Artificial General Intelligence in 7 months?
Jeroen
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlands Veteran
Supposedly this is the prediction of experts watching the progress of OpenAI’s models. For those who do not know, artificial general intelligence is the point at which artificial intelligence is as good as human in a wide range of areas. What we have now with ChatGPT is a chat bot, which can summarise and investigate but that is still a long way short of general intelligence.
But things are moving quickly, this is the robot built by Figure and powered by OpenAI technology. It already shows situational awareness and the ability to learn from situations.
It could be that predictions are right and before the year is out we will have an artificial general intelligence. What will happen then is an explosion of AI generated stuff will flood the internet… books, videos, music, humans looking to profit will direct the AI to generate a tidal wave of material. Discovery of the things that match your taste will become much more difficult. Human talent will become more rare.
We live in interesting times.
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Back when Al Gore and Newt Gingrich invented the internet, although people knew it could be revolutionary/useful/dangerous, no one could have predicted the vast complexity and second-tier effects that resulted. But humans are still humans, in all our fabulous diversity, we just have a powerful tool to enable and magnify -- but not invent -- the native talent. Artists, scientists, and horse rustlers moved to the internet, but the internet didn't invent art, science, or crime. AI seems similar to me: It will change everything and it will change nothing. I expect it won't reduce my ability to discover things that match my (peculiar) taste, and I don't think it likely that human talent will become more rare; quite the contrary I'd imagine. I certainly expect things to get pretty interesting, but I also expect to still be able to go for a hike, play the piano, have interesting dreams, cold beer, and hot showers. I'm expecting something akin to turning up the gain in a circuit: signal-to-noise will get worse, the signal itself will get amazing, art and science will both boom, sleazeballs will get sleazier, scams will get scammier, Jundo will beam a 5-dimensional treeleaf directly into all our synapses, and Bill Gates won't need to use vaccines to implant his microchips any more. But even with all those and many unimagined-yet miracles to come, I think/hope we'll still need soap and windshield wipers and loud electric guitars played raucously.
We invented the wheel, then we invented propulsion, then we flew the Flyer at Kitty Hawk, then we flew to the MOON. Welcome AI -- let the future begin!
Can't say when AGI will come but since the quick rise of self driving cars then a stall, I've heard what sounds like a fairly common coding saying, "99% of the work is the last 1%".
So I guess my uninformed opinion would be that these sorts of specific AIs will proliferate and get better, but AGI will be a ways off yet.
There was an Nvidia conference on Wednesday, during which they announced a new chip code named Blackwell, which is the largest parallel processor they have built to date. When deployed in the data centers which power the cloud, it will enable the creation of AI models ten times as complex as the one in ChatGPT-3. It will take a couple of years for this to happen, but then we may find AI which is substantially more capable than human-level.
Nvidia’s technology is a kind of bedrock on which a lot of AI processing is built, and it is earning them a lot of money. They used to build only graphics processors, which earnt them 2.9 bn USD a quarter, but that is now dwarfed by the business for AI processors, which earnt them 18.7 bn USD in the last quarter.
"We live in interesting times."
I would say we live in scary times. Look at how humans have handled the internet and social media ( hint: extremely badly). I don't see AI ending well for humans. Not trying to be negative but an honest take. Look at the rise of the far right across the globe. AI will undoubtedly also be put to terrible use by certain humans. But as we see in history it only takes a powerful minority to destroy the world. I am not an AI fan and do not embrace it. But totally can see why people might be more optimistic than I am about it.
Humans haven't learned the lessons of history which is why we are always on the brink of collapse. It's not the AI as such I don't trust but the group of humans who will undoubtedly use it for dangerous purposes.
I have many other reservations besides the one I've mentioned. I wish I could feel we were living in exciting times in a positive way but that's not how I feel.
There is a certain amount of truth in that. A big part of that is the likes of Facebook and TikTok, which engineer their products for ‘maximum engagement’ which translates to addictiveness. It’s led to a generation of smartphone zombies.
