Further there are some hybrid chips which might help increase computing power specifically for the matrix math that all these systems work on.
But yeah, none of this is making what people talk about when they say AGI. Just like how some tech cult people felt that Level 5 self driving was around the corner, even with all the evidence to the contrary.
The self driving we have (or really, assisted cruise control) IS impressive, and leagues ahead of what we could do even a decade or two ago, but the gulf between that, and the goal, is similar to GPT and AGI in my eyes.
There are a lot of fundamental problems we still don't have answers to. We've just gotten a lot better at doing what we already did, and getting more conformity on how.
Uh, what do you mean by this? Are you trying to draw a fundamental science vs engineering distinction here?
Because today's LLMs definitely have capabilities we previously didn't have.
But it is an interesting technology.
Are you defining "artificial intelligence" is some unusual way?
I follow Roger Penrose's thinking here. [1]
How are you defining "consciousness" and "understanding" here? Because a feedback loop into an LLM would meet the most common definition of consciousness (possessing a phonetic loop). And having an accurate internal predictive model of a system is the normal definition of understanding and a good LLM has that too.
I’ve watched my coworkers try to make use of LLMs at work, and it has convinced me the LLM’s contributions are well below the bar where their output is a net benefit to the team.
I don't really get the "low bar for contributions" argument because GH Copilot's contributions are too small-sized for there to even be any bar. It writes the obvious and tedious loops and other boilerplate so I can focus on what the code should actually do.
P.S. I've just created this account here on Hacker News because Altman is one of the talking heads I've been listening to. Not too sure what to make of this. I'm an accelerationist, so my biggest fear is America stifling its research the same way it buried space exploration and human gene editing in the past. All hope is for China - but then again, the CCP might be even more fearful of non-human entities than the West. Stormy times indeed.
The fact that we can communicate with computers using just natural language, and can query data, use powerful and complex tools just by describing what we want is an incredible breakthrough, and that's a very conservative use of the technology.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBook#iBook_G3_(%22Clamshell%2... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MR4R5LdrJw
Smartphones changed day to day human life more profoundly than anything since the steam engine.
I basically agree with you about the 20 year hype-cycle, and but when compute power reaches parity with human brain hardware (Kurzweil predicts by about 2029), one barrier is removed.
Materialists normally believe in a big bang (which has no life) and religious people normally think a higher being created the first life.
This is pretty fascinating, to you have a link explaining the religion/ideology/worldview you have?
So not an ”AI”, but closer to ”universal adaptor” or ”smart automation”.
Pretty nice in any case. And if true AI is possible, the automations enabled by this will probably be part of the narrative how we reach it (just like mundane things like standardized screws were part of the narrative of Apollo mission).
But yet (just like with the soul) we're sure we have it, and it's impossible for anything else to have it. Perhaps consciousness is simply a hallucination that makes us feel special about ourselves.
Empathy is the ability to emulate the contents of another consciousness.
While an agent could mimic empathetic behaviors (and words), given enough interrogation and testing you would encounter an out-of-training case that it would fail.
> given enough interrogation and testing you would encounter an out-of-training case that it would fail.
This is also the case with regular humans.
Hype and announcements, sure, but this is the first time there's actually a product.
No, its not. Its just once the hype cycle dies down, we tend to stop calling the products of the last AI hype cycle "AI", we call them after the name of the more specific implementation technology (rules engines/expert systems being one of the older ones, for instance.)
And if this cycle hits a wall, maybe in 20 years we'll have LLMs and diffusion models, etc., embedded lots of places, but no one will call them alone "AI", and then the next hype cycle will have some new technology and we'll call that "AI" while the cycle is active...
I've never experienced the massively life changing effects of having a smartphone, and (thankfully) none of my friends seem to be those people who are always looking at their phones.
But also, how do you know that LMs aren't empathic? By your own admission they do "mimic empathetic behaviors", but you reject this as the real thing because you claim that with enough testing you would encounter a failure. This raises all kinds of "no true Scotsman" flags, not to mention that empathy failure is not exactly uncommon among humans. So how exactly do you actually test your hypothesis?
Note that engineering fluid simulation (cfd) makes these choices in discretization of pde's all the time, based on application requirements.
1) Earth has an infinite past that has always included life
2) The Earth as a planet has a finite past, but it (along with what made up the Earth) is in some sense alive, and life as we know it emerged from that life
3) The Earth has a finite past, and life has transferred to Earth from somewhere else in space
4) We are the Universe, and the Universe is alive
Or something else? I will try to tie it back to computers after this short intermission :)
For instance, I remember the time when chatting online (even with people you knew offline) was considered to be a nerdy activity. Then it gradually became more mainstream and now it's the norm to do it and a lot of people do it multiple times per day. This fundamentally changes how people interact with each other.
Another example is dating. Not that I have personal experience with modern online dating (enabled by smartphones) but what I read is disturbing and captivating at the same time e.g. apparent normalization of "ghosting"...