Problems that attract smart people
medium.com
medium.com
You can find interesting problems in many banal situations. You only have to look.
The narratives people tell themselves to self-justify their involvement are weird.
Unfortunately (unrelated to AI and co), this is also a problem; many engineers write overcomplicated solutions for simple / banal problems, because they get bored otherwise.
Well, I can't speak about strengthening democracy for sure, but what I see is that AI will become a significant means of digital production, and we wouldn't want those means to be in the hands of a few people.
> but it potentially enables AI to run on any device with a low footprint for surveillance purposes as well,
Yes, a low barrier for inference cuts both ways. That is a risk.
> democratising the means of digital production is the difference between a dystopian authoritarian future and an empowered (and admittedly chaotic) humanity
The usage here means make accessible to everyone.
As long as surveillance tech requires big resources, governments will have the edge. Miniaturize it, decentralize it, and it means citizens and public interest organizations can hold the government accountable more easily (this is, notably, what OSINT is all about).
If you think this is the modern-day equivalent of a printing press, it's vital to avoid this being in the hands of only one or two multi-billion-dollar corporations with a history of morally questionable moves.
If you think privacy rights and freedom from surveillance are critical to democracy, you want your smart speaker or video doorbell to do all its processing on board, without uploading recordings to the cloud. And you want your neighbour's doorbell to do the same.
And frankly, nobody goes after Microsoft Word when someone writes Xi Jinping satire using it, or ICE buy it - because people know it's a tool rather than a platform.
On the other hand, if you think ML technology is going to produce the next wave of fake amazon reviews and forum spam - you might be a lot less eager to see it in the hands of everyone.
If you think society will be slow to adapt to things like deepfakes; and that cops and corporations will immediately start using things like facial recognition technology - well, then wider access to ML might seem to have a great many downsides.
I think AI has the same potential: filling administrative work, walking the complexity of an information overloaded world, keeping up to date with laws you can't ignore but have no way to know about, planning logistics that our modern life impose on us...
Suddenly, like the CEO of today, every one will be able to have a secretary.
Yes, that can make a huge different.
Don't think about AI as the thing we have today. GPT the nokia 3310 of AI. Amazing, but very basic.
Think that one day, somebody will come out with the iphone of AI.
- reading boring documents and giving me the gist of it
- classifying my emails
- checking for typos and problems in my writing
- writing the boiler plate of documents
- translating doc
- doing basic search on a topic, such as legal obligations that haven't change in the last 2 years
It's cheaper than my secretary, faster, and has roughly the same error rate for those tasks. I have to double check her work anyway.
With plugins, people are already making stuff like booking a plane, another thing my secretary does.
It will expend.
I don't think you realize the amount of risk involved in giving these opaque probabilistic systems control over data and compute. They are not people replacements and assuming so and acting on it will create more problems than it solves... Because extending thee lines to wrap around your needs is wishful thinking and there is a lot more complexity and hidden unintended consequences than assumed when saying chatbots capable of using APIs will be dependable personal assistants, which is the point I'm trying to make.
After playing around with ChatGPT for a few hours I have a hard time seeing how someone could objectively call it "basic".
But compared to what we have today, it's very basic.
Same for chatgpt.
The washing machine has reached a tipping point, we hit diminishing returns from now on.
The AI is in the nokia phase. It's at the primitive stage of development.
You lost me at iPhone for AI. I think I know what you mean but it can be expressed better.
In other words the jump ahead from GPT to broadly useful AI is akin to the jump from the old Nokia feature phone to iPhone. Don’t let the current limitations of GPT color what you think AI will be generally capable of within the next decade.
I think something that was majorly lost in the past 60 years is the secretary. I agree with you that it’d be great if everyone had one - the working relationship between a secretary and the person they support can be amazingly productive.
The biggest game changer was the fossil fuel that enabled that washing machine, and all the other modern devices we rely on.
That same substance is used to as chemical feedstock for fertilizers and more than double yields, and more than double the amount of "arable" land. If we were to run out, half of humanity would likely starve.
But I was thinking of the tool-vs-platform distinction in the context of the censorship question raised by Midjourney blocking images of Xi Jinping.
'Platforms' like Facebook and Github often censor things like porn, terror recruitment, and political satire fearing reputational damage and loss of advertisers from having such content on their domain, next to their logo - whereas offline tools like MS Word aren't subject to the same fears.
So people who think political satire is a particularly important form of speech might prefer an offline tool for their greater censorship resistance, irrespective of their opinion on issues of copyright.
I don't see how it should be any different from the PC revolution. We've all got a 1970s supercomputer in our pocket now, for better or worse. But it's certainly preferable to only the richest and most powerful having one.
“Hey OpenChatGPT, find a list of every person who has ever wronged me and constantly harass them with death threats from behind seven proxies”
Yeah that will make the world better.
It works both ways. Attack and defense.