It is the underlying ruthlessness of the logical mind that is the problem. People who think with their head and are not in their emotional centre come up with ruthless ‘business solutions’ which unfortunately do a lot of damage but also make a lot of short term money, and leave society to pick up the pieces.
The potential for misuse is huge, and easy to see. It’s like having thousands of free expert workers to do projects for you, whatever you think those projects should be. Just in the area of scamming, I’ve noticed that scam emails have become much better written of late, it’s all being done by chat bots.
“The right use of the mind is in the service of love, truth and beauty.”
— Nisargadatta Maharaj
as someone only marginally more intelligent/sentient than the next hype bubble, I know:
Have a thoughtful day everyone. stay safe, be kind. Job done! 🦞🫶🫠
Some musings from recent history...
Chess and poker and Go are games with a limited number of rules and clear objectives. For some time now, computers have been far better at these games than even the best humans. We say that these games have been "solved" (that the optimum strategy has been found) but this is actually not true - since computers keep improving and finding even better strategies.
What has happened with humans playing these games...
... the best players try to learn from and emulate the computer strategy. Generally, the closer you are to the computer strategy, the better you are. However, noone can fully do so because the computer strategy is too complicated.
... (I am not sure, but I strongly suspect) the average human skill-level in these games has increased. This is primarily because now the correct principles have been "proven" and so they can be learnt and taught in ever simpler and more efficient ways.
... some of the "mistique" has been lost for players at the top (because the computer is better).
... there is increasing concern about cheating (ie. using computers while playing other humans).
... people still want to see people play these games and play themselves. Pretty much noone watches computer vs computer games and human vs human games are as popular as ever.
... if your goal is to really delve deeply into the strategy aspect and learn, it is now easier than ever and you can go far further.
I too am concerned about AI, and am not sure what my comment adds to the discussion, but I guess computers solving games was a precursor to today's AI, so how that played out could be partially indicative of how AI will play out.
This all reminded me of a recent development that gives me a "Go Humans!" feel. Someone developed a simple strategy that anyone could easily beat the Go AI. Don't ask me to explain it, but basically its a strategy that any basic Go player would recognize and easily prevent if played against them, but the AI had no clue what was happening.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7v5xb/a-human-amateur-beat-a-top-go-playing-ai-using-a-simple-trick
What that kind of shows is that AI currently has no sense of what it is doing or what it is looking at, it is just a super sophisticated calculator that looks like it knows what its doing from the outside. Another way to say it is maybe AI is an example of hyper intelligence with zero wisdom or common sense.
I worry about AI malfunctioning, I worry about AI malfunctioning, I worry about AI malfunctioning, I worry about AI malfunctioning, I worry about AI malfunctioning... Oops I've been sprung
Loved your reply. Thank you. 👍👍
Thank you. ❤️👍
Can't beat some humour. Thank you. ❤️👍
Great reply. Thank you. ❤️
It has a lot of advantages and it is a killer of mundane and repetitive tasks which can be tedious to do but form part of our dynamics. Cover letters, forms, etc. Not that they are perfect, but if you keep an watchful eye and learn to program it with the right questions and procedures, it can be a great ally.
Now....I hope Artifitial intelligence does not substitute intelligence as a whole. I have fallen prey to YouTube shorts and I acknowledge that hyperstimulation is not good and cunning...we have great tools at our hands, like imagine the first books, the first belts, swords, axes...
I "vow" to use them mindfully...
Well, if people still enjoy seeing humans “play”, perhaps it will become a thing to observe human skills like painting or drawing. AI will undoubtedly be able to do these things better, but the expression of a human skill still has value.
Some things will probably vanish, like the skill of low-level computer programming or writing ominous legal letters. Those mind jobs which no-one wants to do like data entry will be delegated to AI and good riddance. But we will probably end up with fewer humans employed full-time in skilled labour.
For example, in making computer games, all you need is a visionary director who has a deep knowledge of technology and a bunch of AI programmers and artists, and they will probably be able to make a computer game much more quickly than in the past.