13 ms·
Crazy how intelligence is cheap, efficient and commonplace now. We humans better refocusing our energy on our core values/principles, given most of our skills
by mw67 2mo ago
Crazy how intelligence is cheap, efficient and commonplace now.
We humans better refocusing our energy on our core values/principles, given most of our skills are becoming irrelevant
- esafak 2mo agoOnce we figure out the pesky problem of how we're going to pay for housing, food, and healthcare.
- timcobb 2mo agoI can't stop wondering myself.... I'm writing some software with AI and wondering, why am I doing this? Will anyone need this? Will anyone have money to buy this? Best I've come up with is we'll need to be adopted by technofeudlaist overlords to be our patrons like in the roman days
- skeke 2mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- georgemcbay 2mo ago> Best I've come up with is we'll need to be adopted by technofeudlaist overlords to be our patrons like in the roman days Continually progressing AI (combined with our current socioeconomic systems) throws a lot of uncertainty into our mid to long term future, but I don't think this is going to be what happens. There are billions more of "us" than of "them", people don't respond well en masse to a drastic worsening of their societal status and "they" are lagging very far behind on building their robot armies. If we poorly navigate this transition the outcome should be worrying them more than it worries us.
- esafak 2mo agoI don't know how you would translate the strength of a robot army to a human one; they haven't fought yet.
- timcobb 2mo agoHumans aren't sheep but in the broad average it seems like we have a strong tendency to fall inline. Fwiw I was mostly joking. I agree that the techno overlords have no reason to keep us, unlike in Roman times.
- ben_w 2mo ago> There are billions more of "us" than of "them", people don't respond well en masse to a drastic worsening of their societal status and "they" are lagging very far behind on building their robot armies. Fortunately, yes, those robot armies do seem to be rather behind schedule*. However, even if Musk dies of old age before anything like the Optimus can be connected to useful artificial intelligence, it can still be driven by the common joke a few years back that "AI" really stood for "Actually Indians". When all the people currently upset about "immigrants coming here taking our jobs" discover those same people are now staying home and remote-working those same jobs over a VR headset and a Starlink connection... my guess is that by this point, Musk will have no political allies left. > If we poorly navigate this transition the outcome should be worrying them more than it worries us. It can screw everyone over. Literal communism was invented in response to Laissez-faire capitalism, and while Laissez-faire died with the Great Depression, the form of capitalism which succeeded it in the USA came into conflict with the USSR and gave us the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, etc. * 2022 "next year": https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/08/elon-musk-says-tesla-is-aiming-to-start-production-on-optimus-next-year.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/08/elon-musk-says-tesla-is-aimi...
- z3t4 2mo agoWhen machines are doing all the work - we no longer have to.
- gf000 2mo ago> the couple multi-trillioners will have all the wealth of the world, and it will all crumble down You mistyped it.
- esafak 2mo agoIs that what you're going to tell your mortgage lender?
- School-Cotton 2mo agoWhat makes you think the people who own the machines will share their resources with you?
- duskdozer 2mo agoI think the big names behind the AI companies already have that problem solved. A lot of people probably won't like the solution very much though.
- tctcd6 2mo agoYes, they have a final solution for all of us.
- weregiraffe 2mo agoMathematics is a human-designed game that involves rearranging symbols.
- MinimalAction 2mo agoThat view is incredibly reductionist. It really is an efficient encoding of how nature behaves. It might be a human construct, but given how best it allows to understand nature (through principles of physics), it is uncanny to be any different from the language of nature. Reminds me of Wigner's Unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in natural sciences [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...
- weregiraffe 2mo agoNature has no language. Language is a human tool to imperfectly describe nature. Putting language before nature is magical thinking (also known as Platonism).
- MinimalAction 2mo agoYes, of course mathematics is a tool to model nature as accurately as we could. That still doesn't mean mathematics is as trivial or frivolous as manipulating symbols.
- weregiraffe 2mo agoBut what else is there to it? Mathematics has no experiments where you find new knowledge in nature. There are just symbols.
