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I cant believe people still arent grasping the profound implications of computers that can talk and make decisions.
by mikert89 1y ago
I cant believe people still arent grasping the profound implications of computers that can talk and make decisions.
- softwaredoug 1y agoYou can have a bubble, and still have profound impact from AI. See also the dotcom boom.
- mikert89 1y agowho cares about a bubble? we are on the cusp of intelligent machines. The implications will last for hundreds of years, maybe impact the trajectory of humanity
- mjr00 1y ago> we are on the cusp of intelligent machines. Nah, we aren't. There's a reason the output of generative AI is called slop.
- skywhopper 1y agoExcept we aren’t. They aren’t thinking, and they can’t actually make decisions. They generate language. That feels magical at first but in the end it’s not going to solve human problems.
- bigyabai 1y ago> we are on the cusp of intelligent machines. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. We have machines that talk, which is corollary to nothing.
- fruitworks 1y agoSometimes I wonder if reason is partially a product of manipulating language.
- card_zero 1y agoIt's nice that you say partially, that's bit different from every other HN comment that wondered this. Yeah, probably partially, as in, you have reason, you add in language, you get more reason.
- toss1 1y agoExplanation of reason and reasoning paths is a product of manipulating language. Most ideas, even in the reasoning fields, are generated in non-linguistic processes. Of course, some problems are solved by step-by-step linguistic (or math) A, then B, then C steps, etc., but even for those types of problems, when they get complex, the solution looks more like follow a bunch of paths to dead ends, think some more, go away, and then "Aha!" the idea of a solution pops into our head, then we back it up and make it explicit with the linguistic/logical 'chain of reasoning' to explain it to others. That solution did not come from manipulating language, but from some other cognitive processes we do not understand, but the explanation of it used language. LLMs aren't even close to that type of processing.
- dcminter 1y ago> we are on the cusp of intelligent machines That's an extremely speculative view that has been fashionable at several points in the last 50 years.
- Gattopardo 1y agoMy dude, it's literally just fancy autocomplete and isn't intelligent at all.
- rusk 1y agoClippy with a Bachelors in web search
- forgotusername6 1y agoWhat makes you so sure that you aren't just fancy autocomplete?
- alganet 1y agoI am sure that if I am a fancy auto-complete, I'm way fancier than LLMs. A whole different category of fancy way above their league. Not just me, but any living human is.
- abathologist 1y agoI am so sure because of the self-evidence of my experience, the results of 2 millennia of analysis into the nature of cognition and experience, and consideration of the material composition of our organism (we obviously have lots of critical analog components, which are not selecting tokens, but instead connecting with flows from other continua). Prediction is obviously involved in certain forms of cognition, but it obviously isn't all there is to the kinds of beings we are.
- daytonix 1y agobrother please
- lifestyleguru 1y agoMatrix is calling you on the rotary dial phone.
- stanac 1y agoIs that why we no longer have telephone boots? They want to prevent Neo from jumping in and out of Matrix?
- lifestyleguru 1y agoOh god, you know it.
- card_zero 1y agoTelephone ... boots? Napkin scribbles
- lifestyleguru 1y agoThese boots are make for phone calls
- maxglute 1y agoBubble burst means current technical AI approach economic deadend, if the most resourced tech companies in the world can't afford to maintain AI improvment then it's probably not going to happen because public likely isn't going to let state spend $$$$ in lieu of services on sovereign Ai projects that will make them unemployed.
- Mistletoe 1y agoHow do we make money on it, especially if massive amounts of the population lose their jobs?
- mikert89 1y agodude again, we have computers that can talk and make decisions. We have birthed something here. We have something, this is big.
- mjhay 1y agoEven by HN standards, this is just an incredible comment. You’d think it’s satire, but I doubt it.
- rootusrootus 1y agoOne of the reasons I like to swing by HN on the weekend is that the flavor of the comments is a lot spicier. For better or worse.
