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Is Wang even able to achieve superintelligence? Is anyone? I'm unable to make sense of Wang's compensation package. What actual, practical skills does he bring
by dazamarquez 9mo ago
Is Wang even able to achieve superintelligence? Is anyone? I'm unable to make sense of Wang's compensation package. What actual, practical skills does he bring to the table? Is this all a stunt to drive Meta's stock value?
- ActionHank 9mo agoWang is able to accurately gauge zuck’s intelligence.
- this_user 9mo agoThe way it sounds, Zuckerberg believes that they can, or at the very least has people around him telling him that they can. But Zuckerberg also though that the Metaverse would be thing. LeCun obviously thinks otherwise and believes that LLMs are a dead-end, and he might be right. The trouble with LLMs is that most people don't really understand how they work. They seem smart, but they are not; they are really just good at appearing to be smart. But that may have created the illusion the true artificial intelligence is much closer than it really is in the minds of many people including Zuckerberg. And obviously, there now exists an entire industry that relies on that idea to raise further funding. As for Wang, he's not an AI researcher per se, he basically built a data sweatshop. But he apparently is a good manager who knows how to get projects done. Maybe the hope is that giving him as many resources as possible will allow him to work his magic and get their superintelligence project on track.
- Mistletoe 9mo agoWhat are the differences between a person that is smart and an LLM that seems smart but isn't?
- tom_ 9mo agoThe LLM is not a person.
- yakbarber 9mo agoit's in the eye of the beholder
- hibern8 9mo agoThe ability to generate novel ideas.
- bgirard 9mo agoWhat's your definition of a novel idea? How do you measure that? I've had a 15 year+ successful career as a SWE so far. I don't think I've had a single idea so novel that today's LLM could not have come up with it.
- lelanthran 9mo agoI've had plenty. Independent discovery is a real thing, especially with juniors.
- nl 9mo agoWell that's not true - see the Terry Tao article using AlphaEvolve to discover new proofs. Additionally, "novel ideas" isn't something that is included in something that smart people do so why would it be a requirement for AI.
- vjvjvjvjghv 9mo agoHow many people generate novel ideas? When I look around at work, most people basically operate like an LLM. They see what’s being done by others and emulate it.
- yujzgzc 9mo agoIn my experience, discernment and good judgment. The "generating ideas" capabilities is good. The text summarization capabilities are great. However when it comes to making reasoned choices, it seems like it's losing all abilities, and even worse it will sound grossly overconfident or sycophantic or both.
- Eisenstein 9mo ago> They seem smart, but they are not; they are really just good at appearing to be smart. Can you give an example of the difference between these two things?
- mrits 9mo agoBeing able to learn to play Moonlight Sonata vs. being able to create it. Being able to write a video game vs being able to write a video game that sells. Being able to tell you newtons equations vs being able to discover the acceleration of gravity on earth
- Eisenstein 9mo agoSo if an LLM could do any of those things you would consider it very smart?
- this_user 9mo agoImagine an actor who is playing a character speaking a language that they actor does not speak. Due to a lack of time, the actor decides against actually learning the language and instead opts to just memorise and train how to speak their lines without actually understanding the content. Let's assume they are doing a pretty convincing job too. Now, the audience watching these scenes may think that the actor is actually speaking the language, but in reality they are just mimicking. This is what an LLM essentially is. It is good at mimicking, reproducing and recombining the things it was trained on. But it has no creativity to go beyond this, and it doesn't even possess true reasoning, which is how it will end up making mistakes that are just immediately obvious to a human observer, yet the LLM is unable to see them, because it just mimicking.
- Eisenstein 9mo ago1. I would argue that an actor performing in this way does actually understand what his character means 2. Why doesn't this apply to you from my perspective?
- retsibsi 9mo ago
- nl 9mo agoHumans aren't smart, they are really just good at appearing to be smart. Prove me wrong.
- antod 9mo agoYou'll just claim we only "appeared" to prove you wrong ;)
- prng2021 9mo agoIf you don’t think humans are smart, then what living creature qualifies as smart to you? Or do you think humans created the word but it describes nothing that actually exists in the real world?
- nl 9mo agoI think most things humans do are reflexive, type one "thinking" that AIs do just as well as humans. I think our type two reasoning is roughly comparable to LLM reasoning when it is within the LLM reinforcement learning distribution. I think some humans are smarter than LLMs out-of-distribution, but only when we think carefully, and in many cases LLMs perform better than many humams even in this case.
