Large Language Models are nothing but very advanced regurgitation machines. That’s the AI these articles are hand wringing about - not a real Artificial Intelligence.
These articles remind me of the bitcoin articles we used to see.
What ability do you think that they are currently missing that makes them 'regurgitation machines' rather than just limited and dumb but genuine early AI?
Discreet object recognition. Right now they can’t answer the simplest questions that require counting discrete objects. Which to me implies they have no discreet object sense at all. They’re just looking for word patterns.
I’ll give you an example, If you were to ask one of these. “I was on my way to the store when I saw a sow with six piglets, how many feet do we have?”
We could have a lively debate about what potential answers would be acceptable. Maybe there’s only 2 feet because the rest are hooves, maybe there’s 30 because that’s how many foot like appendages there are in total, but the answer it will give you will make absolutely no sense.
Chat GPT will be like, “11” or “15” and if you ask it any questions or follow up it genuinely does not have any answer for how any of these objects could be discreetly counted or partitioned. It can try to explain itself but quickly starts babbling nonsense.
I think that might be a chatgpt specific thing, I tried with bing in precise mode and it responded with this:
"A sow is an adult female pig and piglets are baby pigs. Pigs have four feet, so a sow with six piglets would have a total of 28 feet (4 feet for the sow + 6 piglets * 4 feet each). Is that what you were asking?"
And monkeys could fly out of my ass. Before we start hand wringing about AI someone would probably need to actually invent one. We’re probably closer to actual room temperature fusion at this point than we are an actual general purpose AI.
Instead of wasting time worrying about a thing that doesn’t even exist and probably won’t in any of our lifetimes, we should probably do something about the things actually killing us like global warming and unchecked corporate greed.
Exactly. There was an article floating around just a couple of days ago that from what I recall was saying that billionaires were funding these AI-scare studies in top universities, I presume to distract the public from the very real and near scare of climate disaster, economic inequality, etc. Here, unfortunately paywalled: washingtonpost.com/…/ai-apocalypse-college-studen…
A lot of the folks worried about AI x-risk are also worried about climate, and pandemics, and lots of other things too. It’s not like there’s only one threat.
That’s fair. It just seems lopsided to worry about AI destroying the world when it doesn’t yet show any signs of real intelligence, while the planet is burning up, half the world is on the edge of revolution, and no one in power is pushing hard for any real solutions to those things.
It’s all about risks, if you worry about being runover ok it’s reasonable, but if you worry about shark attacks when you live in the forest it is ludicrous and a waste of time.
@fubo@xapr I don’t doubt that, but that begs the question whether the unrealistic concerns raised for by those folks outweigh the realistic ones that need more actual and funding. For example, how much money are the billionaires and top elites putting in to solve climate change, past/future pandemics compared to studying AI-driven doom? I don’t know the answer, and I welcome you to find out.
I absolutely hate this craze. Most of the questions I get about AI are just facepalming because everyone is feeding off each other with these absurd things that could hypothetically happen. Clearly because actually explaining it doesn't generate clicks and controversy
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