RTX, and while differences still exist between pro gamer cards and workstation cards, most of what workstation GPUs were used back then is easily doable by pro gamer cards nowadays. Let's just hope that the quoted values are also valid for these prosumer devices like Project DIGITS. Also, let's hope that companies start targeting that user base specifically, like a Groq SBC. [0] https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-puts-grace-blackwell-on-every-desk-and-at-every-ai-developers-fingertips https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-puts-grace-blackwe...
caust1c 2y ago
The crux of the challenges AGI presents is hardly mentioned as a footnote in this blog: > In particular, it does seem like the balance of power between capital and labor could easily get messed up, and this may require early intervention. We are open to strange-sounding ideas like giving some “compute budget” to enable everyone on Earth to use a lot of AI, but we can also see a lot of ways where just relentlessly driving the cost of intelligence as low as possible has the desired effect. The primary challenge in my opinion is that access to AGI will dramatically accelerate wealth inequality. Driving costs lower will not magically enable the less educated to be better able to educate themselves using AGI, particularly if they're already at risk or on the edge of economic uncertainty. I want to know how people like sama are thinking about the economics of access to AGI in more broad terms, more than just a footnote in a utopian fluff piece. edit: I am an optimist when it comes to the applications around AI, but I have no doubt that we're in for a rough time as the world copes with the economic implications of it's applications. Globally, the highest paying jobs are knowledge workers and we're on the verge (relatively speaking) of making that work go the way that blue collar work did in post-war United States. There's a lot of hard problems ahead and it bothers me when people sweep them under the rug in the name of progress.
timewizard 2y ago
> 1. The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it. We are burning cash so fast and getting very little in return for it. This is a death spiral and we refuse to admit it. > The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. We are entirely unconcerned with accuracy and refuse to see how the limitations of our product will not allow us to follow this simple economic aphorism into success. > The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. You see, even though we're burning money at an exponentially increasing rate, some how this /linear/ increase in output is secretly "super-exponential" in nature. I have nothing to back this up but you just have to believe me. At least Steve Jobs build something worth having before bullshitting about it. This is just embarassing.
guybedo 2y ago
At first AI models/systems/agents help employees be more productive. But i can't imagine a future where this doesn't lead to mass layoffs, or hiring freezes because these systems can replace tens or hundreds of employess, the end result being more and more unemployed people. Sure there's been the industrial revolution and the argument usually is: some people will lose their jobs but many other jobs will be created. I'm not sure this argument gonna hold this time given the magnitude of the change. Is there any serious study of the impact of AI on society and employment, and most importantly is there any solution to this problem ?
- jayseattle 2y ago
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- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  In terms of solutions: UBI is frequently proposed. Depending on the degree to which AI and automation obsoletes human labor and increases, UBI could become arbitrarily redistributive. Increased output would keep inflation at bay, and the reduced incentive to work would be mitigated by the fact that there almost wouldn't need to be any incentives remaining for wealth creation. Such an AGI scenario might also raise some old questions about the degree to which wealth disparity-as-an-incentive-for-success remains useful and justifiable. One wonders how Altman would receive this proposal.
  - kadushka 2y ago
    I wonder what will happen to millions of people with $3k+/mo mortgages when they’re all unemployed and UBI is only $2k/mo.
    - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
      Sounds like the mortgage market would go through a correction? Or UBI would be bumped up to $4k. Lots of possible outcomes.
      - 2y ago
sealeck 2y ago
Reading between the lines, I get the feeling that OpenAI may be starting to feel desperate if they feel the need to drive the hype like this.
- iqandjoke 2y ago
  The article is written for journalist (and investor). See the footnote.
  - sealeck 2y ago
    Totally. "AGI = $100bn of profit" lol
- raghavtoshniwal 2y ago
  It feels like every major lab is saying the same thing: https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace https://www.wsj.com/video/events/the-race-for-true-ai-at-google/7953FE4B-AE84-4AFA-9722-AA215EB357EE https://www.wsj.com/video/events/the-race-for-true-ai-at-goo... Even folks _leaving_ OpenAI, who have no incentive to drive hype, are saying that we're very close to AGI. https://x.com/sjgadler/status/1883928200029602236 https://x.com/sjgadler/status/1883928200029602236 Even folks like Yoshua Benjio, Hinton are saying we're close to it. The models keep getting better at an exponential. How much evidence does one need to dispel the "this is OpenAI/sama hype" argument?
  - caseyy 2y ago
    > How much evidence does one need to dispel the "this is OpenAI/sama hype" argument? For AGI hype, we need exactly one piece of evidence that machine AGI exists, or that we know how to build it. Otherwise, it's an exaggeration that AGI is imminent - otherwise known as hype. Or maybe it's hope, but sama suggests it should be an expectation.
  - sealeck 2y ago
    These are all people running AI labs! They want investment, and what better way to get investment than to tell people you're going to create Terminator? The people leaving OpenAI are joining other labs – their livelihoods depend on AI companies receiving investment: "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it". > The models keep getting better at an exponential [sic]. We don't know if this is true. A lot of growth that appears exponential is often quadratic (https://longform.asmartbear.com/exponential-growth/ https://longform.asmartbear.com/exponential-growth/) or follows a logistic function (e.g. Moore's law). Additionally there's a LOT of benchmark gaming going on, and a lot of the benchmark solving is not down to having a process that actually solves the problems; it just turns out that the problems already kind of lie in the span of text on the internet.
abc-1 2y ago
I refuse to listen to anyone who has done nothing in life but maximize their wealth and power, play corporate political games, and grift investors for all they're worth. Shame the actual innovators don't blog much, usually because they're too busy doing the actual work.
azinman2 2y ago
> the economic growth in front of us looks astonishing, and we can now imagine a world where we cure all diseases, have much more time to enjoy with our families, and can fully realize our creative potential. I think this is extremely myopic to assume things like “have much more time to enjoy with our families” unless that time is because you’re unemployed. Every major technology over the past couple hundred years has been paired with such promises, and it’s never materialized. Only through unions did we get 8h days and weekends. Electricity, factory farming, etc has not made me work any less, even if I do different things than I would have 200 years ago. I think it’s also odd to assume the only things preventing curing all disease is the lack of intelligence and scale. There are so many more factors that go into this, and into an already competitive landscape (biology) which is constantly evolving and changing. With every new technique innovated (eg CRISPR) and every new discovery (eg immunotherapy) proven, the directions of what’s possible changes. If AGI is thru LLMs as we know it (color me skeptical), they do not have the ability to absorb such new possibilities and change on a dime. I could go on and on but this is just a random comment on the internet. I understand the original post is meant to achieve certain goals at a specific word length, but not diving into all of to see possibilities (including failure modes in his extraordinarily optimistic assumptions) is quite irresponsible if he is truly meant to be a leader for a bold new future.
- twright 2y ago
  The line you quoted caught my eye too and confused why it was in there without an explicit or implicit mention of "in ten years we'll be so productive we'll have 3-day work weeks". I think you make a great point about LLM's being able to absorb new possibilities. I like to cite the invention of the MRI machine as an incredible innovation that took three independent discoveries over forty years to realize, not to mention commercialize. Maybe if (big if) when AGI comes it will be able to spit out dozens of inventions that are some culmination of similarly independent discoveries but I'm not going to hold my breath. We have to remember they are just extremely good regurgitation machines which, in my experience, why I've found they're nearly useless in niche programming tasks.
deleted 2y ago
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dimgl 2y ago
I’m not sure anyone is convinced this will empower individuals. On the contrary: if we get this tech “right” enough, the inequality gap will become an inequality chasm… There is no financial incentive to pay humans when a machine is a fraction of the cost.
- TechDebtDevin 2y ago
  The next fifty years are going to be quite interesting.
- chad_oliver 2y ago
  If each human body needs 0.2 acre of land to grow the food necessary for subsistence, what happens when the price of intelligence keeps dropping and one person's intelligence (even when directed towards the highest-value use!) is not enough to afford the use of that land? In other words, what happens when humans are no longer economically viable? Jevon's Paradox means that the demand for intelligence will keep rising as the cost drops, so I can't help but expect a steady increase in the economic value of land _when used for AI_. It'll take a long time before it exceeds the economic value of land when used for human subsistence, but the growth curves are not pointing in encouraging directions.
  - jpadkins 2y ago
