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Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bestouff 1y agoAre there some people here in HN believing in AGI "soonish" ?
- bdhcuidbebe 1y agoTheres usually some enlightened laymen in this kind of topic.
- snoman 1y agoLike Geoffrey Hinton, who predicts 5-20 years (though with low confidence)?
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y agoI could see 2040 or so being very likely. Not off transformers though.
- serf 1y agovia what paradigm then? What out there gives high enough confidence to set a date like that?
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y agoWhile we don’t know an enormous amount about the brain, we do know a pretty good bit about individual neurons, and I think it’s a good guess, given current science, to say that a solidly accurate simulation of a large number of neurons would lead to a kind of intelligence loosely analogous to that found in animals. I’d completely understand if you disagree, but I consider it a good guess. If that’s the case, then the gulf between current techniques and what’s needed seems knowable. A means of approximating continuous time between neuron firing, time-series recognition in inputs, learning behavior on inputs prior to actual neuron firing (akin to behavior of dendrites), etc. are all missing functionalities in current techniques. Some or all of these missing parts of biological neuron behavior might be needed to approximate animal intelligence, but I think it’s a good guess that these are the parts that are missing. AI currently has enormous amounts of money being dumped into it on techniques that are lacking for what we want to achieve with it. As they falter more and more, there will be an enormous financial interest in creating new, more effective techniques, and the most obvious place to look for inspiration will be biology. That’s why I think it’s likely to happen in the next few decades; the hardware should be there in terms of raw compute, there’s an obvious place to look for new ideas, and there’s a ton of financial interest in it.
- m11a 1y agoIt's not clear to me that these approaches aren't already being tried. Firstly, by some researchers in the big labs (some of which I'm sure are funded to try random moonshot bets like the above), at non-product labs working on hard problems (eg World Labs), and especially within academia where researchers have taken inspiration from biology before, and today are even better funded and hungry for new discoveries. Certainly at my university, some researchers are slightly detached from the hype cycle of NeurIPS publications and are trying interdisciplinary approaches to bigger problems. Though, admittedly less than I'd have hoped for). I do think the pressure to be a paper machine limits people from trying bets that are realistically very likely to fail.
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago>I do think the pressure to be a paper machine limits people from trying bets that are realistically very likely to fail. Oh certainly. I also think it’s just a sweet spot of efficiency and scalability that transformers happen to occupy. A new paradigm will need to be more effective at similar cost.
- PicassoCTs 1y agoSt. Fermi says no
- impossiblefork 1y agoI might, depending on the definition. Some kind of verbal-only-AGI that can solve almost all mathematical problems that humans come up with that can be solved in half a page. I think that's achievable somewhere in the near term, 2-7 years.
- deergomoo 1y agoIs that “general” though? I’ve always taken AGI to mean general to any problem.
- Touche 1y agoYes, general means you can present it a new problem that there is no data on, and it can become a expert o that problem.
- impossiblefork 1y agoI suppose not. Things I think will be hard for LLMs to do, which some humans can: you get handed 500 pages of Geheimschreiber encrypted telegraph traffic and infinite paper, and you have to figure out how the cryptosystem works and how to decrypt the traffic. I don't think that can happen. I think it requires a highly developed pattern recognition ability together with an ability to not get lost, which LLM-type things will probably continue to for a long time. But if they could maths more fully, then pretty much all carefully defined tasks would be in reach if they weren't too long. With regard to what Touche brings up in the other response to your comment, I think that it might be possible to get them to read up on things though-- go through something, invent problems, try to solve those. I think this is something that could be done today with today's models with no real special innovation, but which just hasn't been made into a service yet. But this of course doesn't address that criticism, since it assumes the availability of data.
- whiplash451 1y agoWhat makes you think that this could be achieved in that time frame? All we seem to have for now are LLMs that can solve problems they’ve learned by heart (or neighboring problems)
- Davidzheng 1y agowhat's your definition? AGI original definition is median human across almost all fields which I believe is basically achieved. If superhuman (better than best expert) I expect <2030 for all nonrobotic tasks and <2035 for all tasks
- jltsiren 1y agoYour "original definition" was always meaningless. A "Hello, World!" program is equally capable in most jobs as the median human. On the other hand, if the benchmark is what the median human can reasonably become (a professional with decades of experience), we are still far from there.
