4 ms·

AI is grown, not built, and like with anything you grow, you'll never be able to predict exactly how it will turn out.

• halestock 5mo ago
  I can't predict the outcome of an RNG but that doesn't mean it grows the numbers.
  • Philpax 5mo ago
    Okay, but that's not relevant to AI training?
    • halestock 5mo ago
      I was being very roundabout, but my point is that AIs are still built, not grown.
      • dwaltrip 5mo ago
        “Grown” is a highly apt metaphor, IMO. It quite succinctly captures some of the most fundamental differences between building Claude and building an Ikea desk, for example.
  • Smaug123 5mo ago
    ("If grown, then unpredictable" is unrelated to your apparent attempted refutation "But X is unpredictable and not grown; checkmate".)
  • School-Cotton 5mo ago
    "X implies Y" doesn't imply "Y implies X".
• shimman 5mo ago
  Except in this care we actually understand and know how these models work. They aren't some unknown construct of the universe. They are human made with particular goals in mind. There is no mysticism behind the curtains, just computer science + math.
  • Philpax 5mo ago
    We do not understand and know how these models work. We know what their architectures are and how to create them, but we cannot explain their behaviours at a fundamental level. There is no definitive way for us to answer the question of "how did it produce response X for query Y?" - we're only grazing the surface with mechanistic interpretability.
    • cflewis 5mo ago
      I would love for this to be more public knowledge. I think the general public (and myself for a long time) believes the AI people know how this stuff works end to end, and so it must be trustworthy. But if we told the public "Look, we know if you put this thing in one end, you'll get something that looks similar to this out the other, but we don't really know what happens inbetween" I think we'd be able to have a more honest discussion about the relationship between AI, productivity and ongoing employment.
    • devmor 5mo ago
      That’s not a refutation because this problem is not a logical problem, it is a scale problem. We can’t explain it because we distilled so many inputs into matrixes and transformed them over and over again. If we had all the time and computing power in the universe to do so, we could trace through it bit by bit and eventually answer that question. It is correct to say that it is just science and math, the same way we can say that gravity is just science and math even if we have only recently begun to understand how it truly functions.
      • Philpax 5mo ago
        It's a refutation that we know how they work now. In the limit, though, yes, we are likely to be able to trace the process: it is possible, though, that understanding remains inaccessible because the trace is beyond comprehension. If you can distil the model's reasoning for a decision into a billion yes/no questions, each covering largely-independent areas, can you really say you understand what its overall reasoning was?
      • 5mo ago
• Rekindle8090 5mo ago
  [dead]
• gensym 5mo ago
  The map is not the territory
• ninjagoo 5mo ago
  > AI is grown, not built, and like with anything you grow, you'll never be able to predict exactly how it will turn out. Remember when the frontier labs found out that curated high-quality training was critical to making better models? Basically, just like high-quality and more education tends to make better humans, on average, I think we can expect quality education to turn out better ai, on average, and with better repeatability than with humans because of better control over the initial conditions and environment.
  • irishcoffee 5mo ago
    > Basically, just like high-quality and more education tends to make better humans, on average Much like these models seem to be plateauing, I think there is a cap to the whole “more education makes better humans” and can’t be more apparent than in the US congress and the boatload of C-Suites not actually being very good humans. What do I know though?
    • ninjagoo 5mo ago
      > can’t be more apparent than in the US congress and the boatload of C-Suites not actually being very good humans. Sadly, education does not correct psychopathic traits, which might be overrepresented in c-suites, and selected for in politicians. It might be critical for humanity to identify and edit out these traits in ai, while we can.
      • irishcoffee 5mo ago
        Seems to me the venn diagram of "congress and c-suites" vs "educated people" would have one circle wholly inside the other. I know people without a college education that would give you the shirt off their back, and educated people that rewrite wills while their parents are on their deathbed. What we call education today is a problem, and one need look no further than the massive amount of debt we saddle on kids. For what? So they can pay for privilege of being told what books to read, what topics to write about, and a rubber stamp? I didn't learn a _thing_ in college that I haven't learned better either at $dayjob, or from reading. Most of my math profs. didn't speak english well, and none of the TAs did. Any math I've since forgotten from college was self-taught. Calc i/ii/iii, diffew, linear, stat. College/education lost the plot. The sooner we admit it, the sooner we can fix it.