    AGI / human overlords that cater to AGI won't need earth resources for more than a few decades. There will be a bootstrapping period, reliant on earth resources but soon it will be much cleaner to have solar/nuclear in space and have robotic mining of raw resources from asteroids.
smokel 2y ago
> The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. ... Moore’s law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger. Moore waited at least five years [1] before deriving his law. On top of that, I don't think that it makes much sense to compare commercial pricing schemes to technical advancements. [1] http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/moore-crammingmorecomponents.pdf http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/moore-crammingm...
- bibanez 2y ago
  The "10x every 12 months" is pure salesman from sama. An engineer wouldn't do these extrapolations from little data in good faith.
  - signatoremo 2y ago
    He is talking about cost. Are you saying price didn’t go down 10 times the last 12 months? How much data is too little?
    - NewJazz 2y ago
      1 year of data is indeed too little if you are trying to forecast one year ahead. Also the pricing is set by OpenAI. We don't know their actual costs decreased by that factor. Only that they cut their prices.
      - sanxiyn 2y ago
        We don't know OpenAI's actual cost, but presumably Sam does know.
        lmm 2y ago
        I'm sure he does, but why would he ever tell the truth about it except by coincidence?
        2y ago
Eliezer 2y ago
I wonder who wrote this? Doesn't sound like Altman's voice. I wonder who theorized this? Altman isn't known for having models about AGI. To the actual theorist: Claiming in one paragraph that AI goes as log resources, and in the next paragraph that the resource costs drop by 10x per year, is a contradiction; the latter paragraph shows a dependence on algorithms that is nothing like "it's just the compute silly".
- cratermoon 2y ago
  [flagged]
- Centigonal 2y ago
  > Altman isn't known for having models about AGI. His blog posts about AGI predate OpenAI. https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1 https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1 https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-2 https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-2
  - Eliezer 2y ago
    Hadn't seen that before, and despite being bog-standard Bostrom it's still more of an attempt to hold a theory than I'd seen associated with him before. Note nonoverlap of writing style and theory with the present post.
cratermoon 2y ago
Relevant: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/sam-altman-mythmaking/680152/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/sam-a...
msp26 2y ago
> one of our reasons for launching products early and often is to give society and the technology time to co-evolve Is this really true? O3 (not mini) is still being held for ""safety testing"", and Sora was announced so far before release.
dbuser99 2y ago
AI has to be the solution to everything to justify the kind of investments going into it right now. Sam’s a savvy businessman so he obviously understands that and goes few steps further. He promises exponential returns and addresses any regulatory and societal concerns. This piece is strategically crafted, not for us, but for investors.
aithrowawaycomm 2y ago
> *By using the term AGI here, we aim to communicate clearly, and we do not intend to alter or interpret the definitions and processes that define our relationship with Microsoft. We fully expect to be partnered with Microsoft for the long term. This footnote seems silly, but on the other hand we know some journalists will try to get clicks by writing something silly so here we are pre-empting the silliness… OpenAI and Microsoft signed a profoundly silly contract with vague terms about AGI! It's petty to snipe about journalists asking silly questions: they are responding to the fact that Sam Altman and Satya Nadella are not serious people, despite all their money and power.
credit_guy 2y ago
Trying to regulate AI so that it is used predominantly for good and not for evil is as futile as trying to regulate steam in the early 19th century to be used for good and not for evil. It turned out steam was mainly used for good, but nothing could stop the navies of the great powers build steam powered battleships. Nothing will stop the Chinese CCP to direct AI towards more state surveillance. Or any number of actors to use AI to create extremely lethal swarms of drones.
chvid 2y ago
“The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it. These resources are chiefly training compute, data, and inference compute.” Hasn’t the latest big improvements in LLMs been due to change in approach/algorithm? Reasoning models and augmenting LLMs with external tools and internet access (agents and deep research). As far I can tell classical pure LLMs are only improving modestly at this point.
ineptech 2y ago
> AI will seep into all areas of the economy and society; we will expect everything to be smart. I fear this is correct, but with "smart" in the sense of smart TVs. In economic terms, TVs are amazing compared to just a few years ago - more pixels, much cheaper, more functionality - but in practice they spy on you and take ten seconds to turn on and show unskippable ads. This is purely a social (legal, economic, etc) problem as opposed to a technical one, and its solution (if we ever find one) would be likewise. So it's frightening to see someone with as much power over the outcome say something like this: > In particular, it does seem like the balance of power between capital and labor could easily get messed up, and this may require early intervention. We are open to strange-sounding ideas like giving some “compute budget” to enable everyone on Earth to use a lot of AI, but we can also see a lot of ways where just relentlessly driving the cost of intelligence as low as possible has the desired effect. When capital has control of an industry, but voluntarily gives little pieces of it out to labor so that they can "share" the profit, I think we all know how that turns out. It does seem possible that AGI really will get built and really will seep into everything and really will create a ton of economic value. But getting from there to the part where it improves everyone's lives is a social problem, akin to the problem of smart TVs, and I can't imagine a worse plan to solve that problem than leaving it up to the capitalist that owns the AGIs.
TheAceOfHearts 2y ago
> The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. I'm still stuck thinking about this point. I don't know that it's obviously true. Maybe a more bounded claim would make more sense, something like: increasing intelligence in the short-term has big compounding effects. But there's also a cap as society and infrastructure has to adapt. And I don't know how this plays out within an adversarial system where people might be competing for scarce resources like human attention. Taken to the extreme, one could imagine a fantasy/scifi scenario where each person is empowered like a god in their own universe, allowing them to experiment, learn and and create endlessly.
- jp42 2y ago
  30 years ago, no one in my native place has seen telephone. Now every single person young and old are connected to the internet, conduct banking and other transaction via phone and many many other things. Many unimaginable things happened in last 30 year from vantage point of my native place. Assuming same level of of transformation for next 30 year it will be still massive progress. Given current tech and AI, the rate of progress for next 30 years will be far greater than last 30. So I am believer in AI and tech in general will make massive progress in next decade
abetusk 2y ago
> 1. The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it. > 2. The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. > 3. The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. My own editorial: Point 1 is pretty interesting as if P != NP then this is essentially "we can't do better than random search". So, in order to find progressively better solutions as we increase the (linear) input, we need exponentially more resources to find the answer. While I believe P != NP it's interesting to see this play out in the context of learning and AI. Point 2 is semi well-known. I'm having trouble finding it but there was an article a while back talking about algorithmic efficiencies to the DFT (or DCT?) were outpacing efficiencies that could be just attributed to Moore's law. Meaning the DFT was improving a few orders of magnitude faster than just Moore's law would imply. I assume this is essentially a Wright's law but for attention, in some sense, where more attention to problems leads to better optimizations that dovetail with Moore's law. Point 3 seems like it's almost a corollary, at least in the short term. If intelligence is capturing the exponential search and it can be re-used to find further efficiency, as in point 2, you get super-exponential growth. I think Kurzweil mentioned something about this as well. I haven't read the whole article but this jumped out at me: > Our mission is to ensure that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) benefits all of humanity. A bald faced lie. Their mission is to capture value from developing AGI. Any benefit to humanity is incidental.
Foofoobar12345 2y ago
So much negativity all the time. The fact remains that AI models are out in the public domain. If you’re unable to see how that can improve the lives of an average person, that’s a failure of imagination. Don’t let megacorps dominance prevent individual action. The best way to be hopeful is to effect change in your immediate surroundings. Teach people how to leverage AI, then they won’t be hold hostage to the tyranny of the beauraucrats - doctors, lawyers, accountants, politicians, software engineers, project managers, bankers, investment advisors etc. Yes, AI makes mistakes .. so what? Humans do too. Credit where credit is due - Sam may be no saint, but OpenAI deserves credit for launching this revolution. Directly or indirectly that led to the release of open models. Would the results have been the same without Sam? Nobody knows, not a point worth anybody’s time debating. Given most of us here are software engineers, it’s natural to feel threatened, there will be those of us whose skills will be made obsolete. And some of us will make the jump to the land of ideas, and these tools will empower us to build solutions that previously required large companies to build. Perhaps that might mean that we focus less on monetary rewards instead of change, as it becomes ever so easy to effect that change. To those whose skills will be made obsolete - you have a choice on whether you want to let that happen. Some amount of fear is healthy - keeps our mind alert and allows us to grow. There will be a growing pain, as our species evolves. We’ll have to navigate that with empathy. Change starts from you. You are more powerful than you can imagine, at any given point.
