Technology

This is smarter. Will tell you how to pump a Calzone full of glue.

It may not be capable of truly understanding anything, but it sure seems to do a better job of it than the vast majority of people I talk to online. I might spend 45 minutes carefully typing out a message explaining my view, only for the other person to completely miss every point I made. With ChatGPT, though, I can speak in broken English, and it’ll repeat back the point I was trying to make much more clearly than I could ever have done myself.

This article from last year compares LLMs to techniques used by “psychics” (cold reading, etc).

https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/

I think it’s a great analogy (and an interesting article).

OpenAI doesn't want you to know that though, they want their work to show progress so they get more investor money. It's pretty fucking disgusting and dangerous to call this tech any form of artificial intelligence. The homogeneous naming conventions to make this tech sound human is also dangerous and irresponsible.

I wish more people would realize this! We’re years away from a truly reasoning computer.

Right now it’s all mimicry. Mimicry that hallucinates no less…

Again, completely pulled from my ass. Take with a boulder of salt.

You're under arrest. That's ass-salt.

To be a little nitpicky most of the AI that can play Mario kart are trained not with a reinforcement learning algorithm, but woth a genetic algorithm, which is a sort of different thing.

Reinforcement learning is rather like how you teach a child. Show them a bunch of good stuff, and show them a bunch of bad stuff, and tell them which is the good stuff and which is the bad stuff.

Genetic algorithms are where you just leave it alone, simulate the evolutionary process on an accelerated time scale, and let normal evolutionary processes take over. Much easier, and less processor intensive, plus you don't need huge corpuses of data. But it takes ages, and it also sometimes results in weird behaviors because evolution finds a solution you never thought of, or it finds a solution to a different problem to the one you were trying to get it to find a solution to.

All signs point to this being a finetune of gpt4o with additional chain of thought steps before the final answer. It has exactly the same pitfalls as the existing model (9.11>9.8 tokenization error, failing simple riddles, being unable to assert that the user is wrong, etc.). It's still a transformer and it's still next token prediction. They hide the thought steps to mask this fact and to prevent others from benefiniting from all of the finetuning data they paid for.

It's weird how so many of these "technophobes" are IT professionals. Crazy that people would line up to go into a profession they so obviously hate and fear.

Until the bubble bursts

Is that even the goal? Do we want an AI that's self aware because I thought that basically the whole point was to have an intelligence without a mind.

We don't really want sapient AI because if we do that then we have to feel bad about putting it in robots and making them do boring jobs. Don't we basically want guildless servants, isn't that the point?

I’m more concerned about them using the word “sapient.” My dog is sentient; it’s not a high bar to clear.

Not until it has senses, which it currently does not have.

I'm kinda in the same boat but on the other side. I always try to argue with people about this. It gets me a lot of flak on pro AI posts but that won't stop me. I usually get very aggressive replies and sometimes some fucked up dm's too.

I'm against it because we are already seeing the consequences of this technology and it's only getting worse. By the time laws catch up it's gonna be too late and the damage will be done. For some technologies that's not always the worst. But we already saw how long it took for anyone to do anything about the Internet when it came out, and we are still trying to this day. This shit is growing so fast we will all feel the whiplash. Sites like Facebook are getting absolutely flooded with so much AI that they are becoming almost unusable. And that's before we even get into the shady shit people use AI for like making porn of people they know with the click of a button. I recently read an article about how bad deepfake porn is in South Korea (found the article. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/12/world/asia/south-korea-deepfake-videos.html). And in places like the US, where a lot of these companies are based, they are so slow to do anything about a problem it's going to be too late by the time they get to it.

But besides all the awful things happening because of AI, I do have one personal gripe with the whole ordeal. Why are we so quick to replace the things we enjoy with AI? When I get home from work I like to make music and practice pixel art (I'm not very good at either yet). I'd much rather have AI replace my job than my hobbies. I'm down for things that are useful, but too much of this just gives me a bad gut feeling. Like their trying to replace people and not their jobs.

This may be the future. But it sounds like a pretty dystopian future to me. You already can't believe everything you see on the Internet and this will only make it worse.

More and more advanced tools for automation are an important part of creating a post-scarcity future. If we can combine that with tearing down our current economic system - which inherently requires and thus has to manufacture scarcity - we can uplift our species in ways we can currently only imagine.

But this ain't it bud. If I ask you for water and you hand me a glass of warm piss, I'm not "against drinking water" for refusing to gulp it down.

This isn't AI. It isn't - meaningfully and usefully - any form of automation at all. A bunch of conmen slapped the letters "AI" on the side of their bottle of piss and you're drinking it down like it's grandma's peach tea.

The people calling out the fundamental flaws with these products aren't doing so because we hate the entire concept of automation, any more than someone exposing a snake-oil salesman hates medicine. What we hate is being lied to. The current state of this technology is bullshit and hype. It is not fit for human consumption (other than recreationally) and the money being pumped into it could be put to far better uses. OpenAI may have lofty goals, but they have utterly failed at achieving them, and right now any true desire to create AGI has been totally subsumed by the need to keep pumping out slightly better looking versions of the same polished turd in order to convince investors to keep paying for their staggeringly high hosting costs.

At the same time, o1 is not as capable as GPT-4o in a lot of areas. It doesn’t do as well on factual knowledge about the world. It also doesn’t have the ability to browse the web or process files and images. Still, the company believes it represents a brand-new class of capabilities. It was named o1 to indicate “resetting the counter back to 1.”

I think it’s more of a proof of concept then a fully functioning model at this point.

This example doesn't prove what you think it does. It shows pattern detection - something computers are inherently very well suited for - but it doesn't demonstrate "reasoning" in any meaningful way.

I'm the same with any programming question as long as the answer is Hello World