HN user
The conclusion of this blog post is a bit hysterical. The intent of this steg is excruciatingly clear (identifying usage by Chinese firms that may be conducting model distillation). It's unclear on how this "punishes normal developers" in any shape or form.
And even if that's true (and it frequently is!), detractors usually miss the underlying and immense impact of "sleeping dad capability" equivalent artificial systems.
Horizontally scaling "sleeping dads" takes decades, but inference capacity for a sleeping dad equivalent model can be scaled instantly, assuming one has the hardware capacity for it. The world isn't really ready for a contraction of skill dissemination going from decades to minutes.
Not "hidden", but probably more like "no one bothered to look".
Well yeah. There weren't enough "someones" available to look. There are a finite number of qualified individuals with time available to look for bugs in OSS, resulting in a finite amount of bug finding capacity available in the world.
Or at least there was. That's what's changing as these models become competent enough to spot and validate bugs. That finite global capacity to find bugs is now increasing, and actual bugs are starting to be dredged up. This year will be very very interesting if models continue to increase in capability.
It's doom and gloom because the underlying game theory forces all state actors into an unbound and irresponsible arms race, consequences be damned.
AI development game theory is extremely similar to the game theory behind nuclear arms development, but worse (nuclear weaponry was born from Human General Intelligence, and is therefore a subset of the potential of AI development). Failing to be the most capable actor could put one in a position of permanent loss of autonomy/agency at the whims of more capable actors.
Unfun thought experiment: In an AGI scenario, what lever of power do the UBI recipients have to force what you've described?
Historically, humanity's biological monopoly on the fundamental resource of "general intelligence" has always been that lever. Looking at the world today, it's pretty clear that democracies are just a temporary balance between the general contempt of the powerful towards commoners, and the fact that the powerful begrudgingly need our economic utility, which is ultimately based on our general intellect. Even callous dictatorships had to exercise partial restraint on violence and murder, to retain a pool of general intellect.
AGI will be a multiple-whammy here:
- most people will become economically worse-than-useless, they will be a total liability on the rich and powerful
- those same people are unlikely to be given access to any levers of power or influence, because they no longer have anything of value to provide to the rich and powerful
- AGI in combination with robotic platforms, after a certain threshold, will permit for insurmountable policing. The "rise up against the robots" cliches we see in film simply become impossible after a certain point.
I desperately hope we end up wielding AI to usher in a post-scarcity utopia, but looking at the types of people who own the world...we'll get what we're allowed to get.
I used to think that "AI operating in meatspace" was going to remain a tough problem for a long time, but seeing the dramatic developments in robotics over the last 2 years, it's pretty clear that's not going to be the case.
As the masses fade into permanent unemployment, this will likely coincide with (and be partially caused by) a corresponding proliferation in intelligent humanoid robots.
At a certain point, "turning on them" becomes physically impossible.
Do you genuinely believe that this is a binary decision, or is this just anti-euthanasia rhetoric disguised as concern trolling?
Offering humane end-of-life options to people suffering today does not prohibit ongoing disease research towards potentially helping people in the future.
You're talking about two different things.
No, you've actually missed his point entirely.
He is alluding to the fact that over the last decade or so, consumers have unwittingly slid down the slope of "not having true control over personal electronic devices". Iphones are already there, Android devices are a few years behind, as are most desktop PCs.
Once there's critical mass, it would not be a stretch for ISPs to only deliver internet to endpoints that have a secure element that attests to the integrity of the internet-con ected device. This will of course be done under the guise of "fighting the spread of malware" and such.
Piracy effectively ends at that point.
A black hole in our solar system is basically "in our backyard" in relation to typical interstellar distances.
Sure, we wouldn't be able to get there for many decades, but "within a century" would be feasible.
There are so many unknowns surrounding the nature of black holes. Having one in our backyard would give us a chance to test our guesses.
Yes, I am quite aware that the current generation of space-based telescopes are quite limited. And it's solely due to the historically extreme cost of mass to orbit.
The largest proposed ground observatories already use segmented mirrors. One can use the same approach in space, it's only a matter of launch cost.
Isn't one of the nice aspects of astronomy is that you can do quite a bit as an amateur with some decent equipment and a nice vantage point? What value does this fleet have to these people?
It doesn't, and admittedly I don't really care that much.
I care far far more that remote communities can now have meaningful access to the internet, one of the most transformative and enabling technologies in existence, than niche hobbyists being mildly encumbered. And most people likely fall into the same camp.
As already mentioned, I find it really hard to believe that the common person whining about "the poor amateur astronomers" are being sincere. Some of them likely are, but "finding any reason possible to whine about billionaires" seems to be vogue these days.
I actually use this exact example when encouraging careful attention to paradigms where a fundamental variable is slowly but consistently changing.
It's essentially equivalent to a boundary on a phase diagram: Cost/Watt has fallen past a critical threshold, and suddenly this dramatically different approach just makes more sense.
I am entirely convinced that absent LEO comsat constellations, people who espouse this sentiment would likely be whining about "useless astronomy taking money away from helping poor people".
If you genuinely care about the field of astronomy, rest assured that the same falling launch costs that have enabled LEO comsat constellations, will enable the launch of fleets of space-based telescopes.
Trains don't have guaranteed personal space, nor do they proceed from one's origin directly to their destination.
