this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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[–] [email protected] -5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

I think some here are grossly overestimating average human capacity. There are many humans that have difficulty discerning the context of a statement based on their experiences aka examples.

This isn't AGI, but in another couple years at this pace, it's coming. Not necessarily because it is some higher mind, but because the metric for AGI is can it perform all the tasks our minds can at our level. Not necessarily Stephen Fry or Albert Einstein, just as well as a median asshole. Have you met us?

We aren't all that, and most of us spend most of our time on a script, sapience must be exercised, many do many don't, and isn't necessary for what we will abuse these for. It would probably be kinder to restrict discussion of such topics from memory when this matures. Even humans have great difficulty wrestling with them, to the point of depression and existential dread.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

nah, if anything this A.I. craze has made me appreciate how incredibly smart even the supposedly dimmest of humans are. we can use language of our own volition, to create meaning. in fact we frigging invented it!!! we're just bloody amazing, to hell with misanthropy.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

Pace my blog post, these last few years have shown diminishing returns on "AI":

  • AI is superintelligence (SFnal tropes like HAL 9000)
  • AI will make knowledge workers obsolete (the promise of "expert systems")
  • AI will replace human vehicle operators
  • AI will replace paralegals and coders
  • AI has made illustrators, stock photographers and spam email copywriters redundant (<- we are here)
  • for $10/month, you will be able to emulate the average Reddit poster (<- the glorious apotheosis)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (2 children)

We aren’t all that, and most of us spend most of our time on a script, sapience must be exercised, many do many don’t, and isn’t necessary for what we will abuse these for. It would probably be kinder to restrict discussion of such topics from memory when this matures. Even humans have great difficulty wrestling with them, to the point of depression and existential dread.

holy fuck please log off and go to therapy. I’m not fucking around. if this is actually how you see yourself and others, you are robbing yourself of the depth of the human experience by not seeking help.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

If this is how you see yourself and others, you might want to touch some grass and meet some more humans outside the Internet.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

the person there just commented on the average human's capacity for reasoning (not all humans, just the average one), and, in all fairness, they're sort of right, I think

don't just think of your friends and family, but about all humans. think about what makes it in the news and then how many things don't make it. religious nuts stoning people for whatever reason, gang sexual assault in the street in certain areas of the world, people showing up in ERs with weird stuff up their back ends, or finding unexploded ordnance from wars past and deciding the best course of action would be to smash it with a hammer or drill into it. this is all of course in addition to the pressing issues nowadays which do also seem to come from a place of not exercising sapience.

and for the less extreme cases, I do think the original commenter here is correct in saying people do tend to follow scripts and glide through life.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

So... the idea here is that OpenAI and friends are gonna charge you N bucks a month so you can have chat conversations with the average internet user? Spoiler alert: that service is already free.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

For $150 they save you the inconvenience of finding the style of twit you wish to interact with, and will dress up to whatever twit your heart desires!

In the beginning.. I can’t wait to see what happens to their pricing when they believe they’ve locked enough in and shift from vc subsidy to actual customer-carried charge. Bet it’s gonna be real popular..

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Apparently the electric power generation in the US is under strain because of all the AI server farms being feverishly built by entrepreneurs with FOMO. The bill is gonna come due some day, especially if Joe and Jill Sixpack can't afford to cool their beer because of some egghead generating pr0n.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

What is your source for this? Cryptocurrency is the only single source of computation that is significant on its own on a world scale (131 TWh per year for bitcoin alone which is most of it); AI's expected to become significant as it gets more and more popular, but the last I saw it wasn't there yet.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

tbf AI isn't quite there yet. If AI continues as it is and bitcoin doesn't somehow drop off, AI will be worse by 2027 IIRC.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

This isn’t AGI, but in another couple years at this pace, it’s coming.

As people noted the last few AI autumns, this is a bad assumption. Winter is coming. S-curve, not exponential.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

Seeing as the notion of "progress" in this space is entirely subjective and based on general vibes, it's easy to make a case for any curve shape.

I could make a passable argument that it's actually a noisy sinusoid.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

When people say stuff like this it always makes me wonder "what pace, exactly?" Truthfully, I feel like hearing someone say "well, generative AI is such a fast-moving field" at this point is enough on its own to ping my BS detector.

Maybe it was forgivable to say it in May 2023, but at this point it definitely feels like progress has slowed down/leveled off. AI doesn't really seem to me to be significantly more capable than it was a year ago -- I guess OpenAI can generate videos now, but it's been almost a year since "will smith eating spaghetti," so...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I'm gonna be honest the videos did better than I expected, still meh in the weird uncanny valley aspect, but better than I expected. But still think that we have reached the end of the fast progress curve due to the whole gpt 4 is basically a couple of 3.5's chained together. Which I think is a sign of people running out of ideas, same as how in the era of multicore cpus the speed of cpus has not increased that drastically, and certainly not that noticeably (compared to the 90's etc).

What is going to be amazing however is the rise of 40k mechanicus style coders, I saw somebody go 'you don't need to know how to code, my program gave this http error, I didn't know what it meant, so I asked GPT how to fix it and implemented that and it works'. Amazing, bunch of servitors.