Re:Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
by amluto on Wednesday March 29, 2023 @12:55PM
(#35359957)
With current tech? GPT appears to learn by studying a large corpus of words and learning how to (apparently intelligently!) put them together. And it can “few/zero-shot learn” to do new things in line that what it was trained on. Don’t get me wrong: this is amazing!
But humans have been manipulating language, apparently intelligently, for tens of thousands of years, and billions of us have spent the last 30 years or so making a huge corpus of digitized words.
What we have not done is to make a huge corpus of digital things that can be manipulated by a computer program. We have books about machining, engineering, etc, and we are still pretty bad about turning written descriptions into working objects. (Read about “technology transfer”. For better or for worse, a lot of manufacturing seems to need experience, not just manuals.) Nicely drawn schematics don’t necessarily work at all, let alone replicate.
It seems quite likely that the robotic AI revolution will happen, but I expect it to be a while.
But humans have been manipulating language, apparently intelligently, for tens of thousands of years, and billions of us have spent the last 30 years or so making a huge corpus of digitized words.
What we have not done is to make a huge corpus of digital things that can be manipulated by a computer program. We have books about machining, engineering, etc, and we are still pretty bad about turning written descriptions into working objects. (Read about “technology transfer”. For better or for worse, a lot of manufacturing seems to need experience, not just manuals.) Nicely drawn schematics don’t necessarily work at all, let alone replicate.
It seems quite likely that the robotic AI revolution will happen, but I expect it to be a while.