thrance 2y ago
> In particular, it does seem like the balance of power between capital and labor could easily get messed up, and this may require early intervention. Marxist analysis from Sam Altman? > We are open to strange-sounding ideas like giving some “compute budget” to enable everyone on Earth to use a lot of AI, but we can also see a lot of ways where just relentlessly driving the cost of intelligence as low as possible has the desired effect. I can't imagine a world in which billionaires (trillionaires?) would happily share their wealth to people whose work they don't need anymore. Honestly, I have more faith in a rogue ASI taking over the world to install a fair post-scarcity society than on current politicians and tech-oligarchs to give up a single cent to the masses.
TheRealNGenius 2y ago
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dustingetz 2y ago
each subsequent post is worse than the one before who is the audience for this drivel
yapyap 2y ago
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blah2244 2y ago
> AGI is a weakly defined term, but generally speaking we mean it to be a system that can tackle increasingly complex problems, at human level, in many fields. Is it just me, or is that an incredibly weak/vague definition for AGI? Feels like you could make the claim that AI is at this level already if you stretch the terms he used enough.
- wat10000 2y ago
  It's funny, there used to be a pretty solid definition of AGI: a system that can pass the Turing Test. Then we got there, and it turned out that passing the Turing Test is actually pretty specialized and doesn't mean the system is as smart as a human in all aspects.
0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
>Ensuring that the benefits of AGI are broadly distributed is critical. The historical impact of technological progress suggests that most of the metrics we care about (health outcomes, economic prosperity, etc.) get better on average and over the long-term, but increasing equality does not seem technologically determined and getting this right may require new ideas. I don't see why we should trust OpenAI's promises now, when they've broken promises in the past. See the "OpenAI has a history of broken promises" section of this webpage: https://www.safetyabandoned.org/ https://www.safetyabandoned.org/ In my view, state AGs should not allow them to complete their transition to a for-profit.
- deleted 2y ago
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- noch 2y ago
  > I don't see why we should trust OpenAI's promises now, when they've broken promises in the past. I don't see what "our" trust has to do with anything. Perhaps you're an investor in OpenAI and your trust matters to OpenAI and its plans? But for the rest of us, our trust doesn't matter. It would be like me saying, "I don't see why we should trust Saudi Aramco."
  - h0l0cube 2y ago
    > It would be like me saying, "I don't see why we should trust Saudi Aramco." It's completely fair response to say that if the CEO of Saudi Aramco performatively pens an article on how to mitigate the effects of global warming, while also profiting from it, and engaging in no tangible actions to fix the problem.
    - noch 2y ago
      > It's completely fair response My question, rephrased, is "so what"? What is my or our trust worth? What does us claiming we no longer trust Saudi Aramco achieve unless we are investors or perhaps other significant stakeholders?
pton_xd 2y ago
We can't even simulate a C. elegans worm with 1k cells and 302 neurons. But, sure, a few more GPUs and we'll have AGI!
- drdeca 2y ago
  This seems to be assuming that AGI would be similarly difficult to full brain emulation? This doesn’t seem obviously true.
  - almostgotcaught 2y ago
    > This doesn’t seem obviously true. Is this kind of "casting doubt" some kind of cheat code that suspends all disbelief? Anyway, yes it does seem absolutely obviously true that if you want to reproduce intelligence you must (at least at first) simulate it.
    - ckw 2y ago
      Reasoning models are more intelligent than C. elegans.
    - drdeca 2y ago
      It is easier to make a flying machine than it is to make a machine that flies by the exact principles that birds use to fly (with flapping wings and such). Do you have an argument for why general intelligence couldn’t be like flight in this way? You just said that it is obvious. I do not share this intuition. Could you give an explanation for why you expect it to be unlike flight in this respect?
      - almostgotcaught 2y ago
        > It is easier to make a flying machine than it is to make a machine that flies by the exact principles that birds use to fly do you think that "flying machines" aren't simulated before manufacturing?
        2y ago
vivzkestrel 2y ago
the day your neural network has 1 quintillion connections between each other wake me up because that is when we are getting anywhere close to AGI, billions and trillions are rookie numbers
- moralestapia 2y ago
  >one quintillion connections What a load of nonsense.
Animats 2y ago
2. The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. You can see this in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024, where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period. Moore’s law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger. 3. The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. A consequence of this is that we see no reason for exponentially increasing investment to stop in the near future. First, if the cost is coming down so fast, why the need for "exponentially increasing investment"? One could make the same exponential growth claim for, say, the electric power industry, which had a growth period around a century ago and eventually stabilized near 5% of GDP. The "tech sector" in total is around 9% of US GDP, and relatively stable. Second, only about half the people with college degrees in the US have jobs that need college degrees. The demand for educated people is finite, as is painfully obvious to those paying off college loans. This screed comes across as a desperate attempt to justify OpenAI's bloated valuation.
- choilive 2y ago
  The costs are coming down fast because of the investment and would not happen independently of the investment. The same reason for Moore's law can be generalized as the learning/experience curve. You could make the argument that the demand for AI has a higher growth rate than the learning rate ex. if AI becomes 10x more cost efficient and results in demand growing 100x, you would also need to follow with an exponential growth in inference investment.
- joshtbradley 2y ago
  First, it requires exponential investment because > 1. The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it. Incremental improvements in intelligence require exponentially more resources. Only once that step is achieved can costs be reduced. Second, intelligence is not the same as education. Education is specialized, intelligence is general. Every modern convenience around you is the result of intelligence.
  - esperent 2y ago
xbar 2y ago
Only two of those are observations.
pplonski86 2y ago
> Still, imagine it as a real-but-relatively-junior virtual coworker. Now imagine 1,000 of them. Or 1 million of them. Now imagine such agents in every field of knowledge work. I really don't want a future in which I had to supervise 1 million of real-but-relatively-junior virtual coworkers. I would prefer 1 senior over 1 million juniors. I'm in the programming industry and I don't think that coding might be scaled.
tunesmith 2y ago
We've just gotten through a big second generation of available models, but at least for the projects I'm on, I still feel just as far away as ever as being able to trust responses. I spent a few hours this weekend working on a side project that involved setting up a graphql server with a few basic query resolvers and field resolvers, and my experience with 4o, R1, o3-mini-high were all akin to arguing with too-confident junior engineers that were confused, without realizing it, about what they thought they knew. And this was basic stuff about simple graphql resolvers. I did have my first experience of o3-mini-high (finally, after much arguing) being able to answer something that R1 couldn't, though. It's weird, because it's still wildly useful and my ideas for side projects are definitely more expansive than they used to be. And yet, I'm really far from having any fear of replacement. Almost none of the answers I'm getting are truly nailing the experience of teaching me something new, while also having perfect accuracy. (I'm on ChatGPT+, not pro.)
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  Same. I think the tools have gotten a little better with agent mode and all that but it still doesn't get anything even slightly complicated for an API it hasn't seen before. Like it hasn't gotten more intelligent since maybe Gpt 3.5. I quite like them as somebody who has a huge problem with onset procrastination. I immediately ask them to write something and criticize them and write it myself because whatever it comes up with is so damn stupid.
  - cma 2y ago
    Have you tried putting the API in context? Gemini has 2M context, where original 3.5 had like 4K and not great with it. While some large apis may not fit, not many that it hasn't seen before fit that bill. For updated large APIs you can put in the changelog but more work to gather all the detailed API changes and changed documentation on their own.
- sunpazed 2y ago
  Even though I have a reasonable intuition and understanding of how a LLM works, I am still awe-struck each and every time I use one. The fact that I have a junior developer at my convenience is a huge efficiency gain. I’ve been able to automate the rudimentary elements and focus my time on the stuff that counts.
DrScientist 2y ago
> we can now imagine a world where we cure all diseases Sure we can imagine it. However to make it happen, it's not enough to imagine the end goal, you need to understand and execute every single step. I suspect his lack of knowledge about what's actually involved allows him to imagine it. ie I notice he hasn't declared a world free of software bugs and failures ( a much easier task ), before declaring a world free of bugs in human biology.

