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Comment by gdubs | Hacker News Reader

Throughout history there are moments where humans realize they're not special in a way they previously thought they were — universe doesn't revolve around us, other animals possess skills we thought were unique to us, etc.

I think what's interesting is that many types of creativity may really just be re-synthesizing "stuff we already know."

So a lot of the negative comments along the lines of, "it can't be creative because it never thinks of anything beyond its training data" don't click with me. I think synthesizing two existing concepts into some third thing is actually a form of creativity.

These nets may not learn the same way we do exactly, and they may not possess the same creative abilities as us — but there's definitely something interesting going on. I for one am taking a Beginner's Mind view of it all. It's pretty fascinating.

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Just about human intelligence in general. I used to think replacing my software job was a long ways off because it is fairly intellectually challenging but chatgpt has really changed my opinion on that.

Its funny how many people will immediately poke holes in it for software development, but two years ago I could not imagine an AI could write code like chatgpt is doing now.

The challenge isnt writing code. It is writing code that is relatively free of defects. It falls down hard on that point.

Do you believe we're at the peak of what will be capable?

As shown by this post, we're still discovering what's possible with the tools we have now.

Also, human programmers aren't amazing at writing defect free code.

Free of defects is the least of the problems. Doing what a customer wants is the major one. One could argue that customers will be able to write their code alone but they'll always have something else to do and will pay somebody to do it, exactly as for all the other parts of their business. On the other side maybe one wouldn't have to know one of the current programming languages, much like we don't have to know machine code nowadays. English and a good dose of perseverance could be enough.

Sounds similar to the arguments against self-driving: "Self-driving itself isn't the challenge. It is self-driving better than humans". AFAIK this is already possible at least under certain conditions or at certain roads.

I didn't poke any holes into it. I just entered my code and asked it to do some work for me and it simply failed. The problem was a simple 50 line function I copy pasted from stackoverflow. I asked it to do something really easy.

The AI can output a lot of text but can you input a 100000 line code base into it? No you can't. You can't even input 50 lines of code that is already in the data set!

And by failure I mean somethin akin to a blue screen and not that the output was wrong, there was no output!

I wonder though could you have it create a list of comments about the function. then use the comments to generate smaller functions and then generate test data for those functions then build unit test for those functions then have it build something to solve the original problem with the smaller functions along with test data.

You don't even have to do that last step and you'll be doing more debugging than is necessary to do that. Just do the elephant carpaccio yourself then feed it the slices and glue the shit it excretes out together and boom you have MVP.

Yeah I now routinely ask it for boilerplate to get things done way faster and it's REALLY good at flawlessly translating from one programming language to another. It'll be a shame when it goes behind a paywall.

On that thought, does anyone even still use Copilot?

I wish the negative comments were right, but from these models it’s clear that the next step in evolution, AGI is something many of us will experience at some time in the future.

I would stop that kind of evolution, as it can be catastrophic, but I know that humanity is not able to stop itself from evolving further.

I don’t think anyone had demonstrated AGI is a foregone conclusion. I’m not sure it is possible with a Turing machine. We do not think in any manner like a Turing machine or any computer ever conceived. If we do, no one has provided any evidence of such a claim. Humans can make complex insights with hardly any training and on very few calories.

How do you figure regarding hardly any training? Humans are constantly training on a never ending stream of sensory information from the time their brains form in the womb, not to mention whatever subconscious and conscious processes are reconciling that data with memory, or whatever training has been built into our minds over eons of evolution.

An 18 year old will have been training for ~160,000 hours on a volume of raw data that is probably far beyond our ability to currently store let alone train an AI with.

As far as training for a specific task, all that training on other matters kicks in to help the human learn or accomplish a “novel” task more rapidly, for example, knowing how to read and interpret the instructions for that task, knowing how to move your appendages and the expected consequences of your physical interactions with a material object. You’re certainly not taking a fetus with a blank slate and getting it to accomplish much at all.

It absolutely is hardly any training for the types of problems humans have solved. Ramanujan did not need to consume the entire corpus of mathematics or even had much formal education whatsoever. He did so, again, on very few calories compared to pre-trained AI models. I am not claiming learning how to pick up a rock does not help you in any way to understand continued fractions but it is pretty unreasonably to compare an AI as has been demonstrated as being anywhere near the same sort of thing.

One day, there could be a telephone in every town

Sure, we can go with the other option that humans will stay the most intelligent species on Earth until the solar system dies, history just shows that it's quite improbable.

Where does history show that? Are you serious? Humans are an outlier on Earth for which there is no other that has anywhere remotely the same level of intelligence. You may think that is aggrandizing humans but it is categorically true. You would need to provide sone world up-ending evidence to prove the contrary.

If you are also saying AIs will be a more intelligent species, able to adapt better on Earth than humans, that requires extraordinary evidence. A human could solve complex problems no other species it machine can solve on nothing more than a handful of rice for a week. Where is the similar scale species/machine?

Idk while gpt is impressive I haven't seen any inductive reasoning coming out of it.

And even then for proper agi it would need to close the loop after inducing an hypothesis with testing.

Meatbags are going to be useful for a while still.

What do you mean exactly by inductive reasoning?

It can translate code from one language to another. Code that it has never seen before. Or between natural language and programming language.

It's certainly not perfect but it is reasoning all right

> I think what's interesting is that many types of creativity may really just be re-synthesizing "stuff we already know."

This is obviously true, and yet we've invented so many things. From the wheel, to control of fire, to farming and animal husbandry, to mathematics, to metallurgy, to physics, to semiconductors, etc.

The interesting question is, was the invention of all those things simply the re-synthesis of "stuff we already know?" If the answer is yes, doesn't that mean we're now on the cusp of a something akin to a singularity? We can now synthesize nearly-unlimited streams of coherent human thought. If we had a way of differentiating the wheat from the chaff, we could analyze what would have been millennia of human output in the proverbial blink of an eye. If human knowledge is just "stuff we already know", then we better buckle up. It's about to be a wild ride.

> If we had a way of differentiating the wheat from the chaff

This is the key to AGI. We need verification systems, they can be a code execution environment, a database of facts, a math symbolic engine, a physical simulation, a game, or real world lab experiments. These verifiers will produce signal that can be used by the language models to improve. The cheaper and faster verification is, the faster we can iterate. Generating ideas is cheap, proof matters.

Just remember AlphaZero a bit - it started from scratch, playing against itself, in a few hours it surpassed human level. Go simulation and verification is trivial. The board is just a matrix. So learning from massive search and verification is a proven path to super-human level.

Here is a related paper:

> Evolution through Large Models

https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.08896

Proof definitely matters. But at this point, as ChatGPT, AlphaZero, and others demonstrate, NNs can solve any problem provided you can express the problem as a differentiable function and get enough training data to train the function. We may be very close to a breakthrough where we can train models that detect sound, good ideas. And 100% accuracy likely isn’t necessary. Even pruning the search space for good ideas by a large amount would make humans way more productive.

> I think synthesizing two existing concepts into some third thing is actually a form of creativity.

And the space is combinatorial. Most of it is unexplored. It is creativity, but also a form of search.

Especially since there are very few people that can actually be 100% creative. Most human creativity is derivative. I didn't invent a new language I learned English.

If you think about it the most creative is random noise. then you apply rules it it to constrain the noise or limit the predictions. And add more rules in layers. so getting the system to produce more creativity is just relaxing the rules at different layers.

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