There’s magic?
Only if you believe in it. Many CEOs do. They’re very good in magical thinking.
I have a counter argument. From an evolutionary standpoint, if you keep doubling computer capacity exponentially isn’t it extraordinarily arrogant of humans to assume that their evolutionarily stagnant brains will remain relevant for much longer?
If you keep doubling the number of fruit flies exponentially, isn’t it likely that humanity will find itself outsmarted?
The answer is no, it isn’t. Quantity does not quality make and all our current AI tech is about ways to breed fruit flies that fly left or right depending on what they see.
As a counter argument against that, companies are trying to make self driving cars work for 20 years. Processing power has increased by a million and the things still get stuck. Pure processing power isn’t everything.
Magic as in street magician, not magic as in wizard. Lots of the things that people claim AI can do are like a magic show, it’s amazing if you look at it from the right angle, and with the right skill you can hide the strings holding it up, but if you try to use it in the real world it falls apart.
I wish there was actual magic
It would make science very difficult.
What if it magically made it easier?
Mmm irrational shit makes rationality harder
Look at quantum mechanics
Everything is magic if you don’t understand how the thing works.
I wish. I don’t understand why my stomach can’t handle corn, but it doesn’t lead to magic. It leads to pain.
Have you eaten hominy corn? The nixtamalisation process makes it digestible.
I don’t have access to that, sadly. I’m pretty sure my body would reject it however. At least from my reading on what it is.
Sam Altman will make a big pile of investor money disappear before your very eyes.
The masses have been treating it like actual magic since the early stages and are only slowly warming up to the idea it‘s calculations. Calculations of things that are often more than the sum of it‘s parts as people start to realize. Well some people anyway.
oh the bubble’s gonna burst sooner than some may think
Next week, some say
If you’re a thechbro, this is the new magic shit, man! To the moooooon!
If only.
Good. It’s dangerous to view AI as magic. I’ve had to debate way too many people who think they LLMs are actually intelligent. It’s dangerous to overestimate their capabilities lest we use them for tasks they can’t perform safely. It’s very powerful but the fact that it’s totally non deterministic and unpredictable means we need to very carefully design systems that rely on LLMs with heavy guards rails.
Conversely, there are way too many people who think that humans are magic and that it’s impossible for AI to ever do <insert whatever is currently being debated here>.
I’ve long believed that there’s a smooth spectrum between not-intelligent and human-intelligent. It’s not a binary yes/no sort of thing. There’s basic inert rocks at one end, and humans at the other, and everything else gets scattered at various points in between. So I think it’s fine to discuss where exactly on that scale LLMs fall, and accept the possibility that they’re moving in our direction.
It’s not linear either. Brains are crazy complex and have sub cortexes that are more specialized to specific tasks. I really don’t think that LLMs alone can possibly demonstrate advanced intelligence, but I do think it could be a very important cortex for one. There’s also different types of intelligence. LLMs are very knowledgeable and have great recall but lack reasoning or worldview.
Indeed, and many of the more advanced AI systems currently out there are already using LLMs as just one component. Retrieval-augmented generation, for example, adds a separate “memory” that gets searched and bits inserted into the context of the LLM when it’s answering questions. LLMs have been trained to be able to call external APIs to do the things they’re bad at, like math. The LLM is typically still the central “core” of the system, though; the other stuff is routine sorts of computer activities that we’ve already had a handle on for decades.
IMO it still boils down to a continuum. If there’s an AI system that’s got an LLM in it but also a Wolfram Alpha API and a websearch API and other such “helpers”, then that system should be considered as a whole when asking how “intelligent” it is.
Lol yup, some people think they’re real smart for realizing how limited LLMs are, but they don’t recognize that the researchers that actually work on this are years ahead on experimentation and theory already and have already realized all this stuff and more. They’re not just making the specific models better, they’re also figuring out how to combine them to make something more generally intelligent instead of super specialized.