192 points by davidbarker 2y ago

> Systems that start to point to AGI* are coming into view And my coffee machine is plotting the Singularity...Let it be for the record in the future, AGI will be known as A Grand Illusion.

imjonse 2y ago

"as we get closer to achieving AGI, we believe that trending more towards individual empowerment is important; the other likely path we can see is AI being used by authoritarian governments to control their population through mass surveillance and loss of autonomy." The AI being controlled by megacorps scenario conveniently left out.

DiscourseFan 2y ago
Currently, OpenAI is the only real big corporation that controls it, but DeepSeek and the myriad academic researchers working on making the models even more efficient are smaller scale and fairly disruptive.
- pithanyChan 2y ago
  > even more efficient are smaller scale and fairly disruptive. your tiny powerful PC "against" data centers running tickytackytock style brainwashing, priming rythms over days, weeks, months, personalized and perfectly timed with all that IoT you pass every day everywhere, just for the sale, the vote, disrupting your cognitive processes, watching you react and act, testing and quantifying your interactions and their (crawling:) psycho-social envelopment of your development... berry undisruptive, if you ask me, all while you think you're so very normal, thank you very much. not much to hope for except "uuuuh you can makes animes and animations for bluestergram and threats" and ADverse content for le Tube and run automated companies whose supply chains will be just that and maybe maybe maybe train a wAIfu to post on XXX to hopefully find an accelerating ( or exhilarating) and adequately perverted one made of flesh and so on ...
  - chairmansteve 2y ago
    Yep. There's a big difference between personal truth and statiscal truth. In the short term, an individual can avoid the megacorp manipulations. But society will change and those changes will affect the individual.
  - coderenegade 2y ago
    At this stage, it's looking entirely possible that large closed models aren't viable as a moat, because, by virtue of making the model available for use, you open yourself up to having your weights distilled. AI, like anything else, will hit diminishing returns, because there's only so far ahead you can look without error bars exploding, and beyond a certain point, writing "better" code is an academic exercise. Under these circumstances, it would be reasonable to expect that the average person could have a decent amount of useful intelligence at their fingertips. The cynic in me suspects that the result will be zero public access, and a b2b AI service model only from the big players. The optimist in me hopes that the genie has already been unbottled, and open weights (if not necessarily open source) has enough momentum to ensure that people can host this stuff on their own if they so choose. In both cases, training data will be so locked down it'll make breaking into the Pentagon look like an excursion to the sand pit.
- NewJazz 2y ago
  Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft have considerable control over state of the art models.
Analemma_ 2y ago
Even pointing that out is kind of a distraction from the real issue: DOGE is currently an excellent demonstration that the distinction between authoritarian governments and megacorps is a mostly-artificial one, which can and will be blurred to irrelevance if doing so is convenient for the powers that be.
- snozolli 2y ago
  "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." — Benito Mussolini
  - Gys 2y ago
    https://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/02/07/fake-quote-files-mussolini-on-fascism-and-corporatism/ https://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/02/07/fake-quote-...
    - snozolli 2y ago
      Yeah, I've seen the two sites that claim that it's a fake quote. The link you posted contains a bunch of doublespeak in an attempt to avoid the fact that fascism leans very heavily into corporatism.
      - wat10000 2y ago
        Whether it's fake or not is missing the point. Either way, Italian fascism was corporatist. But "corporatism" doesn't mean what people think it means. It refers to dealing with society in terms of different fields, professions, and industries, with "corporation" referring to groups that represented the common interests of those. It's not used here in the common sense of "legally recognized business" and it doesn't refer to rule by said businesses.
      - card_zero 2y ago
        So just say that and don't post a fake quote, jeez. Wikiquote has it under "misattributed": https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini#Misattributed https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini#Misattributed "You won't win anyone over with fake quotes" -- Joan of Arc

zazazache 2y ago

lol, lmao even 1) give me more money and i will make you rich 2) don’t look at deepseek 3) I repeat: there is no reason to not keep giving me EXPONENTIALLY more money to boil all of the oceans

llamaimperative 2y ago

> Over time, in fits and starts, the steady march of human innovation [alongside monumental efforts of risk mitigation of each new innovation] has brought previously unimaginable levels of prosperity and improvements to almost every aspect of people’s lives. Anyway, AI/AGI will not yield economic liberation for the masses. We already produce more than enough for economic liberation all over the world, many times over. It hasn't happened. Why? Snuck in here: > the price of... a few inherently limited resources like land may rise even more dramatically. This is really the crux of it. The price of land will skyrocket, driving the "cost of living" (cost of land) wedge further between the haves and have-nots.

derektank 2y ago
Can you define what you mean by economic liberation? For most of economic history, I think the definition would have been freedom from famine and slavery and I think on both counts we've been wildly successful. Both basically only occur in failed states, where there's either no government at all (Somalia, Sudan, parts of Iraq and Syria) or the government is an authoritarian dictatorship (North Korea, Venezuela) I ask, because I think you might be overestimating the ability of the current global system to produce "economic liberation", depending upon what you mean. A rough estimate of GDP per capita would put it at ~$20K if you adjust for purchasing power, less than $15K if you don't. That's well below what most people in the developed world would consider to be free of burden or worry and it assumes a completely equal distribution of all production, which is obviously unreasonable. We need to continue to push the ball forward in growing wealth by continuing to improve productivity, which is going to require continued advancements in technology like mass adoption of AI.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  Oh sure, I'm not one of those "the world is so awful" people. We've made immense progress on a lot of very important dimensions. Fair point on the current output not producing enough to really give people their time back. And yes I agree, we should continue pushing productivity forward. My point is only that productivity growth by itself does not necessarily yield anything close to the optimal distribution of its benefits. In fact we have good reason to believe that higher tiers of technology which produce more technological leverage owned by fewer and fewer people are naturally antagonistic to optimal distribution of its benefits. I'll take a fairly expansive definition of "optimal distribution" here to just say we should shoot at least for a distribution of wealth that is socially and politically stable for a free society in the long run.

talles 2y ago

TLDR: 1. The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it. 2. The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. 3. The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature.