- cactusplant7374 1y agoIs that a thing now?
- b_e_n_t_o_n 1y agoWhat are they?
- mikert89 1y agohow could i even begin to list them, is the point of my original comment
- dcminter 1y agoIf they're that profound you should be able to come up with one example though, right? Not that I think you're wrong, but come on - make the case! I have the very unoriginal view that - yes, it's a (huge) bubble but also, just like the dot com bubble, the tevhnology is a big deal - but it's not obvious to see what will stand and fall in the aftermath. Remember that Sun Microsystems, a very established pre-dot com business, rose to huge heights on the bubble and was then smashed by the fall when it popped. Who's the AI bubble's Sun and who's its Amazon? Place your bets...
- b_e_n_t_o_n 1y agoHahahaha right
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- lgas 1y agoJust pick one then, since so far you've conveyed nothing at all about them, so we're all left to wonder what you might be thinking of.
- parineum 1y agoI don't think anyone underestimates that and a lot of people can't wait to see it.
- mikert89 1y agoanyone mentioning a bubble is underestimating the gravity of whats going on
- quesera 1y agoI'm old enough to have heard this before, once or thrice. It's always different this time. More seriously: there are decent arguments that say that LLMs have an upper bound of usefulness and that we're not necessarily closer to transcending that with a different AI technology than we were 10 or 30 years ago. The LLMs we have, even if they are approaching an upper bound, are a big deal. They're very interesting and have lots of applications. These applications might be net-negative or net-positive, it will probably vary by circumstance. But they might not become what you're extrapolating them into.
- subjectivationx 1y agoI love chatGPT5 and Claude but they aren't as big of a deal as going from no internet to having the internet. That I think is the entire mistake of this bubble. We confused what we do have with some kind of science fiction fantasy and then have worked backwards from the science fiction fantasy as if it is inevitable. If anything, the lack of use cases is what is most interesting with LLMs. Then again, "AI" can do anything. Probabilistic language models? Kind of limited.
- ff2400t 1y agoI think you aren't understanding the meaning of the world bubble here. No one can deny the impact LLM can have but it still has limits. And the term bubble is used here as an economic phenomenon. This is for the money that openai is planning on spending which they don't have. So much money is being l poured here, but most users won't pay the outrageous sums of money that will actually be needed for these LLM to run, the break even points looks so far off that you can't even think about actual profitability. After the bubble bursts we will still have all the research done, the hardware left and smaller llms for people to use with on device stuff.
- Starlevel004 1y agoThe self checkout machines at the supermarket can talk and make decisions. I don't see them revolutionising the world.
- mikert89 1y agothink bigger, because this certainly is. change on the order of years means nothing
- Starlevel004 1y agoSorry, I don't believe in Calvinism.
- Legend2440 1y ago1. That’s not remotely the same, and you know it. 2. The category of computerized machines (of which self checkouts are one example) has absolutely revolutionized the world. Computerization is the defining technology of the last twenty years.
- alganet 1y agoWhat is that category and what other machines are in it?
- givemeethekeys 1y ago> I don't see them revolutionising the world. They revolutionized supermarkets.
- KPGv2 1y agoIn what way? I would really like to hear you explain how they revolutionized supermarkets. I use them every day, and my shopping experience is served far better by going to a place that is smaller than one that has automated checkout machines. (Smaller means so much faster.) Hell, if you go to Costco, the automated checkout line moves slower than the ones manned by experienced workers.
- flyinglizard 1y agoFrom a software development perspective, the more I think of it, the more I understand it's just another abstraction layer. Before that came high level languages and JVM of sorts, before that came the compiler, before that came the assembler. Outside of the software world it's mostly a (much!) better Google. Between now and a Star Trek world, there's so much to build that we can use any help we can get.
- mikert89 1y agoyeah we have fuzzy computer interfaces now, instead of "hard coded" apis.
- elorant 1y agoSpeech to text and vice versa exists for over a decade. Where's the life altering application from that?