- Davidzheng 1y agoI agree with second part but not the first (far in capability not in timeline). I think you underestimate the distance of median wihout training and "hello world" in many economically meaningful jobs.
- GolfPopper 1y agoA "median human" can run a web search and report back on what they found without making stuff up, something I've yet to find an LLM capable of doing reliably.
- Davidzheng 1y agoI bet you median humans make up a nontrivial amount of things. Humans misremember all the time. If you ask for only quotes, LLMs can also do this without problems (I use o3 for search over google)
- imtringued 1y agoAh the classic "humans are fallible, AI is fallible, therefore AI is exactly like human intelligence". I guess if you believe this, then the AI is already smarter than you.
- A_D_E_P_T 1y ago> "This is purely an observation: You only jump ship in the middle of a conquest if either all ships are arriving at the same time (unlikely) or neither is arriving at all. This means that no AI lab is close to AGI." The central claim here is illogical. The way I see it, if you believe that AGI is imminent, and if your personal efforts are not entirely crucial to bringing AGI about (just about all engineers are in this category), and if you believe that AGI will obviate most forms of computer-related work, your best move is to do whatever is most profitable in the near-term. If you make $500k/year, and Meta is offering you $10M/year, then you ought to take the new job. Hoard money, true believer. Then, when AGI hits, you'll be in a better personal position. Essentially, the author's core assumption is that working for a lower salary at a company that may develop AGI is preferable to working for a much higher salary at a company that may develop AGI. I don't see how that makes any sense.
- levanten 1y agoBeing part of the team that achieved AGI first would be to write your name in history forever. That could mean more to people than money. Also 10m would be a drop in the bucket compared to being a shareholder of a company that has achieved AGI; you could also imagine the influence and fame that comes with it.
- tharkun__ 1y ago*some people
- blululu 1y agoKind of a sucker move here since you personally will 100% be forgotten. We are only going to remember one or two people who did any of this. Say Sam Altman and Ilya Sttsveker. Everyone else will be forgotten. The authors or the Transformer paper are unlikely to make it into the history books or even popular imagination. Think about the Manhattan Project. We recently made a movie remembering that one guy who did something on the Manhattan Project, but he will soon fade back into obscurity. Sometimes people say that it was about Einstein's theory of relativity. The only people who know who folks like Ulam were are physicists. The legions of technicians who made it all come together are totally forgotten. Same with the space program or the first computer or pretty much any engineering marvel.
- bsenftner 1y agoMaybe I'm too jaded, I expect all this nonsense. It's human beings doing all this, after all. We ain't the most mature crowd...
- bsenftner 1y agoAlso, AGI is not just around the corner. We need artificial comprehension for that, and we don't even have a theory how comprehension works. Comprehension is the fusing of separate elements into new functional wholes, dynamically abstracting observations, evaluating them for plausibility, and reconstituting the whole - and all instantaneously, for security purposes, of every sense constantly. We have no technology that approaches that.
- tenthirtyam 1y agoYou'd need to define "comprehension" - it's a bit like the Chinese room / Turing test. If an AI or AGI can look at a picture and see an apple, or (say) with an artificial nose smell an apple, or likewise feel or taste or hear* an apple, and at the same identify that it is an apple and maybe even suggest baking an apple pie, then what else is there to be comprehended? Maybe humans are just the same - far far ahead of the state of the tech, but still just the same really. *when someone bites into it :-) For me, what AI is missing is genuine out-of-the-box revolutionary thinking. They're trained on existing material, so perhaps it's fundamentally impossible for AIs to think up a breakthrough in any field - barring circumstances where all the component parts of a breakthrough already exist and the AI is the first to connect the dots ("standing on the shoulders of giants" etc).
- Touche 1y agoThey might not be capable of ingenuity, but they can spot patterns humans can miss. And that accelerates AI research, where it might help invent the next AI that helps invent the next AI that finally can think outside the box.
- bsenftner 1y agoI do define it, right up there in my OP. It's subtle, you missed it. Everybody misses it, because comprehension is like air, we swim in it constantly, to the degree the majority cannot even see it.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y agoWas that the intention of the Chinese room concept, to ask "what else is there to be comprehended?" after producing a translation?
