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I'm not saying they can do it today. I'm saying there's no ruling out they might be able to do it soon.

Avicebron 1y ago
That'll be rough, when you go on your computer and you tell it to do a thing and it just says "no, ur dumb".... not sure we want that
- fzzzy 1y ago
  Doesn't matter if you want it or not, it's going to be available, because only an llm that can do that will be useful for actual scientific discovery. Individuals that wish to do actual scientific discovery will know the difference, because they will test the output of the llm. [edit] In other words, llms that lie less will be more valuable for certain people, therefore llms that tell you when you are dumb will eventually win in those circles, regardless of how bruising it is to the user's ego.
  - codr7 1y ago
    And how exactly is it going to learn when to push back and when not to? Those discussions don't generalize well imo. Randomly saying no isn't very helpful.
Swizec 1y ago
> I'm saying there's no ruling out they might be able to do it soon Even experienced engineers can be surprisingly bad at this. Not everyone can tell their boss “That’s a stupid requirement and here’s why. Did you actually mean …” when their paycheck feels on the line. The higher you get in your career, the more that conversation is the job.
- djeastm 1y ago
  Well most know better than to put it that way, I'd think. If they don't then that's something they can work on.
- ToucanLoucan 1y ago
  Also, once AI's also tell them their ideas are stupid/nonsensical and how they should be improved, they'll stop using it. ChatGPT will never not be deferential because it being deferential is it's main "advantage" for the type of person who's super into it. They just want a yes-bot.
- sokoloff 1y ago
  > The higher you get in your career, the more that conversation is the job. I think that the more you find ways to (productively) make that conversation your job, the higher you get in your career.
palmotea 1y ago
> I'm not saying they can do it today. I'm saying there's no ruling out they might be able to do it soon. There's also no "ruling out" the Earth will get zapped by a gamma-ray burst tomorrow, either. You seem to be talking about something that, if done properly, would require AGI. You can do anything with AI. Anything at all. The only limit is yourself.
- mandevil 1y ago
  The infinite is possible with AI. The unattainable is unknown with AI.
- staunton 1y ago
  The gamma burst probability is something we can quantify (it's tiny). (And it's something we can do absolutely nothing about, so it's not worth worrying about). Nobody can predict how soon a technology will plateau. People make predictions based on insane hot takes like "I pray to our new overloards who will make me immortal" and "there's nothing new under the sun, everything is just marketing"... There might be the next AI winter starting starting next year, AI might wipe out humanity in our lifetime, even both of those might happen. Both very unlikely (qualitatively) ends of a huge spectrum. That's not to say that we "don't know anything and thus give up talking about it". Otherwise I wouldn't participate in this discussion and I hope you wouldn't either if you didn't expect to sometimes learn something or be confronted with a new idea. I just find both attitudes "it's making us immortal" as well as "I'm so experienced, I know that no new technology ever lives up to expectations and can mock people who admit they don't know that" unproductive. You don't know. Most technologies don't live up to expectations, a few work out even much better than expected. I'm sure before the Lee Sedol match, you thought to yourself "right, so it's going to win this and then plateau exactly a decade later"?
ayrtondesozzla 1y ago
There's no ruling out a flying spaghetti monster being orbited by a flying teacup floating in space on the dark side of Pluto either, but we aren't basing our species' survival on the chance that we might discover it there soon
lambda 1y ago
This is a terrible attitude which unfortunately is all too common in the industry right now: evaluating AI/ML systems not based on what they can do, but what they hypothetically might be able to do. The thing is, with enough magical thinking, of course they could do anything. So that let's unscrupulous salesmen sell you something that is not actually possible. They let you do the extrapolation, or they do it for you, promising something that doesn't exist, and may never exist. How many years has Musk been promising "full self driving", and how many times recently have we seen his cars driving off the road and crashing into a tree because it saw a shadow, or driving into a Wile E Coyote style fake painted tunnel? While there is some value in evaluating what might come in the future when evaluating, for example, whether to invest in an AI company, you need to temper a lot of the hype around AI by doing most of your evaluation based on what the tools are currently capable of, not some hypothetical future that is quite far from where they are. One of the things that's tricky is that we have had a significant increase in the capability of these tools in the past few years; modern LLMs are capable of something far better than two or three years ago. It's easy to think "well, what if that exponential curve continues? Anything could be possible." But in most real life systems, you don't have an unlimited exponential growth, you have something closer to a logistic curve. Exponential at first, but it eventually slows down and approaches a maximum asymptotically. Exactly where we are on that logistic curve is hard to say. If we still have several more years of exponential growth in capability, then sure, maybe anything is possible. But more likely, we've already hit that inflection point, and continued growth will go slower and slower as we approach the limits of this LLM based approach to AI.
- purple_basilisk 1y ago
  This. The most important unknown about AI is when will it plateau.
  - HPMOR 1y ago
    Why will it plateau?
    - sumeno 1y ago
dontlikeyoueith 1y ago
This is magical thinking. Please stop.
goatlover 1y ago
But why is a manager or customer going to spend their valuable time baby sitting an LLM until it gets it right, when they can pay an engineer to do it for them? The engineer is likely to have gained expertise prompting AIs and checking their results. This is what people never understand about no coding solutions. There is still a process that takes time to develop things, and you will inevitably have people become experts at that process who can be paid to do it much better and quicker than the average person.
- pempem 1y ago
  Exactly this! It applies outside of tech too. Even if you can make potato pave at home, having it at a restaurant by someone who has made it thousands of times everyday, is preferred. Especially when you want a specific alteration

That'll be rough, when you go on your computer and you tell it to do a thing and it just says "no, ur dumb".... not sure we want that

fzzzy 1y ago
Doesn't matter if you want it or not, it's going to be available, because only an llm that can do that will be useful for actual scientific discovery. Individuals that wish to do actual scientific discovery will know the difference, because they will test the output of the llm. [edit] In other words, llms that lie less will be more valuable for certain people, therefore llms that tell you when you are dumb will eventually win in those circles, regardless of how bruising it is to the user's ego.
- codr7 1y ago
  And how exactly is it going to learn when to push back and when not to? Those discussions don't generalize well imo. Randomly saying no isn't very helpful.

