5 ms·

We’re years away from anyone creating artificial intelligence, says Martha Wells

45 points by sohkamyung 1y ago

clauderoux 1y ago
Some people still think that LLM are just word predictors. Technically, it is not. First, transformer architectures don't process words, they process semantic representations stored as vectors or embeddings in a continuous space. What a lot of people don't understand is that in an LLM, we go from discrete values (the tokens) to continuous values (embeddings) that the transformer takes as input. A transformer is a polynomial function that will project into the latent embedding space. It doesn't generate word per se, but a vector that is then compared against the latent embedding space to find the closest matches. The decoding part is usually not deterministic. This huge polynomial function is the reason we can't understand what is going on in a transformer. It doesn't mimick human speech, it builds a huge representation of the world, which it uses to respond to a query. This is not a conceptual graph, it is not a mere semantic representation. It is a distillation of all the data it ingested. And each model is unique as the process itself is split over hundreds of gpu, with no control over which GPU is going to churn out which part of the dataset and in which order.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
noiv 1y ago
Well, considering the impact current models already have now, these are good news.
zamalek 1y ago
This has been my opinion for some time too. I don't think I'll see AGI in my lifetime. I think the current widespread belief comes from the massive leap that transformers provided, but transformers have their limits. We would need another radically new idea in order to create AGI - which, just like all discoveries that aren't evolutionary, boils down to random chance[1]. What transformers have given us is substantially more infrastructure for trying new ideas out, so the probability of AGI being discovered has increased. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_effect
- ninetyninenine 1y ago
  Well you’re basing your conclusion on a 2 year blip of not being able to stop LLMs from hallucinating. This is called the pessimism effect. People who deny things by only looking at one small aspect of reality while ignoring the overarching trend. Follow the trendline of the ML for the last decade. We’ve been moving at a breakneck pace and the progress has been both evolutionary in nature and random chance. But there is a clear trendline of linear upwards progress and at times the random chance accelerates us past the linear upward trend. Stop looking at LLMs look at the 10 year trendline of ML as a wholistic picture. You’re drilling down on a specific ML problem and a specific model. I believe we will see agi within our life time but when we see it the goal posts will have moved and the internet will be loaded with so much ai slop that we won’t be amazed at it. Like the agi will be slightly mentally stupid at this one thing and because of that it’s not AI even though it blows past some Turing test (which in itself will be a test where we moved the goal post a thousand times)
  - Xss3 1y ago
    Look at the 10 year trend in consumer GPU speed from 2005 to 2015. It didnt continue.
    - ninetyninenine 1y ago
      Not all trends continue. But if you made a prediction of the trend for the next year from 2005 to 2015 you’d be right for 9 years and you’d be wrong for 1 year, then you’d get right again later. I’d say given the odds follow the trendline.
  - zamalek 1y ago
    My opinion of LLMs is in no way affected by hallucinations. Humans do it all the time too, talking about assumptions as though they are facts. For example: > But there is a clear trendline of linear upwards progress This is not the case at all.[1] [1]: https://llm-stats.com/ https://llm-stats.com/
    - 1y ago
tartoran 1y ago
What we're currently on with LLMs is some kind of scripted artficial intelligence. I would say that is not necessarily a bad thing considering that true artificial intelligence that had autonomy and goals for preserving itself could easily escape our control and wreak real havoc unless we approach it with tiny steps and clear goals.
- cgriswald 1y ago
  Your post sort of hints at it, I think, but I'll state it clearly: Misalignment is the main threat when it comes to AI (and especially ASI). A self-preserving AI isn't meaningfully more dangerous than an AI that solves world hunger by killing us all. In fact, it may be less so if it concludes that starting a war with humans is riskier than letting us live.
- ninetyninenine 1y ago
  How is an LLM scripted? What do you mean? We don’t understand how LLMs work and we know definitively it’s not “stochastic parroting” as people used to call it.
  - daveguy 1y ago
    It is quasi-deterministic (sans a heat parameter) and it only ever responds to a query. It is not at all autonomous. If you let it do chain-of-thought for too long or any sort of continuous feedback loop it always goes off the rails. It is an inference engine. Inference by itself is not intelligence. Chollet has very good reasoning that intelligence requires both inference and search/program design. If you haven't read his papers about the ARC-AGI benchmark, you should check it out.
    - ninetyninenine 1y ago
      > It is quasi-deterministic (sans a heat parameter) Human brains are quasi deterministic. It’s just chaos from ultimately determinist phenomena which can be modeled as a “heat parameter”. > it only ever responds to a query. It is not at all autonomous. We can give it feedback loops like COT and you can even have it talk to itself. Then if you think of the feedback loop as the entire system it is autonomous. Humans are actually doing the same thing, our internal thought process is by definition a feedback loop. > If you let it do chain-of-thought for too long or any sort of continuous feedback loop it always goes off the rails. But this isn’t scripted. This is more the AI goes crazy. Scripting isn’t a characteristic that accurately describes anything that’s going on. AI hallucinates and goes off the rails isn’t characteristic of scripting its characteristic of lack of control. We can’t control AI.
