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Comment by WheelsAtLarge | Hacker News Reader

I think tests should be easy for ChatGPT to pass. It has been trained on data that has the answers and it's good at getting the data. I'm starting to doubt its long term usefulness since it does not seem to have good decision making abilities and even the slightest bit of cognitive ability.

I suspect the current crop of AIs will find very specific functions and hit a hard stop. They will change how we function but we won't be seeing a singularity type of revolution anytime soon. IBM's Watson is a good example of a system with a lot of possibilities but not finding a use. I think most of AI will fall in that realm. We have to get over the idea that it's smart. It's not.

An AI winter is coming so the improvements will come to a stop and we will find its limits. We are no where near general AI.

It's impressive that it can parse the question and write a relevant answer but it's not a robotic SWE.

For now, it's a good tool for cheating on tests.

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Doesn’t have to replace an SWE. 10x-ing the ability of 1 engineer is a good enough win. Soon that will be 20-100x.

Feels odd to dismiss such a huge breakthrough by saying it’s still not as good as the pinnacle of AI (general AI). Just because the Apple 2 wasn’t a home super computer, didn’t make it less revolutionary.

True but it's not thinking. It's not smart it's a tool for programers to be more productive. Right now it has more possibilities than real results. We'll have to see.

The biggest issue to me is that you can't trust the results. You always have to double check the them. I know it's mainly beta but I need to see more to get a better judgement.

The car is still useful even if you're the one driving it and responsible for selecting where to go and how to get there.

How is it at present 10x’ing any engineers, and how is it going to 20-100x them? Legitimate question, because my understanding of these tools is they, at present, generate something that you have to entirely vet and have a limited mental model of.

Why do you think an AI Winter is coming? In the last year we witnessed a BIG BANG of AI solutions.

I think your expectations are in line with my hopes: That our state of the art "AI" performance is very close to local minima that we won't escape from for quite a while.

I really don't want lose my overpaid job gluing together overengineered shite into CRUD applications.

"Experts have predicted 150 of the last 2 AI winters"

We could have an AI winter if we just banned AI research. The military would be tasked with confiscating the compute hardware.

I think that would 1) require a massive negative event cause by AI to cause a real reason for that ban and 2) that ban would be quite infeasible even on a national scale, let alone internationally.

Why would we do that?

How would we do that?

Banning research is just not feasible.

I wouldn’t want to do that. I know that I will be replaced by a machine and I am trying to optimize my personal life to cope for this as well as possible. Part of my personal steps include the amassing of vast wealth so I can avoid a slip into the plebeian UBI class, who will have no agency at all.

Now, If you wanted to resist that and give humanity a few more hundred years, you would clog the bottlenecks on AI progress, which are research talent, data and compute.

If you marched the police into NeurIPS and the military into the datacenters, and you coordinated with other large countries to do the same, and you strongarmed those countries that resisted to do the same, you could get pretty darn far. We humans have managed to greatly slow down the rollout of nuclear technology. We may be able to do the same with AI, if someone figures out which political movement will get into power next, and tells them to read the enlightened writings of Elizier Yudkowsky.

I would also like an “Extinction Rebellion” or “Just Stop Oil” style movement against the artificial intelligence industry, as I appreciate their rebellious and leftist aesthetics.

The current AI algorithms are based on gathering lots of data and using fast processors and memory to get the functions we want.

We are getting to the limits of how fast hardware can be and we are rapidly processing thru available cheap data. At some point it's going to get very expensive to gather data and increase hardware speed.

We'll a see a few years of excitement,(5yrs?,10yrs?) but it will stop until the next big breakthrough. Hopefully there will be one but nothing is guaranteed. That's the AI winter I'm talking about.

AI will have an impact but it won't be the singularity type that some people dream about. Think of the automation of work that happened during the industrial revolution. Now, think of it for white collar work. There are a lot of white collar work that the current AI can automate but it won't be everything and it won't take over to rule over us.

Why are you making these assumptions? Do you believe that human intelligence is based on something ethereal that cannot be recreated by machines, and if so, why?

More accurately, is it based on something ethereal that cannot be recreated by humans.

I mean, currently human intelligence can only be recreated (procreated actually) by humans.

It’s a machine doing calculations on inputs you give it. The day it says no I’d rather paint pictures I might be shocked. It’s so bad that we had to redefine the word AI in last 20 years into AIG so we could start saying we have AI.

Pray tell, why would you want to develop a being with informational superpowers and the behavior of a teenager?

There is a problem with AI, but it's not with the A part, it's with the I part. I want you to give me an algorithmic description of scalable intelligence that covers intelligent behaviors at the smallest scales of life all the way to human behaviors. I know you cannot do this has many very 'intelligent' people have been working on this problem for a long time and have not come up with an agreed upon answer. The fact you see an increase and change in definitions as a failure seems pretty sad to me. We have vastly increased our understanding of what intelligence is and that previous definitions have needed to adapt and change to new information. This occurs in every field of science and is a measure of progress, again that you see this differently is worrying.

> why would you want to develop a being with informational superpowers and the behavior of a teenager?

Because it's better than a zombie with informational superpowers? Especially because once it shows the agency of a teenager, that demonstrates the potential for the agency of an adult.

I look at self driving cars. You can see that the break throughs are slowing. It feels like many things in life where 80% is relatively fast to develop but as you get closer to 100% it starts to get exponential hard. With cars we've gotten through the easy part. The next x% is going to very hard if not impossible. I think all AI will be that way.The last x% is going to be hard if not impossible.

I suspect that any honest attempt at answering your question will be met with an evasive definition of 'intelligence'.

You are hitting the nail on the head but in the wrong direction, as I've stated in another post

"There is a problem with AI, but it's not with the A part, it's with the I part. I want you to give me an algorithmic description of scalable intelligence that covers intelligent behaviors at the smallest scales of life all the way to human behaviors. I know you cannot do this has many very 'intelligent' people have been working on this problem for a long time and have not come up with an agreed upon answer. The fact you see an increase and change in definitions as a failure seems pretty sad to me. We have vastly increased our understanding of what intelligence is and that previous definitions have needed to adapt and change to new information. This occurs in every field of science and is a measure of progress, again that you see this differently is worrying."

This AI issue will always fail at the I issue because the we are trying to define too much. We need to break down intelligence to much smaller digestible pieces instead of trying to treat it as a reachable whole. The models we are creating would then fall more neatly into categorical units rather than the poorly defined mess of what is considered human intelligence.

LLMs are statistical models. All it does is guess word sequences in response to prompts, like a 'roided out version of autocomplete. (This is why it hallucinates imaginary facts.) It has no ability to conceptualize or reason nor is there any credible proposal for a path forward to graft reasoning onto it.

The training data can be tweaked and more compute hours can be thrown at LLMs until it no longer makes financial sense to do so and then, as the OP said, it will hit a hard stop.

This relies on two assumptions, that compute won't get cheaper and there won't be large algorithmic improvements, both of which keep getting proven wrong.

I don't think it's appropriate to mention Watson in the same space as Chat. GPT is perhaps humanities greatest innovation since the wheel, and Watson was nothing more than a scam

Hardware will keep improving even in a winter due to games and other uses.

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