DiscourseFan 2y ago
[flagged]
- dang 2y ago
  "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - DiscourseFan 2y ago
    With all due respect, I wouldn’t be surprised if Sam Altman uses his own software to help him write his blog.
bambax 2y ago
The only true part is 2. 1 is plainly false. Enormous ressources have been poured into models since the end 2023 and the "intelligence" (for lack of a better term) has stayed roughly the same, around the level of GPT-4. Nothing has happened since then. 3 is a philosophical opinion, not based on any falsifiable evidence. All in all: mostly FUD, as per the usual MO.
- uluyol 2y ago
  How is 1 false? Log improvement means for 10x the cost the model is 2x as good. For 100x the cost, the model is 3x as good. Not a curve to be happy about TBH. You need to simultaneously find big efficiency wins and drive up costs substantially to get 4-5x improvements, and it is probably impossible to maintain good year on year improvements after the first 2-3 years when you get all the low hanging fruit.

deleted 2y ago

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gloflo 2y ago

"as we get closer to achieving AGI" AGI as defined by OpenAI as s "AI systems that can generate at least $100 billion in profits", right? Because what they are doing has very little to do with actual AGI.

csmpltn 2y ago
> "AI systems that can generate at least $100 billion in profits" Like... a calculator? or Python?
- graypegg 2y ago
  Linear Regression could be the world's first AGI /sarcasm

fsndz 2y ago

The chief hype officer is back at it again. Altman is defending exponential progress when everything points to incremental progress with signs of diminishing returns. Altman thinks benefits will naturally trickle down when everything points to corporation replacing employees with AI to boost their profit margins. I now understand why some people say Sama might be wrong: https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-sam-altman-is-wrong https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-sam-altman-is-wrong

bwfan123 2y ago
"assume the sale" is the marketing tactic. ie, in every pitch, project that agi (whatever that means) is here, and is a persistent threat. unfortunately, ai is not search or social. there are no network-effects here. so, get-big-fast is not going to work. and slowly the masses start waking up and asking what the hell is this good for except as a fancy auto-complete.
- EA-3167 2y ago
  Unfortunately there is essentially a loose federation of quasi-religious "cults" that have emerged around the topic of AI. For an otherwise mostly secular group of people, the lure of reinventing Abrahamic religion in their own image was inescapable. I feel like most sensible people took the off ramp by the time Roko's Basilisk popped up, but as we saw with the Zizians that's not always the case. So there's this thread of taking two assumptions at face value I see a lot here and elsewhere: 1. What we call "AI" now is actually some kind of AI, and the rest is just scaling up. 2. It's inevitable that AGI would conform to sci-fi tropes. Meanwhile we've been watching BILLIONS spent on data centers, power for data centers, water for data centers... all of that going in one end, and LLM's coming out the other. As long as the future AI overlord requires enough power and water to run a city, and the best it can manage amounts to a fun show, I'll keep my alarmism in check. But Altman, man he really know his audience, and he's going to sell sell sell, to an audience that's been primed on fiction and religion to believe in him like some kind of blank-faced prophet.
csomar 2y ago
> Altman thinks benefits will naturally trickle down when everything points to corporation replacing employees with AI to boost their profit margins. That's not what he is saying. He is saying that this investment in AI will yield incredible returns and power. The investor will dominate the next decade(s) and thus you should invest. Of course, he has to say it in a careful way not to alarm politically correct people. But, in essence, he is trying to create investor FOMO to drive his next round.

bambax 2y ago

The very term "AGI" is a confession that the I in AI doesn't stand for intelligence. What is even the opposite of "general intelligence"? Specialized intelligence? But AI already has a large spectrum. It's not an expert system in this or that. It's quite general. But it's not actually intelligent. We should replace "AGI" with "AAI": Actual Artificial Intelligence.

wat10000 2y ago
"AGI" because computers beat humans in many specific areas of intelligence. Chess playing used to be considered AI, for example. It wasn't too long ago that top human-level Go play was considered out of reach for computers, now computers exceed humans. But there isn't a system that matches or exceeds human intelligence in all aspects. That's what the G is for.

edding4500 2y ago

> In some sense, AGI is just another tool in this ever-taller scaffolding of human progress we are building together. In another sense, it is the beginning of something for which it’s hard not to say “this time it’s different”; the economic growth in front of us looks astonishing, and we can now imagine a world where we cure all diseases, have much more time to enjoy with our families, and can fully realize our creative potential yeah, right. What world is this guy living in? An idealistic one? Will AI equally spread the profits of that economic growth he is talking about? I only see companies getting by on less menpower and doing fine, while poor people stay poor. Bravo. Well thought trhough, guy who now sells "AI".

FloatArtifact 2y ago

"Anyone in 2035 should be able to marshall the intellectual capacity equivalent to everyone in 2025" There's a lot to unpack there. Maintain an internal 10-year technological lead compared to what's public with OpenAI?

qwertox 2y ago

> 2. The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. You can see this in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024, where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period. Moore’s law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger. This is so exciting. I guess NVIDIA's Project DIGITS [0] will be the starting point for a bit more serious home lab usage of local LLMs, while still being a bit like what Quadro used to be in the pro/prosumer market in the 00s/10s. Now it's all RTX, and while differences still exist between pro gamer cards and workstation cards, most of what workstation GPUs were used back then is easily doable by pro gamer cards nowadays. Let's just hope that the quoted values are also valid for these prosumer devices like Project DIGITS. Also, let's hope that companies start targeting that user base specifically, like a Groq SBC. [0] https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-puts-grace-blackwell-on-every-desk-and-at-every-ai-developers-fingertips https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-puts-grace-blackwe...

caust1c 2y ago

The crux of the challenges AGI presents is hardly mentioned as a footnote in this blog: > In particular, it does seem like the balance of power between capital and labor could easily get messed up, and this may require early intervention. We are open to strange-sounding ideas like giving some “compute budget” to enable everyone on Earth to use a lot of AI, but we can also see a lot of ways where just relentlessly driving the cost of intelligence as low as possible has the desired effect. The primary challenge in my opinion is that access to AGI will dramatically accelerate wealth inequality. Driving costs lower will not magically enable the less educated to be better able to educate themselves using AGI, particularly if they're already at risk or on the edge of economic uncertainty. I want to know how people like sama are thinking about the economics of access to AGI in more broad terms, more than just a footnote in a utopian fluff piece. edit: I am an optimist when it comes to the applications around AI, but I have no doubt that we're in for a rough time as the world copes with the economic implications of it's applications. Globally, the highest paying jobs are knowledge workers and we're on the verge (relatively speaking) of making that work go the way that blue collar work did in post-war United States. There's a lot of hard problems ahead and it bothers me when people sweep them under the rug in the name of progress.

timewizard 2y ago

> 1. The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it. We are burning cash so fast and getting very little in return for it. This is a death spiral and we refuse to admit it. > The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. We are entirely unconcerned with accuracy and refuse to see how the limitations of our product will not allow us to follow this simple economic aphorism into success. > The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. You see, even though we're burning money at an exponentially increasing rate, some how this /linear/ increase in output is secretly "super-exponential" in nature. I have nothing to back this up but you just have to believe me. At least Steve Jobs build something worth having before bullshitting about it. This is just embarassing.