cgriswald 1y ago
Well, Wells actually says "...years and years and years away from anyone creating an actual artificial intelligence." You know, in case you correctly interpreted the headline to mean Wells is saying aliens developed AI out there.
vouaobrasil 1y ago
Hyping up AGI is a good way for tech companies to distract people into thinking AI is actually not that big a deal, when it is. It may not be in terms of its pure reasoning or in the goal of reaching AGI, but it is very disruptive, and it's a guaranteed way to heavily reinforce the requirements of using big tech in daily life, without actually improving it. Yes, it may not be AGI and AGI may not come any time soon, but by focusing on that question, people become distracted and don't have as much time to think about how parasitic big tech really is. If it's not a strategy used consciously, it's rather seredipitous for them that the question has come about.
- spacemadness 1y ago
  Not to mention all the people on HN arguing we’re close to AGI because LLMs sound like humans and can “think”. “What’s the difference?” they ask, not in curiosity but after already making a strong claim. I assume it’s the same people that probably skipped every non engineering class in college because of those “useless” liberal arts requirements.
  - skydhash 1y ago
    I’ve done engineering in college, but I’ve beed dibbling in art since young, and philosophy of science is much more attractive to me than actual science. I agree with you that a lot of takes that AI is great, while consistent internally, are very reductive when it comes to technology usage by humans.
    - vouaobrasil 1y ago
      AI is only great when you narrowly define the problem in terms of efficient production of a narrowly-defined thing. And usually, production at that level of efficiency is a bad thing.
- Supermancho 1y ago
  > Hyping up AGI is a good way for tech companies to distract people into thinking AI is actually not that big a deal, when it is. I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Most people don't know the difference between AI and AGI. It's all hype making people thinking it's a big deal. I have family that can't help but constantly text about AI this and AI that. How dangerous it might be or revolutionize something else.
ninetyninenine 1y ago
I can’t read the site it requires subscription. But I and many other researchers disagree. George Hinton for example, massive disagreement. It’s not just LLMs that were a leap and bound. For the past decade and more ML has been rising at a breakneck velocity. We see models for scene recognition, models that can read your mind, models that recognize human movement. We were seeing the pieces and components and amazing results constantly for over 10 years and this is independent of LLMs. And then everyone thinks AI is thousands of years away because we hit a small blip with LLMs in 2 years. And here’s the thing. The blip isn’t even solid. Like LLMs sometimes gets shit wrong and sometimes gets shit right we just can’t control it. Like we can’t definitively say LLMs can’t answer a specific question. Maybe another LLM can get it right, maybe if prompted a different way it will get it right. The other strange thing is that the LLM shows signs of lying. Like it’s not truthful. It has knowledge of the truth but the things purpose is not really to tell us the truth. I guess the best way to put it that current AI sometimes behaves like AGI and sometimes doesn’t. It is not consistently AGI. The fact that we built a machine that inconsistently acts like agi shows how freaking close we are. But the reality is no one understands how LLMs work. This fact is definitive. Like if you think we know how LLMs work then you are out of touch with reality. Nobody knows how LLMs work so this article and my write up are really speculation. We really dont know. But the 10 year trendline of AI in general is the one that has a more accurate trendline into future progress. Basing the future off a 2 year trendline of a specific problem with a specific model of ML of LLMs hallucinating is not predictive.
- tim333 1y ago
  archive link https://archive.ph/AJuKI https://archive.ph/AJuKI
- Supermancho 1y ago
  > I can’t read the site it requires subscription. You can. archive.ph Copy the link, paste the link.
jmclnx 1y ago
>We’re Light-Years Away Needs to be pointed out :) If I move billions of Light-Years from here I will be able to create AI :) A Light-Year is distance, the title should say maybe "decades away". But I fully believe her argument, I think kids being born today will not see any real AI implementation in their lifetime.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
  I'm very down on the idea that LLMs are on the path to AGI but come on man, even they don't trip over simple metaphor.
metalman 1y ago
While "true AI" is likely impossible, that discussion detracts from the fact that a whole new and very powerfull ability to process information is here , which will/is bieng used to automate routine managerial tasks and run certain types of robotic equipment. I am slowly preparing myself to use these new tools, but will never consider them "clean", and will impliment there use in certain hermeticaly compartmented areas of my professional and financial undertakings.
baal80spam 1y ago
You cannot be "light-years away" from a specific point in time. Who is this person and why is what they say important?
- malux85 1y ago
  If you want to argue technicalities I think it depends on your frame of reference. Relative to the galactic centre we are orbiting around it, so if a very long period of time passes, and we don’t have AGI, we certainly can be “light years away” from it.
- sc68cal 1y ago
  It's a figure of speech. She's the author of the popular Murderbot series which has been a successful show on Apple+. Her stories are about artificial life and artificial intelligence.
  - regularjack 1y ago
    I have to admit I also found it weird that scientific american is using a unit of distance as if it was a unit of time.
    - hackable_sand 1y ago
      You can use a distance unit as a time unit. It's not weird.
lostmsu 1y ago
I know the phrase is a metaphor, but it is ironic that light-year away in time is, well, a year.

