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Comment by runarberg | Hacker News Reader

AI hater here:

I have a hard time taking statements from OpenAI about their own product, that they are trying to sell to people and make money, seriously. I take these statements as they are greatly exaggerated or even straight up lies and propaganda.

That said, I think results like these are mostly annoying more then anything. They spent a lot of money, used up gigartiuan amount of compute, to ruin a puzzle that mathematicians were tackling. I am mostly unsurprised that if you spend a trillion times the energy that a team of mathematicians would, that you get maybe 1.5 times the results. I see a future where that 1.5 times the results may go to 3x but not much more. And if that, then I will be more annoyed.

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A trillion times the energy might be a bit hyperbolic, even with the current massive amounts of energy involved here

Yes it is intentionally hyperbolic. I know the factor is several orders of magnitude. I don‘t know the exact, nor even the ballpark. I just know this is a ridiculously large amount, so I may as well pick a number large enough that people know it is an exaggeration.

did we always know that computer can do the thinking for us if we allocate them enough resources? i don’t think so. so even if computers are more expensive than humans the fact that they can play the same game is surprising and (relatively) novel.

I don‘t think it is this simple. I think there is a subset of problems (namely ones that can utilize automatic solver or some other kinds of automatic testers and verifiers) where reaching the solution is correlated with the spent energy.

Maybe people will find some clever way to expand this domain of AI-solvable problems by a couple of more categories, or (more likely) find a clever way of using applying these verifier for problems that was previously not viable, thus changing the solution to “just spend more energy computing dummy”. However I think this too will have its limits.

Regardless, this is still annoying and I want them to stop doing this. Solving math problems should not be relegated to whoever has the most money to spend the most compute.

I think giving the world a "cheat code" to accomplish too many intellectual tasks will eventually take its toll on us because after relegating most of our physical labour to machines, we could at least marvel at the abilities of individuals.

Yes, human beings can do more now in some ways but...to put it poetically, I think there will be no more heroes like Einstein and Newton of the past. Now it will just be someone cleverly turning the crank.

Yes, we still admire Usain Bolt even though we have cars...but maybe the admiration is a lot more trivial than if we did not have them....

Personally, I think AI is a grand mistake.

“ Yes, human beings can do more now in some ways but...to put it poetically, I think there will be no more heroes like Einstein and Newton of the past. Now it will just be someone cleverly turning the crank.”

This is false… there’s lots of ingenuity to be had and demonstrated. But it’ll only get recognised if it makes a material contribution to the economy imo. Otherwise yes it’ll be seen as meh - but that’s already happening.

People like Einstein were revered in society. The average person cannot name a leading scientist etc today.

> The average person cannot name a leading scientist etc today.

When Jane Goodall died last year it was international news. She was a celebrity scientist for sure, I think she even made an appearance in The Simpsons. Ditto Stephen Hawking.

I have no idea who she was.

International news doesn’t mean much - the vast majority of people don’t consume news the way you think - I highly doubt the vast majority had any awareness.

I think there may be a few other basic things you're not aware of either.

So the issue isn't AI, it's AI in a capitalist world

Arguably, I think AI would not even exist without capitalism because it's only the arms-race scenario that has made it somewhat viable. Otherwise we wouldn't be foolish enough to waste energy on this shit.

Even simpler. The issue is capitalism.

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