Actually I think the 'thrown' account makes a fair criticism of the AFP writer bringing AGI into the discussion at this point.. The path to there from here is tenuous at best (though a very worthwhile one to discuss IMHO), the points made in the article sans the AGI red herring are actually a good summary of where we are, so, while 'denial' might be a bit much, all of the issues raised (again without regard to AGI) are certainly real and relevant..
Please chatGPT, write an OS, a spreadsheet and a word processor. Bug free btw. Now Microsoft has no business ?
People realize it’s not that easy right ?
Actually this AI should be called « synthesized work of human intelligence ». Because that’s all that it is. It’s created by us, feed by our intelligence and knowledge and is « usable » by our specie only and has no meaning by itself.
So it’s just like any other powerful tool, if should be regulated asap.
While I am not worried about my situation (and I expect most HN readers will not be either) anyone familiar with the types of corporate thinking behind business process re-engineering or digital transformation will see the streamlining and redesign potential coming online near term.. Couple that with the long term shifts in work patterns accelerated by the pandemic and with the shifts in capital markets that are starting now and will play out over the likely deployments of the next few generations of generative model based systems and there seems to be a lot of downsizing potential throughout large sectors of current business employment.
Sure, though unfortunately it's increasingly hard to get paid (or paid much...) to drive a car. I do think it's striking that AI looks well-suited for lots of desk jobs, but has a ways to go to tackle unskilled / semi-skilled labor.
Judging by the divorce rate and how many grow up traumatized or develop a disorder that relies on traumatic events to have occurred... not entirely sure humans are doing a great job at either of those two tasks. Maybe AI will uphold greater standards of raising kids, like not physically abusing them as a form of "discipline".
I for one work in aerospace software. Even if I could get an AI tool to generate usable code in this domain for me, it would have to be thoroughly checked. Between defining the requirements precisely enough and checking the output thoroughly enough, I'm not really anticipating AI tools supplanting that many humans here.
AI's ultimate impact is more comparable with the printing press. Its an information revolution, greater than the internet, not really comparable with electricity (which is physical).
The printing press:
1. Made information affordable to the masses for the first time in history
2. Radically accelerated science development due to ability to actually distribute research.
3. Enabled large empires governed by bureaucracy (centrally controlled) rather than aristocracy (locally autonomous, such as the mongols). China was a forerunner here because of their paper & printing technology.
4. Broke the information monopoly of the aristocracy-church combination. Made mass democracy (beyond small cities) possible for the first time
5. Caused large wars (the 30 years war), killing millions. The ability to mass print bibles (The source of political and moral truth back then), drastically threatened the existing clergy class, and also enabled the rise of dangerous cults through editing the bible (what we call disinfo today, which also played out).
The immediate economic value of AI is actually rather questionable, because it seems hard to create competitive moats around the tech. But the wider impact and value will be beyond people's imagination.
What do you mean by hard to create a competitive moat around the tech? These LLMs are super expensive to train so isn’t that a moat, or am I understanding it differently?
Kind of? $5M to train a new LLM from scratch is not much of a moat even now we've left the 0 interest period, the question is will people start spending much more on networks in the future. (I'm sure they will spend more, but will there ever be a billion dollar network? idk)
Certainly there are many industries that are impossible to enter with this than 100x that amount of money, either because of regulations or engineering challenges (or both).
I’d assume the each member of the fortune 500 will train their own once they have a plausible use case.
For instance, Domino’s Pizza has been in this space for at least five years. (The idea is to mount a camera on the egress size of conveyor oven, and have the AI grade each pizza in real time.)
Right now, sure. But we are in the exponential upturn right now that will moderate into an S curve where the incremental improvements will slow and you will have a convergence of the large language models.
Using mostly the same data will lead to mostly the same models. At which point, once they leak, what difference does it make how expensive it is to create?
I think there’s a lot of value in having a tailored model trained on data specific to your domain, so self training will be needed for a lot of scenarios. Millions of dollars to train is definitely a higher barrier of entry than say someone writing an app on nights and weekends who just got a bit of seed funding
Raises in brief a lot of on point topics. However, I think the root of the disruption relies on the concept of copying skill. Which is a brand new concept and every effect will be derived from that. Requires new ways of thinking about the impacts.
Any new skill/knowledge can be absorbed by the AI and scaled infinitely. Where will be the incentive for the human investment? We have copyright and other means to protect intellectual property. However, there is no protection for a skill. There has never been a way before to mimic a skill without a high burden of cost which itself was the protection. A partial limiting factor at present is the amount of data required for training the AI models. However, that is likely to be overcome at some point with future advancements.
