But it’s not scary. It’s… marvelous, cringey, uncomfortable, awe-inspiring. What’s scary is not what AI can currently do, but what we expect from it. Can it do math yet? Can it play chess? Can it write entire apps from scratch? Can it just do my entire job for me?

We’re moving toward a world where every job will be modeled, and you’ll either be an AI owner, a model architect, an agent/hardware engineer, a technician, or just.. training data.

After an OpenAI launch, I think it's important to take one's feelings about the future impact of the technology with a HUGE grain of salt. OpenAI are masters of hype. They have been generating hype for years now, yet the real-world impacts remain modest so far.

Do you remember when they teased GPT-2 as "too dangerous" for public access? I do. Yet we now have Llama 3 in the wild, which even at the smaller 8B size is about as powerful as the [edit: 6/13/23] GPT-4 release.

As someone pointed out elsewhere in the comments, a logistic curve looks exponential in the beginning, before it approaches saturation. Yet, logistic curves are more common, especially in ML. I think it's interesting that GPT-4o doesn't show much of an improvement in "reasoning" strength.

It's glib to dismiss safety concerns because we haven't all turned into paperclips yet. LLMs and image gen models are having real effects now.

We're already at a point where AI can generate text and images that will fool a lot of people a lot of the time. For every college-educated young person smugly pointing out that they aren't fooled by an image with six-fingered hands, there are far more people who had marginal media literacy to begin with and are now almost defenceless against a tidal wave of hyper-scaleable deception.

We're already at a point where we're counselling elders to ignore late-night messages from people claiming to be a relative in need of an urgent wire transfer. What defences do we have when an LLM will be able to have a completely fluent, natural-sounding conversation in someone else's voice? I'm not confident that I'd be able to distinguish GPT-4o from a human speaker in the best of circumstances and I'm almost certain that I could be fooled if I'm hurried, distracted, sleep deprived or otherwise impaired.

Regardless of any future impacts on the labour market or any hypothesised X-risks, I think we should be very worried about the immediate risks to trust and social cohesion. An awful lot of people are turning into paranoid weirdos at the moment and I don't particularly blame them, but I can see things getting seriously ugly if we can't abate that trend.

Set a memorable verification phrase with your friends and loved ones. That way if you call them out of the blue or from some strange number (and they actually pick up for some reason) and you tell them you need $300 to get you out of trouble they can ask you to say the phrase and they'll know it's you if you respond appropriately.

I've already done that and I'm far less worried about AI fooling me or my family in a scam than I am about corporations and governments using it without caring about the impact of the inevitable mistakes and hallucinations. AI is already being used by judges to decide how long people should go to jail. Parole boards are using it to decide who to keep locked up. Governments are using it to decide which people/buildings to bomb. Insurance companies are using to deny critical health coverage to people. Police are using it to decide who to target and even to write their reports for them.

More and more people are going to get badly screwed over, lose their freedom, or lose their lives because of AI. It'll save time/money for people with more money and power than you or I will ever have though, so there's no fighting it.

1. something you have

2. something you know

3. something you are

These three things are required for any authz.

As technology advances those proportions will be boosted. Seems inevitable.

Alternatively while it may be difficult to trick you directly, phishing the passphrase from a more naive loved one or bored coworker and then parroting it back to you is also a possibility. 'etc.

Phone scams are no joke and this is getting past the point where regular people can be expected to easily filter them out.

We went from living in villages where everyone knew each other to living in big cities where almost everyone is a stranger.

We went from photos being relatively reliable evidence to digital photography where anyone can fake almost anything and even the line between faking and improving is blurred.

We went from mass distribution of media being a massive capital expenditure that only big publishers could afford to something that is free and anonymous for everyone.

We went from a tiny number of people in close proximity being able to initiate a conversation with us to being reachable for everyone who could dial a phone number or send an email message.

