Hacker News Reader

Comment by dark-star | Hacker News Reader

...and then came the first AI winter. Which will certainly happen again, this time, only a few years later ;-)

Why do you think there'll be an AI winter? And in what form — stagnation of neural-network based technologies, a change in the overall paradigm of learning-from-data, or something else altogether?

Because the realization that "no, an AI is not artificial life" will hit, everyone will realize that all an AI does is running a function with millions of unknown state variables, and that this is not helpful when you're tyring to understand why a network does (or doesn't) do something.

Sure, the applications we have (and then some) will stay, for cases where using AI brings real benefits (just like after the first AI winter).

The next AI winter will be caused by very needy physical robots walking around the world acting like little kids, trying to train their models.

They will ask "what are you doing?" and then the dreaded "why?" about everything. They will annoy the crap out of everyone to the point where we just pack the whole thing up for twenty years.

“Why?” To which any Animaniacs fan will respond, “OK, love you, bye-bye!”.

Bullshit. People have wrongly predicted an AI winter for the last decade. It didn't happen in 2018, it didn't happen in 2022, and it sure as hell won't happen in 2026.

I'm hoping the current crop of ML/AI yields sufficiently commercially viable blindsight behavior [1] to fund continuing research into AGI. Generative LLM seems sufficiently sophisticated to write ad copy and general political speech of all kinds, so if that's the direction we go I can see all kinds of interesting possible implications. I'd like to see baking in positive optimism and collaboration into the DNA of solutions delivered by such blindsight systems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)#Major...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com