You might not value that, but lots of other people do.
I've always felt that trying to pin down the precise definition of AGI is as useless as trying to pin down "what it means to truly understand". It's a mental trap for smart people, that distracts them from focusing on the impacts of hard-to-define concepts like AGI.
AGI doesn't need to be "called", and there is no need for anyone to come to an agreement as to what its precise definition is. But at some point, we will cross that hard-to-define threshold, and the economic effects will be felt almost immediately.
We should probably be focusing on how to prepare society for those changes, and not on academic bullshit.
Strong emphasis on "seems".
I'd encourage you to review the definition of "brute force", and then consider the absolutely immense combinatoric space represented by the grids these puzzles use.
"Brute force" simply cannot touch these puzzles. An amount of understanding and pattern recognition is strictly required, even with the large quantities of test-time compute that were used against arc-agi-1.
This is highly unlikely to be a mechanical limitation of the robotic arms. As others have said, it's likely an inference speed limitation - their model is understanding, reacting, and producing outputs as fast as its supporting hardware can.
But that all just poofs away in a year or two as inferencing hardware gets better/faster. And for many use cases, the slowness/awkwardness doesn't really matter as long as the job gets done.
"AI working in meatspace" was supposed to be hard, and its rapidly becoming clear that isn't going to be the case at all.
Depends on one's goals. If simply hooking up is the objective, although it's disingenuous/dishonest, this would improve one's odds.
You can't run when it's rainy/snowy/etc, so more downtime.
Waymo vehicles don't work in the rain? This is easily verifiable as false.
You really have a tough time with being wrong, don't you?
Sorry, that's goalpost moving.
Just reminding you of your earlier claim:
AI is not good enough yet for anything requiring deep reasoning, mission-critical work...
Is driving a mission-critical function? Due to its safety critical nature, many would say "yes".
So have you simply pivoted to "oh it does work, but it's not as profitable as it should be"?
The way you know fully autonomous driving is nowhere near ready
How do you reconcile this claim with Waymo's dramatically increased rate of expansion these past few years?
We don't understand human cognition despite literally thousands of years of thought and study
Is this a requirement for achieving AGI? The history of progression of the ML field indicates that the answer is "no". We don't really understand how concepts are encoded in today's models, yet that doesn't stop them from being economically useful. So why would the special case of AGI be any different?
At the start of 2021, "we are entering another AI winter" was a common sentiment, even here. People proclaiming that were so very certain about that point of view, and yet, here we are.
What makes you so certain that we will enter an AI winter before reaching the threshold of AGI? Do you have some secret insights into the mechanisms of general intelligence that you aren't sharing with the class?
I don't give a rat's ass about whether or not AI reasoning is "real" or a "mimicry". I care if machines are going to displace my economic value as a human-based general intelligence.
If a synthetic "mimicry" can displace human thinking, we've got serious problems, regardless of whether or not you believe that it's "real".
We already produce more than enough for economic liberation all over the world, many times over. It hasn't happened. Why?
Because directing material resources towards that end requires a certain aggregate amount of willing/aligned general intelligence, which we simply don't have as a society. Failure after failure of socialist states demonstrate that human general intelligence is on average, uninterested in working towards the greater good. AGI won't have such limitations.
The blog post even addresses this: "the cost of intelligence and the cost of energy constrain a lot of things".
However, I actually do agree with you, but for a different reason. AGI is highly unlikely to yield economic liberation for the masses. Not because we won't have the intelligence capacity, but because the iota of people that will have their hands on the levers of power will in all likelyhood be uninterested in tending to the masses of now economically useless people.
Ah yes. I believe this is commonly called "moving the goalposts".
They think it’s the end all be all for everything.
Is (human-based) general intelligence not one of the fundamental enabling elements of literally every human activity throughout history, regardless of how many layers of automation and technology one has to peel back to get to it?
Can you maybe imagine how the ability to create arbitrary amounts of general intelligence, completely divorced from the normal lengthy biological process, could upend that foundation of human activity?
They have the vision of the ‘AI’ they’ve seen in movies in mind, see the current ‘AI’ being used and to them it’s basically almost the same, their brain is mental bridging the concepts and saying it’s only a matter of time.
I've found that most AI-related movies exclusively focus on "quality ASI" scenarios, which are mostly irrelevant to our current state of the world, as an immense amount of danger/value/disruption will arrive with AGI. People who are seriously reasoning about the impacts of AGI are not using movies as references. "Those stupid movie watching idiots" is just a crutch you are using to avoid thinking about something that you disagree with.
Real AI, artificial intelligence, is a fever dream. This is machine learning except the machines are bigger than ever before. There is no intellect.
Do you have any evidence to support this conclusion? And does it even matter? If "fake intellect" can replace a human, that human still has to deal with the very real issue or not having a job anymore. If "fake intellect" is used to conduct mass surveillance, and direct suppression activities towards divergent individuals, those individuals are still going to have a bad time.
Just a heads up, your reading comprehension kinda sucks.
Sorry, didn't see any "kitchen fridge/hot water tank combo units" on their website. Care to provide a link?
Or perhaps you may have missed a nuance in the comments above yours? Nobody is claiming that heat pumps don't work, they certainly require a source of heat to pump though, and the air in a kitchen fridge ain't that.