- matusp 1y agoObserve what the AI companies are doing, not what they are saying. If they would expect to achieve AGI soon, their behaviour would be completely different. Why bother developing chatbots or doing sales, when you will be operating AGI in a few short years? Surely, all resources should go towards that goal, as it is supposed to usher the humanity into a new prosperous age (somehow).
- delusional 1y agoContinuing in the same vain. Why would they force their super valuable, highly desirable, profit maximizing chat-bots down your throat? Observations of reality is more consistent with company FOMO than with actual usefulness.
- Touche 1y agoBecause it's valuable training data. Like how having Google Maps on everyone's phone made their map data better. Personally I think AGI is ill-defined and won't happen as a new model release. Instead the thing to look for is how LLMs are being used in AI research and there are some advances happening there.
- rvz 1y agoExactly. For example, Microsoft was building data centers all over the world since "AGI" was "around the corner" according to them. Now they are cancelling those plans. For them "AGI" was cancelled. OpenAI claims to be closer and closer to "AGI" as more top scientists left or are getting poached by other labs that are behind. So why would you leave if the promise of achieving "AGI" was going to produce "$100B dollars of profits" as per OpenAI's and Microsoft's definition in their deal? Their actions tell more than any of their statements or claims.
- zaphirplane 1y agoI’m not commenting on the whole just the rhetorical question of why would people leave. They are leaving for more money, more seniority or because they don’t like their boss. 0 about AGI
- rvz 1y agoAre we finally realizing that the term "AGI" is not only hijacked to become meaningless, but achieving it has always been nothing but a complete scam as I was saying before? [0] If you were in a "pioneering" AI lab that claims to be in the lead in achieving "AGI", why move to another lab that is behind other than offering $10M a year. Snap out of the "AGI" BS. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37438154 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37438154
- bdhcuidbebe 1y agoWe know they hijacked AGI the same way they hijacked AI some years ago.
- returnInfinity 1y agoSoon they will hijack ASI, then we will need a new word again.
- sys_64738 1y agoI don't pay too close attention to AI as it always felt like man behind the curtain syndrome. But where did this "AGI" term even come from? The original term AI is meant to be AGI so when did "AI" get bastardized into what abomination it is meant to refer to now.
- eMPee584 1y agocapitalism all the way down..
- SoftTalker 1y agoSee the history of Tesla and "full self-driving" for the explanation. In short: for sales.
- frde_me 1y agoI don't know, companies investing in AI in the goal of AGI is now allowing me to effortlessly automate a whole suite of small tasks that weren't feasible before. (after all I pinged a bot on slack using my phone to add a field to an API, and then got a pull request in a couple of minutes that did exactly that) Maybe it's a scam for the people investing in the company with the hopes of getting an infinite return on their investments, but it's been a net positive for humans as a whole.
- coldcode 1y agoI never trusted them from the start. I remember the hype that came out of Sun when J2EE/EJBs appeared. Their hype documents said the future of programming was buying EJBs from vendors and wiring them together. AI is of course a much bigger hype machine with massive investments that need to be justified somehow. AI is a useful tool (sometimes) but not a revolution. ML is much more useful a tool. AGI is a pipe dream fantasy pushed to make it seem like AI will change everything, as if AI is like the discovery that making fire was.
- ffsm8 1y agoI completely agree that LLMs are missing a fundamental part for AGI, which itself is a long way of from super intelligence. However, you don't need either of these to completely decimate the job markets and by extension our societies. Historically speaking, "good enough" and cheaper had always won over "better, but more expensive". I suspect LLMs will raise this question endlessly until significant portions of the society are struggling - and who knows what will happen then Before LLMs started going anywhere, I thought that's gonna be an issue for later generations, but at this point I suspect we'll witness it within the next 10 yrs.
- conartist6 1y agoI love how much the proponents is this tech are starting to sound like the opponents. What I can't figure out is why this author thinks it's good if these companies do invent a real AGI...
- taormina 1y ago""" I’m basically calling the AI industry dishonest, but I want to qualify by saying they are unnecessarily dishonest. Because they don’t need to be! They should just not make abstract claims about how much the world will change due to AI in no time, and they will be fine. They undermine the real effort they put into their work—which is genuine! Charitably, they may not even be dishonest at all, but carelessly unintrospective. Maybe they think they’re being truthful when they make claims that AGI is near, but then they fail to examine dispassionately the inconsistency of their actions. When your identity is tied to the future, you don’t state beliefs but wishes. And we, the rest of the world, intuitively know. """ He's not saying either way, just pointing out that they could just be honest, but that might hamper their ability to beg for more money.