What's the incentive for AI to share energy resources with humans or even animals? I assume that AI will be driven by selfish ambition and its only interest will be reaching the new heights of its own intelligence.
Yes, that is the big alignment question. Nobody really knows. Opinions differ greatly on this topic, but most have a significant level of concern.
We can't say that AI would necessarily be driven by selfish motives. However, that actually isn't the main concern. It is the fact that we can not perceive the means by which it may execute any task. It is like all the old tales of a genie of the lamp that grants wishes. However, they don't turn out as you expect.
For example, ask the AI to end human conflict. Possible results, kill all humans, then no conflict. Or, create a nano tech mind virus to control all of humanity and force uniform conformity.
Finally, we have no idea how to actually successfully align an AI. Most say it is very difficult. I'm more inclined to say it is actually impossible based on their own premise which is a paradox. I've expanded on that in great detail here in case you are interested - https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-singularity-the-hubris-trap
It'll decimate a lot of the service sector, that is white collar workers, and that includes us; it'll decimate it in the same way industrialisation decimated a lot of blue collar jobs; and control of a centralised AI will give companies and governments incredible power. But comparing it to electricity is crazy.
I just asked ChatGPT the definition of Confidence Interval in Statistics. It wrote a very elegant, authoritative and eloquent, but completely wrong explanation, that interestingly, matches the most common misconception around Confidence Intervals.
Specialist jobs are not in danger yet. However the level of bullshitting will increase to such levels, there is a business opportunity here: One for tools capable of identifying the errors, spit out by these very impressive automatic parrots.
The assumption in your post is that the ‘bullshitting’ won’t/can’t be solved within a few iterations.
Given the decrease of this already in GPT 4, it’s entirely possible that this will be solved soon.
We are still right at the birth of this technology - assuming this technology takes 30 years to fully mature it’s like we are in 1978 trying to predict the iPhone.
Actually - that’s a great example. If you go back to the 40s/50s/60s/70s/80s/90s - you’ll see all sorts of grand predictions about how technology will change our lives. And then 20 years go by with very gradual incremental changes. Anyone working in tech realizes that AI has been a work in progress for a long time, it will continue to make in-roads, but is it really going to put us out of work in the next 5-10 years?
Well we still don't have flying cars or fancy spaceships not to mention immortality other SF predictions so I wouldn't hold my breath for a AGI-like discovery. Should I mention we don't have full self driving either...?
Gradual incremental changes until there is suddenly an explosion of change and adoption, if the PC and Internet are anything to go by.
In my view it will probably change the way we work to a large extent in 10 years, and tech work will probably be entirely different in 30 years, but like you say these are impossible things to know and an intelligent person could entirely disagree.
>The assumption in your post is that the ‘bullshitting’ won’t/can’t be solved within a few iterations.
Because it can't, at least not how chatGPT currently operates.
Is it possible there will be more breakthroughs soon? Sure. But it's also possible that we just made a massive leap and we won't see any major revolutions any time soon
>We are still right at the birth of this technology - assuming this technology takes 30 years to fully mature it’s like we are in 1978 trying to predict the iPhone.
Except we don't know where we are. We might verry well be close to the peak, rather then beginning.
It’s unlikely we are close to the peak IMO - the rate of improvement and discoveries appears to be increasing rather than decreasing, implying that we are still at the start of the curve.
Progress doesn’t usually immediately stop, you would expect it to slowly flatten.
It will absolutely need to be combined with other breakthroughs - but this is already happening. There are architectures in the works that allow AI agents to perform accurate calculations, search the internet, and check knowledge graphs.
Then there is a whole raft of technologies yet to emerge which will embed this into real world work flows, which hasn’t really started happening in a significant way yet (bits and bobs but not to where it will inevitably will be).
I just can’t see a world where there isn’t more progress in these technologies - I don’t know if they will be a ‘good’ thing or not for society as we know it, however with the rate of change at the moment we are unlikely to be anywhere near the destination of where the train goes.
Haven’t those jobs already disappeared though? You’re basically describing the minimal skill set required of someone that uses a search engine at work.
Why would this AI be centralized? You’ll probably be able to run the inference side on your phone soon. Training costs are only mid 7 figures and dropping exponentially.
It will be the first white collar job purge of our generation.
There are so many jobs that now can be easily automated or compressed to a fraction of the workforce needed before. Everyone is a prompt engineer now.
