Is Wang even able to achieve superintelligence? Is anyone? I'm unable to make sense of Wang's compensation package. What actual, practical skills does he bring to the table? Is this all a stunt to drive Meta's stock value?
LeCun obviously thinks otherwise and believes that LLMs are a dead-end, and he might be right. The trouble with LLMs is that most people don't really understand how they work. They seem smart, but they are not; they are really just good at appearing to be smart. But that may have created the illusion the true artificial intelligence is much closer than it really is in the minds of many people including Zuckerberg. And obviously, there now exists an entire industry that relies on that idea to raise further funding.
As for Wang, he's not an AI researcher per se, he basically built a data sweatshop. But he apparently is a good manager who knows how to get projects done. Maybe the hope is that giving him as many resources as possible will allow him to work his magic and get their superintelligence project on track.
I've had a 15 year+ successful career as a SWE so far. I don't think I've had a single idea so novel that today's LLM could not have come up with it.
Additionally, "novel ideas" isn't something that is included in something that smart people do so why would it be a requirement for AI.
Can you give an example of the difference between these two things?
This is what an LLM essentially is. It is good at mimicking, reproducing and recombining the things it was trained on. But it has no creativity to go beyond this, and it doesn't even possess true reasoning, which is how it will end up making mistakes that are just immediately obvious to a human observer, yet the LLM is unable to see them, because it just mimicking.
2. Why doesn't this apply to you from my perspective?
Now imagine that, during the interval, you approach the actor backstage and initiate a conversation in that language. His responses are always grammatical, always relevant to what you said modulo ambiguity, largely coherent, and accurate more often than not. You'll quickly realise that 'actor who merely memorized lines in a language he doesn't speak' does not describe this person.
They literally do not, what are you talking about?
It's been discussed a lot recently, but anyone who has interacted with LLMs at a deeper level will tell you that there is something there; not sure if you'd call it "intelligence" or what. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary too. I guess this is a long-winded way of saying "we don't really know what's going on"...
And so when they interact with a bot that knows everything, they associate it with smart.
Plus we anthropomorphise a lot.
Is Wikipedia "smart"?
If, for whatever reason, you don't have a vision and a plan, hiring big names to help kickstart that process seems like a way better next step than "do nothing".
1. Hire an artist.
2. Draw the rest of the fucking owl.
4. In frustration, use some AI tool to generate a couple of drafts that are close to what you want and hand them to the artist.
5. Hire a new artist after the first one quits because you don't respect the creative process.
6. Dig deeper into a variety of AI image-generating tools to get really close to what you want, but not quite get there.
7. Hire someone from Fiverr to tweak it in Photoshop because the artists, both bio and non-bio, have burned through your available cash and time.
8. Settle for the least bad of the lot because you have to ship and accept you will never get the image you have in your head.
That's why I also think the hiring angle makes sense. It would actually be astonishing if he could turn technical and compete with the leaders in OAI/Anthrpic
Prove me wrong.
I think our type two reasoning is roughly comparable to LLM reasoning when it is within the LLM reinforcement learning distribution.
I think some humans are smarter than LLMs out-of-distribution, but only when we think carefully, and in many cases LLMs perform better than many humams even in this case.
I think humans are smart. I also think AI is smart.
“Humans aren't smart, they are really just good at appearing to be smart. Prove me wrong.”
There are too many different ways to measure intelligence.
Speed, matching, discovery, memory, etc.
We can combine those levers infinitely create/justify "smart". Are they dumb? Absolutely, but are they smart? Very much so. You can be both at the same time.
Maybe you meant genius? Because that standard is quite high and there's no way they're genius today.
Trying to create new terminology ("genius", "superintelligence", etc.) seems to only shift goal posts and define new ways of approximation.
Personally, I'll believe a system is intelligent when it presents something novel and new and challenges our understanding of the world as we know it (not as I personally do because I don't have the corpus of the internet in my head).
Smart and dumb are opposites. So this seems dubious. You can have access to a large base of trivial knowledge (mostly in a single language), as LLMs do, but have absolutely no intelligence, as LLMs demonstrate.
You can be dumb yet good at Jeopardy. This is no dichotomy.
This has to be bait
In other words, functionally speaking, for many purposes, they are smart.
This is obvious in coding in particular, where with relatively minimal guidance, LLMs outperform most human developers in many significant respects. Saying that they’re “not smart” seems more like an attempt to claim specialness for your own intelligence than a useful assessment of LLM capabilities.
Seems like a great bang for the buck.
This hot dog, this no hot dog.