45 points by sohkamyung 1y ago

Some people still think that LLM are just word predictors. Technically, it is not. First, transformer architectures don't process words, they process semantic representations stored as vectors or embeddings in a continuous space. What a lot of people don't understand is that in an LLM, we go from discrete values (the tokens) to continuous values (embeddings) that the transformer takes as input. A transformer is a polynomial function that will project into the latent embedding space. It doesn't generate word per se, but a vector that is then compared against the latent embedding space to find the closest matches. The decoding part is usually not deterministic. This huge polynomial function is the reason we can't understand what is going on in a transformer. It doesn't mimick human speech, it builds a huge representation of the world, which it uses to respond to a query. This is not a conceptual graph, it is not a mere semantic representation. It is a distillation of all the data it ingested. And each model is unique as the process itself is split over hundreds of gpu, with no control over which GPU is going to churn out which part of the dataset and in which order.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

noiv 1y ago

Well, considering the impact current models already have now, these are good news.

zamalek 1y ago

This has been my opinion for some time too. I don't think I'll see AGI in my lifetime. I think the current widespread belief comes from the massive leap that transformers provided, but transformers have their limits. We would need another radically new idea in order to create AGI - which, just like all discoveries that aren't evolutionary, boils down to random chance[1]. What transformers have given us is substantially more infrastructure for trying new ideas out, so the probability of AGI being discovered has increased. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_effect