Think goverment / banking / insurrance / big companies
Every workload that is based around consent or rules will be impacted.
Even as a developer my leverage for certain task just went up by a huge margin.
The first, really? What about what happened to accountants when spreadsheets and personal computers came along? Or bank tellers when ATMs started popping up? Or even the monks who copied books when the printing press was invented?
There will always be jobs because humans will always have problems we are willing to throw money at to make go away.
All those professions experienced a massive downturn in staff required, but the jobs remained because the technology wasn't good enough that a potential customer could do the high-end tasks by themselves. We're now getting to the point that they can.
I think we will see a couple very big failures when AIs replace people and then we are back to employing people for many of these roles. I don't see any actual need for AIs in many cases, expert systems could do job better and more accurately. And that has been case for decades.
GPT-4 can barely break the 10th percentile in AP English Literature according to OpenAI. Biological neural networks have a competitive advantage in some areas.
I certainly think that people who use AI will replace people who don't. People that don't use AI won't be able to keep up, and the gap is only going to get wider. I find the claim that AI will replace jobs outright pretty dubious, it's clickbait.
I use ChatGPT (with this plugin https://github.com/dpayne/CodeGPT.nvim) pretty frequently. The output it produces requires a lot of massaging, but it is still faster than doing things from scratch.
With each “improvement” over running a rack of servers in a closet at the office, the fraction of each team I’ve worked in that is dedicated to system administration has increased.
One part time person should be able to easily manage about a dozen physical machines. Good luck getting a part time person to set up a kubernetes cluster, ci pipeline for the containers, implement a bunch of custom operators, and then monitor the result.
If your systems can be run on a rack of servers in a closet at the office by a part-time sysadmin, you're probably better off doing that instead of running said k8s cluster.
If you do need the scale of said k8s cluster, pipelines, operators, observability, on-call engineers etc, you're better off doing that but it does come at a cost.
The vast majority of the jobs are at the small end of the scale. Also, companies tend to just use best practices that were established for larger scale operations.
For instance, in its heyday, the vast majority of Hadoop installations had under ten machines. I suspect the same is true of spark and kubernetes.
Apparently people who use AI will be equally replaced. Just this past week, hundreds of AI projects were made obsolete in a single moment as noted here when Google and Microsoft decided to make AI part of all their tools.
Then, shortly after that, these multi million dollar models were shown to be almost replaceable by a $600 dollar model by leveraging the larger models to train the smaller model.
There are a lot of articles about this. Anecdotally we all used it at my place of work, but once the novelty of it wore off, and it's usefulness sorely lacked, most people have gone back to google. Completely anecdotal as I mentioned, but it's been a long time since I couldn't use chatGPT because it was at capacity.
Maybe they managed to increase their iron, maybe their API's lightened the load, but if this was really as revolutionizing as these articles want it to be, wouldn't the load on the services still be going up?
I'm sure it'll get better, but I'm personally sort of unimpressed by it so far. It's very cool that it can pass interview questions and even university level exams, but that's not actually very useful and something you could already do (much slower) if you were really good on a search engine and had the time to do so. I mean, maybe I just really sucked at getting it to work, and there is the part where the free version is still only offering information that is older than 2021, but it really wasn't very useful for me, and not for a lack of trying. Because I really wanted it to do most of my work. Still do, by the way.
LLMs as they are now won't take over your job, but they are a herald for something in the future that could take your job. We aren't sure yet but the evidence is compelling enough that we need to consider the possibility.
I mean yeah sure it's cool that something can do all your work for you but as your boss, I wouldn't need you then would I? I mean this aspect of economic impact must be considered along with the convenient fact that it makes your job easier.
I also find it hard to see how you're unimpressed? I mean yeah it's not as "impressive" as a human but but it's certainly impressive in terms of progress and potential future progress given such results have never been seen before.
> I mean yeah sure it's cool that something can do all your work for you but as your boss, I wouldn't need you then would I? I mean this aspect of economic impact must be considered along with the convenient fact that it makes your job easier.
Digitalisation is basically replacing manual tasks, so I've frankly been doing it for a decade and a half. I wouldn't mind if the AI could help me write a lot of the boring code and I'm not worried about it replacing me, because even if it makes me more efficient, I've spent 7 years in the public sector seeing how little use "no-code" solutions have been to people who can't tell IT support if their phone runs android or ios.
> I also find it hard to see how you're unimpressed?
