I think for the people doing it, the expected endpoint is more about raising the price of shares they hold until they've been sold.
I wonder what they meant
LLMs have been shown to be capable of embedding logic and reasoning. There is nothing preventing a sequence generator from learning stochastic reasoning skills. Modern LLMs don't even just output language tokens. The latent information stored in the hidden layers is far more abstract than just language.
"We hypothesize that this decline is due to the fact that current LLMs are not capable of genuine logical reasoning; instead, they attempt to replicate the reasoning steps observed in their training data."
Here is an article where a model's learned ability to carry out modular addition is recovered. https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.05217
As you can see, the jury's still out.
Though really, all embedded models of reality are approximate by nature, and based on stochastic empirical data. The real tradeoff with probability-based neural networks is whether a rigid algorithmic approach or a more flexible, but stochastic, approach solves the problem at hand.
Then a week later it'll come up with a version of itself that's twice as smart. A week later that version will come up with a version that's twice as smart again, making it 4x as smart as a human. A week after that, it'll come up with a version that's twice as smart again, 8x as smart as a human. And so on. A year later it'll be a trillion times smarter than a human.
The AI will then either solve all our problems, invent fusion power and faster-than-light travel, and usher in a Star Trek style post-scarcity world of infinite resources and luxury, or it'll take over and create a Terminator style oppressive dystopia where the few surviving humans survive on rats we roast over a barrel in our underground bunker.
Elaborate on this idea please. Are you saying that human languages are self-replicating abstract entities?
The Singularity is the rapture of the nerds, and is about as likely to happen as the second coming of Jesus.
We see this in AI talk all the time "Dude is really good at coding and math, he's smart. We should totally listen to him when he makes things up like a 12 year old who just watched Terminator."
In the case of von Neumann, I mention him because he is the one who introduced the concept to the public. It is something he spent a great deal of time thinking about. He spent his life working around technology and had some incredible insights. Many consider him the smartest person to ever live, though in my opinion there are plenty contenders. He made key contributions to the development of computers, nuclear tech, quantum mechanics, mathematics and more. [0]
So I believe all of this truly does lead credence to the idea, at least enough to warrant sufficient research before dismissal. It's not his authority I appeal to, it's his experience. He didn't obsess over this idea for no reason, and his well-documented achievements aren't comparable to random flash-in-the-pan tech executives.
The ball is in your court to prove why the singularity is not real, because many experienced, decorated technologists disagree and have already laid out their arguments. If you can't prove that, then there's no argument for us to have in the first place.
If we don't grant that expertise on 1950s technology gives insight into 2040s technology, then there's little reason to consider his writing as something other than a cool story.
That's not my intention. It's more that, he simply looked at the historical progress of technology, recognized an acceleration curve, and pondered about the end game.
My argument is that it warrants consideration and not shallow dismissal. Plenty of opponents have criticized the concept, and some decent arguments revolve around rising complexity slowing down technological advancement. That is possible. But we can't just dismiss this concept as some fleeting story made up "like a 12 year old who just watched Terminator".
There are a lot of people out there who believe in technological progressivism and continued advancement of socially beneficial technologies. They just don't speak about a "singularity" beyond which predictive power is not possible, because the idea isn't worth spending time on as it isn't even self-consistent.
It's not our job to show why the Singularity won't happen. It's the nutjobs who believe in the Singularity who have the responsibility of showing why. In the 70 years in which people have been bitten by this idea, nobody has. I'll wait.
No, but shallow dismissal of a subject that many intelligent technologists have spent their life considering just comes off as arrogant.
Predicting technological timelines is a largely pointless exercise, but I wouldn't be hard pressed to imagine a future N decades or centuries from now in which, assuming we do not destroy ourselves, human affairs become overshadowed by machine intelligence or technological complexity, and an increasingly complex technosocial system becomes increasingly difficult to predict until some limit of understanding is crossed.
And even them it would have to be split during a decade or two. And even then.
What's the military budget of USA?
Most of it is spent on personnel and operation.
You'd want to know only what the procurement is - which is ~$146B: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
And most of that is part of Gross Fixed Capital Formation already...