Not being combative or even disagreeing with you - purely out of curiosity, what do you think are the necessary and sufficient conditions of intelligence?
A worldview simulation it can use as a scratch pad for reasoning. I view reasoning as a set of simulated actions to convert a worldview from state a to state b.
It depends on how you define intelligence though. Normally people define it as human like, and I think there are 3 primary sub types of intelligence needed for cognizance, being reasoning, awareness, and knowledge. I think the current Gen is figuring out the knowledge type, but it needs to be combined with the other two to be complete.
Thanks! I’m not clear on what you mean by a worldview simulation as a scratch pad for reasoning. What would be an example of that process at work?
For sure, defining intelligence is non trivial. What clear the bar of intelligence, and what doesn’t, is not obvious to me. So that’s why I’m engaging here, it sounds like you’ve put a lot of thought into an answer. But I’m not sure I understand your terms.
A worldview is your current representational model of the world around you, so for example you know you’re a human on earth in a physical universe when a set of rules, you have a mental representation of your body and it’s capabilities, your location and the physicality of the things in your location. It can also be abstract things too, like your personality and your relationships and your understanding of what’s capable in the world.
Basically, you live in reality, but you need a way to store a representation of that reality in your mind in order to be able to interact with and understand that reality.
The simulation part is your ability to imagine manipulating that reality to achieve a goal, and if you break that down, you’re trying to convert reality from your perceived current real state A, to a imagined desired state B. Reasoning is coming up with a plan to convert the worldview from state A to state B step by step, so let’s say you want to brush your teeth, you a want to convert your worldview of you having dirty teeth to you having clean teeth, and to do that you reason that you need to follow a few steps to achieve that, like moving your body to the bathroom, retrieving tools (toothbrush and toothpaste) and applying mechanical action to your teeth to clean them. You created a step by step plan to change the state of your worldview to a new desired state you came up with. It doesn’t need to be physical either, it could be an abstract goal, like calculating a tip for a bill. It can also be a grand goal, like going to college or creating a mathematical proof.
LLMs don’t have a representational model of the world, they don’t have a working memory or a world simulation to use as a scratchpad for testing out reasoning. They just take a sequence of words and retrieve the next word that is probabilistically and relationally likely to be a good next word based on its training data.
They could be a really important cortex that can assist in developing a worldview model, but in their current granular state of being a single task AI model, they cannot do reasoning on their own.
Knowledge retrieval is an important component that assists in reasoning though, so it can still play a very important role in reasoning.
Interesting. I’m curious to know more about what you think of training datasets. Seems like they could be described as a stored representation of reality that maybe checks the boxes you laid out. It’s a very different structure of representation than what we have as animals, but I’m not sure it can be brushed off as trivial. The way an AI interacts with a training dataset is mechanistic, but as you describe, human worldviews can be described in mechanistic terms as well (I do X because I believe Y).
You haven’t said it, so I might be wrong, but are you pointing to freewill and imagination as somehow tied to intelligence in some necessary way?
I think worldview is all about simulation and maintaining state, it’s not really about making associations, but rather maintaining some kind of up to date and imaginary state that you can simulate on top of, to represent the world. I think it needs to be a very dynamic thing which is a pretty different paradigm to the ML training methodology.
Yes, I view these things as foundational to freewill and imagination, but I’m trying to think more low level than that. Simulation facilities imagination and reasoning facilities motivation which facilities free will.
Are those things necessary for intelligence? Well it depends on your definition and everyone has a different definition ranging from reciting information to full blown consciousness. Personally, I don’t really care about coming up with a rigid definition for it, it’s just a word, I care more about the attributes. I think LLMs are a good knowledge engine and knowledge is a component of intelligence.
I think it’s a big mistake to think that because the most basic LLMs are just autocompletes, or that because LLMs can hallucinate, that what big LLMs do doesn’t constitute “thinking”. No, GPT4 isn’t conscious, but it very clearly “thinks”.
