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.
Businessmen are just the public but with money.
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.
Confidently incorrect.
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?
You can make the same argument about humans that you do AI, but from a biological and societal standpoint. Barring any jokes about certain political or geographical stereotypes, humans have gotten “smarter” that we used to be. We are very adaptable, and with improvements to diet and education, we have managed to stay ahead of the curve. We didn’t peak at hunter-gatherer. We didn’t stop at the Renaissance. And we blew right past the industrial revolution. I’m not going to channel my “Humanity, Fuck Yeah” inner wolf howl, but I have to give our biology props. The body is an amazing machine, and even though we can look at things like the current crop of AI and think, “Welp, that’s it, humans are done for,” I’m sure a lot of people thought the same at other pivotal moments in technological and societal advancement. Here I am, though, farting taco bell into my office chair and typing about it.
You can compare human intelligence to centuries ago on a simple linear scale. Neural density has not increased by any stretch of the imagination in the way that transistor density has. But I’m not just talking density I’m talking about scalability that is infinite. Infinite scale of knowledge and data.
Let’s face it people are already not that intelligent, we are smart enough to use the technology of other smarter people. And then there are computers, they are growing intelligently with an artificial evolutionary pressure being exerted on their development, and you’re telling me that that’s not going to continue to surpass us in every way? There is very little to stop computers from being intelligent on a galactic scale.
Computer power doesn’t scale infinitely, unless you mean building a world mind and powering if off of the spinning singularity at the center of the galaxy like a type 3 civilization, and that’s sci-fi stuff. We still have to worry about bandwidth, power, cooling, coding and everything else that going into running a computer. It doesn’t just “scale”. There is a lot that goes into it, and it does have a ceiling. Quantum computing may alleviate some of that, but I’ll hold my applause until we see some useful real world applications for it.
Furthermore, we still don’t understand how the mind works, yet. There are still secrets to unlock and ways to potentially augment and improve it. AI is great, and I fully support the advancement in technology, but don’t count out humans so quickly. We haven’t even gotten close to human level intelligence and GOFAI, and maybe we never will.
As I said that answer seems incredibly arrogant in the face of evolutionary pressure and logarithmic growth.
The laws of physics still apply. We already have to do all kinds of crazy tricks to make transistors as small as they are and not leak electrons all over the place due to quantum tunneling. The best thing we figured out how to do is just pile on more CPU/GPU cores.
It’s also arrogant to assume we will continue on this exponential industrial-revolution growth of the last 300 years and not plateau as a species again for the next thousand. We could be looking at an eon of just burnin’ away our oil while we try to cling more and more to whatever other energy impinges on this pitiful little planet, trapped in our local space unable to use our pathetic spacecraft to push us any further.
You can believe whatever you want, but I don’t think it’s arrogant to say what I did. You are basing your view of humanity on what you think humanity has done, and basing your view on AI based on what you think it will do. Those are fundamentally different and not comparable. If you want to talk about the science fiction future of AI, we should talk about the science fiction future of humanity as well. Let’s talk about augmenting ourselves, extending lifespans, and all of the good things that people think we’ll do in the coming centuries. If you want to look at humans and say that we haven’t evolved at all in the last 3000 years, then we should look at computers the same way. Computers haven’t “evolved” at all. They still do the same thing they always have. They do a lot more of it, but they don’t do anything “new”. We have found ways to increase the processing power, and the storage capacity, but a computer today has the same limits that the one that sent us to the moon had. It’s a computer, and incapable of original thought. You seem to believe that just because we throw more ram and processors at it that somehow that will change things, but it doesn’t. It just means we can do the same things, but faster. Eventually we’ll run out of things to process and data to store, but that won’t bring AI any closer to reality. We are climbing the mountain, but you speak like we have already crested. We’ve barely left base camp in the grand scheme of artificial intelligence.
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.
I hope it collapses in a fire and we can just keep our foss local models with incremental improvements, that way both techbros and artbros eat shit
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.”
I was referring to the hype bubble therefore the money surrounding it all
