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Comment by taf2 | Hacker News Reader

I just view the current gpt llm as a better search engine. It’s not self learning. It’s stateless when queried - so really the concern is we can create content on demand and create responses that intuitively make the llm very useful tool. Until it’s self learning I’m only concerned with how humans would use it just like any other tool in the hands of humans it can be both super useful and super destructive.

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"just like any other tool in hands of humans" -- the scale of damage a tool can do matters, e.g. civilization cannot withstand nukes being sold at walmart. and, of course, self learning will be here this decade.

I agree llms are powerful but they are not explosive - conflating the two is IMO even more dangerous

they have the potential to take over the control systems of the explosive stuff. including the decision making processes of humans themselves.

to quote none other than sama, oct 2023: "i expect ai to be capable of superhuman persuasion well before it is superhuman at general intelligence, which may lead to some very strange outcomes" https://twitter.com/sama/status/1716972815960961174

take any narrow capability and 'superhuman <narrow capability>' will almost certainly be possible before 'superhuman general intelligence'.

The biggest, best transformer-based LLM you could imagine, that we haven't even made yet, will still fail the basic test "what is the weather tomorrow" since a LLM has no knowledge outside it's training set.

If they figure out how to give an LLM infinite/really long context length, it will basically become self-learning.

Which is more likely to happen first, "an LLM (with) infinite/really long context length," or an LLM-like system which can integrate new training data in real-time?

Am I even asking this question correctly?

LLMs can integrate new information but they only remember what you told them up to the context length. If they could remember longer then you would have agents with a lot of new knowledge.

I guess what I am getting at is: When I ask ChatGPT 4 Turbo to "search for the article by Eric Berger from Sep 10th 2023, and summarize it," it does, and responds including that new information because it is now in the context.

The next step would seem to be to integrate those search results into its training data - while somehow filtering bunk data which is the tough part - and when the next user asks that question it already knows it without searching.

Is this the same thing as saying "infinite context length?" I didn't think so. Is it?

What I mean is if context length wasn't a limit, you could have your own AI agent that remembers that article forever, along with everything else you've ever discussed with it.

If it generated text on its own, without human interaction, and developed its "personality", then you could say it's more like what we consider an intelligent being.

Context length is limited by the length of articles in the training data. You couldn’t use infinite context lengths unless the LLM had been trained on infinity long articles.

Context lengths aren’t arbitrary limits - they reflect the ability (and limits) of the model to actually reason about lengthy topics. If you want longer context lengths you’ll need more training data, larger models, and a lot more money.

Thank you.

So in my very uniformed mind.. "AGI," at the very least, would require real-time retraining... correct?

IMO yes, but more likely and entirely different yet to be discovered way of modeling intelligence

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