Depends on what “transparent” means.
Why wouldn't the AI deal with that the same way human developers do? Follow up with questions, or iterate requirements?
The thing is, with enough magical thinking, of course they could do anything. So that let's unscrupulous salesmen sell you something that is not actually possible. They let you do the extrapolation, or they do it for you, promising something that doesn't exist, and may never exist.
How many years has Musk been promising "full self driving", and how many times recently have we seen his cars driving off the road and crashing into a tree because it saw a shadow, or driving into a Wile E Coyote style fake painted tunnel?
While there is some value in evaluating what might come in the future when evaluating, for example, whether to invest in an AI company, you need to temper a lot of the hype around AI by doing most of your evaluation based on what the tools are currently capable of, not some hypothetical future that is quite far from where they are.
One of the things that's tricky is that we have had a significant increase in the capability of these tools in the past few years; modern LLMs are capable of something far better than two or three years ago. It's easy to think "well, what if that exponential curve continues? Anything could be possible."
But in most real life systems, you don't have an unlimited exponential growth, you have something closer to a logistic curve. Exponential at first, but it eventually slows down and approaches a maximum asymptotically.
Exactly where we are on that logistic curve is hard to say. If we still have several more years of exponential growth in capability, then sure, maybe anything is possible. But more likely, we've already hit that inflection point, and continued growth will go slower and slower as we approach the limits of this LLM based approach to AI.
And what is the endgame for AI?
Also technologies don't develop like evolution really so not sure why you drew that comparison.
Technologies plateau for a combination of reasons - too expensive to make it better, no interest in making it better, can't figure out any more science (key people involved leave / die / lose interest, or it's just too difficult with our current knowledge), theoretical limits (like we are reaching in silicon chips). I don't see a lot of similarity with evolution there.
There's also no "ruling out" the Earth will get zapped by a gamma-ray burst tomorrow, either. You seem to be talking about something that, if done properly, would require AGI.
You can do anything with AI. Anything at all. The only limit is yourself.
Nobody can predict how soon a technology will plateau. People make predictions based on insane hot takes like "I pray to our new overloards who will make me immortal" and "there's nothing new under the sun, everything is just marketing"...
There might be the next AI winter starting starting next year, AI might wipe out humanity in our lifetime, even both of those might happen. Both very unlikely (qualitatively) ends of a huge spectrum.
That's not to say that we "don't know anything and thus give up talking about it". Otherwise I wouldn't participate in this discussion and I hope you wouldn't either if you didn't expect to sometimes learn something or be confronted with a new idea.
I just find both attitudes "it's making us immortal" as well as "I'm so experienced, I know that no new technology ever lives up to expectations and can mock people who admit they don't know that" unproductive. You don't know. Most technologies don't live up to expectations, a few work out even much better than expected. I'm sure before the Lee Sedol match, you thought to yourself "right, so it's going to win this and then plateau exactly a decade later"?
Even experienced engineers can be surprisingly bad at this. Not everyone can tell their boss “That’s a stupid requirement and here’s why. Did you actually mean …” when their paycheck feels on the line.
The higher you get in your career, the more that conversation is the job.
They just want a yes-bot.
I think that the more you find ways to (productively) make that conversation your job, the higher you get in your career.
[edit] In other words, llms that lie less will be more valuable for certain people, therefore llms that tell you when you are dumb will eventually win in those circles, regardless of how bruising it is to the user's ego.
This is what people never understand about no coding solutions. There is still a process that takes time to develop things, and you will inevitably have people become experts at that process who can be paid to do it much better and quicker than the average person.
It applies outside of tech too. Even if you can make potato pave at home, having it at a restaurant by someone who has made it thousands of times everyday, is preferred. Especially when you want a specific alteration
The out put was verbose, but it tried and then corrected me
> Actually, let me clarify something important: what you've described - "every point equidistant from the center" - is actually the definition of a circle, not a square!
here's the prompt
> use ascii art, can you make me an image of a square where every point is equidistant from the center?
If we're just looking for clever solutions, the set of equidistant points in the manhattan metric is a square. No clarifications needed until the client inevitably rejects the smart-ass approach.
The task has been set; the soul weeps
> On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
From Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864), ch. 5 "Difference Engine No. 1"
They are either asking: is the machine capable of genuine thought, and therefore capable of proactively spotting an error in the input and fixing it? Or, they were asking: how sensitive is the output to incorrect permutations in the input (ie., how reliable is it)?