The first answer I got from ChatGPT worked, but it used a library that had been deprecated for at least 2 years. Which it then explained by it's data-cutoff point being in 2021. Since then we've put effort into getting it to do things for us, where it's ranged from "well this is a pretty outdated/less efficient way to do that" to "you're outright making stuff up, aren't you?".
I should've screen grapped it, but at one point, trying to get it to do some asp.versioning, it told us to use a conveniently named method on an object. Only it turned out that the method had never existed in any versions of asp.versioning.
Co-pilot has been even less of a success.
I've also used it for fun. I've had some discussions about books that it obviously haven't read. It's very good at pretending that its answers are correct, but it'll absolutely make stuff up. Maybe that gets better as time goes by, but a lying AI is sort of useless. On the flip-side. I'm an external examiner for CS students, and I can get it to pass most programming questions students are given. Simply by entering the exam question into it... Typically it'll give a better answer than most students will, and it'll do it in like 1 minute on the free version. So it's obviously very good at churning out results for questions that have a gazillion answers on the internet and in a much more efficient way than any "old" search engine would. It's just that when it's tasked with doing something that hasn't been done a million times before, then it sort of falls flat.
I still have high hopes, that AI's will help automate a lot of the things we write. We'e seen some use of them for automating documentation, which if they can also maintain it to keep it up-to-date would be a game changer, but on a whole, they are largely unimpressive to me personally. But I'm open to be impressed by the next versions.
Most people who first used electricity thought it as fancy gas lights. And then, at the time computers started showing at home and then the Internet, most people didn't know what it is for.
I think it is safe to say most people have absolutely no idea what this is going to bring or how revolutionary it is going to be.
But I do think that most people will be worse after dust settles.
Most people who first used a Segway thought of it as a fancy scooter. Most people didn't know what it was for.
They had absolutely no idea what it was going to bring or how revolutionary it was going to be. (nothing much, and not)
> But I do think that most people will be worse after dust settles.
There are two sides to this in my opinion. In Denmark we need nurses, teachers, pedagogues and "trades people"/"craftsmen" (I'm sorry but I'm unsure what the world for electricians/plumbers and so on is in English). If AI were to replace a lot of what is essentially looking up rules, copy pasting data from one system to another while auditing, and so on, then we'd actually be capable of building a better society than we have now.
The other side is the distribution of wealth, which is going to be a political question. I'm not too worried about us here in Europe, but maybe that's naive.
> Most people who first used electricity thought it as fancy gas lights.
I've worked with digitalisation for one and a half decade. We even run our own language models for document recognition and classification so our employees don't have to read through 300-1000 page long contracts in different languages.
I have a fair idea what AI is supposed to be, but I'm just not seeing it in the most recent hype wave. Maybe in the next one?
What I find most interesting about chatGPT is that it correctly parses what I tell it. Even if it generates a BS answer from time to time at least it understood what I was after.
That in and of itself is monumental and will surely at the very least change how we interact with computers. It reminds me very much of the Star Trek Ship computer.
"And such an exciting, frightening shift is a "double-edged sword," Chen said, envisioning using AGI to tackle climate change, for example, but also warning that it is a tool that we want to be as "steerable as possible."
Quite revealing as well as ridiculous. We are circling the drain as a species not because of our intelligence but our stupidity, our unwillingness to learn and change. Clever use of transformers to speed up and improve the quality of output of LLMs is not intelligence, and tackling climate change is not the job for models that tell us what they think we want to hear.
>> As such it "exhibits human-level performance" on some benchmarks, the company said.
LLMs have "exhibit[ed] human-level" and even "superhuman" performance on benchmarks, but that doesn't tell us anything about the abilities of those systems because the benchmarks are broken, and we don't even have good metrics.
What Will it Take to Fix Benchmarking in Natural Language Understanding?
69 comments
[ 0.55 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadFor the rest of us, not so much.
If ChatGPT weren't just remixing and regurgitating billions of hours of work by other people, it would be unimpressive.
The printing press: 1. Made information affordable to the masses for the first time in history 2. Radically accelerated science development due to ability to actually distribute research. 3. Enabled large empires governed by bureaucracy (centrally controlled) rather than aristocracy (locally autonomous, such as the mongols). China was a forerunner here because of their paper & printing technology. 4. Broke the information monopoly of the aristocracy-church combination. Made mass democracy (beyond small cities) possible for the first time 5. Caused large wars (the 30 years war), killing millions. The ability to mass print bibles (The source of political and moral truth back then), drastically threatened the existing clergy class, and also enabled the rise of dangerous cults through editing the bible (what we call disinfo today, which also played out).
