Transcript

Title text: This is how you all fucking sound

[A smug tech bro wearing a sideways cap, watch, chain around his neck stands in front of a data center by a lake with dead fish. A smoke stack blows pollution into the air]

Tech bro: AI is already here, there’s no going back.

[A smug man in a suit with cigarette in hand stands in a restaurant while two disgruntled diners cough from the smoke]

Suit: Smoking indoors is already here, there’s no going back.

[A smug man in a top hat and suit stands in a factory with two sad and dirty children]

Hat: Child labor is already here, there’s no going back.

[A smug plantation owner stands in front of a field with with two angry slaves]

Plantation owner: The Atlantic Slave trade is already here, there’s no going back.

Still Vreni on Bluesky

  • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4310·
    7 days ago

    Yes, but at least at the end of the day you can use nukes to blow stuff up. Presumably your enemies.

    If your enemies win the generative AI “arms” race they can use it to, uh…

    ???

    (Yes, I am aware there are military/governmental applications for neural net learning technologies but they’re the types of pattern recognition and signals analysis stuff we already do without needing to build a football stadium sized datacenter every 50 miles and burn the entire nation’s GDP on electricity generation. Most of the other applications appear to revolve around a regime using it solely to shoot themselves in the foot, e.g. powering a fantasy army of likely to be highly defective murder robots or using it to propagandize at and spy upon their own population in order to ensure a ready supply of destabilizing internal dissent always exists.)

      • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
        391·
        7 days ago

        But LLMs are not the path to the final state of AI, either. And that’s assuming only if — and this is a very big “if” — a true general artificial intelligence can even be created using traditional silicon computing methods in the first place. Blithely assuming that it can be is really rather asking past the sale.

        • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works
          2·
          7 days ago

          Not only that, it’s basically eating all the resources that could go into making AGI.

          There is nooooo way for companies to invest in actual innovation when they are throwing everything at this dead end.

        • venusaur@lemmy.world
          1·
          7 days ago

          Then you’re well aware of the massive power that AGI will bring to any nation that can harness it. And no, LLMs alone are not the path, and possibly not the path at all.

        • Dagnet@lemmy.world
          193·
          7 days ago

          Yep, by design LLM cannot become ‘inteligent’, you can only make it more believable but it’s still copying humans not really thinking by itself. No amount of development or money invested will change that, it’s not a pokemon it won’t just evolve into something different one day.

          • minoscopede@lemmy.world
            11·
            5 days ago

            To strongman your argument, “LLMs with a supervised training pipeline cannot become intelligent”.

            RL training pipelines are much more open-ended, and experts still unsure one way or the other if an LLM + RL could lead to intelligence.

          • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
            231·
            7 days ago

            And it’s worth reiterating, the current crop of generative “AI” is incapable of producing anything new or novel. All it can do is reassemble existing strings, tokens, and patterns in slightly different ways. Innovation can never come from such a machine. That will have to come from a human.

            The current push is the notion that “hyperscaling,” i.e. throwing even more hardware and space and power and money at the same concept, will magically make it something it isn’t. Obviously that’s not going to work. It’ll allow grifters to make a ton of money over it, though!

              • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
                72·
                7 days ago

                From TFA:

                The AI did not prove that its approach is the best anyone can do, though. In fact, mathematician Will Sawin has already improved upon the AI’s grid.

                OpenAI privately contacted Litt, Sawin, Gowers and a number of other mathematicians to verify the LLM’s proof. Together (and without the company’s direct involvement), they wrote up their individual takeaways. (No external experts have seen the AI’s original output, however—just an edited version of its train of thought.)

                What stood out, they said, was the AI’s preternatural patience and focus.

                …

                “AIs have an edge: It’s not just that they can try all known methods,” says Jacob Tsimerman, a mathematician at the University of Toronto, who was not involved in the work but was part of the companion paper solicited by OpenAI. “They can play for longer and in more treacherous waters than mathematicians without getting overwhelmed.”

                …

                The mathematical tools the AI used here are not novel, although their application in this domain appears to be. “The model did not invent something fundamentally new that nobody saw coming,” says Sébastien Bubeck, a mathematician leading OpenAI’s mathematical explorations. “It just executed like an amazing mathematician.”

                So, it’s a monkeys-on-typewriters situation with the computer able to try and reject the hammering of who knows how many square pegs into round holes until it finally arrives at a workable conclusion, which a human has already bested. And we’re not allowed to see its homework.

                This is categorically failing to set the world on fire, except possibly in the literal sense.

                • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
                  52·
                  7 days ago

                  After 80 years of fruitless struggle by human mathematicians, a major geometry conjecture has at last been solved—via a straightforward query to a chatbot.

                  There’s value having tedious work done by AI so it can provide inspiration to real people, which is exactly what happened in this case.

                  So, it’s a monkeys-on-typewriters situation with the computer able to try and reject the hammering of who knows how many square pegs into round holes until it finally arrives at a workable conclusion, which a human has already bested.

                  Gee, sounds like it’s enabling people! The horror.

                  This is categorically failing to set the world on fire,

                  Things can be useful in the right context without setting the world on fire.

    • 9point6@lemmy.world
      29·
      7 days ago

      Making a better LLM isn’t the point of all this, it’s taking what they have and building on it until they create a true AGI.

      Whoever gets there first, makes basically everything else obsolete in an instant.

      In a world where the organisations that are blazing the trail are in private hands, this is very bad news for everyone who isn’t in the winning organisation.

      That’s essentially the arms race: who gets to be king of the world.

      The slim chance of it not being monumentally detrimental to humanity is basically tied to us abandoning capitalism wholesale and uniting the world, so I’m not holding my breath.

      Edit: few downvotes on this, so check my other replies for clarity, if you still think I’m taking out my arse, comment and set me right. It’s Lemmy, the points don’t matter, I’d rather have a conversation. Plus read again if you somehow get the impression I’m advocating for any of this

      • ThisSeriesIsFalse@lemmy.caEnglish
        171·
        7 days ago

        Nobody’s making AGI anytime soon. LLMs do not have any of the baselines required for this. They’re expensive predictive text algorithms, more or less the same ones used in mobile keyboards, but upscaled to an absurd degree. Anyone truly worried about other companies or nations developing AGI has no idea how our current “AI” works. You’re never going to get there by building on them.

        • 9point6@lemmy.world
          28·
          7 days ago

          I’d like to believe too, but it doesn’t really track when you watch what these companies are actually doing.

          Of course an LLM on its own isn’t going to become an AGI. Anyone with a braincell can see that. These orgs aren’t so high on their own farts that they ignore this.

          Nearly all of the actual uses today aren’t just the LLM, but the tooling built on top of it, the LLM is the bit that you can plug into the past century of computing developments to enable much greater autonomy.

          It’s true to say an LLM in isolation isn’t going to become AGI, but it’s also looking very likely that an AGI will feature an LLM as a key component.

          That’s what’s happening in parallel to the model development, tooling and harnesses that make the overall system more capable. If it can be done by a computer (or by extension a sufficiently advanced robot), the LLM can do it too with a bit of integration work (which it is very able to do on its own today, with minimal steering). If you can test for something being correct in any way, that too can be ultimately hooked up to an LLM as another input to push it back onto the desired path when it veers off.

          Frankly I’m starting to feel like for most people it’ll feel like it’s years off until the day it happens. I don’t see remotely enough people taking the risk seriously in time to do anything.