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To me, what's scary is exponential graphs. Anything before the curve looks flat, and everything after looks nearly vertical. Everything seems fine, and right now you have time to get bored between each step, until one day it's suddenly happening much faster than you can even react to it.

Consider how this year alone we basically had Dall-E, Imagen, Stable Fusion, Midjourney, Lambda, early Imagen Video samples and now ChatGPT, and the years not even over yet. Original Dall-E was almost 2 years ago, GPT-2 was 3 years ago.

It could be an exponential graph, but it could also be a discrete step chart. When you're at the point where a leap in technology is happening, it looks like it's exponential for a brief period of time. But after that jump, things remain largely flat for indefinite periods of time. This is what leads to AI hype cycles and AI winters.

Another aspect to consider is that a lot of the recent growth in AI is economic, not technological. The kind of language model that makes Hacker News headlines today is a thousand times larger than models were four years ago. GPUs haven't gotten a thousand times better, and the underlying algorithms aren't a thousand times better; companies are just spending a lot more money. There is no particular reason to expect that trend to continue indefinitely.

What happened to self-driving for example, though?

The growth of the the technology hasn't been exponential, it seems to grow under a diminishing marginal returns law, that is, the first 90% was "easy" to solve, but every bit of the remaining 10% seems increasingly and excruciatingly harder. If you're observing local behavior in the first 90% of the curve it might look like it could explode any time but unbeknownst to you, the behavior towards infinite is a actually a constant ceiling.

I'm not categorically denying it's exponential, I'm just saying it's very difficult to make assumptions based on observed local behavior.

Self driving is limited by the only real testing requiring real hours of driving with real cars, where getting the last 10% of the way requires getting real-life testing in increasingly rare conditions.

But can you ascertain that similar dynamics won't also come into play for software? Yes, software is easier to deploy and test at scale - there are barely any physical constraints compared to driving. But on the other hand it's also a more complex domain than driving.

Taking Advent of Code as an example, GPT seems to be making mince meat of some problems, but it struggles with others.

Is it not conceivable that in software there will be a "last 10%" where AI will trip up, either because the inputs (prompts/requirements) are hard to express or parse, or the output (code) is hard to generate?

"Similar dynamics" requires situations where training the AI becomes bottlenecked on training opportunities.

There will certainly be areas where such bottlenecks exist, and so we can assume that there will be types of problems we can't expect exponential improvement to continue once it hits those bottlenecks. But the point is that self-driving is a poor example to use to judge what we can expect to see in fields that are less constrained by turnaround times and safety. Not least because "anyone" - though certainly constrained by costs - can try to do novel things with large language models. Very few can try to do novel things with self-driving because they have nothing realistic to test it on at scale.

No. Full self driving requires development of full AGI. General intelligence is needed to navigate construction zones with a flag man directing traffic someplace it normally doesn't go. As but one example. Stopping to ask said flagman a question for clarification is also preferable to just guessing the answer.

There are levels of self-driving far below that that capture almost all of the useful improvement.

While I don't agree with what you write here, none of it contradicts what I wrote above.

Cruise has 100 operating simultaneously in SF with no safety driver:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/olivercameron_speaking-of-ai-...

100 cars driving around the tech capital of the world is not even close to the scale many people imagined 5-10 years ago though.

Do you expect that it will stop here? People usually overestimate the short-term changes and underestimate the long-term ones.

No, but the last five years of progress have not been exponential, which is the whole point of discussion with GP. A major breakthrough could see it 99.9% solved and adopted at scale, but until then it could be a slow grind for every 0.1% of progress.

Driving frequently in a large areas of a busy city without a safety driver is insane progress. Just lots of hype-men like Musk (and earlier Jensen) made wild promises.

It should be noted this service is only available 10PM-530AM, and only in the less traffic-y areas of SF: no downtown/market, mission, etc.

https://getcruise.com/rides/

this information is out of date. they are 24 hours and basically SF-wide now.

Exponential graphs and "the singularity" aren't real. Everything in real life is an S-curve.

This is just someone scaring you with math by pretending inconvenient details like entropy don't exist.

I would have agreed with you. But think about it, when non tech people posed nonsense questions like "Do robots dream" we dismissed them because that is not how computers work.

Turns out they not only dream but they do it better than us! Maybe we can also rethink our then correct assumptions about the singularity

I think it's right to "scare" at least when you point out the places where we expect growth, i.e we expect exponential growth. You could say the Limits to grown (book) is about that it's an S curve and want people to take note and get ready for limits/brakes.

Some systems behave differently in a state of constant growth and in a resource limited state.

Limits to Growth is a bad book that caused the housing crisis in the US and the coming demographic crisis in China. Literally they did the one child policy because someone read it.

It’s basically Thanos’s manifesto.

Knowing a curve will eventually level off isn't very reassuring if you don't know what level it will reach.

Sure it’s an S curve but we don’t know where it will level off.

This is the same as the response to people who bash economists for thinking “growth will go on forever.” Of course that can’t happen, but where is the top? Earth? Solar system? Galaxy? Parallel dimensions? Miniaturization and dematerialization causing extreme decoupling of economy from resource use? Nobody knows. The S curve could plateau in 10 years or 10,000 years.

Yes, makes sense; however, exponential growth is not always sustained and that is why logistic growth is observed across several phenomena that occur in nature. Now, granted, it may be a while before we ever reach a plateau, so possibly more exciting things to see till then.

"Maintaining the plot" by efficient retention of relevant and trimming of irrelevant data seems like the next big challenge.

Man I cannot wait to feed a novel into an AI and get a comic book version output.

