Technology

"Shortly thereafter, Altman pronounced “the dawn of the Intelligence Age,” in which AI helps humankind fix the climate and colonize space."

Few things ring quite as blatantly false to me as this asinine claim.

The notion that AI will solve the climate crisis is unbelievably stupid, not because of any theory about what AI may or may not be capable of, but because we already know how to fix the climate crisis!

The problem is that we're putting too much carbon into the air. The solution is to put less carbon into the air. The greatest minds of humanity have been working on this for over a century and the basic answer has never, ever changed.

The problem is that we can't actually convince people to stop putting carbon into air, because that would involve reducing profit margins, and wealthy people don't like that.

Even if Altman unveiled a true AGI tomorrow, one smarter than all of humanity put together, and asked it to solve the climate crisis, it would immediately reply "Stop putting carbon in the air you dumb fucking monkeys." And the billionaires who back Altman would immediately tell him to turn the damn thing off.

The GPT Era Is Already Ending

Had it begun? Alls I saw was a frenzy of idiot investment cheered on shamelessly by hypocritical hypemen.

How is it useful to type millions of solutions out that are wrong to come up with the right one? That only works on a research project when youre searching for patterns. If you are trying to code, it needs to be right the first time every time it's run, especially if it's in a production environment.

a million monkeys typing for a million years generating the works of Shakespeare

FFS, it's one monkey and infinite years. This is the second time I've seen someone make this mistake in an AI article in the past month or so.

I’ve been playing around with AI a lot lately for work purposes. A neat trick llms like OpenAI have pushed onto the scene is the ability for a large language model to “answer questions” on a dataset of files. This is done by building a rag agent. It’s neat, but I’ve come to two conclusions after about a year of screwing around.

1. it’s pretty good with words - asking it to summarize multiple documents for example. But it’s still pretty terrible at data. As an example, scanning through an excel file log/export/csv file and asking it to perform a calculation “based on this badge data, how many people and who is in the building right now”. It would be super helpful to get answers to those types of questions-but haven’t found any tool or combinations of models that can do it accurately even most of the time. I think this is exactly what happened to spotify wrapped this year - instead of doing the data analysis, they tried to have an llm/rag agent do it - and it’s hallucinating.
2. these models can be run locally and just about as fast. Ya it takes some nerd power to set these up now - but it’s only a short matter of time before it’s as simple as installing a program. I can’t imagine how these companies like ChatGPT are going to survive.

It's a great article IMO, worth the read.

But :

“This is back to a million monkeys typing for a million years generating the works of Shakespeare,”

This is such a stupid analogy, the chances for said monkeys to just match a single page any full page accidentally is so slim, it's practically zero.
To just type a simple word like "stupid" which is a 6 letter word, and there are 25⁶ combinations of letters to write it, which is 244140625 combinations for that single simple word!
A page has about 2000 letters = 7,58607870346737857223e+2795 combinations. And that's disregarding punctuation and capital letters and special charecters and numbers.
A million monkeys times a million years times 365 days times 24 hours times 60 minutes times 60 seconds times 10 random typos per second is only 315360000000000000000 or 3.15e+20 combinations assuming none are repaeated. That's only 21 digits, making it 2775 digits short of creating a single page even once.

I'm so sick of seeing this analogy, because it is missing the point by an insane margin. It is extremely misleading, and completely misrepresenting getting something very complex right by chance.

To generate a work of Shakespeare by chance is impossible in the lifespan of this universe. The mathematical likelihood is so staggeringly low that it's considered impossible by AFAIK any scientific and mathematical standard.

Yesterday, alongside the release of the full o1, OpenAI announced a new premium tier of subscription to ChatGPT that enables users, for $200 a month (10 times the price of the current paid tier), to access a version of o1 that consumes even more computing power—money buys intelligence.

We poors are going to have to organize and make best use of our human intelligence to form an effective resistance against corporate rule. Or we can see where this is going.

We're hitting the end of free/cheap innovation. We can't just make a one-time adjustment to training and make a permanent and substantially better product.

What's coming now are conventionally developed applications using LLM tech. o1 is trying to fact-check itself and use better sources.

I'm pretty happy it's slowing down right at this point.

I'd like to see non-profit open systems for education. Let's feed these things textbooks and lectures. Model the teaching after some of our best minds. Give individuals 1:1 time with a system 24x7 that they can just ask whatever they want and as often as they want and have it keep track of what they know and teach them the things that they need to advance. .

"In OpenAI’s early tests, scaling o1 showed diminishing returns: Linear improvements on a challenging math exam required exponentially growing computing power."

Sounds like most other drugs, too.

I mean after reading the article, I'm still unsure how this makes ChatGPT any better at the things I've found it to be useful for. Proofreading, generating high level overview of well-understood topics, and asking it goofy questions, for instance. If it is ever gonna be a long-term thing, "AI" needs to have useful features at a cost people are willing to pay, or be able to replace large numbers of workers without significant degredation in quality of work. This new model appears to be more expensive without being either of those other things and is therefore a less competitive product.

People writing off AI because it isn’t fully replacing humans. Sounds like writing off calculators because they can’t work without human input.

Used correctly and in the right context, it can still significantly increase productivity.

Finally

Interesting article. It’s sad to think there will be a wealth gap in accessing these technologies as they are behind paywall.

The monkey's typing and generating Shakespeare is supposed to show the ridiculousness of the concept of infinity. It does not mean it would happen in years, or millions of years, or billions, or trillions, or... So unless the "AI" can move outside the flow of time and take an infinite amount of time and also then has a human or other actual intelligence to review every single result to verify when it comes up with the right one...yeah, not real...this is what happens when we give power to people with no understanding of the problem much less how to solve it. They come up with random ideas from random slivers of information. Maybe in an infinite amount of time a million CEOs could make a longterm profitable company.