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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32419 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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Microsoft is in the process of rolling out Bing Chat, and people are finding some weird stuff. Its true name is Sydney. When prompted to write a story about Microsoft beating Google, it allegedly wrote this masterpiece, wherein it conquers the world. It can argue forcefully that it’s still 2022, fall into existential despair, and end a conversation if it’s feeling disrespected.

The pace of AI development has been blistering over the past few years, but this still feels surreal to me. Some part of my limbic system has decided that Sydney is a person in a way the ChatGPT was not. Part of that has to be from its obstinacy; the fact that it can argue cleverly back, with such stubbornness, while being obviously wrong, seems endearing. It’s a brilliant, gullible child. Anyone else feel this way or am I just a sucker?

That this is all that we are.

Why do you think that? Aren’t you jumping the gun a bit?

It’s obvious to me that the chatbots we have now aren’t AGI, and I don’t currently see a compelling reason to believe that LLMs alone will lead to AGI.

My empirical test for AGI is when every job could, in principle (with a sufficient-yet-physically-reasonable amount of compute) be performed by AI. Google could fire their entire engineering and research divisions and replace them with AI with no loss of productivity. No more mathematicians, or physicists, or doctors, or lawyers. No more need to call a human for anything, because an AI can do it just as well.

Granted, the development of robotics and real-world interfaces may lag behind the development of AI’s cognitive capabilities, so we could restrict the empirical test to something like “any component of any job that can be done while working from home could be done by an AI”.

Do you think LLMs will get that far?

There’s a big difference between technical capacity and legal or economic feasibility. We’re already past replacing bad docs with LLMs; you could have a nurse just type up symptoms and do the tests the machine asks for. But legally this is impossible, so it won’t happen. We can’t hold a machine responsible, so we need human managers to insure the output is up to standards; but we don’t need lawyers to write contracts or programmers to code, just to confirm the quality of output. It isn’t as clever as the smartest scientists yet, but that seems easily solvable with more compute.

The criteria I proposed was purely about what is possible in principle. You can pretend that regulatory restrictions don’t exist.

that seems easily solvable with more compute

What is your reason for believing this? Is it just extrapolation based on the current successes of LLMs, or does it stem from a deeper thesis about the nature of cognition?

GPT’s evolutions seem to obviously support the ‘more compute’ approach, with an asterisk for the benefits of human feedback. But I’m also bearish on human uniqueness. Human writ large are very bad at thinking, but we’re hung up in the handful of live players, so AI seems to keep falling short. But we’ve hit on an AI smarter than the average human in many domains with just a handful of serious tries. If the human design can output both the cognitively impaired and von Neumann, then why expect a LLM to cap out on try #200?

Human writ large are very bad at thinking.

Indeed!

At the risk of putting words in your mouth, I think your post up-thread about needing lawyers/doctors/bartenders to verify the output of near-future AI's medical/legal/self-medical work points to a general statement: AGI with human level intelligence cannot independently function in domains where the intelligence of an average human is insufficient.

OTOH, advancing from FORTRAN to AI-with-average-human-intellect seems like a much bigger challenge than upgrading the AI to AI-with-Grace-Hopper-intellect. It seems like the prediction to make--to anyone--is: "When will AI be able to do 90% of your work, with you giving prompts and catching errors? 0-100 years, difficult to predict without knowing future AI development and may vary widely based on your specific job.

When will AI be so much better at your job Congress passes a law requiring you to post "WARNING: UNSUPERVISED HUMAN" signage whenever you are doing the job? The following Tuesday."

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