Make defensive comments in response to LLM skepticism all you want— there are still precisely zero (0) reasons to believe they’ll make a quantum leap towards human-level reasoning any time soon.
The fact that they’re much better than any previous tech is irrelevant when they’re still so obviously far from competent in so many important ways.
To allow your technological optimism to convince you to that this very simple and very big challenge is somehow trivial and that progress will inevitably continue apace is to engage in the very drollest form of kidding yoursef.
Pre-space travel, you could’ve climbed the tallest mountain on earth and have truthfully claimed that you were closer to the moon than any previous human, but that doesn’t change the fact that the best way to actually get to the moon is to climb down from the mountain and start building a rocket.
I made a reply about rolling my eyes to this comment that got flagged (rightly so); this was unproductive and impulsive and I admit I shouldn't have done it.
I'm not sure how HN handles replies to flagged comments, so I'm posting the following here in the hopes it'll be seen by more fellow technical people :
In the future, if you wish to invite productive comments from your audience and not curt dismissal, consider framing your concerns as potential risks rather than the cynical expressions of fatalistic certainty so often employed by naive, greedy technologists when regulation that is firmly in the public interest threatens their paychecks.
I'd've liked very much to give you one, but your blanket dismissal of what I consider to be a very important step for the field of AI ethics as the work of "Innovation Sponges" reveals that we fundamentally disagree about some pretty big underlying issues here.
In the future, if you wish to invite productive comments and not curt dismissal, consider framing your concerns as potential risks rather than the cynical expressions of fatalistic certainty so often employed by naive, greedy technologists when regulation that is firmly in the public interest threatens their paychecks.
^ Go read the comment guidelines. Really read them.
I dare you (rhetorically, not really: I won't read any further replies from
you so save your breath) to then assert with a straight face that you've been paying even a lick of heed to a single one of them.
With this in mind, I am unwilling to engage with you further on the matter-- but I will say in closing that I genuinely hope that you may someday find true peace and self-acceptance.
I don't mean this flippantly: you'll truly be lots happier if you can eventually let go of the compulsive need to "win" every argument or exchange and learn to actually listen to others with an open mind.
Dude, the core tenet of this forum is making a good-faith [1] effort to really understand the fantastically complex issues at play here, and then to communicate about them honestly in a collaborative, rather than competitive, spirit.
Sorry, but what on earth does any of this actually mean?
You appear to be arguing in unequivocal favor of a short-termist, purely profit-driven way of doing business, which is a viewpoint that, to me, needs a whole lot more cogent support than the word salad posted above.
Oh no, a slippery slope of compassion! To wit, the long title of the bill:
"An Act to make provision for an Animal Sentience Committee with functions relating to the effect of government policy on the welfare of animals as sentient beings."
I take your point, but this feels pretty defeatist to me.
I don’t personally believe that “we have not historically done this well, if at all” is a good reason to stop trying to manage the negative externalities of emerging technology— quite the opposite, in my opinion.
I see now you were making reference to a comment I made in reply to someone else.
Yes, that was something that I said and I stand by it.
I do not see any reason to be concerned about AI as an existential threat at the present moment.
I have explained in my previous comment why I feel this is the case; if you feel that this view is recklessly dismissive and wish to change my mind, then I invite you to do the same.
Edit: I’m sorry for any excessive crispiness or combativeness in my tone; I can see now from your post history that you are likely arguing in good faith.
I have grown weary of arguing against concern trolls lately on this topic, so I may have misjudged your initial comment based on its brevity. Sorry about that.
I didn’t dismiss anything. I didn’t say anything was alarmist. Please don’t put words in my mouth.
You didn’t say anything about societal problems. You wondered if the growth will ever stop, and I tried my best in good faith to give the reasons why I believe that it will.
If the question is “when will the models be powerful enough to cause societal problems”, then that is a completely different question and I think the answer to it is clearly “they already are”. (But not because they are superintelligent or anything close to AGI.)
I cannot imagine a scenario where it doesn’t drop off.
The massive recent improvements in GPT’s performance are a result of giving the model enormous numbers of parameters and a wealth of training data. That’s it.
Surely this paradigm cannot scale up indefinitely. Moore’s law is moribund.
Are we going to build a supercomputer that encircles the globe just for the purpose of trying to make the biggest LLM we can?
Also, even we could scale indefinitely, there is no reason to suspect that an LLM with hundreds of quadrillions of parameters will somehow magically spontaneously become an AGI.
It’s tempting to think that the line will go up forever, but that just doesn’t square with reality.
Anyone whose response to this is something like “well, maybe all the brain is doing is just the same thing that LLMs do” is fundamentally underestimating the complexity of the human brain by many orders of magnitude.
It is the most complex system in the known universe and we do not understand it at all.
I am generally optimistic about AI, but to me it is the absolute height of delusional hubris to think that superintelligence is likely to somehow “fall out” of a language model, just as soon as we make one large enough and give it enough training data.
To come to such a conclusion reveals a failure to grasp the magnitude of the problem.