guybedo 2y ago

At first AI models/systems/agents help employees be more productive. But i can't imagine a future where this doesn't lead to mass layoffs, or hiring freezes because these systems can replace tens or hundreds of employess, the end result being more and more unemployed people. Sure there's been the industrial revolution and the argument usually is: some people will lose their jobs but many other jobs will be created. I'm not sure this argument gonna hold this time given the magnitude of the change. Is there any serious study of the impact of AI on society and employment, and most importantly is there any solution to this problem ?

jayseattle 2y ago
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mitthrowaway2 2y ago
In terms of solutions: UBI is frequently proposed. Depending on the degree to which AI and automation obsoletes human labor and increases, UBI could become arbitrarily redistributive. Increased output would keep inflation at bay, and the reduced incentive to work would be mitigated by the fact that there almost wouldn't need to be any incentives remaining for wealth creation. Such an AGI scenario might also raise some old questions about the degree to which wealth disparity-as-an-incentive-for-success remains useful and justifiable. One wonders how Altman would receive this proposal.
- kadushka 2y ago
  I wonder what will happen to millions of people with $3k+/mo mortgages when they’re all unemployed and UBI is only $2k/mo.
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    Sounds like the mortgage market would go through a correction? Or UBI would be bumped up to $4k. Lots of possible outcomes.
    - 2y ago

sealeck 2y ago

Reading between the lines, I get the feeling that OpenAI may be starting to feel desperate if they feel the need to drive the hype like this.

iqandjoke 2y ago
The article is written for journalist (and investor). See the footnote.
- sealeck 2y ago
  Totally. "AGI = $100bn of profit" lol
raghavtoshniwal 2y ago
It feels like every major lab is saying the same thing: https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace https://www.wsj.com/video/events/the-race-for-true-ai-at-google/7953FE4B-AE84-4AFA-9722-AA215EB357EE https://www.wsj.com/video/events/the-race-for-true-ai-at-goo... Even folks _leaving_ OpenAI, who have no incentive to drive hype, are saying that we're very close to AGI. https://x.com/sjgadler/status/1883928200029602236 https://x.com/sjgadler/status/1883928200029602236 Even folks like Yoshua Benjio, Hinton are saying we're close to it. The models keep getting better at an exponential. How much evidence does one need to dispel the "this is OpenAI/sama hype" argument?
- caseyy 2y ago
  > How much evidence does one need to dispel the "this is OpenAI/sama hype" argument? For AGI hype, we need exactly one piece of evidence that machine AGI exists, or that we know how to build it. Otherwise, it's an exaggeration that AGI is imminent - otherwise known as hype. Or maybe it's hope, but sama suggests it should be an expectation.
- sealeck 2y ago
  These are all people running AI labs! They want investment, and what better way to get investment than to tell people you're going to create Terminator? The people leaving OpenAI are joining other labs – their livelihoods depend on AI companies receiving investment: "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it". > The models keep getting better at an exponential [sic]. We don't know if this is true. A lot of growth that appears exponential is often quadratic (https://longform.asmartbear.com/exponential-growth/ https://longform.asmartbear.com/exponential-growth/) or follows a logistic function (e.g. Moore's law). Additionally there's a LOT of benchmark gaming going on, and a lot of the benchmark solving is not down to having a process that actually solves the problems; it just turns out that the problems already kind of lie in the span of text on the internet.

abc-1 2y ago

I refuse to listen to anyone who has done nothing in life but maximize their wealth and power, play corporate political games, and grift investors for all they're worth. Shame the actual innovators don't blog much, usually because they're too busy doing the actual work.

azinman2 2y ago

> the economic growth in front of us looks astonishing, and we can now imagine a world where we cure all diseases, have much more time to enjoy with our families, and can fully realize our creative potential. I think this is extremely myopic to assume things like “have much more time to enjoy with our families” unless that time is because you’re unemployed. Every major technology over the past couple hundred years has been paired with such promises, and it’s never materialized. Only through unions did we get 8h days and weekends. Electricity, factory farming, etc has not made me work any less, even if I do different things than I would have 200 years ago. I think it’s also odd to assume the only things preventing curing all disease is the lack of intelligence and scale. There are so many more factors that go into this, and into an already competitive landscape (biology) which is constantly evolving and changing. With every new technique innovated (eg CRISPR) and every new discovery (eg immunotherapy) proven, the directions of what’s possible changes. If AGI is thru LLMs as we know it (color me skeptical), they do not have the ability to absorb such new possibilities and change on a dime. I could go on and on but this is just a random comment on the internet. I understand the original post is meant to achieve certain goals at a specific word length, but not diving into all of to see possibilities (including failure modes in his extraordinarily optimistic assumptions) is quite irresponsible if he is truly meant to be a leader for a bold new future.

twright 2y ago
The line you quoted caught my eye too and confused why it was in there without an explicit or implicit mention of "in ten years we'll be so productive we'll have 3-day work weeks". I think you make a great point about LLM's being able to absorb new possibilities. I like to cite the invention of the MRI machine as an incredible innovation that took three independent discoveries over forty years to realize, not to mention commercialize. Maybe if (big if) when AGI comes it will be able to spit out dozens of inventions that are some culmination of similarly independent discoveries but I'm not going to hold my breath. We have to remember they are just extremely good regurgitation machines which, in my experience, why I've found they're nearly useless in niche programming tasks.

deleted 2y ago

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dimgl 2y ago

I’m not sure anyone is convinced this will empower individuals. On the contrary: if we get this tech “right” enough, the inequality gap will become an inequality chasm… There is no financial incentive to pay humans when a machine is a fraction of the cost.

TechDebtDevin 2y ago
The next fifty years are going to be quite interesting.
chad_oliver 2y ago
If each human body needs 0.2 acre of land to grow the food necessary for subsistence, what happens when the price of intelligence keeps dropping and one person's intelligence (even when directed towards the highest-value use!) is not enough to afford the use of that land? In other words, what happens when humans are no longer economically viable? Jevon's Paradox means that the demand for intelligence will keep rising as the cost drops, so I can't help but expect a steady increase in the economic value of land _when used for AI_. It'll take a long time before it exceeds the economic value of land when used for human subsistence, but the growth curves are not pointing in encouraging directions.
- jpadkins 2y ago
  AGI / human overlords that cater to AGI won't need earth resources for more than a few decades. There will be a bootstrapping period, reliant on earth resources but soon it will be much cleaner to have solar/nuclear in space and have robotic mining of raw resources from asteroids.

smokel 2y ago

> The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. ... Moore’s law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger. Moore waited at least five years [1] before deriving his law. On top of that, I don't think that it makes much sense to compare commercial pricing schemes to technical advancements. [1] http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/moore-crammingmorecomponents.pdf http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/moore-crammingm...

bibanez 2y ago
The "10x every 12 months" is pure salesman from sama. An engineer wouldn't do these extrapolations from little data in good faith.
- signatoremo 2y ago
  He is talking about cost. Are you saying price didn’t go down 10 times the last 12 months? How much data is too little?
  - NewJazz 2y ago
    1 year of data is indeed too little if you are trying to forecast one year ahead. Also the pricing is set by OpenAI. We don't know their actual costs decreased by that factor. Only that they cut their prices.
    - sanxiyn 2y ago
      We don't know OpenAI's actual cost, but presumably Sam does know.
      - lmm 2y ago
        I'm sure he does, but why would he ever tell the truth about it except by coincidence?
      - 2y ago