The immediate economic value of AI is actually rather questionable, because it seems hard to create competitive moats around the tech. But the wider impact and value will be beyond people's imagination.
Certainly there are many industries that are impossible to enter with this than 100x that amount of money, either because of regulations or engineering challenges (or both).
For instance, Domino’s Pizza has been in this space for at least five years. (The idea is to mount a camera on the egress size of conveyor oven, and have the AI grade each pizza in real time.)
Using mostly the same data will lead to mostly the same models. At which point, once they leak, what difference does it make how expensive it is to create?
Any new skill/knowledge can be absorbed by the AI and scaled infinitely. Where will be the incentive for the human investment? We have copyright and other means to protect intellectual property. However, there is no protection for a skill. There has never been a way before to mimic a skill without a high burden of cost which itself was the protection. A partial limiting factor at present is the amount of data required for training the AI models. However, that is likely to be overcome at some point with future advancements.
from - https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things
We can't say that AI would necessarily be driven by selfish motives. However, that actually isn't the main concern. It is the fact that we can not perceive the means by which it may execute any task. It is like all the old tales of a genie of the lamp that grants wishes. However, they don't turn out as you expect.
For example, ask the AI to end human conflict. Possible results, kill all humans, then no conflict. Or, create a nano tech mind virus to control all of humanity and force uniform conformity.
Finally, we have no idea how to actually successfully align an AI. Most say it is very difficult. I'm more inclined to say it is actually impossible based on their own premise which is a paradox. I've expanded on that in great detail here in case you are interested - https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-singularity-the-hubris-trap
Specialist jobs are not in danger yet. However the level of bullshitting will increase to such levels, there is a business opportunity here: One for tools capable of identifying the errors, spit out by these very impressive automatic parrots.
Given the decrease of this already in GPT 4, it’s entirely possible that this will be solved soon.
We are still right at the birth of this technology - assuming this technology takes 30 years to fully mature it’s like we are in 1978 trying to predict the iPhone.
In my view it will probably change the way we work to a large extent in 10 years, and tech work will probably be entirely different in 30 years, but like you say these are impossible things to know and an intelligent person could entirely disagree.
Because it can't, at least not how chatGPT currently operates. Is it possible there will be more breakthroughs soon? Sure. But it's also possible that we just made a massive leap and we won't see any major revolutions any time soon
>We are still right at the birth of this technology - assuming this technology takes 30 years to fully mature it’s like we are in 1978 trying to predict the iPhone.
Except we don't know where we are. We might verry well be close to the peak, rather then beginning.
Progress doesn’t usually immediately stop, you would expect it to slowly flatten.
It will absolutely need to be combined with other breakthroughs - but this is already happening. There are architectures in the works that allow AI agents to perform accurate calculations, search the internet, and check knowledge graphs.
Then there is a whole raft of technologies yet to emerge which will embed this into real world work flows, which hasn’t really started happening in a significant way yet (bits and bobs but not to where it will inevitably will be).
I just can’t see a world where there isn’t more progress in these technologies - I don’t know if they will be a ‘good’ thing or not for society as we know it, however with the rate of change at the moment we are unlikely to be anywhere near the destination of where the train goes.
You'll still need experts to check the output. But this will be their job--checking, refining, regenerating--rather than creating.
And jobs underneath that level will disappear.
Think goverment / banking / insurrance / big companies
Every workload that is based around consent or rules will be impacted.
Even as a developer my leverage for certain task just went up by a huge margin.
There will always be jobs because humans will always have problems we are willing to throw money at to make go away.
What experience of your contradicts that?
One part time person should be able to easily manage about a dozen physical machines. Good luck getting a part time person to set up a kubernetes cluster, ci pipeline for the containers, implement a bunch of custom operators, and then monitor the result.
If your systems can be run on a rack of servers in a closet at the office by a part-time sysadmin, you're probably better off doing that instead of running said k8s cluster.
If you do need the scale of said k8s cluster, pipelines, operators, observability, on-call engineers etc, you're better off doing that but it does come at a cost.
For instance, in its heyday, the vast majority of Hadoop installations had under ten machines. I suspect the same is true of spark and kubernetes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DH-2BHDYNfk
Then, shortly after that, these multi million dollar models were shown to be almost replaceable by a $600 dollar model by leveraging the larger models to train the smaller model.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xslW5sQOkC8
It is going to be total bedlam with the disruptors disrupting the disruptors in faster and faster cycles.