- prng2021 9mo agoYou didn’t answer my question
- milowata 9mo agoWang is a networking machine and has connected with everyone in the industry. Likely was brought in as a recruiting leader. Mark being Mark, though, doesn’t understand the value of vision and figured getting big names in the same room was better than actually having a plan.
- sokoloff 9mo agoYour last sentence suggests that he willingly failed to take the choice to create a vision and a plan. If, for whatever reason, you don't have a vision and a plan, hiring big names to help kickstart that process seems like a way better next step than "do nothing".
- canyp 9mo agoHow to draw an owl: 1. Hire an artist. 2. Draw the rest of the fucking owl.
- rickydroll 9mo ago3. Scribble over the draft from the artist. Tell them what is wrong and why. repeat a few times. 4. In frustration, use some AI tool to generate a couple of drafts that are close to what you want and hand them to the artist. 5. Hire a new artist after the first one quits because you don't respect the creative process. 6. Dig deeper into a variety of AI image-generating tools to get really close to what you want, but not quite get there. 7. Hire someone from Fiverr to tweak it in Photoshop because the artists, both bio and non-bio, have burned through your available cash and time. 8. Settle for the least bad of the lot because you have to ship and accept you will never get the image you have in your head.
- gloryjulio 9mo agoWang is not Zuck's first choice. Zuck couldn't get the top talents he wanted so he got Wang. Unfortunately Wang is not technical, he excels in managing the labeling company and be the top in providing such services. That's why I also think the hiring angle makes sense. It would actually be astonishing if he could turn technical and compete with the leaders in OAI/Anthrpic
- irjustin 9mo ago> They seem smart, but they are not; they are really just good at appearing to be smart There are too many different ways to measure intelligence. Speed, matching, discovery, memory, etc. We can combine those levers infinitely create/justify "smart". Are they dumb? Absolutely, but are they smart? Very much so. You can be both at the same time. Maybe you meant genius? Because that standard is quite high and there's no way they're genius today.
- alpha_squared 9mo agoThey're neither smart nor dumb and I think that trying to measure them along that scale is a fool's errand. They're combinatorial regurgitation machines. The fact that we keep pointing to that as an approximation of intelligence says more about us than it, namely that we don't understand intelligence and that we look for ourselves in other things to define intelligence. This is why when experts use these things within their domain of expertise they're underwhelmed, but when used outside of those domains they become halfway useful. Trying to create new terminology ("genius", "superintelligence", etc.) seems to only shift goal posts and define new ways of approximation. Personally, I'll believe a system is intelligent when it presents something novel and new and challenges our understanding of the world as we know it (not as I personally do because I don't have the corpus of the internet in my head).
- themafia 9mo ago> You can be both at the same time. Smart and dumb are opposites. So this seems dubious. You can have access to a large base of trivial knowledge (mostly in a single language), as LLMs do, but have absolutely no intelligence, as LLMs demonstrate. You can be dumb yet good at Jeopardy. This is no dichotomy.
- captain_coffee 9mo ago> Are they dumb? Absolutely, but are they smart? Very much so. You can be both at the same time. This has to be bait
- antonvs 9mo ago> they are really just good at appearing to be smart. In other words, functionally speaking, for many purposes, they are smart. This is obvious in coding in particular, where with relatively minimal guidance, LLMs outperform most human developers in many significant respects. Saying that they’re “not smart” seems more like an attempt to claim specialness for your own intelligence than a useful assessment of LLM capabilities.
- hshdhdhj4444 9mo agoIf Zuck throws $2-$4Bn towards a bunch of AI “superstars” and that’s enough to convince the market that Meta is now a serious AI company, it will translate into hundreds of billions in market cap increases. Seems like a great bang for the buck.
- PessimalDecimal 9mo agoOracle also briefly convinced the market it was a serious AI company and received a market cap increase. Until it evaporated.
- ginnyaang 9mo ago> What actual, practical skills does he bring to the table? This hot dog, this no hot dog.
- fmajid 9mo agoWang never led a frontier lab. He founded a company that uses hlow-paid uman intelligence to label training data. But clearly he is as slick a schmoozer as Sam Altman to have taken in a seasoned operator like Zuckerberg.