It seems totally possible that enough interest groups don’t want Ukraine to actually win, so they block anything more than the minimum viable amount. So it’s not much of a barometer at all for anything…
There's probably some small-ish 'dark budget'. But think about it: the official budget is in the order of single digit percentage points of US GDP. That represents and enormous amount of resources. Any appreciable fraction of that in a 'dark budget' would also leave traces all over the place.
The world is vastly more complex than say the world of 1945, so almost certainly there are now likely several dozens to several hundreds of ‘epicycles’ that are in fact true and necessary for full understanding.
Edit: Now the pentagon doesn’t contain the entire complexity of mankind within it… but it’s probably not that far off.
What bearing does what you mention have on the question on whether things got more or less complicated?
> Also, when expected outcomes don't align with perceived results, it's usually best but not very human to doubt yourself.
Eg this seems like something that would apply equally well at any time?
> Whoever has Shor/Grovers going first, has a advantage equitable to winning the AGI race... That too can win wars.
We have plenty of quantum resistant options, and people are already switching over.
And the story of the Enigma and its encryption shows that cryptographic and its breakage was already important back in the day.
> Nothing is simple and perceived simpleness is on the clock, for everyone.
How is this different now than before, though?
In monteary terms, this is barely more expensive than maintainig enough of a weapons stockpile during peacetime to counter Russia. And at the end of the conflict, anti-war sentiment within Russia might reach Germany post WW2 levels.
By comparison, more overt support to Ukraine, enough for Ukraine to at least humiliate Russia and throw them all the way out of the country, would only serve to help spread the anti-West hate within Russia, and generate support for even more ambitious rearmament in the years that would follow.
Pretty much like Germany after WW1.
> Accounting for non DoD military-related expenditure gives a total budget in excess of $1.4 trillion.[91]
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/pentagon-audit-2666415734/
Somewhere between $900B and $1T this year
I don't have papers but I think calculators, which are amazing and necessary, impact people's mental calculation capabilities. I know I used to he better at multiplication when i didn't have calculators all around me.
IMO, AI will have similar impact. Great advance overall but will nerf some areas of or mental capacity.
Like astronauts losing muscle mass faster in zero gravity.
AI impact on our brain, just like the calculator, might be a reasonable price to pay for the advancement it gives.
My manual calculation skills were at their peak in seventh grade in school, when we were allowed to use a calculator for the first time (and thus the exercises got harder) but simultaneously I usually forgot to bring mine.
But yeah, I don't think I could think better in general, when I did arithmetic better.
I thought it was really damning how Apple's recent ads involved a celebrity using it to respond to their agent about a script proposal they didn't actually read.
It just turns out that AGI (artificial general intelligence, which ChatGPT objectively is), is not a singularity nor even a tipping point towards causing one.
Put this another way, suppose we create a computer program that is only as smart as a bottom 10% human (I'm not saying they have.) You can't reasonably say that is smarter than humans generally. But are you comfortable saying that bottom 10% humans lack any general intelligence at all? General intelligence doesn't mean extreme intelligence, and so Artificial General Intelligence doesn't either. You might say that the term is more than the sum of the parts, which is fair, but I still dispute that superhuman abilities was ever part of the definition of AGI. It was just a (thusfar) failed prediction about AGI.
Now you could find a software that is smarter than some percentage of humanity in a few tasks. Is that software AGI? Is AlphaGo AGI? Is the Google Deep mind AI gamer AGI?
What you are getting confused about is that there is a segment of people that have purposefully confused / conflated ASI (artificial SUPER intelligence) with AGI, due to their own beliefs about the hard-takeoff potential of AGI. This notably includes the founders of OpenAI and Anthropic, and early backers of OpenAI prior to the release of ChatGPT. Through their success they've set the narrative about AGI, but they are doing so by co-opting and redefining a term that has a quarter century of history behind it.
