this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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Why would people think he knows anything about AI?
Because we often look up to public figures for stuff they are not qualified to comment on.
Can we get a second opinion from Dre?
But what does ja rule think?
Are you saying that Barack Obama and Dr. Dre both are equally unqualified to talk about "AI"? What other similarities do they share that makes you reach for Dr. Dre so quickly? Do you believe that Obama or Dre are incapable of interacting with computers or understanding computer science? Do you think that people who look like "thugs" to a person like you might be capable of learning and performing complex tasks?
https://youtu.be/Mo-ddYhXAZc?si=S9-XF-cwCnR5G_ZW
If he's an unqualified bystander, then what the fuck are you?
I'm always surprised that the people with all the answers only share them with thirty other assholes on the Internet.
I'm confident a 14 year old can write their own AI, maybe even a smart 10 year old.
Here's instructions for kids:
https://youtu.be/XJ7HLz9VYz0?si=1QN3fqT03HSMufib
You think Obama can't wrap his head around a little algebra?
Why, when speaking intelligently and thoughtfully in the subject, is he so wrong in his assessment, when you, in one lazy sentence, are so right?
I'm really worried about would-be wise people just throwing in the towel cause they don't know how much better they could be with a little discipline, and settle for being clever here and there.
Obama is employing good old human exceptionalism and moving the goal post. A tried and true method of argumentation that has continued to fail for the last 50+ years when it comes to AI. "AI is good at X, but not Y" becomes "AI is good at X and Y, but not Z" the next year. Focus on a tiny niche that AI hasn't covered yet, while ignoring the pace at which AI is advancing. Wasn't too long ago that people where proclaiming that computers could never be creative. Nowadays that switched to "but it can't beat the human masters". Well, guess what? That did neither hold true for Chess nor Go and it won't work out for Bob Dylan music either. Be prepared for a future where AI is better at everything. It will come and much sooner than people expect.
It's also worth keeping in mind the quantity of AI generated content. I still hear tons of artists talk as if AI were competing with them on a level playing field. But in the time they finish one image, AI finished thousands or even millions. This is not just about AI replacing the human, but completely shifting how we deal with information in general. Something like ChatGPT isn't interesting because it can write better websites than a human, but because it completely bypasses the need to visit websites in the first place. You ask the AI and the AI delivers the answers. There is no intermediate step where knowledge needs to get dumped into a static website or a book.
As far as I know, Obama has nothing to do with IT and doesn't have a big interest in it. A lot of people on here are probably more qualified than he is when it comes to these topics simply because they spent a lot of their free time learning about it.
Because he's a world leader and AI programs are answering search engine queries with what you want to hear now, not actual answers. Ain;t no way hes unaware that.
Why are you acting like it's at all difficult to understand?
Because you can teach a teen to do it in two weeks. He was a constitutional law professor, as well as the first elected African-American president in the United States. I learned LLMs in a couple months and I never used a comp until 2021. Why are you gatekeeping?
Using the end product and having any idea how it works are two VERY different things.
I agree, my argument is that both aren't challenging for even the average person if they really want/need to understand how these models produce refined noise informed by human patterns.
There are electricians everywhere you know.
This isn't a random person thoughtlessly yelling one-sentence nonsense pablum on the Internet like you.
You think this person can't understand something as straightforward as programming, coming from law?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama
Please link your Wikipedia below 🫠
It's a bit more complicated than you're making it out to be lmfao, there's a reason it's only really been viable for the past few years.
The principles are really easy though. At its core, neural nets are just a bunch of big matrix multiplication operations. Training is still fundamentally gradient descent, which while it is a fairly new concept in the grand scheme of things, isn't super hard to understand.
The progress in recent years is primarily due to better hardware and optimizations at the low levels that don't directly have anything to do with machine learning.
We've also gotten a lot better at combining those fundamentals in creative ways to do stuff like GANs.
AI researcher (PhD) here and for what it's worth, Obama got it extremely right. I saw this and went "holy shit, he gets it"
Yeah I dont believe you at all. I got my master in AI 8 years ago and have been working in the field ever since and no one with any knowledge would agree with you at all. In fact I showed a couple of my colleagues the headline of this article and they both just laughed.
If you don't think ai will get there and surpass everything humans have done in the past, you should change career.
I'm saying this because I do this for a living. It has become obvious to everyone in research (for example - https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.00059) that "AI"s don't understand what they are outputting. The secret sauce with all these large models is the data scale. That is, we have not had real algorithmic breakthroughs - it's just model scale and data scale. So we can make models that mimic human language and music etc but to go beyond, we need multiple fundamentally different breakthroughs. There is a ton of research attention now so it might happen, but it's not guaranteed - the improvements we've seen in the past few years will plateau as data plateaus (we are already there according to some, i.e we've used all the data on the Internet). Also, this - https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493v2
You do it for a living and you can't even understand what a general ai is. Alas I long since understood that mostly everyone is profoundly incompetent at their own jobs.