I sometimes take them to be asking the former question, as when someone asks, "Is the capital of France, paree?" and one responds, "Yes, it's spoken by the french like paree, but written Paris"
But they could equally mean, "is the output merely a probable consequence of the input, or is the machine deductively reliable"
Babbage, understanding the machine as a pure mechanism is oblivious to either possibility, yet very much inclined to sell it as a kind of thinking engine -- which would require, at least, both capacities
And go and read accounts of the time on "the thinking machine", and the like.
I have no idea what you are going on about.
My view arises from the accounts of people who spoke to Babbage and his interactions with the government, press and similar. He would often dramatically overpromise on what his inventions, always incomplete, could do -- and leave people "hyped". The phrase "thinking machine" was one iirc, lovelace engaged with in order to at once speculate on the many ways the machine will perform (never did, nor could), and caution against an exaggerated interpretation.
However, much evidence by people who interacted with babbage show he was far less cautious than lovelace in order to have the government pay vast sums to fund his engineering. Though, no doubt, towards the end of his life when he's writing a philosophical autobiography -- and has no inventions to show anyone -- he's somewhat more reserved about these accomplishments, and indeed, goes far to include many irrelevant others to pad his CV.
Forgive me for finding his oblivious contempt expressed towards the politicians who were funding his enterprise rather less than charming. It's today a quote trotted out by people very similar to babbage, and this says quite a lot.
So to see you again using such smug language on another thread, proclaiming unsubstantiated conclusions and refusing to reconsider your position when faced with counterevidence or to otherwise provide solid, direct evidence of your own, while calling someone else smug, is equal parts amusing and concerning. If you think smugness leads to confusion, I think it's time to reevaluate your own approach to discourse.
Perhaps I should more proactively split the interaction in my head, "is this a political expression?" or "is this, say, an academic expression?" (here, I'm def., politics: concerned with the who-and-why of belief, over its content). The problem for people like me is that they're often closely related, and we're in positions in which we're surrounded by a kind of politics we didn't consent to.
In particular, the discursive environment of, say computer science, is pathological to the literal and honest use of language. I find the "politics of computer science" qua the people, attitudes, approaches, etc. of the discourse to be basically dishonest. This, i think, is a case very easily made today especially. I used to think it was merely corporate hype, but it actually runs all the way down to fantasist researchers whose preference for fantastical metaphor grossly exceeds their capacity for good faith communication.
So Babbage in having peddled his ideas for money back then, and gualling quoted in his oblivious tone, is a totem for this issue. He was not so extreme as we see today, for sure; but did not hesitate to use the misapprehensions of his benefactors for money. I dislike how readily he is quoted on this.
In any case, I am not always well composed in a climate I find basically dishonest, that's for sure. I'll censor myself more in the future on this. And perhaps I should just finally give up caring about this issue, and consign this disappointment as one more in the bin of nihilism: the "science" of computers is a schizophrenic hall of mirrors where people play bad-faith games with language and incredulous onlookers take up these games and proceed sincerely. What content there is to the innovation is buried, what might be said honestly about it, nearly impossible to discern -- and so on. Very well.
I'd say I thought physicists and philosophers were above it, but string theorists did play similar games in the 90s -- and I was angry all the way through the popsci of that too.
If you're tired of discussing something, maybe it's fine to just let it go and let someone else handle it. But you come off a bit unapproachable when you bring negative energy into the conversation. This is a place where we can learn from each other, a forum, not a battlefield. Positivity opens minds, negativity shuts them. It's not any one person's fault if you've encountered their ideas before, and besides, you might be wrong sometimes, as we all are.
I'm sure you'll share some relevant quotes from these accounts any day now then
You put in 2+2, and 4 comes out. That's the right answer.
If you put in 1+1, which are the wrong figures for the question of 2+2, will 4 still come out? It's easy to make a machine that always says 4.
What an absurdly elegant way of saying one can't comprehend the stupidity behind some questions.
Given those requirements, I would draw a square on the surface of a sphere, making each point of the square equidistant from the sphere's center.
I think AI will get there when it comes to “you asked for a gif but they don’t support transparency”, but I am 100% sure people will continue to write “make the logo a square where every point is equidistant from the center” requirments.
EDIT: yes jpg, not gif, naughty typo + autocorrect