It will save a lot of time for a lot of people. Yes. But so did computers when they could search through massive amount of data.
It’s right there. You can go and see it any time, doing the things you don’t think it’s capable of doing. Just a little curiosity is all you need.
I see a whole lot of software created by smart people - as far as I can tell, about the same amount of software they would have created on their own.
Open to being wrong! But show me the results.
It is generating large amount of power on demand.
From that one can imagine what it could do. But more importantly in this context, one could also imagine what it could NEVER do. If someone say "Oh, the mighty steam engine! It lets us print 100x more books than we were doing before. Who knows, may be some day it will even start writing new books!"
And at that point, if you understand anything about the steam engine, or writing, you can call bluff. But if you don't understand what the steam engine is doing, and if you don't actually know what it takes to come up with a story, one could take a look at the engine printing the books, and blunder into the conclusion that it printing an entirely new book is only a question of time.
So in short, it is not "hate", just the acknowledgement about what it is not.
Steam engines were known since the first century, at the vert least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
It does take a lot of imagination and creativity to come up with new and better ways to use an already existing idea. We're currently just scratching the surface of what LLMs are going to do for us
Better search could be used in ways that we can't think of right now..
For example, even something like "I want python code to do X" could get exact hit in a stack overflow answer using regular internet "search"
Just wrote about it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47178461
> The aeolipile is considered to be the first recorded steam engine or reaction steam turbine, but it is neither a practical source of power nor a direct predecessor of the type of steam engine invented during the Industrial Revolution.
Newcomen engines are mere curiosities today, because we have better sources of power (better engines). In the past, they had better sources of power too (donkeys, wind, water, or human slaves). Newcomen engines, like all technologies, are only viable in certain economic environments. In all others they are curiosities.
Are you just saying that you're more intelligent than them? You can see clearly, where all the steam engine technicians can't?
The potential of the current crop of LLM/AIs will stop at being a very powerful tool to search large volumes of text using free-form questions.
I do think that pretty clearly contradicts with what a lot of people who make/use LLM models are saying haha
.. which is not far off from what people said about ChatGPT in 2022.
I don't know how long it'll take for AI to be as broadly impactful as the steam engine was, but.. it's definitely coming. I expect the world to look radically different in 50 years.
The AI commentators are not saying that ELIZA will change the world, they’re saying that one of the big companies is moments away from an AGI. Sam Altman called a recent ChatGPT model a “PhD level expert”; wouldn’t infinite PhDs for $20/month or $200/month be transformative?
That is, your objection isn’t the usual “LLMs aren’t going to be AGI”, you’re saying “even if they do, it won’t be a big deal”?
Anyway, the challenge is making a difference. Current-day LLMs can, for example, generate stories and books; one tweet said "this can generate 1000 screenplays a day". Which sounds impressive by the numbers, but books, screenplays, etc were never about volume.
Same with PhDs - is there a shortage of them? Does adding potentially infinite PhDs (whatever they are) to a project make it better, or does it just make... more?
This is the main difference with the industrial revolution - it, for example, introduced machines that turned 10 people jobs into 1 person jobs. I don't think LLMs will do something like that, it'll just output 10 people's worth of Stuff that will need some use.
I don't think anyone ever asked for 1000 screenplays a day, or infinite PhD's for $20. But then, nobody asked for a riderless carriage yet here we are.
Yes, there is still a large demand for people with analytical thinking, a deep knowledge base, and good problem-solving skills. This demand shows up broadly across STEM fields, and it's a major reason that these fields pay relatively high.
Even just thinking of R&D, there is an immense amount of work left to be done in basic science. Research is throttled partly by a lack of cheap graduate lab labor. (If that physical + mental labor became much cheaper, the costs of research would shift - what does it take to get reagants? What does it take to build more lab space, and provide water and light? Etc.)
The present issue is that current AI does not really offer the same capabilities as a good grad student or PhD. Not just physically, as in, we don't have good robotics yet, but mentally. LLMs do not exhibit good judgment or problem-solving skills, like a good PhD does. And they don't exhibit continual learning.
No clue on when these will change, but yes, a cheap AI with solid problem-solving skills and good judgment would absolutely upend our economy.
This is why I said "isn’t the usual “LLMs aren’t going to be AGI”", but you still went straight for "LLMs aren't AGI", which was not in question.
AGI is what OpenAI says they are going for. That's the goal of all this trillion dollar investment, not to output 1000 screenplays a day, but to takeover the world, basically. What would infinite PhDs discover if they could hold all of Arxive in their 'heads' at once and see patterns in every experiment that's ever been done? What could they engineer and manufacture if they could 'concentrate' on millions of steps of a manufacturing process at once without getting fatigued or bored? What ideas could they test if they could be PhD level in a dozen subjects all at once?
Not op, but yes, 100%. Steam backs nearly all development of technology of the last 150+ years. Where do you think the power come from to make things? More than half of the world's power *still* runs on steam, as will many of the systems running AI.
If steam power never existed, not only would you not exist but there's a good chance the country you live in wouldn't either. If you don't believe the effect is large, go to the farthest uncontacted place on earth and take out a CO2 meter.
It's not that I "don't believe the effect is large", but the changes from pre-intelligence planet Earth to post-intelligence planet Earth are larger because they include the invention of steam, and literally everything else too: language, writing, irrigation, cities, trade, numbers, currency, mathematics, chemistry, engineering, nations, governments, supply chains, steam, etc.
An AGI that can solve the problems we think are solvable, but we can't solve, would be huge. Any sci-fi idea that isn't ruled out by the laws of physics, but that we haven't got the brains to solve, any breakthrough that we think should be there but we haven't found, any problem that requires too much time to learn, or too many parts to hold in one human mind, any coordination that is too big for one team, any funding problem, any scarcity problem, any disease or illness problem, any long timeframe problem, are all on the table as possibilities.
LLMs and modern day """AI"""? Don't kid yourself.
No other change has had the potential to generate value for capital without delivering any value whatsoever to the broader world.
Intelligent robotic agents enable an abandonment of traditional economic structures to build empires that are purely extractive and only deliver value to themselves.
They need not manufacture products for sale, and they will not need money. Automated general purpose labor is power, in the same way that commanding the mongol hordes was power. They didn’t need to have customers or the endorsement of governments to project and multiply that power.
Of course commanding robotic hordes is the steelman of this argument, but the fact that a steelman even exists for this argument, and the unique case that it requests and requires actually zero external or internal cooperation from people makes it fundamentally distinct in character.
Humans will always have some kind of economic system, but it very well may become separate from -and competing for resources with- industrial society, in which humans may become a vanishing minority.
Would you mind expanding on this?
If you think, hey but people had a “job” in 1700, and they had a “job” in 1900, think again. Being a peasant (majority of people in Europe in 1700) and being an urban factory worker in 1900 were fundamentally different ways of life. They only look superficially similar because we did not live the changes ourselves. But read the historical sources enough and you will see.
I would go as far as to say that the peasant in 1700 did not have a “job” at all in the sense that we now understand; they did not work for wages and their relationship to the wider economy was fundamentally different. In some sense industrialization created the era of the “job” as a way for most working-age people to participate in economic life. It’s not an eternal and unchanging condition of things, and it could one day come to an end.
It’s too early to say if AI will be a technology like this, I think. But it may be. Sometimes technologies do transform the texture of human life. And it is not possible to be sure what those will be in the early stages: the first steam engines were extremely inefficient and had very few uses. It took decades for it to be clear that they had, in fact, changed everything. That may be true of AI, or it may not. It is best to be openminded about this.