There was probably a point of maximum hype ~12 months ago, or right after the launch of GPT-4 where the belief of imminent singularity was running high.
I wonder what they meant
LLMs have been shown to be capable of embedding logic and reasoning. There is nothing preventing a sequence generator from learning stochastic reasoning skills. Modern LLMs don't even just output language tokens. The latent information stored in the hidden layers is far more abstract than just language.
"We hypothesize that this decline is due to the fact that current LLMs are not capable of genuine logical reasoning; instead, they attempt to replicate the reasoning steps observed in their training data."
Here is an article where a model's learned ability to carry out modular addition is recovered. https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.05217
As you can see, the jury's still out.
Though really, all embedded models of reality are approximate by nature, and based on stochastic empirical data. The real tradeoff with probability-based neural networks is whether a rigid algorithmic approach or a more flexible, but stochastic, approach solves the problem at hand.
I think for the people doing it, the expected endpoint is more about raising the price of shares they hold until they've been sold.
Then a week later it'll come up with a version of itself that's twice as smart. A week later that version will come up with a version that's twice as smart again, making it 4x as smart as a human. A week after that, it'll come up with a version that's twice as smart again, 8x as smart as a human. And so on. A year later it'll be a trillion times smarter than a human.
The AI will then either solve all our problems, invent fusion power and faster-than-light travel, and usher in a Star Trek style post-scarcity world of infinite resources and luxury, or it'll take over and create a Terminator style oppressive dystopia where the few surviving humans survive on rats we roast over a barrel in our underground bunker.
Elaborate on this idea please. Are you saying that human languages are self-replicating abstract entities?
The Singularity is the rapture of the nerds, and is about as likely to happen as the second coming of Jesus.
We see this in AI talk all the time "Dude is really good at coding and math, he's smart. We should totally listen to him when he makes things up like a 12 year old who just watched Terminator."
In the case of von Neumann, I mention him because he is the one who introduced the concept to the public. It is something he spent a great deal of time thinking about. He spent his life working around technology and had some incredible insights. Many consider him the smartest person to ever live, though in my opinion there are plenty contenders. He made key contributions to the development of computers, nuclear tech, quantum mechanics, mathematics and more. [0]
So I believe all of this truly does lead credence to the idea, at least enough to warrant sufficient research before dismissal. It's not his authority I appeal to, it's his experience. He didn't obsess over this idea for no reason, and his well-documented achievements aren't comparable to random flash-in-the-pan tech executives.
The ball is in your court to prove why the singularity is not real, because many experienced, decorated technologists disagree and have already laid out their arguments. If you can't prove that, then there's no argument for us to have in the first place.
There are a lot of people out there who believe in technological progressivism and continued advancement of socially beneficial technologies. They just don't speak about a "singularity" beyond which predictive power is not possible, because the idea isn't worth spending time on as it isn't even self-consistent.
It's not our job to show why the Singularity won't happen. It's the nutjobs who believe in the Singularity who have the responsibility of showing why. In the 70 years in which people have been bitten by this idea, nobody has. I'll wait.
No, but shallow dismissal of a subject that many intelligent technologists have spent their life considering just comes off as arrogant.
Predicting technological timelines is a largely pointless exercise, but I wouldn't be hard pressed to imagine a future N decades or centuries from now in which, assuming we do not destroy ourselves, human affairs become overshadowed by machine intelligence or technological complexity, and an increasingly complex technosocial system becomes increasingly difficult to predict until some limit of understanding is crossed.
If we don't grant that expertise on 1950s technology gives insight into 2040s technology, then there's little reason to consider his writing as something other than a cool story.
That's not my intention. It's more that, he simply looked at the historical progress of technology, recognized an acceleration curve, and pondered about the end game.
My argument is that it warrants consideration and not shallow dismissal. Plenty of opponents have criticized the concept, and some decent arguments revolve around rising complexity slowing down technological advancement. That is possible. But we can't just dismiss this concept as some fleeting story made up "like a 12 year old who just watched Terminator".