The core mistake started with Bostrom, although to his credit he is very careful to distinguish ASI from AGI. But he argued that once you had AGI (the ability to apply intelligence to solving any problem) you would rapidly get ASI through a process of rapid iterative design. Yudkowsky took those ideas a step further in his FOOM debate with Robin Hanson in 2008, in which he argued that the AGI -> ASI transition would be short, measured in months, weeks, days, or even mere hours. In 2022, six months prior to the release of ChatGPT, Yudkowsky has a public meltdown in which he asserted there is no time left and we're all going to die, after having been privately shown an early version of ChatGPT.
It's almost two years since the release of ChatGPT, which is absolutely AGI by the definition of the people who coined the term and have run the AGI Conference series for ~25 years, or by the definition of Bostrom or Yudkowsky for that matter. ChatGP is general intelligence, and it is artificial. Two years of AGI, yet we are still here and there is no ASI in sight. Yudkowsky was wrong.
Yet OpenAI, which was founded by a bunch of Yudkowsky acolytes, is still out there saying that "AGI" will bring about the singularity, because that was the core assumption underlying their founding and the reason for the investments they've received. They can get away with this without changing their message because they've subtly redefined "AGI" to mean ASI, and are hoping you don't notice the slight of hand.
I'm sorry, but that's absolutely delusional.
I read it on the internet myself with “sources saying” but I think it’s BS.
There’s a 68% chance that Altman met with someone who got their degree in the US (if only one executive attended, otherwise chances are higher).
And the others probably also have little difficulty communicating in English or calculating the cost of 36 fabs in any currency, since that’s their business.
Much more likely they talked about 3-6 fabs, some other person laughed about 36 fabs for podcast guy, someone else overheard that and posted on Weibo. That made it to NYT eventually.
>You don't just acquire $7T.
Perhaps the goal was only 1-2 Trillion but you should start high. I would have asked for 10 Trillion.....
My guess is that since they are so sure of AGI being achievable soon, that they think they can squeeze out any amount of money they want out of investors.
After all, AGI would be worth way more thab 7T right?
If you're applying for a job as a fry chef at a burger joint, asking for $25/hr is a good idea. Asking for $1000/hr will convince the shop owner that you are a crazy person who isn't serious about wanting the job.
It might be a $100B company on paper but that’s propped up by Microsoft investment. It’s hemoragging money still isn’t it?
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-projections-i...
It took Google 15 years to build an ad empire.
And they still have trouble filling ad slots on YouTube.
You think ChatGPT is just going to "turn on" $100B in online ad spending overnight?
That's not how it works.
Personally, if I could buy OpenAI stock at 100B market cap right now, I would back up the truck.
Google can easily monetize a search for "dentist in $city" where your intent is to spend money, OpenAI would have to monetize "sum up this email" where money is not involved at all.
sure, but Google makes _way_ more money than X or Reddit or Pornhub, not all eye gazes are the same.
https://www.fierceelectronics.com/electronics/openai-ceo-alt...
> He added the number is not known, adding that the $7 trillion came from a report with an anonymous source. “You can always find some anonymous source to say something, I guess,” he added.
Lobbyists?
I'm not personally knowledgeable about this or anything, so look into it yourself, but just picking a random really big one, United Airlines, it looks like they consistently beat the S&P 500 for most of the past 20 years, until Covid, and the past four years since then have been pretty bad.
What they don't seem to be able to weather is significant changes in the structure of pension obligations, and dramatic fatal crashes.
There is also an impending shift into electric short-haul flights that is going to cause some changes to the business model, with whoever can't adapt exiting those markets.
That was why you had such rapid consolidation, as America West became US Airways became American, United bought Continental, and Delta bought Northwest, to remove so much competition that they could be profitable again.
I read that thing about the integral of all profits back to the Wright Brothers back around in 2010, and I can't find a good source on aviation profitability in the 1970's right now.
You don't just acquire $7T.
The ENTIRE US domestic Net Investment isn't even $1T: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W790RC1Q027SBEA
Gross Fixed Capital Formation (Net Investment + Deprecation) isn't much more: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NFIRSAXDCUSQ
Google, Apple, and Microsoft together don't even spend $100B on CapEx per year. And they're worth almost $10T put together.
Asking for $7T when you're a $100B company is so ridiculous it's beyond belief.