It’s started to feel to me like current AIs are reasonable recreations of parts of our minds. It’s like they’re our ability to visualize, to verbalize, and to an extent, to reason (at least the way we intuitively reason, not formally), but separared from the “rest” of our thought processes.
Depends on how you define thinking. I agree, LLMs could be a component of thinking, specifically knowledge and recall.
Yes, as Linus Torvalds said humans are also thinking like autocomplete systems.
Yea, try talking to chatgpt about things that you really know in detail about. It will fail to show you the hidden, niche things (unless you mention them yourself), it will make lots of stuff up that you would not pick up on otherwise (and once you point it out, the bloody thing will “I knew that” you, sometimes even if you are wrong) and it is very shallow in its details. Sometimes, it just repeats your question back to you as a well-written essay. And that’s fine…it is still a miracle that it is able to be as reliable and entertaining as some random bullshitter you talk to in a bar, it’s good for brainstorming too.
It’s like watching mainstream media news talk about something you know about.
Oh good comparison
Haha, definitely, it’s infuriating and scary. But it also depends on what you are watching for. If you are watching TV, you do it for convenience or entertainment. LLMs have the potential to be much more than that, but unless a very open and accessible ecosystem is created for them, they are going to be whatever our tech overlords decide they want them to be in their boardrooms to milk us.
Well, if you read the article, you’ll see that’s exactly what is happening. Every company you can imagine is investing the GDP of smaller nations into AI. Google, Facebook, Microsoft. AI isn’t the future of humanity. It’s the future of capitalist interests. It’s the future of profit chasing. It’s the future of human misery. Tech companies have trampled all over human happiness and sanity to make a buck. And with the way surveillance capitalism is moving—facial recognition being integrated into insane places, like the M&M vending machine, the huge market for our most personal, revealing data—these could literally be two horsemen of the apocalypse.
Advancements in tech haven’t helped us as humans in while. But they sure did streamline profit centers. We have to wrest control of our future back from corporate America because this plutocracy driven by these people is very, very fucking dangerous.
AI is not the future for us. It’s the future for them. Our jobs getting “streamlined” will not mean the end of work and the rise of UBI. It will mean stronger, more invasive corporations wielding more power than ever while more and more people suffer, are cast out and told they’re just not working hard enough.
Sony wants photographs of my ears for “360 reality audio”. No. Just no.
Dude! I bought some Bose headphones that were amazing. But I read over the privacy policy and they wanted to “map my head movements” and they wanted permission to passively listen to audio sent through the speakers and any audio around the microphone.
I ran those fuckers back to the store as quickly as possible.
But not before having to duck and dodge agreeing to the privacy policy in their app, so I quickly deleted it. But when I started interacting with their customer service, they tried to get me to sign a different privacy policy that seemed formulated just for the information shared in the chat, but in two separate addenda I had to dig through, I saw they were tryin to get me to sign the original super invasive privacy policy.
Fuck Bose. Fuck all these fake fronts for surveillance capitalism. Fuck capitalism.
Wrong chat dude. What does that have to do with AI anyways?
I think the claim is that they can use AI to improve the sound of their headphones if you supply them with images of your ears. I just dont like them having a database of personally identifying information like that.
How personally identifiable is your ear though? It’s not connected to your thoughts, you can’t use it to determine your age height and weight, which ad company would need that data? IMO, it’s no different than sending a mold of your ear tube to a CIEM company to get your custom molded earphones.
it’s bizarre without context, but i recognise what they mean - Sony’s headphones app suggests you send them photos of your ears so they can analyse the shape to improve the noise cancellation.
Which I don’t think has anything to do with GenAI. Though, I admit I’m not well educated in ear scanning and 3D audio reconstruction, so good sources are appreciated.
What worries me is how much of the AI criticism on Lemmy wants to make everything worse; not share the gains more equally. If that’s what passes for left today, well…
I don’t have a problem with machine learning. I have a problem with one company getting x trillion dollars investment. Who pays when the investors want their returns? Eventually it’s going to be all of us.