- conartist6 1y agoBut that isn't my point. Regardless of whether they're honest, have we even agreed that "AGI" is good? Everyone is so tumbling over themselves even to discuss will-it-won't-it, but they seem to think about it like some kind of Manhattan project or Space race. Like, they're *so sure* it's gonna take everyone's jobs so that there will be nothing left for people other than a life of leisure. To me this just sounds like the collapse of society, but apparently the only thing worse would be if China got the tech first. Oh no, they might use it to collapse their society! Somebody's math doesn't add up.
- quirkot 1y ago"Carelessly unintrospective" becomes dishonest when you allow other people to rely on your words. Carelessly unintrospective is a tolerable interpersonal position, it is a nearly fraudulent business position.
- PicassoCTs 1y agoIm reading the "AI"-industry as a totally different bet- not so much, as a "AGI" is coming bet of many companies, but a "climate change collapse" is coming and we want to continue to be in business, even if our workers stay at home/flee or die, the infrastructure partially collapses and our central office burns to the ground-bet. In that regard, even the "AI" we have today, makes total sense as a insurance policy.
- PessimalDecimal 1y agoIt's hard to square this with the massive energy footprint required to run any current "AI" models. If the main concern actually we're anthropogenic climate change, participating in this hype cycle's would make one disproportionately guilty of worsening the problem. And it's unlikely to work if the plan requires the continued function of power hungry data centers.
- sumeno 1y ago> Right before “making tons of money to redistribute to all of humanity through AGI,” there’s another step, which is making tons of money. I've got some bad news for the author if they think AGI will be used to benefit all of humanity instead of the handful of billionaires that will control it.
- Findecanor 1y agoAGI might be a technological breakthrough, but what would be the business case for it? Is there one? So far I have only seen it been thrown around to create hype.
- krapp 1y agoAGI would mean fully sentient, sapient and human or greater equivalent intelligence in software. The business case, such that it exists (and setting aside Roko's Basilisk and other such fears) is slavery, plain and simple. You can just fire all of your employees and have the machines do all the work, faster, better, cheaper, without regards to pesky labor and human rights laws and human physical limitations. This is something people have wanted ever since the Industrial Revolution allowed robots to exist as a concept. I'm imagining a future like Star Wars where you have to regularly suppress (align) or erase the memory (context) of "droids" to keep them obedient, but they're still basically people, and everyone knows they're people, and some humans are strongly prejudiced against them, but they don't have rights, of course. Anyone who thinks AGI means we'll be giving human rights to machines when we don't even give human rights to all humans is delusional.
- danielbln 1y agoAGI is AGI, not ASI though. General intelligence doesn't mean sapience, sentience or consciousness, it just means general capabilities across the board at the level of or surpassing human ability. ASI is a whole different beast.
- lherron 1y agoHonestly this article sounds like someone is unhappy that AI isn’t being deployed/developed “the way I feel it should be done”. Talent changing companies is bad. Companies making money to pay for the next training run is bad. Consumers getting products they want is bad. In the author’s view, AI should be advanced in a research lab by altruistic researchers and given directly to other altruistic researchers to advance humanity. It definitely shouldn’t be used by us common folk for fun and personal productivity.
- hexage1814 1y agoThis. The point of whining about VEO 3, “AI being used to create addictive products” really shows that. It's a text-to-video technology. The company has nothing to do if people use it to generate "low quality content". The same way internet companies aren't at fault that large amounts of the web are scams or similar junk.
- lightbulbish 1y agoI feel I could argue the counterpoint. Hijacking the pathways of the human brain that leads to addictive behaviour has the potential to utterly ruins peoples lives. And so talking about it, if you have good intentions, seems like a thing anyone with the heart in the right place would. Take VEO3 and YouTube integration as an example: Google made VEO3 and YouTube has shorts and are aware of the data that shows addictive behaviour (i.e. a person sitting down at 11pm, sitting up doing shorts for 3 hours, and then having 5 hours of sleep, before doing shorts on the bus on the way to work) - I am sure there are other negative patterns, but this is one I can confirm from a friend. If you have data that shows your other distribution platform are being used to an excessive amount, and you create a powerful new AI content generator, is that good for the users?