Eliezer 2y ago

I wonder who wrote this? Doesn't sound like Altman's voice. I wonder who theorized this? Altman isn't known for having models about AGI. To the actual theorist: Claiming in one paragraph that AI goes as log resources, and in the next paragraph that the resource costs drop by 10x per year, is a contradiction; the latter paragraph shows a dependence on algorithms that is nothing like "it's just the compute silly".

cratermoon 2y ago
[flagged]
Centigonal 2y ago
> Altman isn't known for having models about AGI. His blog posts about AGI predate OpenAI. https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1 https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1 https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-2 https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-2
- Eliezer 2y ago
  Hadn't seen that before, and despite being bog-standard Bostrom it's still more of an attempt to hold a theory than I'd seen associated with him before. Note nonoverlap of writing style and theory with the present post.

cratermoon 2y ago

Relevant: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/sam-altman-mythmaking/680152/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/sam-a...

msp26 2y ago

> one of our reasons for launching products early and often is to give society and the technology time to co-evolve Is this really true? O3 (not mini) is still being held for ""safety testing"", and Sora was announced so far before release.

dbuser99 2y ago

AI has to be the solution to everything to justify the kind of investments going into it right now. Sam’s a savvy businessman so he obviously understands that and goes few steps further. He promises exponential returns and addresses any regulatory and societal concerns. This piece is strategically crafted, not for us, but for investors.

aithrowawaycomm 2y ago

> *By using the term AGI here, we aim to communicate clearly, and we do not intend to alter or interpret the definitions and processes that define our relationship with Microsoft. We fully expect to be partnered with Microsoft for the long term. This footnote seems silly, but on the other hand we know some journalists will try to get clicks by writing something silly so here we are pre-empting the silliness… OpenAI and Microsoft signed a profoundly silly contract with vague terms about AGI! It's petty to snipe about journalists asking silly questions: they are responding to the fact that Sam Altman and Satya Nadella are not serious people, despite all their money and power.

credit_guy 2y ago

Trying to regulate AI so that it is used predominantly for good and not for evil is as futile as trying to regulate steam in the early 19th century to be used for good and not for evil. It turned out steam was mainly used for good, but nothing could stop the navies of the great powers build steam powered battleships. Nothing will stop the Chinese CCP to direct AI towards more state surveillance. Or any number of actors to use AI to create extremely lethal swarms of drones.

chvid 2y ago

“The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it. These resources are chiefly training compute, data, and inference compute.” Hasn’t the latest big improvements in LLMs been due to change in approach/algorithm? Reasoning models and augmenting LLMs with external tools and internet access (agents and deep research). As far I can tell classical pure LLMs are only improving modestly at this point.

ineptech 2y ago

> AI will seep into all areas of the economy and society; we will expect everything to be smart. I fear this is correct, but with "smart" in the sense of smart TVs. In economic terms, TVs are amazing compared to just a few years ago - more pixels, much cheaper, more functionality - but in practice they spy on you and take ten seconds to turn on and show unskippable ads. This is purely a social (legal, economic, etc) problem as opposed to a technical one, and its solution (if we ever find one) would be likewise. So it's frightening to see someone with as much power over the outcome say something like this: > In particular, it does seem like the balance of power between capital and labor could easily get messed up, and this may require early intervention. We are open to strange-sounding ideas like giving some “compute budget” to enable everyone on Earth to use a lot of AI, but we can also see a lot of ways where just relentlessly driving the cost of intelligence as low as possible has the desired effect. When capital has control of an industry, but voluntarily gives little pieces of it out to labor so that they can "share" the profit, I think we all know how that turns out. It does seem possible that AGI really will get built and really will seep into everything and really will create a ton of economic value. But getting from there to the part where it improves everyone's lives is a social problem, akin to the problem of smart TVs, and I can't imagine a worse plan to solve that problem than leaving it up to the capitalist that owns the AGIs.

TheAceOfHearts 2y ago

> The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. I'm still stuck thinking about this point. I don't know that it's obviously true. Maybe a more bounded claim would make more sense, something like: increasing intelligence in the short-term has big compounding effects. But there's also a cap as society and infrastructure has to adapt. And I don't know how this plays out within an adversarial system where people might be competing for scarce resources like human attention. Taken to the extreme, one could imagine a fantasy/scifi scenario where each person is empowered like a god in their own universe, allowing them to experiment, learn and and create endlessly.

jp42 2y ago
30 years ago, no one in my native place has seen telephone. Now every single person young and old are connected to the internet, conduct banking and other transaction via phone and many many other things. Many unimaginable things happened in last 30 year from vantage point of my native place. Assuming same level of of transformation for next 30 year it will be still massive progress. Given current tech and AI, the rate of progress for next 30 years will be far greater than last 30. So I am believer in AI and tech in general will make massive progress in next decade

abetusk 2y ago

> 1. The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it. > 2. The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. > 3. The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. My own editorial: Point 1 is pretty interesting as if P != NP then this is essentially "we can't do better than random search". So, in order to find progressively better solutions as we increase the (linear) input, we need exponentially more resources to find the answer. While I believe P != NP it's interesting to see this play out in the context of learning and AI. Point 2 is semi well-known. I'm having trouble finding it but there was an article a while back talking about algorithmic efficiencies to the DFT (or DCT?) were outpacing efficiencies that could be just attributed to Moore's law. Meaning the DFT was improving a few orders of magnitude faster than just Moore's law would imply. I assume this is essentially a Wright's law but for attention, in some sense, where more attention to problems leads to better optimizations that dovetail with Moore's law. Point 3 seems like it's almost a corollary, at least in the short term. If intelligence is capturing the exponential search and it can be re-used to find further efficiency, as in point 2, you get super-exponential growth. I think Kurzweil mentioned something about this as well. I haven't read the whole article but this jumped out at me: > Our mission is to ensure that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) benefits all of humanity. A bald faced lie. Their mission is to capture value from developing AGI. Any benefit to humanity is incidental.

Foofoobar12345 2y ago

So much negativity all the time. The fact remains that AI models are out in the public domain. If you’re unable to see how that can improve the lives of an average person, that’s a failure of imagination. Don’t let megacorps dominance prevent individual action. The best way to be hopeful is to effect change in your immediate surroundings. Teach people how to leverage AI, then they won’t be hold hostage to the tyranny of the beauraucrats - doctors, lawyers, accountants, politicians, software engineers, project managers, bankers, investment advisors etc. Yes, AI makes mistakes .. so what? Humans do too. Credit where credit is due - Sam may be no saint, but OpenAI deserves credit for launching this revolution. Directly or indirectly that led to the release of open models. Would the results have been the same without Sam? Nobody knows, not a point worth anybody’s time debating. Given most of us here are software engineers, it’s natural to feel threatened, there will be those of us whose skills will be made obsolete. And some of us will make the jump to the land of ideas, and these tools will empower us to build solutions that previously required large companies to build. Perhaps that might mean that we focus less on monetary rewards instead of change, as it becomes ever so easy to effect that change. To those whose skills will be made obsolete - you have a choice on whether you want to let that happen. Some amount of fear is healthy - keeps our mind alert and allows us to grow. There will be a growing pain, as our species evolves. We’ll have to navigate that with empathy. Change starts from you. You are more powerful than you can imagine, at any given point.

thrance 2y ago

> In particular, it does seem like the balance of power between capital and labor could easily get messed up, and this may require early intervention. Marxist analysis from Sam Altman? > We are open to strange-sounding ideas like giving some “compute budget” to enable everyone on Earth to use a lot of AI, but we can also see a lot of ways where just relentlessly driving the cost of intelligence as low as possible has the desired effect. I can't imagine a world in which billionaires (trillionaires?) would happily share their wealth to people whose work they don't need anymore. Honestly, I have more faith in a rogue ASI taking over the world to install a fair post-scarcity society than on current politicians and tech-oligarchs to give up a single cent to the masses.