I don’t think they have that much potential. They are just uncontrollable, it’s a neat trick but totally unreliable if there isn’t a human in the loop. This approach is missing all the control systems we have in our brains.
I really only use for “oh damn, I known there’s a great one-liner to do that in Python” sort of thing. It’s usually right and of it isn’t it’ll be immediacy obvious and you can move on with your day. For anything more complex the gas lighting and subtle errors make it unusable.
Oh yes, it’s great for that. My google-fu was never good enough to “find the name of this thing that does this, but only when in this circumstance”
ChatGPT is great for helping with specific problems. Google search for example gives fairly general answers, or may have information that doesn’t apply to your specific situation. But if you give ChatGPT a very specific description of the issue you’re running into it will generally give some very useful recommendations. And it’s an iterative process, you just need to treat it like a conversation.
It’s also a decent writer’s room brainstorm kind of tool, although it can’t really get beyond the initial pitch as it’s pretty terrible at staying consistent when trying to clean up ideas.
I find it incredibly helpful for breaking into new things.
I want to learn terraform today, no guide/video/docs site can do it as well as having a teacher available at any time for Q&A.
Aside from that, it’s pretty good for general Q&A on documented topics, and great when provided context (ie. A full 200MB export of documentation from a tool or system).
But the moment I try and dig deeper I to something I’m an expert in, it just breaks down.
That’s why I’ve found it somewhat dangerous to use to jump into new things. It doesn’t care about bes practices and will just help you enough to let you shoot yourself in the foot.
Just wait for MeanGirlsGPT
Those recent failures only come across as cracks for people who see AI as magic in the first place. What they’re really cracks in is people’s misperceptions about what AI can do.
Recent AI advances are still amazing and world-changing. People have been spoiled by science fiction, though, and are disappointed that it’s not the person-in-a-robot-body kind of AI that they imagined they were being promised. Turns out we don’t need to jump straight to that level to still get dramatic changes to society and the economy out of it.
I get strong “everything is amazing and nobody is happy” vibes from this sort of thing.
Also interesting is that most people don’t understand the advances it makes possible so when they hear people saying it’s amazing and then try it of course they’re going to think it’s not lived upto hype.
The big things are going to completely change things like how we use computers especially being able to describe how you want it to lay out ui and create custom tools on the fly.
Exactly, it’s the people who know that are amazed by the subtle intricacies of AI and the implications of it. It’s the people that don’t know saying, “I asked it to write a horror story about a killer clown, and it ended up sounding like Stephen King. What a rip off machine.”
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
everything is amazing and nobody is happy
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Removed by mod
Unfortunately for that outcome, brute forcing with more compute is pretty helpful for now
And even if local small-scale models turn out to be optimal, that wouldn’t stop big business from using them. I’m not sure what “it” is being referred to with “I hope it collapses.”
Removed by mod
There are quite a lot of AI-sceptics in this thread. If you compare the situation to 10 years ago, isn’t it insane how far we’ve come since then?
Image generation, video generation, self-driving cars (Level 4 so the driver doesn’t need to pay attention at all times), capable text comprehension and generation. Whether it is used for translation, help with writing reports or coding. And to top it all off, we have open source models that are at least in a similar ballpark as the closed ones and those models can be run on consumer hardware.
Obviously AI is not a solved problem yet and there are lots of shortcomings (especially with LLMs and logic where they completely fail for even simple problems) but the progress is astonishing.
I think a big obstacle to meaningfully using AI is going to be public perception. Understanding the difference between CHAT-GPT and open source models means that people like us will probably continue to find ways of using AI as it continues to improve, but what I keep seeing is botched applications, where neither the consumers nor the investors who are pushing AI really understand what it is or what it’s useful for. It’s like trying to dig a grave with a fork - people are going to throw away the fork and say it’s useless, not realising that that’s not how it’s meant to be used.