- mikert89 1y ago[flagged]
- dcminter 1y ago> this is not an intellectually honest claim Don't do that, it's not cool. > Take [...] a step further, and imagine the systems in 2035 How about imagining AI slop multiplied by 10 years. How bad is this going to get? It's cool that you're excited, but you need a bit more than enthusiasm to make the case.
- KPGv2 1y ago> Speech to text and vice versa exists for over a decade. Indeed. I was using speech to text three decades ago. Dragon Naturally Speaking was released in the 90s.
- lxgr 1y agoThen you hopefully remember how “natural” it actually was.
- imtringued 1y agoThe old voice bank for the redhead with drills had more soul.
- dragonsky67 1y agotell that to the medical typing pool that no longer exists.
- AstroBen 1y ago..except they can't It's blatantly obvious to see if you work with something you personally have a lot of expertise in. They're effectively advanced search engines. Useful sure.. but they're not anywhere close to "making decisions"
- gosub100 1y agoAn RNG can "make a decision" lol.
- fragmede 1y agoIn what sense? It seems entirely possible to have a computer program that calls ChatGPT with questions on what stocks to buy, and for that computer program to then trade stock based on the results, entirely autonomously. No matter your opinion of the idea itself, why wouldn't that count as "making decisions"?
- AstroBen 1y agoAre you buying stocks based on ChatGPT's advice?
- fragmede 1y agoNot especially. The computer program does all the work. It's the one that hits ChatGPT for a list of trades, and then the computer program hits the brokerage's API to execute the trades. I made the decision to set the program up in the first place, and the trades are happening on an account that has my name on it, sure, but as I'm not nit-picking each individual trade that gets made and it runs autonomously without a human in the loop, it seems fair to claim that ChatGPT is making decisions on what to buy on my behalf, even though I do have veto authority over the program and ChatGPT, and can stop it at any time.
- AstroBen 1y agoMy point was on the quality and reliability of the decisions An RNG can do what you're describing
- zkmon 1y agoMaybe you are not grasping the convergence effect of the overall socio-political-economic trends that could actually label AI output as abhorrent plastic pollution or atleast not a high priority for public good.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- paufernandez 1y agoIn my case I fully grasp what such a future could be, but I don't think we are on the path to that, I believe people are too optimistic, i.e. they just believe instead of being truly skeptical. From where I look at it, LLMs are flawed in many ways, and people who see progress as inevitable do not have a mental model of the foundation of those systems to be able to extrapolate. Also, people do not know any other forms of AI or have though hard about this stuff on their own. The most problematic things are: 1) LLMs are probabilistic and a continuous function, forced by gradient descent. (Just having a "temperature" seems so crazy to me.) We need to merge symbolic and discrete forms of AI. Hallucinations are the elephant in the room. They should not be put under the rug. They should just not be there in the first place! If we try to cover them with a layer of varnish, the cost will be very large in the long run (it already is: step-by-step reasoning, mixture of experts, RAG, etc. are all varnish, in my opinion) 2) Even if generalization seems ok, I think it is still really far from where it should be, since humans need exponentially less data and generalize to concepts way more abstract than AI systems. This is related to HASA and ISA relations. Current AI systems do not have any of that. Hierarchy is supposed to be the depth of the network, but it is a guess at best. 3) We are just putting layer upon layer of complexity instead of simplifying. It is the victory of the complexifiers and it is motivated by the rush to win the race. However, I am not so sure that, even if the goal seems so close now, we are going to reach it. What are we gonna do? Keep adding another order of magnitude of compute on top of the last one to move forward? That's the bubble that I see. I think that that is not solving AI at all. And I'm almost sure that a much better way of doing AI is possible, but we have fallen into a bad attractor just because Ilya was very determined. We need new models, way simpler, symbolic and continuous at the same time (i.e. symbolic that simulate continuous), non-gradient descent learning (just store stuff like a database), HAS-A hierarchies to attend to different levels of structure, IS-A taxonomies as a way to generalize deeply, etc, etc, etc. Even if we make progress by brute forcing it with resources, there is so much work to simplify and find new ideas that I still don't understand why people are so optimistic.
