See these predictions of AI in 2025 by an OpenAI insider and a former DeepMind research engineer:
“I predict that by the end of 2025 neural nets will:
- have human-level situational awareness (understand that they're NNs, how their actions interface with the world, etc)
- beat any human at writing down effective multi-step real-world plans
- do better than most peer reviewers
- autonomously design, code and distribute whole apps (but not the most complex ones)
- beat any human on any computer task a typical white-collar worker can do in 10 minutes
- write award-winning short stories and publishable 50k-word books
- generate coherent 20-min films “
Source: https://twitter.com/RichardMCNgo/status/1640568775018975232
This is a bold claim. Today LLMs have not been demonstrated to be capable of synthesizing novel code. There was a post just a few days ago on the performance gap between problems that had polluted the training data and novel problems that had not.
So if we project forward from the current state of the art: it would be more accurate to say autonomously (re-)design, (re-)code and distribute whole apps. There are two important variables here:
* The size of the context needed to enable that task.
* The ability to synthesize solutions to unseen problems.
While it is possible that "most complex" is carrying a lot of load in that quote, it is worth being clear about it means.
They are capable of doing that (to some extend). Personally, I've generated plenty of (working) code to solve novel problems and I'm 100% sure that code wasn't part of the training set.
Is there evidence of this? The Whitehouse floor plan is very well known, and available online in many different formats and representations. Transforming one of those into a sequence of calls would be easier.
Have you tried this with a textual description of a building that does not have any floorplans available, i.e. something unique?
I’ll be more impressed if chatGPT can take a large, poorly maintained, poorly documented codebase and make meaningful changes to it.
Far easier to write something from scratch than to modify something that was first written in Fortran in 1991.
What OpenAI insider could have said? That ChatGPT is a glorified search engine with categorization algo that copy stuff from several websites and put it together (without providing source of its revolutionary result, which makes this even less useful then wikipedia).
Check out cases of people using GPT-4 to help automate their coding (on Twitter and elsewhere). It's not ready for harder problems but we're probably just 1-3 key ideas away from solving those as well.
To solve harder coding problems, one needs to be able to extrapolate properly. When an AI can do that, it's basically AGI and can probably solve any cognitive problems a human is capable of. Combined with its other qualities like massive communication bandwidth, self-replication with ease, travel at the light speed, it will be ready to take over the world from humanity if it wants to.
Wikipedia cannot do the followings which even current AI can:
* Minerva: Solving Quantitative Reasoning Problems with Language Models https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/06/minerva-solving-quantitati...
* What can AI do in 30 minutes? https://oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/superhuman-what-can-ai...
For that matter, most signatories of the petition (and myself) were never persuaded by most other "revolutionary" ideas you mentioned above.
See the names and accomplishments of the signatories at the bottom part of the page: https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experime...