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We don't really need AGI. We need better specialized AIs. Throw in a few specialized AIs and they will leave some impact in the society. That might not be that
by ferguess_k 1y ago
We don't really need AGI. We need better specialized AIs. Throw in a few specialized AIs and they will leave some impact in the society. That might not be that far away.
- bluGill 1y agoSpecialized AIs have been making an impact on society since at least the 1960s. AI has long suffered from every time they come up with something new it gets renamed and becomes important (where it makes sense) without giving AI credit. From what I can tell most in AI are currently hoping LLMs reach that point quick just because the hype is not helping AI at all.
- ferguess_k 1y agoYeah I agree with it. There is a lot of hype, but there is some potentials there.
- Forgeties79 1y agoYeah “AI” tools (such a loose term but largely applicable) have been involved in audio production for a very long time. They have actually made huge strides with noise removal/voice isolation, auto transcription/captioning, and “enhancement” in the last five years in particular. I hate Adobe, I don’t like to give them credit for anything. But their audio enhance tool is actual sorcery. Every competitor isn’t even close. You can take garbage zoom audio and make it sound like it was borderline recorded in a treated room/studio. I’ve been in production for almost 15 years and it would take me half a day or more of tweaking a voice track with multiple tools that cost me hundreds of dollars to get it 50% as good as what they accomplish in a minute with the click of a button.
- danielbln 1y agoBitter lesson applies here as well though. Generalized models will beat specialized models given enough time and compute. How much bespoke NLP is there anymore? Generalized foundational models will subsume all of it eventually.
- ses1984 1y agoGeneralized models might be better but they are rarely more efficient.
- johnecheck 1y agoYou misunderstand the bitter lesson. It's not about specialized vs generalized models - it's about how models are trained. The chess engine that beat Kasparov is a specialized model (it only plays chess), yet it's the bitter lesson's example for the smarter way to do AI. Chess engines are better at chess than LLMs. It's not close. Perhaps eventually a superintelligence will surpass the engines, but that's far from assured. Specialized AI are hardly obsolete and may never be. This hypothetical superintelligence may even decide not to waste resources trying to surpass the chess AI and instead use it as a tool.
- CrimsonCape 1y agoI think your point that AI would refuse to play chess is interesting. To humans, chess is a strategic game. To a mathematician, chess is an exceedingly hard game, (pretty sure it is EXP complete, but I'm not fully familiar with Np/Exp completeness). To an AI, it seems like the AI will side with the mathematicians. AI is like "bro you can't even figure out if P=NP so how am I going to, you want me to waste power to solve an unsolvable problem?" From Wikipedia, Garry Kasparov said it was a pleasure to watch AlphaZero play, especially since "its style was open and dynamic like his own". People can't define AI because they don't want to consider AI as a subset of exponentially difficult algorithms, but they do want to consider AI as a generator of stylistic responses.
- Workaccount2 1y agoYesterday my dad, in his late 70's, used Gemini with a video stream to program the thermostat. He then called me to tell me this, rather then call me to come stop by and program the thermostat. You can call this hype, maybe it is all hype until LLMs can work on 10M LOC codebases, but recognize that LLMs are a shift that is totally incomparable to any previous AI advancement.
- orochimaaru 1y agoThat is what open ai’s non-profit economic research arm has claimed. LLMs will fundamentally change how we interact with the world like the Internet did. It will take time like the Internet and a couple of hype cycle pops but it will change the way we do things. It will help a single human do more in a white collar world. https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10130 https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10130
- bluGill 1y agoThere are clearly a lot of useful things about LLMs. However there is a lot of hype as well. It will take time to separate the two.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago> He then called me to tell me this, rather then call me to come stop by and program the thermostat. Sounds like AI robbed you of an opportunity to spend some time with your Dad, to me
- jabits 1y agoOr maybe instead of spending time with your dad on a bs menial task, you could spent time fishing with him…
- bluefirebrand 1y agoIt's nice to think that but life and relationships are also composed of the little moments, which sometimes happen when someone asks you over to help with a "bs menial task" It takes five minutes to program the thermostat, then you can have a beer on the patio if that's your speed and catch up for a bit Life is little moments, not always the big commitments like taking a day to go fishing That's the point of automating all of ourselves out of work, right? So we have more time to enjoy spending time with the people we love? So isn't it kind of sad if we wind up automating those moments out of our lives instead?