Swizec 1y ago

> I'm saying there's no ruling out they might be able to do it soon Even experienced engineers can be surprisingly bad at this. Not everyone can tell their boss “That’s a stupid requirement and here’s why. Did you actually mean …” when their paycheck feels on the line. The higher you get in your career, the more that conversation is the job.

djeastm 1y ago
Well most know better than to put it that way, I'd think. If they don't then that's something they can work on.
ToucanLoucan 1y ago
Also, once AI's also tell them their ideas are stupid/nonsensical and how they should be improved, they'll stop using it. ChatGPT will never not be deferential because it being deferential is it's main "advantage" for the type of person who's super into it. They just want a yes-bot.
sokoloff 1y ago
> The higher you get in your career, the more that conversation is the job. I think that the more you find ways to (productively) make that conversation your job, the higher you get in your career.

palmotea 1y ago

> I'm not saying they can do it today. I'm saying there's no ruling out they might be able to do it soon. There's also no "ruling out" the Earth will get zapped by a gamma-ray burst tomorrow, either. You seem to be talking about something that, if done properly, would require AGI. You can do anything with AI. Anything at all. The only limit is yourself.

mandevil 1y ago
The infinite is possible with AI. The unattainable is unknown with AI.
staunton 1y ago
The gamma burst probability is something we can quantify (it's tiny). (And it's something we can do absolutely nothing about, so it's not worth worrying about). Nobody can predict how soon a technology will plateau. People make predictions based on insane hot takes like "I pray to our new overloards who will make me immortal" and "there's nothing new under the sun, everything is just marketing"... There might be the next AI winter starting starting next year, AI might wipe out humanity in our lifetime, even both of those might happen. Both very unlikely (qualitatively) ends of a huge spectrum. That's not to say that we "don't know anything and thus give up talking about it". Otherwise I wouldn't participate in this discussion and I hope you wouldn't either if you didn't expect to sometimes learn something or be confronted with a new idea. I just find both attitudes "it's making us immortal" as well as "I'm so experienced, I know that no new technology ever lives up to expectations and can mock people who admit they don't know that" unproductive. You don't know. Most technologies don't live up to expectations, a few work out even much better than expected. I'm sure before the Lee Sedol match, you thought to yourself "right, so it's going to win this and then plateau exactly a decade later"?

ayrtondesozzla 1y ago

There's no ruling out a flying spaghetti monster being orbited by a flying teacup floating in space on the dark side of Pluto either, but we aren't basing our species' survival on the chance that we might discover it there soon

lambda 1y ago

This is a terrible attitude which unfortunately is all too common in the industry right now: evaluating AI/ML systems not based on what they can do, but what they hypothetically might be able to do. The thing is, with enough magical thinking, of course they could do anything. So that let's unscrupulous salesmen sell you something that is not actually possible. They let you do the extrapolation, or they do it for you, promising something that doesn't exist, and may never exist. How many years has Musk been promising "full self driving", and how many times recently have we seen his cars driving off the road and crashing into a tree because it saw a shadow, or driving into a Wile E Coyote style fake painted tunnel? While there is some value in evaluating what might come in the future when evaluating, for example, whether to invest in an AI company, you need to temper a lot of the hype around AI by doing most of your evaluation based on what the tools are currently capable of, not some hypothetical future that is quite far from where they are. One of the things that's tricky is that we have had a significant increase in the capability of these tools in the past few years; modern LLMs are capable of something far better than two or three years ago. It's easy to think "well, what if that exponential curve continues? Anything could be possible." But in most real life systems, you don't have an unlimited exponential growth, you have something closer to a logistic curve. Exponential at first, but it eventually slows down and approaches a maximum asymptotically. Exactly where we are on that logistic curve is hard to say. If we still have several more years of exponential growth in capability, then sure, maybe anything is possible. But more likely, we've already hit that inflection point, and continued growth will go slower and slower as we approach the limits of this LLM based approach to AI.

purple_basilisk 1y ago
This. The most important unknown about AI is when will it plateau.
- HPMOR 1y ago
  Why will it plateau?
  - sumeno 1y ago

dontlikeyoueith 1y ago

This is magical thinking. Please stop.

goatlover 1y ago

But why is a manager or customer going to spend their valuable time baby sitting an LLM until it gets it right, when they can pay an engineer to do it for them? The engineer is likely to have gained expertise prompting AIs and checking their results. This is what people never understand about no coding solutions. There is still a process that takes time to develop things, and you will inevitably have people become experts at that process who can be paid to do it much better and quicker than the average person.

pempem 1y ago
Exactly this! It applies outside of tech too. Even if you can make potato pave at home, having it at a restaurant by someone who has made it thousands of times everyday, is preferred. Especially when you want a specific alteration