- JustFinishedBSG 2mo agoAt a very high level mathematics is basically 100% text/symbolic rewriting. You start from some set of postulate assumed true and you do your thing to get a new different set of equivalent assertions in a form that is more useful. I don’t know if LLMs will kill the working-mathematicians but at least seem like that it doesn’t seem absurd to imagine LLMs will be good at math…
- slashdave 2mo agoIteratively leaning on lean to prove a conjecture is not intelligence, it is automation
- fidotron 2mo agoIt's still clear that LLMs lack spatial reasoning, either in the concrete or abstract, and while that sort of reasoning has been downplayed by academia for at least a century it is fundamental to technology and industry. (And many would say for science and mathematics too). They will, however, get there as well either directly or as interfaces to models that do, and your core point stands.
- simianwords 2mo agoIs there any proof that they are not good at special reasoning? Arc agi 1 and 2 are saturated.
- fidotron 2mo agoI will be posting something to that effect later this week. (Hopefully). Basically current gen LLMs apparently do spatial reasoning the way they seemingly do everything else: by reference to previous example. I didn't see them work out which known example to use for a given problem until specifically prompted, in my case by accident.
- StilesCrisis 2mo agoIf you ask an LLM, "what known example did you use to solve this?" it is very likely to cite something plausible-sounding. That absolutely doesn't mean it is what it actually did. It is trying to give the "right answer" and please.
- fidotron 2mo ago> If you ask an LLM, "what known example did you use to solve this?" it is very likely to cite something plausible-sounding. That absolutely doesn't mean it is what it actually did. It is trying to give the "right answer" and please. That's not what I said happened though. It didn't solve the problem (for weeks) until I (accidentally) told it which example it happened to know was relevant, and then it solved it in hours.
- 2mo ago
- skeke 2mo agoOh brother AI hasn’t even taken the class of jobs associated with customer service lmao
- 12345hn6789 2mo agoUh.... Have you ever called customer service lately?
- fidotron 2mo agoDo we employ mathematicians in customer service roles?
- sscaryterry 2mo agoThats a silly and obtuse comment.
- fidotron 2mo agoYou mean the answer betrays the point: customer service is surprisingly hard, we just have a large number of people that are capable of doing it. This is what the whole https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/elephants.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/elephants.pdf is about.
- codingdave 2mo agoIf it were commonplace, there wouldn't be a post and discussion about it. Cheap? Arguable - while it didn't cost thousands, it wasn't free. Cheap is in the eye of the beholder. Efficient...How do we even measure that? The massive infrastructure and training to take a product to the point where someone could do this is massive. Ignoring everything behind the scenes and acting like one session and result is the whole picture of efficiency doesn't seem right. And no, nothing produced by AI makes skills irrelevant. That is the whole ongoing argument of whether people are losing cognitive ability by moving their thinking to AI. Overall, this is an impressive proof of capability. But I wouldn't take that proof as anything more than what it is.
- Izmaki 2mo agoSeconded on the "not cheap" argument here. I've spent $25 worth of tokens completing a one-week task in an afternoon, or rather my company spent the money. I would never have personally felt OK with throwing this much money after some prompting back and forth for a few hours, one lazy Saturday afternoon. I ran the risk of not finding the solution before the token usage would be too high for me to want to carry on, if I was my own credit card linked to the account. Of course money in this situation is a bit of a funny measurement, right, because if I was able to take the rest of the week off as soon as I had solved the one-week problem, then I would have no problem at all throwing even $100 worth of tokens at it, so I could enjoy a nice 4-day "mini-vacation". How cheap "cheap" is, is indeed "in the eye of the beholder".
- throw310822 2mo agoIs is sarcasm? $25 to perform in half a day a week of work, that is not cheap, it's a massive saving of money- probably in the thousands.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- lvl155 2mo agoIntelligence was always relatively cheap. You can pick up a phone and get answers for free in most academic settings.
- amelius 2mo ago(within limits)
- ben_w 2mo agoYou've not seen how they react to noobs asking physics questions, I think. Even when you've got an interesting idea, if you're an enthusiastic amateur who don't yet know enough to phrase the question right but does actually know the basics, they'll put you in the same category as the people who think healing crystals can power hyperspace telepathy with Anubis: "oh no not another one". LLMs have infinite patience, but unfortunately come (came?) with too much sycophancy, giving even more people far too much confidence.