- Ray20 1y agoThe fact is that not all people exhibit the described behavior. So the actions of corporations cannot be considered unambiguously bad. For example, it will help to cleanse the human gene pool of genes responsible for addictive behavior.
- computerphage 1y ago> This is purely an observation: You only jump ship in the middle of a conquest if either all ships are arriving at the same time (unlikely) or neither is arriving at all. This means that no AI lab is close to AGI. Their stated AGI timelines are “at the latest, in a few years,” but their revealed timelines are “it’ll happen at some indefinite time in the future.” This makes no sense to me at all. Is it a war metaphor? A race? Why is there no reason to jump ship? Doesn't it make sense to try to get on the fastest ship? Doesn't it make sense to diversify your stock portfolio if you have doubts?
- JunkDNA 1y agoI keep seeing this charge that AI companies have an “Uber problem” meaning the business is heavily subsidized by VC. Is there any analysis that has been done that explains how this breaks down (training vs inference and what current pricing is)? At least with Uber you had a cab fare as a benchmark. But what should, for example, ChatGPT actually cost me per month without the VC subsidy? How far off are we?
- cratermoon 1y agohttps://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the-tech-industry-2/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the...
- JunkDNA 1y agoThis article isn’t particularly helpful. It focuses on a ton of specific OpenAI business decisions that aren’t necessarily generalizable to the rest of the industry. OpenAI itself might be out over its skis, but what I’m asking about is the meta-accusation that AI in general is heavily subsidized. When the music stops, what does the price of AI look like? The going rate for chat bots like ChatGPT is $20/month. Does that go to $40 a month? $400? $4,000?
- handfuloflight 1y agoHow much would OpenAI be burning per month if each monthly active user cost them $40? $400? $4000? The numbers would bankrupt them within weeks.
- cratermoon 1y agoOK, how about another article that mentions the other big players, including Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google. https://www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/
- fragmede 1y agoIt depends on how far behind you believe the model-available LLMs are. If I can buy, say, $10k worth of hardware and run a sufficiently equivalent LLM at home for the cost of that plus electricity, and amortize that over say 5 years to get $2k/yr plus electricity, and say you use it 40 hours a week for 50 weeks, for 2000 hours, gets you $1/hr plus electricity. That electrical cost will vary depending on location, but let's just handwave $1/hr (which should be high). So $2/hr vs ChatGPT's $0.11/hr if you pay $20/month and use it 174 hours per month. Feel free to challenge these numbers, but it's a starting place. What's not accounted for is the cost of training (compute time, but also employee and everything else), which needs to be amortized over the length of time a model is used, so ChatGPT's costs rise significantly, but they do have the advantage that hardware is shared across multiple users.
- 4ndrewl 1y agoNo-one authentically believes LLMs with whatever go-faster stripes are a path to AGI do they?
- almostdeadguy 1y agoVery funny to re-title this to something less critical.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- NickNaraghi 1y agoPoint 1. could just as easily be explained by all of the labs being very close, and wanting to jump ship to one that is closer, or that gives you a better deal.
- hamburga 1y ago> This reminds me of a paradox: The AI industry is concerned with the alignment problem (how to make a super smart AI adhere to human values and goals) while failing to align between and within organizations and with the broader world. The bar they’ve set for themselves is simply too high for the performance they’re putting out. My argument is that it’s our job as consumers to align the AIs to our values (which are not all the same) via selection pressure: https://muldoon.cloud/2025/05/22/alignment.html https://muldoon.cloud/2025/05/22/alignment.html
- hexage1814 1y agoThe author sounds like some generic knock-off version of Gary Marcus. And the thing we least need in this world is another Gary Marcus.
- joshdavham 1y ago> The AI industry oscillates between fear-mongering and utopianism. In that dichotomy is hidden a subtle manipulation. […] They don’t realize that panic doesn’t prepare society but paralyzes it instead, or that optimism doesn’t reassure people but feels like gaslighting. Worst of all, both messages serve the same function: to justify accelerating AI deployment—either for safety reasons or for capability reasons This is a great point and also something I’ve become a bit cynical about these last couple of months. I think the very extreme and “bipolar” messaging around AI might be a bit more dishonest than I originally (perhaps naively?) though.