You may not feel the need to construct a strong defense because of your disposition and mental model, but you should because of the motivations and mental models of those building a strong offense.
A take as old as time. History books are always written by the victors.
More seriously: Corporations have fiduciary obligations only to the shareholders. Civilization disrupting technology can not, must not, be trusted to sole custodianship of such decision making regimes.
It's literally the dictatorship of the majority over all the other minorities.
We should move towards decentralising power (ideally up to the individual level), not strengthening democracy.
Democracy is just a tool we use to decide what to do with the collective power we have.
And enabling everyone to run LLMs definitely helps everyone to become more independent of governments and large corporations.
There is the assumption that it will be written about.
There is the assumption that "solving" is the appropriate response.
Combined, they describe a constrained perspective. A volume which, compared to the alternative, is infinitely small.
So consider that the next time you feel a riddle's tug, smarty.
Tons of smart people I know are doing mediocre jobs.
The fact someone is tackling hard problems doesn't make them the smartest people in the room, you need a combination of risk taking and smart in life.
And also, just the will to climb. Smart people often look at the big picture and come to view the rat race as pointless, thus staying on a lower rung of the ladder for life.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis>
Child prodigy, IQ assessed between 250 and 300, contemporary, classmate, and friend of Norbert Wiener (father of cybernetics, also a child prodigy), and ended up ... making a life's work of studying bus transfers. As in the tickets, not commute patterns themselves.
Several HN submissions though no substantive discussion: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=William%20James%20Sidis>
Sidis Archives: <https://www.sidis.net/>
Maybe when we make AGIs in bulk we’ll be able to talk about analytical capacity on some more meaningful scale than IQ, but for now, numbers like you gave attached to a human are just silly hyperbole.
I saw people saying it only loads the weights necessary, but all the weights are necessary (unless the architecture is heavily modified). Does it stream or load only the currently necessary layers in a way?
Most of the drama is contained in this thread, if you like reading this sort of stuff: https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/pull/711#issuecomment...
Whose ambition?
Smart how?
For what outcome? For who?
Would that be even efficient? (there are many other issues to "panic" over other than AI)
The outsider perspective on this is to fancy yourself a smart inventor who's going to outwit/outsmart/outplay the competition with your own company, find product market fit. This factory makes software widgets, and striking gold with such ephemeral products is as hard as striking gold with making sounds (which is the magic that the pop music industry makes happen regularly, somehow). (So, smart enough to write and release quality, reliable software to the public, or build a team capable of doing this).
Demand is so high for any software that becomes popular, that proxies for value are accepted with a "we'll worry about profit later" kind of attitude. So this justifies focusing on a hyped technology even if it isn't real. But if the hyped technology is real, even better.
A rational agent, selling their intellectual labor, understanding the current lay of the land, will see that the subject of "improving AI and integrating AI into applications" is going to be in high demand for a period of time, which means higher income.
I can explain why a higher income is desirable, if you like.
Yes, limited in the sense that smart = can make computers do stuff.
> if it’s scammy, it will attract the kind of people who’d play in moral grey areas for personal profit; if it’s bureaucratic-authoritarian, yup, you know who you’ll find there
You don’t think smart people run scams or that only idiots want to be authoritarians?
My problem is that there are also plenty of people who don't trigger that sense in me, but that have gone on to do really great stuff all the same. So I try to be humble about my assessments.
I agree that whatever separator line there is, it's not 'intelligence', maybe more like intelligence * drive * longevity, and I may be keying in on the first factor but not others.
This reflects the hubris of the tech world that overestimates its own intelligence....
This Medium blog post is not the PR person for the "tech world".
What about “I want to thank both you and the original article author”? Should it be “or” instead of “and”?
This seems a reach to me. I think your confusion is not unfounded and is not uncommon, but I think it's also extremely (and moreso?) common to read the sentence as the author intended. It took me 0ms to puzzle out the meaning because the intended meaning was the natural assumption of my brain.
Besides that, it seems a bit absurd to me to say that "and" and "as well as" have entirely distinct meanings. They're not totally interchangeable, but there is overlap.
Also consider: if LLMs weren't as big as they were, would the people pursuing this still be the "smartest engineers?" Would their efforts still be as brilliant? If you answered no to any of those, why not?
And if I can't tell the difference between a human generated piece of art and an AI generated one, then I find that fascinating, not threatening. It says a lot about 1) your own tastes and perceptions, 2) the meaning of art in general, and 3) what exactly it means when activities previously considered solely human are mastered by programs, such as what happened in the past with chess engines, etc.
I think these are all exciting developments, and I look forward to seeing how art will evolve in the way the emergence of chess engines changed strategy for humans moving forward.
The threat is that it will no longer be viable to make money from creative works. A completely trivial and laughable concern if you don't live in a society that believes you have to "earn a living".
Although I see a comparison to previous technologies replacing human jobs, I'm willing to put that point aside and focus solely on AI.