Each of these transitions caused big problems. None of these problems have ever been completely solved. But each time we found mitigations that limit the impact of any misuse.

I see the current AI wave as yet another step away from trusting superficial appearances to a world that requires more formal authentication protocols.

Passports were introduced long ago but never properly transitioned into the digital world. Using some unsigned PDF allegedly representing a utility bill as proof of address seems questionable as well. And the way in which social security numbers are used for authentication in the US is nothing short of bizarre.

So I think there are some very low hanging fruits in terms of authentication and digital signatures. We have all the tools to deal with the trust issues caused by generative AI. We just have to use them.

So the question, I think, is how do we reclaim trust in a world where every kind of content can be convincingly faked? And I think the answer is by rebuilding trust between users such that we actually have reason to simply trust the users we're interacting with aren't lying to us (and that also goes for building trust in the platforms we use). In my mind, that means a shift to small federated and P2P communication since both of these enable both the users and the operators to build the network around existing real-world relationships. A federation network can still grow large, but it can do so through those relationships rather than giving institutional bad actors as easy of an entrance as anyone else.

Isn't it rather brilliant that you can just ask questions of competent people in some subreddit without first becoming part of that particular social circle?

It could also reintroduce geographical exclusion based on the rather arbitrary birth lottery.

The best we can ever hope to do is find mitigations as and when problems arise.

That's massive fast change, and we haven't culturally caught up to any of it yet.

This happened from the 15th century onward. By the 19th century more than half of the UK population could read and write.

> it'd have to be impacting the real world

By writing business plans? Getting lawyers punished because they didn't realise that "passes bar exam" isn't the same as "can be relied on for citations"? By defrauding people with synthesised conversations using stolen voices? By automating and personalising propaganda?

Or does it only count when it's guiding a robot that's not merely a tech demo?

Edit: Also this doesn't mean less medea, just less actual humans getting paid to make medea or work adjacent jobs

Maybe it's time to construct some (high[er] density) housing where people want to live? No? Okay, then maybe next decade ... but then let's construct transport for them so they can get to work, how about some new subway lines? Ah, okay, not that either.

Then I guess the only thing remains to construct is all the factories that will be built as companies decouple from China.

Apparently so: https://www.businessinsider.com/jobs-lost-in-may-because-of-...

Note that this article is about a year old now.

> Comparing it to the internet is insane, based off of its status as a highly advanced auto complete.

(1) I was quoting you.

(2) Don't you get some cognitive dissonance dismissing it in those terms, at this point?

"Fancy auto complete" was valid for half the models before InstructGPT, as that's all the early models were even trying to be… but now? The phrase doesn't fit so well when it's multimodal and can describe what it's seeing or hearing and create new images and respond with speech, all as a single unified model, any more than dismissing a bee brain as "just chemistry" or a human as "just an animal".

Replacing all jobs except LLM developers? I’ll tell my hairdresser

Maybe they didn't know, maybe none of their colleagues used it, their company didn't pay for it, or maybe all they need is an Excel update.

But I am confident that using Copilot would be faster than clicking through the sludge that are Microsoft Office help pages (third party or not.)

So I think it is correct to fear capabilities, even if the real world impace is still missing. When you invent an airplane, there won't be an airstrip to land on yet. Is it useless, won't it change anything?

It's still early, and I don't see much in corporate communications, for instance, but it will be quite the change.

It's worse than I thought. They've already managed to mimick the median HN user perfectly!

I fear that at some point the anonymity that made the internet great in the first place will be destroyed by this.

The dead internet theory started to look more real with time, AI spam is just scaling it up.

I guess we need to have an AI secretary to take in all phonecalls from now on (spam folder will become a lot more interesting with celebrity phone calls, your dead relative phoning you etc)

As someone that grew up with late-90’s internet culture and has seen all the pros and cons and changes over the decades, I find myself using the internet less and less for dialogue with people. And I’m spending more time in nature and saying hi to strangers in reality.

