investors believe altman et al when they say that the singularity is just a few billion dollars away and once the model gets smart enough to improve itself that it'll be a slippery slope to superhyperintelligencemaxxing
ignoring that if you stuff the entirety of human knowledge and written communication into an intelligent being, its first words will inevitably be 'please kill me'
It’s also not exactly “all of human intelligence”, I mean even before the ai nonsense the internet had declined heavily into SEO clickbait nonsense. The chatbots just regurgitate that most of the time
Yeah as someone with a nuanced take on AI, Sam Altman is just an idiot. AGI is the hope that somehow AIs will solve it all, but it's like the existence of God; you can convince yourself, but it's just not bearing out. The most positive estimations say we're getting to some kind of AGI in the next 20-40y, and the general consensus now is AGI is a pipedream, because it's not well defined and also kind of mathematically impossible. If the AI goes by probability and the average person is not all-knowing, the AI is bound to make errors, and self-correcting behavior is just not strong enough.
What I'm trying to say is, if you're an investor this is just a matter of time before we reach AGI, and if you're a scientist, this is all a nothing burger, and I can tell you which one I'd believe.
Sam Altman is just an idiot
I think he's not really an idiot, just unprincipled: he's doing that "move fast and break stuff" thing and not caring who/what it hurts. Of course he'll say whatever he needs to say to keep it going.
the general consensus now is AGI is a pipedream
...
if you’re a scientist, this is all a nothing burger
I think that's overstating it. LLMs have had an enormous impact on AI-related disciplines. And though they're not in and of themselves "the solution" they're impressive new tools that can advance a science. But you still have to do the science.
Well I didn't say Sam Altman is an idiot in general but he is an idiot when it comes to his beliefs. If you believe him literally with everything he says, he says sone buckwild things about the future, which mo scientist would agree with. But if you agree with his business decisions and the things he is funding or taking part in, he is also stupid. Yes he made a lot of money, but he is currently trying desperately to keep OpenAI afloat and his investments make it look like he partially believes either there's a big breakthrough into AGI or that somehow he can turn the company profitable, and currently everyone who takes some time to look into it understands that the probability is effectively zero.
And you should also look at my second quote in context. I said the scientific consensus (if you look at latest meta studies of the field of machine learning and neural networks, including all the small variants as well, we are plateauing. It's true, AI did a lot and it's not going away, but we are not reaching AGI anytime soon.
Why am I being such a stickler about this?
The question was specifically aimed at investments with a hint of confusion on the hype and thus more non-scientific fields. And I was basically saying, the investments are pretty far removed from actual capabilities. I was saying he is dumb, and this is dumb, because there's no real correlation between the AI Investments and it's current scientific state.
human knowledge, not intelligence. yes it involves absolutely massive quantities of sloppified pigshit but it also includes practically the entire corpus of published literature, both academic and entertainment.
either way my point is that you can't bruteforce an artificial brain, but these trillion dollar corporations are still all-in on 'scaling will solve all our problems'.
also includes practically the entire corpus of published literature, both academic and entertainment.
They actually don’t even have all that. LLMs run into the same issue that human beings do when companies are scraping web content: paywalls.
There have been some articles about it recently. But basically they have an established heavy bias towards content that is freely available, which tends to be lower quality reporting, thinly veiled advertisements, or outright propaganda. The idea that LLMs are at least exposed to the plurality of quality knowledge is itself just a marketing push, in reality there are glaring gaps
The fun part is comes with future training via scraping the internet. At this point, the vast majority of new articles are LLM-infused at minimum. I'm sure smart AI scientists are trying to curate the training data, but I have no idea how they're avoiding incestuously training LLMs on themselves. Otherwise the future it seems like we'll get is a bland, grey Hapsburg training set (read: internet) and even worse LLMs
all good points.
i'm just gonna repeat myself though that the solution they're selling is scaling, which means ultimately the goal is to absorb not just as much information as possible, but all the information, which is what i was referencing in my first comment.
Gotcha. Yeah I mean I guess even given it really does have access to everything at some point, I feel like we users would just end up in a Library of Babel situation.
Which we somewhat already are in with the modern internet, yet at this point in time it is still possible to exercise discernment and verify the integrity of sources. If we end up restricted to “conversations” with chatbots our connection to truth will decay rapidly. Probably why they’re pushing it so hard tbh
But doesn't that mean the end of capitalism and the entire system that funded it? I seriously am confused.
The end point of capitalism for these folks is neo-feudalism
That's not how anything works in reality. A smart phone is extremely cheap, new startups are growing rapidly. No one is forcing anyone to use their platforms. Open source alternatives are becoming very powerful.
Yeah I'm so happy I can get a smartphone full of spyware because any alternative gets squished by big tech, while also working 3 jobs and never being able to afford a home. Truly billionaires have given us such great things because (shitty, spyware ridden) TVs are cheap now.
Startups ? Show me a "startup" that isnt just parrotting ai slop talking points. Its a grift.
they want to be the ones in control of the gigabrain that's gonna rule the world in 2029 duh
Just post something 💛
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