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High altitude planes going to the moon is a beautiful analogy. I think this is what I’ll use to explain to less technical friends why I think we’re still many y

High altitude planes going to the moon is a beautiful analogy. I think this is what I’ll use to explain to less technical friends why I think we’re still many years from self driving cars.

dbcurtis 6y ago
I have been using that analogy to explain why Tesla is many years away from a self driving car. Several others are building something that is fundamentally different.
- fastball 6y ago
  Aren't they rolling out a beta of FSD literally as we speak?
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    No.
  - legolas2412 6y ago
    And that is why i dislike the term "self-driving". It makes people think "driverless", which "full self-driving" is not.
    - fastball 6y ago
      If it can get you from A to B without any human input, is the driver not a safety technicality at that point? What term would you prefer to describe a car that can get you from A to B without your input?
  - edgyquant 6y ago
    I think full self driving will remain two years away for a decade at least.
    - fastball 6y ago
      Based on...?
      - edgyquant 6y ago
        Several things. Mostly that it has to be rolled out slowly because people lives are at stake so testing can run for quite a bit longer than you’d expect. Also that everyone wants to be the one who makes the breakthrough so companies will claim its right around the corner (like fusion) repetitively, i.e. Tesla saying it’d be here in 2018. We’re just at a point where these things can use parking lots so I wouldn’t expect a complete rollout several years as systems are built on top of other systems that have been widely tested and confirmed to work.
  - oldmonk1990 6y ago
    They will continue to move their goalposts. It's never enough for the self-professed "cynics" of AI.
solveit 6y ago
The question isn't whether high-altitude planes can go to the moon, it's whether human intelligence is closer to the clouds or to the moon. For all the talk about how language models "just" learn correlations, there's a remarkable dearth of evidence that humans do something qualitatively different.
- gfodor 6y ago
  Exactly - the analogy fails if a few assumptions we have about ourselves or what GPT-3 is actually “doing” are wrong. Until we hit some asymptotic limit on training these kinds of language models, I’m withholding judgement on what such a model will be capable of representing if/when that limit arrives.
- otabdeveloper4 6y ago
  > remarkable dearth I've never seen a language model that could create language models. (Never mind the hardware that runs them.) You're using a very loaded and narrow sense of 'human' here.
- hooande 6y ago
  Are you just dumbing down humans to match the model? LeCunn's post is very sparse on detail, but the point is that humans can easily reason about a vast number of things that any form of sequential language model cannot. That alone is evidence that humans are doing something qualitatively different. It isn't conclusive evidence however, and larger models may produce significantly more human like results. But from what we know about how gpt-3 works, all the evidence is on the side of it not resembling human intelligence.
- katzgrau 6y ago
  > there's a remarkable dearth of evidence that humans do something qualitatively different. Perhaps now, but if history is any indication, when we (as humans) think we have a good grip on how something really works (like human intellect in this example), we've been wrong. We model the world around us from observation and testing, find our errors, remodel, and improve over time. Then at some point we find some piece of information that shows us our model was a decent approximation, but fundamentally wrong, and that we need to start from scratch. If we find that we want to go beyond the moon (and we eventually will), or that the moon is further than we think, we'll again need a different approach. I always feel like there's a certain beauty and cosmic humor to it.
weregiraffe 6y ago
> I think this is what I’ll use to explain to less technical friends why I think we’re still many years from self driving cars. Explain to them also that you think one highly specialized skill (driving) is the same as the sum of all human knowledge.

High altitude planes going to the moon is a beautiful analogy. I think this is what I’ll use to explain to less technical friends why I think we’re still many years from self driving cars.

dbcurtis 6y ago

I have been using that analogy to explain why Tesla is many years away from a self driving car. Several others are building something that is fundamentally different.

fastball 6y ago
Aren't they rolling out a beta of FSD literally as we speak?
- jeffbee 6y ago
  No.
- legolas2412 6y ago
  And that is why i dislike the term "self-driving". It makes people think "driverless", which "full self-driving" is not.
  - fastball 6y ago
    If it can get you from A to B without any human input, is the driver not a safety technicality at that point? What term would you prefer to describe a car that can get you from A to B without your input?
- edgyquant 6y ago
  I think full self driving will remain two years away for a decade at least.
  - fastball 6y ago
    Based on...?
    - edgyquant 6y ago
      Several things. Mostly that it has to be rolled out slowly because people lives are at stake so testing can run for quite a bit longer than you’d expect. Also that everyone wants to be the one who makes the breakthrough so companies will claim its right around the corner (like fusion) repetitively, i.e. Tesla saying it’d be here in 2018. We’re just at a point where these things can use parking lots so I wouldn’t expect a complete rollout several years as systems are built on top of other systems that have been widely tested and confirmed to work.
- oldmonk1990 6y ago
  They will continue to move their goalposts. It's never enough for the self-professed "cynics" of AI.

solveit 6y ago

The question isn't whether high-altitude planes can go to the moon, it's whether human intelligence is closer to the clouds or to the moon. For all the talk about how language models "just" learn correlations, there's a remarkable dearth of evidence that humans do something qualitatively different.

gfodor 6y ago
Exactly - the analogy fails if a few assumptions we have about ourselves or what GPT-3 is actually “doing” are wrong. Until we hit some asymptotic limit on training these kinds of language models, I’m withholding judgement on what such a model will be capable of representing if/when that limit arrives.
otabdeveloper4 6y ago
> remarkable dearth I've never seen a language model that could create language models. (Never mind the hardware that runs them.) You're using a very loaded and narrow sense of 'human' here.
hooande 6y ago
Are you just dumbing down humans to match the model? LeCunn's post is very sparse on detail, but the point is that humans can easily reason about a vast number of things that any form of sequential language model cannot. That alone is evidence that humans are doing something qualitatively different. It isn't conclusive evidence however, and larger models may produce significantly more human like results. But from what we know about how gpt-3 works, all the evidence is on the side of it not resembling human intelligence.
katzgrau 6y ago
> there's a remarkable dearth of evidence that humans do something qualitatively different. Perhaps now, but if history is any indication, when we (as humans) think we have a good grip on how something really works (like human intellect in this example), we've been wrong. We model the world around us from observation and testing, find our errors, remodel, and improve over time. Then at some point we find some piece of information that shows us our model was a decent approximation, but fundamentally wrong, and that we need to start from scratch. If we find that we want to go beyond the moon (and we eventually will), or that the moon is further than we think, we'll again need a different approach. I always feel like there's a certain beauty and cosmic humor to it.

weregiraffe 6y ago

> I think this is what I’ll use to explain to less technical friends why I think we’re still many years from self driving cars. Explain to them also that you think one highly specialized skill (driving) is the same as the sum of all human knowledge.