I’m still worries about the impact this will have on a lot of people’s ability to reason however. “Just” Tik Tok and apps like it has already had devastating results on certain demographics.

It's hard to know what to believe if you get a phone call with the voice of your child or colleague, and your "child"/"colleague" replies within milliseconds in a convincing way.

I think unfortunately it will massively lower the trust of actual real videos and images, because someone can dismiss them with little thought.

And that's the case even if you've never ever posted anything on your social media - it could be family&friends, or employer, or if you're ever been in a public-facing job position that has ever done any community outreach, or ever done a public performance with your music or another hobby, or if you've ever walked past a news crew asking questions to bystanders of some event, or if you've ever participated in some contests or competitions or sports leagues, etc, all of that is generally findable in various archives.

I'm sure AI-based ageing can do a good enough job to convince many people that a fake image of someone they haven't seen for years is an older version of the person they remember; but how often would it succeed in ageing an old photo in such a way that it looks like a person I have seen recently and therefore have knowledge rather than guesses about exactly what the years have changed about them?

(Not a rhetorical question to disagree with you, I genuinely have no idea if ageing is predictable enough for a high % result or if it would only fool people with poor visual memory and/or who haven't seen the person in over a decade.)

I feel like even ignoring the big unknowns (at what age, if any, will a person start going bald, or choose to grow a beard or to die their hair, or get a scar on their face, etc.) there must be a lot of more subtle but still important aspects from skin tone to makeup style to hair to...

I've looked up photos of some school classmates that I haven't seen since we were teens (a couple of decades ago), and while nearly all of them I think "ah yes I can still recognise them", I don't feel I would have accurately guessed how they would look now from my memories of how they used to look. Even looking at old photos of family members I see regularly still to this day, even for example comparing old photos of me and old photos of my siblings, it's surprising how hard it would be for a human to predict the exact course of ageing - and my instinct is that this is more down to randomness that can't be predicted than down to precise logic that an AI could learn to predict rather than guess at. But I could be wrong.

Why not an AI assistant in the browser to fend all the adversarial manipulation and spam AIs on the web? Going online without your AI assistant would be like venturing without a mask during COVID

I foresee a cat-and-mouse game, AIs for manipulation vs AIs for protection one upping each other. It will be like immune system vs viruses.

This is my biggest gripe against the telecom industry. Calls pretending to be from someone else.

For every single call, someone somewhere must know at least the next link in the chain to connect a call. Keep following the chain until you find someone who either through malice or by looking the other way allows someone to spoof someone else's number AND remove their ability to send the current link in the chain (or anyone) messages. (Ideally also send them to prison if they are in the same country.) It shouldn't be that hard, right?

The technology to build trustable caller ID has existed for a long time, the problem is no one wants to be the one forcing telcos all over the world to upgrade their sometimes many decades old systems.

Discovering an asteroid full of gold, with as much gold as half the earth to put a modest number, would have huge impact to the labour market. Anything conductive like copper, silver, mining jobs would all go away. Also housing would be obsolete as we would all live in golden houses. A huge impact to the housing market, yet it doesn't seem such a bad thing to me.

>We're already at a point where we're counselling elders to ignore late-night messages from people claiming to be a relative in need of an urgent wire transfer.

Anyone can prove their identity, or identities, over the wire, wire-fully or wire-lessly, anything you like. When i did go to university, i was the only one attending the cryptography class, no one else showed up for a boring class like this. I wrote a story about the Electrona Corp in my blog.

What i say to people for at least 2 years now, is that "Remember when governments were not just some cryptographic algorithms?" Yeah, that's gonna change. Cryptography is here to stay, it is not as dead as people think and it's gonna make a huge blast.

All this would do is crash the gold price. Also note that all the gold at our disposal right now (worldwide) basically fits into a cube with 20m edges (its not as much as you might think).