I’m concerned about the way the hype behaves because I wouldn’t be surprised if people got so sick of hearing about AI at all, let alone broken AI nonsense, that it hastens the next AI winter. I worry that legitimate development may be held back by all the nonsense.
I actually think public perception is not going to be that big a deal one way or the other. A lot of decisions about AI applications will be made by businessmen in boardrooms, and people will be presented with the results without necessarily even knowing that it’s AI.
I’ve seen a weird aspect of it from the science side, where people writing grant applications or writing papers feel compelled to incorporate AI into it, because even if they know that their sub-field has no reliable use-cases for AI yet, they’re feeling the pressure of the hype.
Specifically, when I say the pressure of the hype, I mean that some of the best scientists I have known were pretty bad at the academic schmoozing that facilitates better funding and more prestige. In practice, businessmen in boardrooms are often the ones holding the purse strings and sometimes it’s easier to try to speak their language than to “translate” one’s research to something they’ll understand.
Businessmen are just the public but with money.
Fair point. I personally think that AI lives up to enough parts of the hype so that there won’t be another AI winter but who knows. Some will obviously get disillusioned but not enough.
Lol. It doesn’t do video generation. It just takes existing video and makes it look weird. Image generation is about the same: they just take existing works and smash them together, often in an incoherent way. Half the text generation shit is just fine by underpaid people in Kenya Ave and similar places.
There are a few areas where llm could be useful, things like trawling large data sets, etc, but every bit of the stuff that is being hyped as “AI” is just spam generators.
That’s totally not how it works. Not only nobody has the need for such tools, but the technology got there much before the current state of AI
Confidently incorrect.
deleted by creator
As I often mention when this subject pops up: while the current statistics-based generative models might see some application, I believe that they’ll be eventually replaced by better models that are actually aware of what they’re generating, instead of simply reproducing patterns. With the current models being seen as “that cute 20s toy”.
In text generation (currently dominated by LLMs), for example, this means that the main “bulk” of the model would do three things:
- convert input tokens into sememes (units of meaning)
- perform logic operations with the sememes
- convert sememes back into tokens for the output
Because, as it stands, LLMs are only chaining tokens. They might do this in an incredibly complex way, but that’s it. That’s obvious when you look at what LLM-fuelled bots output as “hallucination” - they aren’t the result of some internal error, they’re simply an undesired product of a model that sometimes outputs desirable stuff too.
Sub “tokens” and “sememes” with “pixels” and “objects” and this probably holds true for image generating models, too. Probably.
Now, am I some sort of genius for noticing this? Probably not; I’m just some nobody with a chimp avatar, rambling in the Fediverse. Odds are that people behind those tech giants already noticed the same ages ago, and at least some of them reached the same conclusion - that better gen models need more awareness. If they are not doing this already, it means that this shit would be painfully expensive to implement, so the “better models” that I mentioned at the start will probably not appear too soon.
Most cracks will stay there; Google will hide them with an obnoxious band-aid, OpenAI will leave them in plain daylight, but the magic trick will still not be perfect, at least in the foreseeable future.
And some might say “use MOAR processing power!”, or “input MOAR training data!”, in the hopes that the current approach will “magically” fix itself. For those, imagine yourself trying to drain the Atlantic with a bucket: does it really matter if you use more buckets, or larger buckets? Brute-forcing problems only go so far.
Just my two cents.
I agree 100%, and I think Zuckerberg’s attempt at a massive 340,000 of Nvidia’s H100 GPUs AI based on LLM with the aim to create a generel AI sounds stupid. Unless there’s a lot more to their attempt, it’s doomed to fail.
I suppose the idea is something about achieving critical mass, but it’s pretty obvious, that that is far from the only factor missing to achieve general AI.
I still think it’s impressive what they can do with LLM. And it seems to be a pretty huge step forward. But It’s taken about 40 years from we had decent “pattern recognition” to get here, the next step could be another 40 years?