- amelius 2mo agoEverybody can be an armchair mathematician now. Just fling some thoughts in the direction of your AI setup and let it do breadth first search with AI based pruning heuristics.
- jethkl 2mo agoI generally agree, though direction, intuition, and domain knowledge are still relevant. Your breadth-first-search framing feels right, but you still need a sense of which paths are worth following, and you need to know when to trust the results. I’ve been doing more math as a hobby in the past few weeks — working on lesser-known conjectures and exploring proofs of hard theorems — than I could have managed over the previous several years. It’s an exciting time.
- Jweb_Guru 2mo agoIf you really believe this, try to use GPT 5.6 to prove an open problem you know nothing about. You might get lucky, but if you don't, you will soon discover that 5.6 can make "progress" towards a theorem without actually getting anywhere pretty much indefinitely.
- slopinthebag 2mo agoI imagine there are hundreds of thousands of people doing this, yet all we seem to get is a handful of solved problems. So it would seem the success rate is extremely low.
- witx 2mo agoyeah...right. Go touch some grass
- William_BB 2mo agoEver heard of the infinite monkey theorem? This is basically what LLMs do on really hard tasks. Prompt it a million times on a really hard problem and it might output the correct answer once.
- ben_w 2mo agoThe infinite monkey theorem assumes random distribution of symbols*. Given the tokenizers have a vocabulary in the 10k-100k range, "a million attempts" will generally still only get the first token of the answer correct. Even really rubbish models, e.g. talkie, the "what if we only use pre-1930s data to train a model?"** model, had to be almost all the way to the right answer to reach the really low HumanEval pass@100 score of ~0.04 (I'm only eyeballing the relevant chart). * Actual monkeys not being like this is, while amusing, irrelevant ** https://talkie-lm.com/introducing-talkie https://talkie-lm.com/introducing-talkie
- artninja1988 2mo ago>Ever heard of the infinite monkey theorem? Even if every atom in the universe were a supercomputer generating a trillion trillion random characters every second since the Big Bang, the chance of producing Hamlet would still be essentially zero.
- Levitz 2mo agoIntelligence on its own is not very useful though. We put it on a pedestal because it creates huge potential when paired with other things, wisdom, discipline, empathy, but on its own?
- ratg13 2mo agoAI / LLMs are not intelligence .. they are just a prediction engine that has been branded as 'intelligence' by marketing employees At the end of the day it is still making a best guess at what the user wants based on data it has seen before. It still requires someone smarter than the output to be able to evaluate if the result is any good, or just hand waving.
- efdee 2mo agoCan you tell me the difference between that and doing code review for a task performed by a non-senior?
- skekke 2mo agoIt’s no diff to an educated human. Stored potential. But will that potential be converted that contributes to the economy..? That requires other traits. Might be focus, might be discipline, might be the need to get revenge lmao. This is what the llm-boosters miss. Progress is willed into existence.
- petra 2mo agoLlm's do have discipline and persistence, though.
- bwestergard 2mo agoA counter argument: A strong distinction between "intelligence" (understanding what is) and "values/principles" (understanding what ought to be) was characteristic of much early modern European philosophy from Descartes to Kant, which received its influential strong formulation from David Hume. But trying to maintain this distinction leads to insuperable difficulties. Our conceptual framework for understanding the world are always value-laden. There is no "view from nowhere", no historically unconditioned set of values or concepts. Your framing, in which "values" are external to "intelligence" and must be imposed on it (on pain of intelligence being "value-neutral"), leads inevitably to the dead end of "AI Alignment", "superintelligence", etc. Which is a kind of pseudo-theology. "We humans better [be] refocusing our energy on our core values/principles, given most of our skills are becoming irrelevant." In light of the untenability of a strong fact/value or intelligence/ethics distinction, I would suggest this alternative advice: humans should focus on critical appropriation and extension of the received wisdom, whether that comes to us directly from human beings or indirectly through an LLM. Perhaps this is compatible with the spirit of your original suggestion.
- tripleee 2mo agohow much can I bill for having good core values?