Don't worry, with generative AI, everyone's social media will look 10x more awesome and it will all be fake. Even wealthy people will take it to a new level.
One thing which isn't discussed enough is how bad the Tsunami is environmentally. The coastline of Japan is absolutely littered with crap from the 2011 Tsunami. All manner of chemicals were sucked into the nearby sea, tires, carpets, hard and soft plastics, absolutely everywhere. It almost looks unrecoverable.
I know that seems like a non-issue in the grand scale of things, but Tsunami's of the past didn't do this. Most pollution was biodegradable.
I can't imagine what the coast of LA would look like after a similar event :(
I'm not saying that they can't be more capable, I'm saying the guy can get a little overly excited about things which are hard to measure or quantify.
We're observing these systems and making up our own interpretations about how good they are at certain tasks, but it's not really easy to measure how much better or worse these things can be overall.
Your example about language translation is a good example of where these things aren't really "better", just different. I speak multiple languages and while these systems are fantastic, they can fail in ways a professional translator wouldn't and it doesn't seem to automatically know it failed and should fix itself.
The car example is also great because it again proves my point. We can easily measure a car and a person and workout a car is faster, but we can also see that a car can't walk. So it's faster but it;s also entirely different.
I recently saw Hinton give a talk where he very, very, very excitedly and confidently gave us an example to demonstrate how incredibly intelligent and creative LLMS are.
He asked an LLM a question, but he didn't give us the answer. He let us have time to answer it ourselves. Personally I knew the answer instantly. He gave us the answer and sort of assumed no one would've known the answer and then used it as as justification for how smart these systems were. It honestly didn't feel very reassuring to me and honestly, I'd be surprised if it wasn't a topic covered somewhere on the internet before. With all due respect to Mr Hinton, I felt it showed his age a bit honestly.
What is difficult about Hinton's statements is that he can't really give evidence to back up these sort of claims. How do you measure how much a person knows, and how do you objectively measure how much an LLM knows? How smart is an LLM? You can't really know. It seems almost rhetorical. How many notes in a saxophone ?
We can make observations but that's not a great way to measure anything precisely.
There is a limit to language and I think this is one of those topics where that limit is touched or even breached.I don't even know if "intelligence" is a sufficient enough word to describe what's going on with these systems. It's the best word we have but it doesn't seem to adequately describe what we're observing.
Sometimes I do get the feeling that he is just slowing down and innovation and change just keep going at the same rate. He seems to parrot the same sort of ideas over and over again.
I find he can get really fixated on certain examples, things he has seen an LLM do and he can't seem to get beyond it, as if the singularity is at hand. Where as a 22 year old I work with just accepts the technology and tries to get work done with it.
This is actually a sort of mental crutch which some eastern philosophy talks about. Which is interesting. It's not really seen as a positive thing in those traditions.
Rather than non-judgmentally listening to what people have to say, the mind jumps to some conclusion or as you said wants to complete a sentence out of habit or exposure some stimulus. Sort of monkey mind.
100% having the same experience. It's mind bending how tired you can get.
We recently all had the flu, 2 nights of the baby having a fever and both of us being sick and also having a fever was one of the most testing things in my life.