I think that Zuckerberg’s attempt is a mix of publicity stunt and “I want [you] to believe!”. Trying to reach AGI through a large enough LLM sounds silly, on the same level as “ants build, right? If we gather enough ants, they’ll build a skyscraper! Chrust me.”
In fact I wonder if the opposite direction wouldn’t be a bit more feasible - start with some extremely primitive AGI, then “teach” it Language (as a skill) and a language (like Mandarin or English or whatever).
I’m not sure on how many years it’ll take for an AGI to pop up. 100 years perhaps, but I’m just guessing.
That’s a huge oversimplification of the way LLMs work. They’re not statistical in the way a Markov chain is. They use neural networks, which are a decent analogy for the human brain. The way the synapses between neurons are wired is obviously different, and the way the neurons are triggered and the types of signals they can send to other neurons is obviously different. But overall, similar capabilities can in theory be achieved with either method. If you’re going to call neural networks statistics based, you might as well call the human brain statistics based as well.
That’s a huge oversimplification of the way LLMs work.
I’m sticking to what matters for the sake of the argument. Anyone who wants to inform themself further has a plethora of online resources to do so.
They’re not statistical in the way a Markov chain is.
Implied: “you’re suggesting that they work like Markov chains, they don’t.”
In no moment I mentioned or even implied Markov chains. My usage of the verb “to chain” is clearly vaguer within that context; please do not assume words onto my mouth.
They use neural networks, which are a decent analogy for the human brain. The way the synapses between neurons are wired is obviously different, and the way the neurons are triggered and the types of signals they can send to other neurons is obviously different. But overall, similar capabilities can in theory be achieved with either method.
I don’t disagree with the conclusion (i.e. I believe that neural networks can achieve human-like capabilities), but the argument itself is such a fallacious babble (false equivalence) that I’m not bothering further with your comment.
And it’s also an “ackshyually” given this context dammit. I’m not talking about the bloody neural network, but how it is used.
No need to get offended. Maybe I misunderstood the intent behind your original message. I think you made a lot of good points.
I brought up the Markov chain because a common misconception I’ve seen on the Internet and in real life is that LLMs work pretty much the same as Markov chains under the hood. And I saw no mention of neural networks in your original comment.
Trying to make real and good use of AI generative models are cracks in the magic.
It’s pretty useful if you know exactly what you want and how to work within it’s limitations.
Coworkers around me already use ChatGPT to generate code snippets for Python, Excel VBA, etc. to good success.
Right, it’s a tool with quirks, techniques and skills to use just like any other tool. ChatGPT has definitely saved me time and on at least one occasion, kept me from missing a deadline that I probably would have missed if I went about it “the old way” lmao
You mean they’re using it to write boilerplate which shouldn’t have been written in the first place.
Call it whatever makes you feel happy, it is allowing me to accomplish things much more quickly and easily than working without it does.
Until someone has to maintain it.
That’s why I said code “snippets”. I don’t trust it to give me the entire answer right from the get go, because I acknowledge its limitations and review it before pasting it in. I find it works better if I tell it to generate specific code rather than everything at once.
Plus, we’re not working on mission critical server stuff here. Those are code used for data analysis which probably could also be found on Stackoverflow anyway. If it works, it works.
Why? If you know how to incorporate “boilerplate” and modify it correctly into your own code, what difference does it make if its from ChatGPT or Stackoverflow?
Difference to copy and paste from stackoverflow, probably not terribly much. The latter is already bad.
It’s as if the young’uns heard the term “10x developer” and decided that not understanding what you’re doing is the way to get there.
I found this graph very clear
Well, natural language processing is placed in the trough of disillusionment and projected to stay there for years. ChatGPT was released in November 2022…
“This post is for paid subscribers”
(Also that page has a script I had to override just to copy and paste that)
It’s well worth reading the longer newsletter the above link quotes: https://www.wheresyoured.at/sam-altman-fried/
I kinda agree we are probably cresting the peak of the hype cycle right now.
darkaltrax