Will AI generated content be cheaper? Will AI content be more interesting and engaging than anything a human could create? If there is no economic demand for human generated artwork, then should it still be viable to make money from it? Is there reason to believe the people who remain in the art market won't be able to make more money by occupying niches that AI art doesn't serve, or by selling to "hipsters" or "luddites" who are anti-AI art? It used to be the only way to make real money through art was having a patron. Perhaps there will be wealthy people who will still be willing to patronize human artists.
Historically, we are in a special place in history where average people can make a living through creative work, but it's not at all an easy industry to break into, even today, and it has always been competitive and everchanging, just as art itself. Economics aside, people have always produced art for intrinsic purposes, and they will continue to do so even when the profit motive is gone.
The only artists I can think of that died with at least some money had sponsors that encouraged their work.
So I’m not sure much changes here.
If AI is supposed to stop us all from working, then those people will just be better off.
That's not relevant. There are tons of working artists today and there have been for decades. But if a person can't pay rent by selling their art, things suddenly change for millions of people.
The interesting stuff is asking what is an artist trying to convey or explore within the nuances of the medium they are working with: why does neon genesis rebuild movies use live action camera techniques and what does that do to the overall themes of the work? Why does one painting use the texture of the paint instead of the color theory of the paint as a message conveyor? How is the use of reflective or matte surfaces communicating an environment in an installed art piece?
Furthermore, of the very smart people I know, the intellectually stimulating stuff is kind of bizarre, and avenues of finding this stuff or funding this stuff is being drowned out by comparatively understimulating works. Artists usually fund their more unusual pursuits with the commercial work that MidJourney/Stable Diffusion targets.
For some, this is an important aspect of art appreciation, and I would expect those people to continue to gravitate toward human produced art. For other people who don't have that background, and don't think about those things, the difference won't be relevant to them, and they'll judge the end product based on their own personal and arbitrary criteria. What's interesting about an artwork to one person makes it banal to another, and no amount of academic study or criticism will change peoples' tastes.
Let's not forget that often creators themselves aren't always actively thinking about composition, texture, color, etc, and part of the work for them can be as black box out of their subconscious as the creation of a neural network.
Similar to people being fooled by white wine dyed red, I think we'll also have critics who remark on how absolutely human a work of art has to be due to X/Y/Z, only for it to be revealed to be an AI work. That I think encapsulates a lot of what I look forward to in terms of the debate over what exactly about art is human-specific and what it means for something, human or not, to have artistic capabilities.
I thought it would be upset so I kind of introduced the topic lightly.
I was relieved how much he didn’t care.
I completely agree with you. A button click image will never relate to most people like a real work of art.
I think the same about television. I think we all like Seinfeld because we know he is a real person with real experiences that we can relate too. I think this is important.
But I also agree that for many other smart people, what these things do is sort of an "obvious" result of doing bulk statistics on lots of data. The particulars can sometimes be surprising, but the aggregate result "thing that confidently generates false data" isn't.
In between, there seems to be a very passionate, and very excited group of people who don't get it and think the AI magic is "thinking". Some of these people may also be smart, but they sure don't have a strong complete vertical understanding of the topic. These people are numerous, and provide lots of conflicting and confusing information at about the level of through of the latest popular science breakthrough article -- setting wrong expectations all along the way.
Not only that, there's the whole cult of intelligence issue, which attracts people who are very skilled at presenting themselves as uber-intelligent even if their greatest talents like in the realm of social engineering and bureaucratic manipulation (many highly successful academics fall into this category). This is a kind of 'smartness', but not necessarily the kind that helps one grasp complex maths.
What we call 'smartness', or 'actual skill' is the product of some degree of native intelligence and the amound of time and energy spent developing that intelligence in a particular area via diligent effort.
Meanwhile, intelligence research continues to be one of the more fruitful (and reliable) fields of the social sciences
This might also be an either-or situation - i.e. some people specialize in the ability to quickly grasp a wide variety of knowledge at a relatively shallow level, others specialize in in-depth knowledge of a particular subject, and it's impossible to be really good at both.
Maybe to a limited extent, but most of the difference is likely natural ability.
Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.
The trouble with reacting to provocations like this, even if the indignation is genuine (it's basically always genuine) is that it leads to much less interesting discussions.
What is said here could almost have the same logical outcome as saying "the most challenging problems have no brilliant solution until one of the smartest people come along".
Nothing about attraction whatsoever, factored out instead.
Still seems pretty sensible when it works.
Now pick 3 top mathematical wizards.
Would it have been possible to achieve that status unless they had already accepted (and overcome!) challenges that were too much for those who came before?
And maybe still have their hands full with remaining challenges which were already accepted before AI came near enough to be considered within reach?
It should be most obvious to those having the best numerical abilty, to figure that more than just 3 of the smartest people will be needed with the growing number of challenges that nobody has even tried to overcome, sometimes not even recognize.