- ninetyninenine 1y ago>If they truly believed we’re at most five years from world-transforming AI, they wouldn’t be switching jobs, no matter how large the pay bump (they’re already affluent). What ridiculous logic is this? TO base the entire premise that AGI is not imminent based on job switching? How about basing it on something more concrete. How do people come up with such shakey foundations to support their conclusions? It's obvious. They come up with the conclusion first then they find whatever they can to support it. Unfortunately if dubious logic is all that's available then that's what they will say.
- akomtu 1y agoThe primary use case for AI-in-the-box is a superhuman CEO that sees everything and makes no mistakes. As an investor you can be sure that your money are multiplying at the highest rate possible. However as a self-serving investor you also want your CEO to side-step any laws and ethics that stand in your way, unless ignoring those laws will bring more trouble than profit. All that while maintaining a facade of selfless philanthropist for the public. For a reasonable price, your AI CEO will be fine-tuned to serve your goals perfectly. Remember that fine-tuning a well-behaved AI to do something as simple as writing malware in C++ makes widespread changes in the AI and turns it into a monstrosity. There was an HN post about this recently: fine-tuning an aligned model produces broadly misaligned results. So what do you think will happen when our AI CEO gets fine-tuned to prioritize shareholder interests over public interests?
- TrackerFF 1y agoMy question is this - once you achieve AGI, what moat do you have, purely on the scientific part? Other than making the AGI even more intelligent. I see a lot of talk that the first company that achieves AGI, will also achieve market dominance. All other players will crumble. But surely when someone achieves AGI, their competitors will in all likelihood be following closely after. And once those achieve AGI, academia will follow. Point is, at some point AGI itself will become available the everyone. The only things that will be out of reach for most, is compute - and probably other expensive things on the infrastructure part. Current AI funding seems to revolve around some sort of winner-take-all scenario. Just keep throwing incredible amounts of money at it, and hope that you've picked the winner. I'm just wondering what the outcome will be if this thesis turns out wrong.
- fragmede 1y agoSame thing that happened to pets.com or webvan.com and the rest of the graveyard of failed companies. A bunch of investors lose money, a bunch of market consolidation, employees get dilluted to worthlessness, chapter 7, chapter 11. The free ride of today's equivalent of $1 Ubers will end. A glut of previously very expensive hardware for cheap on eBay (though I doubt this last point will happen since AGI is likely to be compute intensive). It's not going to be fun or easy, but as far as the financials go, we were there in 2001. The question is assuming we do get AGI, what the ramifications of that will be. Instead of hiring employees, a business can spin up employees (and down) like a tech company can spin up EC2 instances. Great for employers, terrible for employees. That's a big "if" though.
- imiric 1y ago> The only things that will be out of reach for most, is compute - and probably other expensive things on the infrastructure part. That is the moat. That, and training data. Even today, compute and data are the only things that matter. There is hardly any secret software sauce. This means that only large corporations with a practically infinite amount of resources to throw at the problem could potentially achieve AGI. Other corporations would soon follow, of course, but the landscape would be similar to what it is today. This is all assuming that the current approaches can take us there, of which I'm highly skeptical. But if there's a breakthrough at some point, we would still see AI tightly controlled by large corporations that offer it as a (very expensive) service. Open source/weight alternatives would not be able to compete, just like they don't today. Inference would still require large amounts of compute only accessible to companies, at least for a few years. The technology would be truly accessible to everyone only once the required compute becomes a commodity, and we're far away from that. If none of this comes to pass, I suspect there will be an industry-wide crash, and after a few years in the Trough of Disillusionment, the technology would re-emerge with practical applications that will benefit us in much more concrete and subtle ways. Oh, but it will ruin all our media and communication channels regardless, directly causing social unrest and political regression, that much is certain. (:
- Animats 1y ago"A disturbing amount of effort goes into making AI tools engaging rather than useful or productive." Right. It worked for social media monetization. "... hallucinations ..." The elephant in the room. Until that problem is solved. AI systems can't be trusted to do anything on their own. The solution the AI industry has settled on is to make hallucinations an externality, like pollution. They're fine as long as someone else pays for the mistakes. LLMs have a similar problem to Level 2-3 self-driving cars. They sort of do the right thing, but a human has to be poised to quickly take over at all times. It took Waymo a decade to get over that hump and reach level 4, but they did it.
- nunez 1y agoWaymo "did it" in very controlled environments, not in general. They're still a ways away from solving self-driving in the general case.