Maybe they managed to increase their iron, maybe their API's lightened the load, but if this was really as revolutionizing as these articles want it to be, wouldn't the load on the services still be going up?
I'm sure it'll get better, but I'm personally sort of unimpressed by it so far. It's very cool that it can pass interview questions and even university level exams, but that's not actually very useful and something you could already do (much slower) if you were really good on a search engine and had the time to do so. I mean, maybe I just really sucked at getting it to work, and there is the part where the free version is still only offering information that is older than 2021, but it really wasn't very useful for me, and not for a lack of trying. Because I really wanted it to do most of my work. Still do, by the way.
I mean yeah sure it's cool that something can do all your work for you but as your boss, I wouldn't need you then would I? I mean this aspect of economic impact must be considered along with the convenient fact that it makes your job easier.
I also find it hard to see how you're unimpressed? I mean yeah it's not as "impressive" as a human but but it's certainly impressive in terms of progress and potential future progress given such results have never been seen before.
Digitalisation is basically replacing manual tasks, so I've frankly been doing it for a decade and a half. I wouldn't mind if the AI could help me write a lot of the boring code and I'm not worried about it replacing me, because even if it makes me more efficient, I've spent 7 years in the public sector seeing how little use "no-code" solutions have been to people who can't tell IT support if their phone runs android or ios.
> I also find it hard to see how you're unimpressed?
The first answer I got from ChatGPT worked, but it used a library that had been deprecated for at least 2 years. Which it then explained by it's data-cutoff point being in 2021. Since then we've put effort into getting it to do things for us, where it's ranged from "well this is a pretty outdated/less efficient way to do that" to "you're outright making stuff up, aren't you?".
I should've screen grapped it, but at one point, trying to get it to do some asp.versioning, it told us to use a conveniently named method on an object. Only it turned out that the method had never existed in any versions of asp.versioning.
Co-pilot has been even less of a success.
I've also used it for fun. I've had some discussions about books that it obviously haven't read. It's very good at pretending that its answers are correct, but it'll absolutely make stuff up. Maybe that gets better as time goes by, but a lying AI is sort of useless. On the flip-side. I'm an external examiner for CS students, and I can get it to pass most programming questions students are given. Simply by entering the exam question into it... Typically it'll give a better answer than most students will, and it'll do it in like 1 minute on the free version. So it's obviously very good at churning out results for questions that have a gazillion answers on the internet and in a much more efficient way than any "old" search engine would. It's just that when it's tasked with doing something that hasn't been done a million times before, then it sort of falls flat.
I still have high hopes, that AI's will help automate a lot of the things we write. We'e seen some use of them for automating documentation, which if they can also maintain it to keep it up-to-date would be a game changer, but on a whole, they are largely unimpressive to me personally. But I'm open to be impressed by the next versions.
I think it is safe to say most people have absolutely no idea what this is going to bring or how revolutionary it is going to be.
But I do think that most people will be worse after dust settles.
There are two sides to this in my opinion. In Denmark we need nurses, teachers, pedagogues and "trades people"/"craftsmen" (I'm sorry but I'm unsure what the world for electricians/plumbers and so on is in English). If AI were to replace a lot of what is essentially looking up rules, copy pasting data from one system to another while auditing, and so on, then we'd actually be capable of building a better society than we have now.
The other side is the distribution of wealth, which is going to be a political question. I'm not too worried about us here in Europe, but maybe that's naive.
> Most people who first used electricity thought it as fancy gas lights.
I've worked with digitalisation for one and a half decade. We even run our own language models for document recognition and classification so our employees don't have to read through 300-1000 page long contracts in different languages.
I have a fair idea what AI is supposed to be, but I'm just not seeing it in the most recent hype wave. Maybe in the next one?
I personally have been using it for how do I do this in X, and why is X producing Y error.
Or could not.
That in and of itself is monumental and will surely at the very least change how we interact with computers. It reminds me very much of the Star Trek Ship computer.
Quite revealing as well as ridiculous. We are circling the drain as a species not because of our intelligence but our stupidity, our unwillingness to learn and change. Clever use of transformers to speed up and improve the quality of output of LLMs is not intelligence, and tackling climate change is not the job for models that tell us what they think we want to hear.
But it might not either
Humanoid robots could one day rule the world
LLMs have "exhibit[ed] human-level" and even "superhuman" performance on benchmarks, but that doesn't tell us anything about the abilities of those systems because the benchmarks are broken, and we don't even have good metrics.
What Will it Take to Fix Benchmarking in Natural Language Understanding?
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.385/