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homezlice t1_iyecje0 wrote

it's so odd to me that folks here think the singularity is some event in the future, and not something we are in the middle of right now. Even experts can't predict what will be seen in many fields 6 months from now - why would the singularity be something that happens in an afternoon, and not over decades? GPT-3 can write songs that rhyme and tell stories, feature just came out in the last week - and if you had asked me this Spring I would have said that was years away.

A singularity is something we can't see beyond - and we're there.

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Cryptizard t1_iyegrs7 wrote

>Even experts can't predict what will be seen in many fields 6 months from now

Example of this? I'm pretty sure the folks at OpenAI know what is coming in 6 months.

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homezlice t1_iyehyx9 wrote

no, they really don't know how powerful future LLMs will be in solving certain types of problems. Yes, they know how they plan on training and tweaking these models, but they don't know the exact moment say the Turning test will become trivial to pass for a LLM. Is it GPT4? GPT6? OpenAI also don't know how new techniques and processes and technologies will impact the future iterations of the software. Or how allowing AI to tune and improve these models will be effective or not.

But my point really was more about, say, a scientific field, which is announcing new AI-based discoveries every day. There are so many teams working with so many technologies it would be impossible to say with certainty when the next breakthrough will happen.

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Cryptizard t1_iyerlq1 wrote

>There are so many teams working with so many technologies it would be impossible to say with certainty when the next breakthrough will happen.

I don't see how that is different from any time in the last 100 years though. Nobody predicted the lightbulb before it happened. Or the telephone. Or, like, anything big that was invented. It only seems different because you are living now and you weren't living then.

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homezlice t1_iyeu8j5 wrote

There were actually 23 patents for the light bulb that Edison bought up before he developed the carbon filament. So lots of people were working on it

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Cryptizard t1_iyeyfam wrote

Just like lots of people are working on AI.

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homezlice t1_iyf47md wrote

yep, exactly - but my point is, for instance, everyone thinks that AGI is a few years off...maybe a decade. But maybe it's actually 4 months off. It wouldn't surprise me. Same thing with neural linkage to human brains - maybe someone is working on some nanotech that changes the game within a year or two. Or maybe some other tech is about to be unleashed that will make all this irrelevant.

Electric light is actually a great example of people working for many years to make something happen at a pretty slow pace (also, you needed AC power networks to make it practical for use in home in biz). But the number of folks working on it, based on patents anyhow, was somewhere in the hundreds or thousands. With AI we have hundreds of thousands of folks worldwide working with neural networks, and the lid is just starting to blow off.

back to my original point - we're already in the rapid change, and it will go on likely for as long as people are still around

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