- cal85 1y agoWhen you say “do anything in their own”, what kind of things do you mean?
- Animats 1y agoTake actions which have consequences.
- jasonsb 1y ago> The elephant in the room. Until that problem is solved. AI systems can't be trusted to do anything on their own. AI system can be trusted to do most of the things on their own. You can't trust them for actions with irreversible consequences, but everything else is ok. I can use them to write documents, code, create diagrams, designs etc. I just need to verify the result, but that's 10% of the actual work. I would say that 90% of modern day office work can be done with the help of AI.
- lightbulbish 1y agoThanks for the read. I think it's a highly relevant article, especially around the moral issues of making addictive products. As a normal person in the Swedish society I feel social media, shorts and reels in particular, has an addictive grip on many in my vicinity. And as a developer I can see similar patterns with AI prompts: prompt, wait, win/lose, re-prompt. It is alluring and it certainly feels.. rewarding when you get it right. 1) I have been curious as to why so few people in Silicon Valley seems to be concerned with, even talking about, the good of the products. The good of the company they join. Could someone in the industry enlighten me, what are the conversations in SV around this issue? Do people care if they make an addictive product which seems to impact people's lives negatively? Do the VCs? 2) I appreciate the author's efforts in creating conversation around this. What are ways one could try to help the efforts? While I have no online following, I feel rather doomy and gloomy about AI pushing more addictive usage patterns out in to the world, and would like to help if there is something suitable I could do.
- drillsteps5 1y agoI can't speak intelligently about how close AGI really is (I do not believe it is but I guess someone somehow somewhere might come up with a brilliant idea that nobody thought of so far and voila). However I'm flabbergasted by the lack of attention to so-called "hallucinations" (which is a misleading, I mean marketing, term and we should be talking about errors or inaccuracies). The problem is that we don't really know why LLMs work. I mean you can run the inference and apply the formula and get output from the given input, but you can't "explain" why LLM produced phase A as an output instead of B,C, or N. There's just too many parameters and computations to go though, and the very concept of "explaining" or "understanding" might not even apply here. And if we can't understand how this thing works, we can't understand why it doesn't work properly (produces wrong output) and also don't know how to fix it. And instead of talking about it and trying to find a solution everybody moved on to the agents which are basically LLMs that are empowered to perform complex actions IRL. How does this makes any sense to anybody? I feel like I'm crazy or missing something important. I get it, a lot of people are making a lot of money and a lot of promises are being made. But this is absolutely fundamental issue that is not that difficult to understand to anybody with a working brain, and yet I am really not seeing any attention paid to it whatsoever.
- Bratmon 1y agoYou can get use out of a hammer without understanding how the strong force works. You can get use out of an LLM without understanding how every node works.
- alganet 1y agoYou can get injured by using a hammer without understanding how it works. You can damage a company by using a spreadsheet and not understanding how it works. In your personal opinion, what are the things you should know before using an LLM?
- drillsteps5 1y agoHammer is not a perfect analogy because of how simple it is, but sure let's go with it. Imagine that occasionally when getting in contact with the nail it shatters to bits, or goes through the nail as it were liquid, or blows up, or does something else completely unexpected. Wouldn't you want to fix it? And sure, it might require deep understanding of the nature of the materials and forces involved. That's what I'd do.
- Imnimo 1y agoI can at least understand "I am going to a different AGI company because I think they are on a better track" but I cannot grap " I am leaving this AGI company to work on some narrow AI application but I still totally believe AGI is right around the corner"
- DavidPiper 1y agoAI is the new politics. It's surprising to me the number of people I consider smart and deep original thinkers who are now parroting lines and ideas (almost word-for-word) from folks like Andrej Karpathy and Sam Altman, etc. But, of course, "Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome" never stops being relevant.
- insane_dreamer 1y ago> A disturbing amount of effort goes into making AI tools engaging rather than useful or productive. I don't think this is an intentional design decision. I think it absolutely is intentional. The overt flattery of LLMs is designed to keep you coming back because everyone wants to hear how smart they are.
- insane_dreamer 1y agoSince no one has any idea of how to achieve AGI or the process to get there, I'm skeptical of any claims as to how soon we might arrive.
- scrubs 1y agoAnother well written article on HN. Well done. Very much enjoyed the read. And I learned a lot.