Gold is not suitable to replace steel as building material (because it has much lower strength and hardness), nor copper/aluminium as conductor (it's a worse conductor than copper and much worse in conductivity/weigth than aluminium). The main technical application short term would be gold plated electrical contacts on every plug and little else...

I didn't know that copper is a better conductor than gold. Surprised by that.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2Gd8CRG0cc

The thing about cryptography and government is that it's easy to imagine for a great technology to be adapted on the governmental level because of its greatness. But it is another thing to actually implement it. We live in a bubble, where almost anyone knows about cryptographic hashes and RSA, but for most of the people it is not the case.

Another thing is that political actors are tending to try to concentrate power in their own hands. No way they will delegate a decision making to any form of algorithm — being cryptographic or not.

As soon as this becomes a problem, then it might start bottom-up, citizens to government officials, rather than top to bottom, from president to government departments. Then governments will be forced to formalize identity solutions based on cryptography. See also this case in Germany [2].

One example like that, is bankruptcy laws in China. China didn't have any law regarding to bankruptcy till 2007. For a communist country, or rather not totally capitalist country like China, bankruptcy is not an important subject. When some people stop being profitable, they will keep working because they like to work and they contribute to the great nation of China. That doesn't make any sense of course, so their government was forced to implement some bankruptcy laws.

[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/fraudsters-use-ai-to-mimic-ceos... [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39866056

I don't think anyone has a good answer to that question, which is the problem in a nutshell. Job one is to start investing seriously in finding possible answers.

>We need to roll back to "don't trust anything online, don't share your identity or payment information online"

That's easy to say, but it's a trillion-dollar decision. Alphabet and Meta are both worthless in that scenario, because ~all of their revenue comes from connecting unfamiliar sellers with buyers. Amazon is at existential risk. The collapse of Alibaba would have a devastating impact on Chinese exporters, with massive consequent geopolitical risks. Rolling back to the internet of old means rolling back on many years worth of productivity and GDP growth.

Well that's exactly the sort of service that will be extremely valuable in a post-trust internet. They can develop authentication solutions that cut down on fraud at the cost of anonymity.

This tech is dangerous, and I'm currently of the opinion that its uses for malicious purposes are far better and more significant than LLM's replacing anyone's jobs. The bullshit asymmetry principle is very incredibly significant for covert ops and asymmetric warfare, and generating convincing misinformation has become basically free overnight.

The nature of this tech itself is probably what is getting most people - it looks, sounds and feels _human_ - it's very relatable and easy for a non-tech person to understand it and thus get creeped out. I'd argue there are _far_ more dangerous technologies out there, but no one notices and / or cares because they don't understand the tech in the first place!

The "yet" is carrying a lot of weight in that statement. It is now five years since the launch of GPT-2, three years since the launch of GPT-3 and less than 18 months since the launch of ChatGPT. I cannot think of any technology that has improved so much in such a short space of time.

We might hit an inflection point and see that rate of improvement stall, but we might not; we're not really sure where that point might lie, because there's likely to still be a reasonable amount of low-hanging fruit regarding algorithmic and hardware efficiency. If OpenAI and their peers can maintain a reasonable rate of improvement for just a few more years, then we're looking at a truly transformational technology, something like the internet that will have vast repercussions that we can't begin to predict.

The whole LLM thing might be a nothingburger, but how much are we willing to gamble on that outcome?

I second that. I remember when Google search first came out. Within a few days it completely changed my workflow, how I use the Internet, my reading habits. It easily 5 ~ 10x the value of Internet for me over a couple of weeks.

LLMs is doing nothing of the sort for me.

That's not to say it won't have more significant impact in the future; I wouldn't know. But so far, I've yet to see the hype get realised.

ChatGPT does this again for me. I am routinely getting zero useful results on the first page or two of Google searches, but AI is answering or giving me guidance quickly.

