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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

> It can complete phrases by having seen TBs of similar ones no more suprisingly than google can.

Hard disagree here. Google can't do what GPT-3 does and it has access to a lot more than 350gb (size of GPT-3 model). I doubt you literally believe that.

> We have never thought totally dumb solutions to these problems were unimaginable. They were just so dumb, that the only route to using them would be to somehow run a Ghz processor. Well, since we now have those, dumb partial solutions to dumb problems are possible.

Did the GPT-3 architecture exist 10 years ago? Could an ANN from 10 years ago have produced comparable results, given access to the same hardware? I doubt so.

It basically seems that in your worldview, anything below "human level intelligence" is just unimpressive? Seems quite a high bar.

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It isnt in the category of intelligence, so it being impressive is just whether it's algorithm is impressive. It isnt.

The mathematics of NNs are Victorian, it's just regression. The NN architecture is largely irrelevant: that only determines how easily the regression converges. The strategy is the same: just compress the data into a correlative statistical model, and estimate using statistical associations.

That's the wrong category of solution, and as a category, it's anchient. The hardware of modern digital computers is impressive, NNs are an absurd joke -- as is any correlative model of data -- a magic trick carried entirely by the performance of CPUs and HDDs.

Newton did not predict the existence of an undiscovered planet by finding correlations in the stars of the night sky. He first produced an actual theory of gravity.

Intelligence is theorising, ie., it is an explanatory process. Correlations in the frequencies of characters in books (we wrote!) is the basis for a neat trick.

There's a tremendous amount of pseudoscience in the claim that these are models of anything at all. Inasmuch as correlations in patterns of pixels in the night sky is not a model of gravity, and provides no means to "predict" anything other than pixel patterns of the night sky.

I know how artificial neural networks work. To me, the fact that they're based on relatively simple maths is not that relevant. A lot of simple mechanism produce complex results (e.g. the relatively simple laws of physics have produced human brains).

Back to my point, your bar is pretty high. Artificial intelligence to the level you describe will basically be a "world as you know it is now obsolete" type discovery. It will likely go down as the most impactful discovery of all time. Most of us have a lower bar for what counts as impressive.

"Impressive" isnt really a category for me, but also, I havent mentioned that my issue concerns how impressive anything is.

I am, yes, anti-wonder; I do think people get hopped-up on wonder and that lowers their threshold for reasonable belief and they end up in (religious) absurdities.

My issue here, in these terms, is that the "wonder" associated with the magic trick of modern ML is preducing a gross cognitive bias in which people believe this is an example of intelligence; or otherwise, an example like us in some significant sense. This leads to pseudoscience, charlatanism and a religious techno-utopian faith.

At the heart of it is a wonder-scam in the vein of all miracle-based shysterism. The fool looks at the miracle, is impressed out of all reason, and concludes miracles exist.

For sure, I dont really trade in wonder and I have never found it to do anything other than profoundly distort people's beliefs.

You are ranting about a bunch of things that I've never witnessed on HN or anywhere really (except perhaps for that one guy from Google whose claims were quickly debunked on HN and elsewhere). No one claimed that GPT-3 was sentient or possessed human level intelligence. The more common "religious/pseudoscientific" claims I've seen around here are those that completely dismiss the possibility of human level AI because of some miraculous-like property of the brain.

The question of "human-level AI" isnt relevant to the field of AI as it exists.

It's like someone in crypto talking about a future crypto-based financial system whilst at the same time being unable to processes basically any transactions, stabalise any currency, ensure any regulation, deal with any fraud, etc.

Or likewise, an MLM health company talking about cures for cancer all the while hocking vitamin supplements.

The question of what properties animals have which enable them to implement intelligence isn't relevant to whether correlative statistical techniques which capture word frequencies are "intelligence" -- inasmuch as vitamin 'science' isnt relevant to curing cancer.

This gross level of chalatanism, wishful-thinking, scamming, delusion and out-right fraud is overwhelming.

Who exactly is claiming to have solved human-level AI? Can you give some examples of "gross level of charlatanism, wishful-thinking, scamming, delusion and out-right fraud"? I genuinely haven't witnessed any of that. In my experience, most AI people acknowledge that the timeline for AGI is unknown and that it will most likely involve yet to be discovered algorithms, not just throwing more data/processing power at it.

>most AI people acknowledge that the timeline for AGI is unknown and that it will most likely involve yet to be discovered algorithms, not just throwing more data/processing power at it.

Try telling that to Sutskever or Karpathy (or indeed a bunch of "rationalists" on twitter, at least a subset of which works in AI) because both of them have made the claim you assert you haven't seen.

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