ninetyninenine 1y ago
Well you’re basing your conclusion on a 2 year blip of not being able to stop LLMs from hallucinating. This is called the pessimism effect. People who deny things by only looking at one small aspect of reality while ignoring the overarching trend. Follow the trendline of the ML for the last decade. We’ve been moving at a breakneck pace and the progress has been both evolutionary in nature and random chance. But there is a clear trendline of linear upwards progress and at times the random chance accelerates us past the linear upward trend. Stop looking at LLMs look at the 10 year trendline of ML as a wholistic picture. You’re drilling down on a specific ML problem and a specific model. I believe we will see agi within our life time but when we see it the goal posts will have moved and the internet will be loaded with so much ai slop that we won’t be amazed at it. Like the agi will be slightly mentally stupid at this one thing and because of that it’s not AI even though it blows past some Turing test (which in itself will be a test where we moved the goal post a thousand times)
- Xss3 1y ago
  Look at the 10 year trend in consumer GPU speed from 2005 to 2015. It didnt continue.
  - ninetyninenine 1y ago
    Not all trends continue. But if you made a prediction of the trend for the next year from 2005 to 2015 you’d be right for 9 years and you’d be wrong for 1 year, then you’d get right again later. I’d say given the odds follow the trendline.
- zamalek 1y ago
  My opinion of LLMs is in no way affected by hallucinations. Humans do it all the time too, talking about assumptions as though they are facts. For example: > But there is a clear trendline of linear upwards progress This is not the case at all.[1] [1]: https://llm-stats.com/ https://llm-stats.com/
  - 1y ago

tartoran 1y ago

What we're currently on with LLMs is some kind of scripted artficial intelligence. I would say that is not necessarily a bad thing considering that true artificial intelligence that had autonomy and goals for preserving itself could easily escape our control and wreak real havoc unless we approach it with tiny steps and clear goals.

cgriswald 1y ago
Your post sort of hints at it, I think, but I'll state it clearly: Misalignment is the main threat when it comes to AI (and especially ASI). A self-preserving AI isn't meaningfully more dangerous than an AI that solves world hunger by killing us all. In fact, it may be less so if it concludes that starting a war with humans is riskier than letting us live.
ninetyninenine 1y ago
How is an LLM scripted? What do you mean? We don’t understand how LLMs work and we know definitively it’s not “stochastic parroting” as people used to call it.
- daveguy 1y ago
  It is quasi-deterministic (sans a heat parameter) and it only ever responds to a query. It is not at all autonomous. If you let it do chain-of-thought for too long or any sort of continuous feedback loop it always goes off the rails. It is an inference engine. Inference by itself is not intelligence. Chollet has very good reasoning that intelligence requires both inference and search/program design. If you haven't read his papers about the ARC-AGI benchmark, you should check it out.
  - ninetyninenine 1y ago
    > It is quasi-deterministic (sans a heat parameter) Human brains are quasi deterministic. It’s just chaos from ultimately determinist phenomena which can be modeled as a “heat parameter”. > it only ever responds to a query. It is not at all autonomous. We can give it feedback loops like COT and you can even have it talk to itself. Then if you think of the feedback loop as the entire system it is autonomous. Humans are actually doing the same thing, our internal thought process is by definition a feedback loop. > If you let it do chain-of-thought for too long or any sort of continuous feedback loop it always goes off the rails. But this isn’t scripted. This is more the AI goes crazy. Scripting isn’t a characteristic that accurately describes anything that’s going on. AI hallucinates and goes off the rails isn’t characteristic of scripting its characteristic of lack of control. We can’t control AI.

cgriswald 1y ago

Well, Wells actually says "...years and years and years away from anyone creating an actual artificial intelligence." You know, in case you correctly interpreted the headline to mean Wells is saying aliens developed AI out there.

vouaobrasil 1y ago

Hyping up AGI is a good way for tech companies to distract people into thinking AI is actually not that big a deal, when it is. It may not be in terms of its pure reasoning or in the goal of reaching AGI, but it is very disruptive, and it's a guaranteed way to heavily reinforce the requirements of using big tech in daily life, without actually improving it. Yes, it may not be AGI and AGI may not come any time soon, but by focusing on that question, people become distracted and don't have as much time to think about how parasitic big tech really is. If it's not a strategy used consciously, it's rather seredipitous for them that the question has come about.