What is an exponential growth curve of a chatbot supposed to look like? The endpoint is being consistently indistinguishable from a human on the other end. Once that is achieved, I don't see how you get even better than human at generating text. You can certainly get faster and generate a lot more text than a human, but computers have been able to do that already for decades.

I'm trying to think of what this author here envisions happening because an AI writes a story about doing bad things. Very good stories about human extinction have existed for a long time and have not resulted in actual human extinction. When I think of texts that seem associated with significant world historical changes, like the New Testament, Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence, it seems there was quite a bit of event context that was important, and it wasn't the sheer quality of the text itself that impacted history.

Similarly with art. Is Videogen-4 going to be able to create a synthetic sequence of image frames with an audio track that is "exponentially" better than Casablanca? What would that even mean? The quality of art is completely subjective. There is no quantifiable measure like transistor density that can get X times improvement. No film has the power to cause human extinction and neither do great filmmakers.

AI has advanced mostly due to increase in compute and data available. The results are very impressive but the defects are also pretty obvious. Just like self driving cars we'll soon get into the long tail problem

There is hope. Previously, all OpenAI needed to do to initiate a hype cycle was put out a press release with a few cherry-picked example outputs. Now they have to burn a bunch of money letting people run the model for free!

One can only hope that in another couple years, OpenAI will have to release something that people can actually run on their own computers before social media loses their minds about it.

Maybe the fact that more people try it, it's more likely that we surface issues early?

You want openAI to open AI? not possible. Stability and Eleuther are preparing the open versions of these models.

What a weird take. The fact that people quickly get bored of new innovations implies absolutely nothing about it's potential impact or its dangers.

The primary part is that article is pure sensationalism and clickbait. There was zero lines of none pseudo code. Sure it was syntactically correct python, but that is long way from actually working.

Same with Stable Diffusion. People acted as if it alone is going to kill artists and make every people able to make convincing fake news as snap of their fingers, but that is not the case. Stable Diffusion is very impressive, but it still requires work after the image has been generated to be anything but a toy.

Maybe in couple years it could evolve, but we are still quite far.

Fair point on sensationalism, I think it's a useful hook to get folks reading and talking.

There is a "Nuance" section at the bottom where I qualify most of the rah rah language.

That being said, I disagree that it is that far from actually working. Check out the codex demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGUCcjHTmGY&ab_channel=OpenA... This is a year old and we've made a lot of progress since then.

The model is certainly capable of writing non pseudo-code, although I started hitting rate limits before I got it all the way there in my example.

Edit (typos)

> The primary part is that article is pure sensationalism and clickbait. There was zero lines of none pseudo code. Sure it was syntactically correct python, but that is long way from actually working.

Not as far as you think. This has repeatedly been the case for AI progress so far.

> Same with Stable Diffusion. People acted as if it alone is going to kill artists and make every people able to make convincing fake news as snap of their fingers, but that is not the case.

I'm not sure how you can make that determination at this time as it literally just came out.

I completely agree that there is a hype cycle with every new advancement in AI, and that the novelty can wear off quickly. But I think it's important to remember that these advancements are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what AI is capable of. While it's easy to get excited about a cool new trick that a computer can do, we need to remember that AI is still in its early stages and has a lot of room for growth. As AI continues to advance, we'll likely see more and more impressive capabilities that will truly change the world in ways we can't even imagine yet. So while it's natural to get excited and then let the excitement fade, I think it's important to remember the potential of AI and keep pushing forward with its development.

Oh by the way, this comment was generated by chatGPT with the following prompt: "Respond to the following comment in the character of someone who is optimistic about the continued growth of AI capabilities. (Your comment)"

Funnily enough, two sentences in I thought "this comment sounds like it was written by GPT3."

To me that says that as impressive as it is, it's not passing the Turing test anytime soon.

It certainly has its own distinct voice. I think it has some constraints inside it that forces it to only speak in complete, grammatically correct sentences. If you give it different directions for what kind of structure to provide, it can really change how it sounds. I got interesting and more natural sounding results asking it to play "a human who occasionally does not respond with complete sentences", and also "a laconic human".

Yes, we become desensitized to technological advancements as they are normalized, now at a faster rate than ever.

The fact that we have new breakthroughs very frequently I believe is more cause for concern, not less.

Regarding histrionics / tone. I may reel the language back a bit to be a bit less alarmist. But tbh, I genuinely find some of the outputs to be pretty damn alarming.

> People already have learned what SD pics look like and are generally just annoyed when people share them on social media now. The novelty has worn off.

I have not, and I’m both fascinated by what they can do and love seeing all that art.

You folks are so freakin’ cynical. This feels like magic. It obvioulsy heralds future developments in AI that will be genuinely world-changing in less than a decade. Why not just revel in that for a little moment?

The exact same thing could have been said (and probably was said) about the first wave of AI research in the 1960s. And we all know how that panned out. There's a reason that "AI winter" is an established phrase with its own Wikipedia article.

I don't know for you but I'm still amazed at Dall-e and know plenty of people who are too. I got access 112 days ago, and was also relatively impressed before too (but definitively not as much as when I got access).

> we'll just accept that this is what computers are capable of doing.

I accepted that on day 1 for Dall-E, and I kind of accepted that for ChatGPT too (but that one is more nuanced as it can do "more" than a task, it's hard to determine its limit obviously).

Doesn't change that this is amazing and I do believe will change the world forever.

Taleb has a nice paradigm of a duck that until its 1000th day thinks the world is wonderful and then is historical data model is broken down by an axe.