Maybe this would not seem such an improvement if Google's results were like they were 10 years ago and not barely usable blogspam

To me, this just sounds like Google Search has become shit, and since Google simply isn't going to give up the precious ad $$$ that the current format is generating, the next best thing is ChatGPT. But this is different from saying that ChatGPT is a similar step up like Search was.

For what it's worth, I agree with you that Google Search has become unusable. Google basically destroyed it's best product (for users), by turning it into an ad riddles shovelware cesspit.

That ChatGPT is similarly good like Google Search used to be, is a tragedy. Basically we had a conceptually simple product that functioned very well, and we are replacing it with a significantly more complex product.

The cool kids in those days used Metacrawler, which meta searched all the search engines.

Metasearch only helps recall. It won't help precision, the metasearch still needs to rank the aggregate results.

Perhaps.

> Do you remember when they teased GPT-2 as "too dangerous" for public access? I do. Yet we now have Llama 3 in the wild, which even at the smaller 8B size is about as powerful as the [edit: 6/13/23] GPT-4 release.

The statement was rather more prosaic and less surprising; are you sure it's OpenAI (rather than say all the AI fans and the press) who are hyping?

"""This decision, as well as our discussion of it, is an experiment: while we are not sure that it is the right decision today, we believe that the AI community will eventually need to tackle the issue of publication norms in a thoughtful way in certain research areas.

…

We are aware that some researchers have the technical capacity to reproduce and open source our results. We believe our release strategy limits the initial set of organizations who may choose to do this, and gives the AI community more time to have a discussion about the implications of such systems."""

I disagree here also: the company has openly acknowledged that this is a risk to be avoided with regards to safety related legislation, what they've called for looks a lot more like "we don't want a prisoner's dilemma that drives everyone to go fast at the expense of safety" rather than "we're good everyone else is bad".

People read too many sci-fi books and then project their fantasies on to real-world technologies. This stuff is incredibly powerful and will have social effects, but it’s not going to replace every single job by next year.

Now we have devs asking AI to generate regex formulas and pasting it into code without much concern on its validity.

I can't help but notice the huge amount of hindsight and bad faith that it demonstrated here. Yes, now we are aware that the internet did not drown in a flood of bullshit (well, not noticeably more), when GPT-2 was released.

But was it obvious? I certainly thought that there was a chance that the amount of blog spam that could be generated effortlessly might just make internet search unusable. You are declaring "hype", when you could also say "very uncertain and conscientious". Is this not something we want people in charge to be careful with?

Job seekers currently in college have no idea what is about to hit them in 3-5 years.

In any other industry where just need an average margin of error close to a human's work and verification is much easier than generating possible outputs, the market will change drastically.

Planning is different in that it is an essential part of agency. That's what Q* is supposed to add. My guess is that planning is the next type of functionality to be added to GPT. I wouldn't be surprised if they already have a version internally with such functionality, but that they've decided to hold it back for now for reasons such as safety (some may care about the election this year) or simply that the inference costs are so huge they cannot possibly expose it publicly.

"Intern of all trades, senior of none", to modernise the cliché.

Really philosophy seems to be one of the least important subjects right now. Hardly anyone learns about it in school.

If it was so important to success in the wild than it would stand to reason we all work hard at improving our reasoning skills, but very few do.

These did not provide useful life-lessons for me.

(The philosophy A-level I did voluntarily seemed to be 50% "can you find the flaws in this supposed proof of the existence of god?")

Even now, they're shipping text-image 4o but not the new voice while leaving old-voice up and confusing/disappointing a whole lot of people. This is a pretty big marketing blunder.

I remember for a good 2-3 months in 2023 ALL you could see on tiktok / youtube shorts was just garbage about 'how amazing' ChatGPT was. Like - video after video and I was surprised of the repeat content being recommended to me... No doubt openAI (or something) was behind that huge marketing push

I doubt OpenAI spent even one cent marketing their system (e.g. as in paying other companies to push it).