spacemadness 1y ago
Not to mention all the people on HN arguing we’re close to AGI because LLMs sound like humans and can “think”. “What’s the difference?” they ask, not in curiosity but after already making a strong claim. I assume it’s the same people that probably skipped every non engineering class in college because of those “useless” liberal arts requirements.
- skydhash 1y ago
  I’ve done engineering in college, but I’ve beed dibbling in art since young, and philosophy of science is much more attractive to me than actual science. I agree with you that a lot of takes that AI is great, while consistent internally, are very reductive when it comes to technology usage by humans.
  - vouaobrasil 1y ago
    AI is only great when you narrowly define the problem in terms of efficient production of a narrowly-defined thing. And usually, production at that level of efficiency is a bad thing.
Supermancho 1y ago
> Hyping up AGI is a good way for tech companies to distract people into thinking AI is actually not that big a deal, when it is. I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Most people don't know the difference between AI and AGI. It's all hype making people thinking it's a big deal. I have family that can't help but constantly text about AI this and AI that. How dangerous it might be or revolutionize something else.

ninetyninenine 1y ago

I can’t read the site it requires subscription. But I and many other researchers disagree. George Hinton for example, massive disagreement. It’s not just LLMs that were a leap and bound. For the past decade and more ML has been rising at a breakneck velocity. We see models for scene recognition, models that can read your mind, models that recognize human movement. We were seeing the pieces and components and amazing results constantly for over 10 years and this is independent of LLMs. And then everyone thinks AI is thousands of years away because we hit a small blip with LLMs in 2 years. And here’s the thing. The blip isn’t even solid. Like LLMs sometimes gets shit wrong and sometimes gets shit right we just can’t control it. Like we can’t definitively say LLMs can’t answer a specific question. Maybe another LLM can get it right, maybe if prompted a different way it will get it right. The other strange thing is that the LLM shows signs of lying. Like it’s not truthful. It has knowledge of the truth but the things purpose is not really to tell us the truth. I guess the best way to put it that current AI sometimes behaves like AGI and sometimes doesn’t. It is not consistently AGI. The fact that we built a machine that inconsistently acts like agi shows how freaking close we are. But the reality is no one understands how LLMs work. This fact is definitive. Like if you think we know how LLMs work then you are out of touch with reality. Nobody knows how LLMs work so this article and my write up are really speculation. We really dont know. But the 10 year trendline of AI in general is the one that has a more accurate trendline into future progress. Basing the future off a 2 year trendline of a specific problem with a specific model of ML of LLMs hallucinating is not predictive.

tim333 1y ago
archive link https://archive.ph/AJuKI https://archive.ph/AJuKI
Supermancho 1y ago
> I can’t read the site it requires subscription. You can. archive.ph Copy the link, paste the link.

jmclnx 1y ago

>We’re Light-Years Away Needs to be pointed out :) If I move billions of Light-Years from here I will be able to create AI :) A Light-Year is distance, the title should say maybe "decades away". But I fully believe her argument, I think kids being born today will not see any real AI implementation in their lifetime.

add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
I'm very down on the idea that LLMs are on the path to AGI but come on man, even they don't trip over simple metaphor.

metalman 1y ago

While "true AI" is likely impossible, that discussion detracts from the fact that a whole new and very powerfull ability to process information is here , which will/is bieng used to automate routine managerial tasks and run certain types of robotic equipment. I am slowly preparing myself to use these new tools, but will never consider them "clean", and will impliment there use in certain hermeticaly compartmented areas of my professional and financial undertakings.

baal80spam 1y ago

You cannot be "light-years away" from a specific point in time. Who is this person and why is what they say important?

malux85 1y ago
If you want to argue technicalities I think it depends on your frame of reference. Relative to the galactic centre we are orbiting around it, so if a very long period of time passes, and we don’t have AGI, we certainly can be “light years away” from it.
sc68cal 1y ago
It's a figure of speech. She's the author of the popular Murderbot series which has been a successful show on Apple+. Her stories are about artificial life and artificial intelligence.
- regularjack 1y ago
  I have to admit I also found it weird that scientific american is using a unit of distance as if it was a unit of time.
  - hackable_sand 1y ago
    You can use a distance unit as a time unit. It's not weird.

lostmsu 1y ago

I know the phrase is a metaphor, but it is ironic that light-year away in time is, well, a year.