TheRealNGenius 2y ago

[dead]

dustingetz 2y ago

each subsequent post is worse than the one before who is the audience for this drivel

yapyap 2y ago

[flagged]

blah2244 2y ago

> AGI is a weakly defined term, but generally speaking we mean it to be a system that can tackle increasingly complex problems, at human level, in many fields. Is it just me, or is that an incredibly weak/vague definition for AGI? Feels like you could make the claim that AI is at this level already if you stretch the terms he used enough.

wat10000 2y ago
It's funny, there used to be a pretty solid definition of AGI: a system that can pass the Turing Test. Then we got there, and it turned out that passing the Turing Test is actually pretty specialized and doesn't mean the system is as smart as a human in all aspects.

0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago

>Ensuring that the benefits of AGI are broadly distributed is critical. The historical impact of technological progress suggests that most of the metrics we care about (health outcomes, economic prosperity, etc.) get better on average and over the long-term, but increasing equality does not seem technologically determined and getting this right may require new ideas. I don't see why we should trust OpenAI's promises now, when they've broken promises in the past. See the "OpenAI has a history of broken promises" section of this webpage: https://www.safetyabandoned.org/ https://www.safetyabandoned.org/ In my view, state AGs should not allow them to complete their transition to a for-profit.

deleted 2y ago
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noch 2y ago
> I don't see why we should trust OpenAI's promises now, when they've broken promises in the past. I don't see what "our" trust has to do with anything. Perhaps you're an investor in OpenAI and your trust matters to OpenAI and its plans? But for the rest of us, our trust doesn't matter. It would be like me saying, "I don't see why we should trust Saudi Aramco."
- h0l0cube 2y ago
  > It would be like me saying, "I don't see why we should trust Saudi Aramco." It's completely fair response to say that if the CEO of Saudi Aramco performatively pens an article on how to mitigate the effects of global warming, while also profiting from it, and engaging in no tangible actions to fix the problem.
  - noch 2y ago
    > It's completely fair response My question, rephrased, is "so what"? What is my or our trust worth? What does us claiming we no longer trust Saudi Aramco achieve unless we are investors or perhaps other significant stakeholders?

pton_xd 2y ago

We can't even simulate a C. elegans worm with 1k cells and 302 neurons. But, sure, a few more GPUs and we'll have AGI!

drdeca 2y ago
This seems to be assuming that AGI would be similarly difficult to full brain emulation? This doesn’t seem obviously true.
- almostgotcaught 2y ago
  > This doesn’t seem obviously true. Is this kind of "casting doubt" some kind of cheat code that suspends all disbelief? Anyway, yes it does seem absolutely obviously true that if you want to reproduce intelligence you must (at least at first) simulate it.
  - ckw 2y ago
    Reasoning models are more intelligent than C. elegans.
  - drdeca 2y ago
    It is easier to make a flying machine than it is to make a machine that flies by the exact principles that birds use to fly (with flapping wings and such). Do you have an argument for why general intelligence couldn’t be like flight in this way? You just said that it is obvious. I do not share this intuition. Could you give an explanation for why you expect it to be unlike flight in this respect?
    - almostgotcaught 2y ago
      > It is easier to make a flying machine than it is to make a machine that flies by the exact principles that birds use to fly do you think that "flying machines" aren't simulated before manufacturing?
      - 2y ago

vivzkestrel 2y ago

the day your neural network has 1 quintillion connections between each other wake me up because that is when we are getting anywhere close to AGI, billions and trillions are rookie numbers

moralestapia 2y ago
>one quintillion connections What a load of nonsense.

Animats 2y ago

2. The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. You can see this in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024, where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period. Moore’s law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger. 3. The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. A consequence of this is that we see no reason for exponentially increasing investment to stop in the near future. First, if the cost is coming down so fast, why the need for "exponentially increasing investment"? One could make the same exponential growth claim for, say, the electric power industry, which had a growth period around a century ago and eventually stabilized near 5% of GDP. The "tech sector" in total is around 9% of US GDP, and relatively stable. Second, only about half the people with college degrees in the US have jobs that need college degrees. The demand for educated people is finite, as is painfully obvious to those paying off college loans. This screed comes across as a desperate attempt to justify OpenAI's bloated valuation.

choilive 2y ago
The costs are coming down fast because of the investment and would not happen independently of the investment. The same reason for Moore's law can be generalized as the learning/experience curve. You could make the argument that the demand for AI has a higher growth rate than the learning rate ex. if AI becomes 10x more cost efficient and results in demand growing 100x, you would also need to follow with an exponential growth in inference investment.
joshtbradley 2y ago
First, it requires exponential investment because > 1. The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it. Incremental improvements in intelligence require exponentially more resources. Only once that step is achieved can costs be reduced. Second, intelligence is not the same as education. Education is specialized, intelligence is general. Every modern convenience around you is the result of intelligence.
- esperent 2y ago

xbar 2y ago

Only two of those are observations.

pplonski86 2y ago

> Still, imagine it as a real-but-relatively-junior virtual coworker. Now imagine 1,000 of them. Or 1 million of them. Now imagine such agents in every field of knowledge work. I really don't want a future in which I had to supervise 1 million of real-but-relatively-junior virtual coworkers. I would prefer 1 senior over 1 million juniors. I'm in the programming industry and I don't think that coding might be scaled.

tunesmith 2y ago

We've just gotten through a big second generation of available models, but at least for the projects I'm on, I still feel just as far away as ever as being able to trust responses. I spent a few hours this weekend working on a side project that involved setting up a graphql server with a few basic query resolvers and field resolvers, and my experience with 4o, R1, o3-mini-high were all akin to arguing with too-confident junior engineers that were confused, without realizing it, about what they thought they knew. And this was basic stuff about simple graphql resolvers. I did have my first experience of o3-mini-high (finally, after much arguing) being able to answer something that R1 couldn't, though. It's weird, because it's still wildly useful and my ideas for side projects are definitely more expansive than they used to be. And yet, I'm really far from having any fear of replacement. Almost none of the answers I'm getting are truly nailing the experience of teaching me something new, while also having perfect accuracy. (I'm on ChatGPT+, not pro.)

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
Same. I think the tools have gotten a little better with agent mode and all that but it still doesn't get anything even slightly complicated for an API it hasn't seen before. Like it hasn't gotten more intelligent since maybe Gpt 3.5. I quite like them as somebody who has a huge problem with onset procrastination. I immediately ask them to write something and criticize them and write it myself because whatever it comes up with is so damn stupid.
- cma 2y ago
  Have you tried putting the API in context? Gemini has 2M context, where original 3.5 had like 4K and not great with it. While some large apis may not fit, not many that it hasn't seen before fit that bill. For updated large APIs you can put in the changelog but more work to gather all the detailed API changes and changed documentation on their own.
sunpazed 2y ago
Even though I have a reasonable intuition and understanding of how a LLM works, I am still awe-struck each and every time I use one. The fact that I have a junior developer at my convenience is a huge efficiency gain. I’ve been able to automate the rudimentary elements and focus my time on the stuff that counts.

DrScientist 2y ago

> we can now imagine a world where we cure all diseases Sure we can imagine it. However to make it happen, it's not enough to imagine the end goal, you need to understand and execute every single step. I suspect his lack of knowledge about what's actually involved allows him to imagine it. ie I notice he hasn't declared a world free of software bugs and failures ( a much easier task ), before declaring a world free of bugs in human biology.