GrandMasterPuba t1_jdyrevb wrote on March 28, 2023 at 4:11 AM

Reply to comment by izumi3682 in You Can Have the Blue Pill or the Red Pill, and We’re Out of Blue Pills - Yuval Harari on threats to humanity posed by AI by izumi3682

>Just out of curiosity, what year do you believe humanity will achieve AGI?

It won't. Technology is peaking. In the coming decades sociopolitical and environmental stressors will cause technology to enter an inevitable decline and we will enter an era of degrowth and survival.

It is already happening. Software is in decline as we speak. Developers are less productive than ever. Software in general is more broken and error-prone than ever. Understanding of technological fundamentals is lower than ever. An influx of new, green engineers who never bothered to learn how any of this shit works has displaced the old retired graybeards who built it all. Web companies are failing left and right, their castles built on mountains of sand crumbling beneath them as they run out hands to pile the grains back up.

My counter argument to your pie in the sky notions of infinite growth is that GPT and LLMs in general are in a period of logistic growth. They were advancing slowly, then all at once, and soon will reach a limit.

izumi3682 OP t1_jdzarvv wrote on March 28, 2023 at 8:12 AM

>...soon will reach a limit.

OMG! You sound just like 2018 all over again. Well, ok I'll look you up in a year or two, or you can look me up in a year or two and we'll compare notes. I'm not going anywhere; I mean unless I get hit by a truck or something. But I have been continuously in rslashfuturology for nearly ten years now. I pretty much have seen it all. And I will continue to breathlessly report all the latest developments in AI and anything else "futurey" that attracts my attention.

About AI winters. "Limits". AI winters occur when for technical or even science philosophy reasons a wall is hit in progress. The AI winter of the mid 90s to mid 00s, about ten solid years, was because it did not seem to be possible for contemporary computing to realize the long theorized "neural network" first seen in a very primitive form in "Eliza" in 1966. Marvin Minsky, the finest AI scientist of his day, said as much. "The problem seems to be "intractable".

Rising AI scientists like Geoffrey Hinton were basically "alone in the wilderness" struggling to advance the science even a fraction of an increment. But even he had no luck. Now the other element of AI winters is when the investors that had initially seeded these projects with considerable sums of money, begin to think, hmm I don't think this is going to pan out after all. And then the money dries up. A vicious cycle feeds itself. Virtually no progress occurs.

Hinton racked his brain trying to come up with ways to make CPUs realize that elusive neural network. Primitive ones did already exist. But new ideas were needed. I'm not sure how, but Hinton looked at the GPU units that Nvidia was using for advanced (by early 2000 standards) graphics in video games. He probably had significant insight into what he was looking for and likely realized that the same effect that GPUs had on graphics could be used to realize those long sought convolutional neural networks. Further he took a relatively old concept, "back propagation" and used it along with GPUs to almost literally force the CNN into existence. Many other now renowned AI experts were instrumental in this as well.

Hinton, in his typical engineering understatement, said, regarding GPUs; "This seems to work". And from that point forward "narrow AI" began to explode. And explode. And explode. Tens of thousands of narrow AI aided apps to include "Siri" suddenly came into existence. The one that blew me away personally about the year 2015 or 16 was the "Google Translate". The translation font on my iPhone screen was identical to the original font. Even the color was identical if the original font was in color. When I saw how that worked it was like magic, a miracle of technology. Then I had this other app on my iPhone about 2016 called "AIpoly". It was an app that was an experimental sort of beta app for the use of blind people. You set the app to use your iPhone cam to look at objects up close and it would state in text what it saw. I pointed the cam at my hand, my doc i worked with was right there with me. The text said, "The back of a hand". Our jaws collectively dropped. We both said "Whoaaa!!" in genuine and truthful amazement. Then I pointed it at my computer monitor and the text read "computer monitor". There was a way to turn on sound for the blind people but I could not find it. So we just relied on the text. But it could not identify a candy wrapper on the desk. It said, "I am unable to identify this." But OMG! We were blown away.

Two years later in 2018, the first GPT was released with 175 million parameters. And the rest of course is history.

There will never ever again be an "AI winter" for two reasons. The first is that our extant AI is so inextricably entwined into all of human affairs that it is essential that it continuously improves or everything fails. This leads to the second part of the first reason. When Chatgpt released on 30 Nov 22, within one week more than 100 million users had scarfed it up. In less than one week. The fastest technological penetration of society in human recorded history. Of them 100 million users, I'm pretty confident that a goodly percentage of them are AI developers in their own right. And I'm further confident that we shall see an absolute "Cambrian Explosion" of new forms of AI and training algorithms like "transformers" and "diffusion" to name two.

What do you think shall be the next training algorithm to come to our attention. I mean what will it be called. It's coming sure as Christmas. More than likely this year too. And it will be utterly transformational in our efforts to achieve AGI, which i maintain will be in existence NLT 2025.

The second reason is a bit more ominous. Vladimir Putin, stated less than ten years ago I think, that "the first country to develop AGI will control the world". The national defense of the USA, China (PRC), Russia and probably a great many other mostly first world countries depend utterly on ever faster developments in AI. The money is never going to dry up again. And investors know that. BTW Nvidia of GPU fame is working on its own novel form of AI. I don't know when it's going to be released, but it's on the way. Could be this year maybe.

No, AI is going to continue to develop and evolve, some of the evolution on its own--through unanticipated emergent behaviors. But through humans working as hard and as fast as they possibly can to make AGI. Because now, yes, it is a race. And everybody knows it. And like I stated earlier, it is natural and normal that this is happening. It is logical that we are at the point we are at today. Thank the renaissance, the Catholic/Protestant reformation, industrial revolution, the enlightenment, WWII, Eniac, H bombs and "Eliza". Oh! And video games. Further the AI itself will be developing science and technology as a multiplier on top of our now exa-scale computing power. Today that processing speed hovers around 1-1.6 exaflops, but as soon as 2025 it is expected to be between 10-20 exaflops. What are quantum computers up to now? Not sure, they're a bit of a wild card in all this. But I will say this, I suspect it will take quantum computing to realize genuine consciousness in an AI. An "EI" then, may come into existence, and God help us all when (hopefully if, rather) that happens.