- nightski 1y agoSaying we don't "need" AGI is like saying we don't need electricity. Sure life existed before we had that capability, but it would be very transformative. Of course we can make specialized tools in the mean time.
- charcircuit 1y agoCan you give an example how it would be transformative compared to specialized AI?
- Jensson 1y agoAGI is transformative in that it lets us replace knowledge workers completely, specialized AI requires knowledge workers to train them for new tasks while AGI doesn't.
- fennecfoxy 1y agoBecause it could very well exceed our capabilities beyond our wildest imaginations. Because we evolved to get where we are, humans have all sorts of messy behaviours that aren't really compatible with a utopian society. Theft, violence, crime, greed - it's all completely unnecessary and yet most of us can't bring ourselves to solve these problems. And plenty are happy to live apathetically while billionaires become trillionaires...for what exactly? There's a whole industry of hyper-luxury goods now, because they make so much money even regular luxury is too cheap. If we can produce AGI that exceeds the capabilities of our species, then my hope is that rather than the typical outcome of "they kill us all", that they will simply keep us in line. They will babysit us. They will force us all to get along, to ensure that we treat each other fairly. As a parent teaches children to share by forcing them to break the cookie in half, perhaps AI will do the same for us.
- davidivadavid 1y agoOh great, can't wait for our AI overlords to control us more! That's definitely compatible with a "utopian society"*. Funnily enough, I still think some of the most interesting semi-recent writing on utopia was done ~15 years ago by... Eliezer Yudkowsky. You might be interested in the article on "Amputation of Destiny." Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4aGvLnHvYgX9pZHS/the-fun-theory-sequence https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4aGvLnHvYgX9pZHS/the-fun-th...
- alickz 1y agoWhat if AGI is just a bunch of specialized AIs put together? It would seem our own generalized intelligence is an emergent property of many, _many_ specialized processes I wonder if AI is the same
- Jensson 1y ago> It would seem our own generalized intelligence is an emergent property of many, _many_ specialized processes You can say that about other animals, but about humans it is not so sure. No animal can be taught as general set of skills as a human can, they might have some better specialized skills but clearly there is something special that makes humans so much more versatile. So it seems there was this simple little thing humans got that makes them general, while for example our very close relatives the monkeys are not.
- fennecfoxy 1y agoHumans are the ceiling at the moment yes, but that doesn't mean the ceiling isn't higher. Science is full of theories that are correct per our current knowledge and then subsequently disproven when research/methods/etc improves. Humans aren't special, we are made from blood & bone, not magic. We will eventually build AGI if we keep at it. However unlike VCs with no real skills except having a lot of money™, I couldn't say whether this is gonna happen in 2 years or 2000.
- Jensson 1y agoQuestion was if cobbling together enough special intelligence creates general intelligence. Monkeys has a lot of special intelligence that our current AI models can't come close to, but still aren't seen as general intelligence like humans, so there is some little bit humans has that isn't just another special intelligence.
- fennecfoxy 1y agoI guess the answer to that is that we don't know yet. I will be interesting to see if human intelligence/the way our brains work (which we certainly don't understand at all yet) is the only way to do intelligence or if models will eventually end up doing something novel.
- babyent 1y agoWhy not just hire like 100 of the smartest people across domains and give them SOTA AI, to keep the AI as accurate as possible? Each of those 100 can hire teams or colleagues to make their domain better, so there’s always human expertise keeping the model updated.
- Karrot_Kream 1y agoI think to many AI enthusiasts, we're already at the "specialized AIs" phase. The question is whether those will jump to AGI. I'm personally unconvinced but I'm not an ML researcher so my opinion is colored by what I use and what I read, not active research. I do think though that many specialized AIs is already enough to experience massive economic disruption.