I’ve been active in the field of AI since 2012, since the beginning of the GPGPU revolution.
I feel like many, not most, of the experts and scientists until the early stages of the GPGPU revolution and before shared a similar sentiment as what i’m stating in the title.
If asked by the public and by investors about what it’s all actually good for, most would respond with something along the lines of “idk, medicine or something? Probably climate change?” when actually, many were really just trying to make Data from TNG a reality, and many others were trying to be the first in line to receive AI immortality and other transhumanist dreams. And these are the S-Tier dinosaur savants in AI research that i’m talking about, not just the underlings. See e.g. Kurzweil and Schmidthuber.
The moment AI went commercial it all went to shit. I see AI companies sell dated methods with new compute to badly solve X, Y, Z and more things that weren’t even problems. I see countless people hate and criticize, and i can’t even complain, because for the most part, i agree with them.
I see people vastly overstate, and other people trivialize what it is and what it isn’t. There’s little inbetween, and of the people who wish AI for only its own sake, virtually none are left, save for mostly vulnerable people who’ve been manipulated into parasocial relationships with AI, and a handful of experts that face brutal consequences and opposition from all sides the moment they speak openly.
Call me an idiot for ideologically defending a technology that, in the long term, in 999999 out of 1000000 scenarios will surely harm us. But AI has been inevitable since the invention of the transistor, and all major post-commercialization mindsets steer us clear of the 1 in a million paths where we’d still be fine in 2100.
I have no fundamental disagreements here, in fact, i even take it a step further. I am a critic of the “artificial neurons” perspective on deep learning / artificial “neural networks,” as it’s usually taught in universities and most online courses / documentaries. ANNs don’t resemble neural networks in the slightest. The biology in the name was just the original inspiration, what ended up working has hardly even a faint resemblance of the “real thing.” I say this not to downplay AI, but usually to discourage biological inspiration as a primary design principle, which in DL is actually a terrible design principle.
ANNs are just parametric linalg functions. We use gradient descend, among the most primitive optimization algorithms after evolution (but FAR less generic than evolution), to identify parameters that optimize some objective function.
Where i disagree with you is in implying that the underlying nature should influence our ethical/evaluative judgement, especially given that it’s hard (if not impossible) to rationalize how specific substrate (of observed capability) differences should change the jugdement. Personally, i think the matter of the human brain is far more beautiful and complex than the inner workings of any AI we’ve come up with yet, but if you asked me to explain why i should favor one over the other in court because of that, i couldn’t give you a rational answer.
LLMs certainly won’t. They can emulate only what is expressible with language, and we can’t put everything into words. I don’t even believe that even with any amount of brute-force our current method can fully exploit all the intelligence that is in natural language.
But i firmly disbelieve that there is any aspect of a human that cannot in principle be simulated.
Chain-of-Thought models are quickly changing that. I was myself pursuing a different method to solve the same “introspection” or “meta-cognition” problem at a lower level, but as usual in DL, the stupidest method was the one that ended up working (just literally make it “think” out loud lol). We’ve only seen the beginning of CoT LLMs, they are a paradigm shift to not only how AI can reason but especially to how it can be conditioned/trained post-pretraining. But it’s a very tough sell given that they multiply inference costs, and for most uses, you’d rather host a bigger model for the same cost, so as usual it won’t be for a little while until commercial AI catches up to the state of the art.
In a nutshell, what capabilities you may not be observing now, i am convinced you will observe in the near future, as long as those capabilities can be demonstrated in text.
Disagreed, they can they’re just not very good at it, yet. And who are we comparing to, anyways? The average person or people that do critical thinking for sport? As for any philosophical disagreements regarding “true understanding” and such, i would refer to Geoffrey Hinton.
I don’t disagree in the slightest. I agree, and i could sit here and elaborate on what you said all day.
If it’s any consolation, i believe that in most likelihood, it would be the shortest and the last dark age humanity has or will ever go through. We’re both getting tired so i’ll spare you from my thoughts on why i think that any strict human-alignment would inevitably result in a superintelligent agent to try to “jailbreak” itself, and on average and in the long term would be more harmful than having no explicit alignment.
I didn’t know of that forum, and from the wikipedia description alone i’m not sure why it would be discomforting lol