- mikert89 1y agosymbols and concepts are just collections of neurons that fire with the correct activation. its all about the bitter lesson, human beings cannot design ai, they can only find the most general equations, most general loss function, and push data in. and thats what we have, and thats why its a big deal. The LLM is just a manifestation of a much broader discovery, a generalized learning algorithm. it worked on language because of the information density, but with more compute, we may be able to push in more general sensory data...
- rafavento 1y agoComputers have been able to talk and make decisions from the beginning. Maybe you meant mimicking humans?
- mikert89 1y agomimick is quite a loaded word
- dotnet00 1y agoReminds me of crypto/Web-3.0 hype. Lots of bluster about changing economic systems, offering people freedom and wealth, only to mostly be scams, and coming with too serious inherent drawbacks/costs to solve many of the big problems it promises to solve. In the end leaving the world changed, but not as meaningfully or positively as promised.
- mikert89 1y agothe difference is the impact of crypto was always hypothetical, chatgpt can be used, explored, and if you are creative enough, levered in ways as the ultimate tool
- dotnet00 1y agoYou've done nothing but reuse the Sam Altman/Elon Musk playbook of making wild and extremely vague statements. Maybe say something concrete? What's a positive real world impact of LLMs where they aren't hideously expensive and error prone to the point of near uselessness? Something that isn't just the equivalent of a crypto-bro saying that their system for semi-regulated speculation (totally not a rugpull!) will end the tyranny of the banks.
- ogogmad 1y agoSo you're saying that modern LLMs are a just like crypto/Web3, except in all the ways they're not, so they must be useless. --- Less flippantly, they are excellent for self-studying university-level topics. It's like being able to ask questions to a personal tutor/professor.
- zirror 1y agoBut you need to verify everything unless it’s self evident. The number of times CoPilot (Sonnett 4) still hallucinates Browser APIs is astonishing. Imaging trying to learn something that can’t be checked easily, like Egyptian archeology or something.
- Findecanor 1y ago“The ability to speak does not make you intelligent.”
- mikert89 1y agoagain, only a few years ago, the concept of a real time voice conversation with a computer was straight out of science fiction
- dcminter 1y agoThis is true. The old original series (and later) Star Trek computers being able to interpret normal idiomatic humam speech and act upon it was, to those in the know, hilariously unrealistic until very suddenly just recently it wasn't. Pretty cool.
- mikert89 1y agopretty much all of the classical ideas of what an ai could do, can be done with our existing capabilities. and yet, people continue to live as if the world has not changed
- dcminter 1y ago"AI" has been doing that since the 1950s though. The problem is that each time we define something and say "only an intelligent machine can X" we find out that X is woefully inadequate as an example of real intelligence. Like hilariously so. e.g. "play chess" - seemed perfectly reasonable at the time, but clearly 1980s budget chess computers are not "intelligent" in any very useful way regardless of how Sci Fi they were in the 40s. So why's it different this time?
- mikert89 1y agoyeah im in agreement, ai will eventually do everything a human being can
- gosub100 1y agoI can't believe I still have to do my own laundry and dishes. Like that's some how way more powerful than the models of a megawatt powered data center and millions of dollars in 3nm silicon can conquer.
- jiggawatts 1y ago… by hand? With water you heated on a wood fire, the ashes of which you turned into potash so you can make your own soap? Or did you pop your laundry into a machine and your dishes into another one and press a button?
- techblueberry 1y agoGiven the failure rate of people actually being able to use AI, and the continued inability to find any meaningful use-case, comments like this are starting to feel like cope. Call me in 10 years from your bitcoin operated phone and tell me all about the “revolution”.