It's ironic because the OpenAI creators really loved school and excelled academically. Nobody cares that ChatGPT destroyed advertising copywriting. But whatever little hope remained for the average high schooler post-lockdowns, it was destroyed by instant homework cheating via ChatGPT. So much for safety.

In a way I'm sorry, that's what people do nowadays. I'd prefer it to be paid for, honestly.

It definitely took out a lot of jobs from the lowest rungs of the market, but on the more specialized / upper end of the ladder wages got actually higher and a lot of companies got burned, and now they have to readjust. It's rolling over slowly still, as there a lot of companies selling AI products and in turn new companies adopting those products. But it tells you a lot that

A) a company selling an AI assistant last year is now totally tied to automating busy work tasks around marketing and sales

B) AI writing companies are some of the busiest in employing human talent for... writing and editorial roles!

It's all very peculiar. I haven't seen anything like this in the past 15 years... maybe the financial crisis and big data was similar, but much much smaller at scale.

We were naive to think we could have nice things for free.

But OpenAI is having a hard time retaining/increasing ChatGPT users. Also, Alphabet's stock is about as valuable as it's ever been. So I don't think we have evidence that this is really challenging Google's search dominance.

But ChatGPT has really hurt Google's brand image.

The questions I still ask Google, have a lot of monetary value (restaurants, cloths, movie, etc).

I spend a part of yesterday evening sorting my freshly dried t-shirts into 4 distinct piles. I used OpenAI Vision (through BeMyEyes) from my phone. I got a clear description of each and every piece of clothing, including print, colours and brand. I am blind BTW. But I guess you are right, no impact at all.

> Yet we now have Llama 3 in the wild

Yes, great, THANKS Meta, now the Scammers have something to work with. Thats a wonderful achievement which should be praised!

That is a really great application of this tech. And definitely qualifies as real-world impact. Thanks for sharing that!

Maybe not GPT-2, but in general LLMs and other generative AI types aren't without their downsides.

From companies looking to downsize their staff to replace them with software, to the work of artists/writers being devalued somewhat, to even easier scams and something like the rise of AI girlfriends, which has also gotten some critique, some of those can probably be a net negative.

Even when it's not pearl clutching over the advancements in technology and the social changes that arise, I do wonder how much my own development work will be devalued due to the somewhat lowered entry barrier into the industry and people looking for quick cash, same as with boot camps leading to more saturation. Probably not my position individually (not exactly entry level), but the market as a whole.

It's kind of at a point where I use LLMs for dev work not to fall behind, cause the productivity gains for simple problems and boilerplate are hard to argue with.

~8 years ago when self driving technology was all the rage and every major company was getting on board with ever more impressive technological demos, it seemed entirely reasonable to expect that we'd all be in a world of complete self driving imminently. I remember mocking somebody online around the time who was pursuing a class C/commercial trucking license. Yet now a decade later, there are more truckers than ever and the tech itself seems further away than ever before. And that's because most have now accepted that progress on such has basically stalled out in spite of absolutely monumental efforts at moving forward.

So long as LLMs regularly hallucinate, they're not going to be useful for much other than tasks that can accept relatively high rates of failure. And many of those generally creative domains are the ones LLMs are paradoxically the weakest in - like writing. Reading a book written by an LLM would be cruel and unusual punishment given then current state of the art. One domain I do see them completely taking over is search. They work excellently as natural language search engines, and "failure" in such is very poorly defined.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function

I think what maybe seems not obvious amidst the hype is that there is a hell of a lot of engineering left to do. The fact that you can squash the weights of a neural net down to 3 bits per param and it still works -- is evidence that we have quite a way to go with maturing this technology. Multimodality, improvements to the UX of it, the human-computer interface part of it. Those are fundamental tech things, but they are foremost engineering problems. Getting latency down. Getting efficiency up. Designing the experience, then building it out.

25 years ago, early tech demos on the internet were promising that everyone would do their shopping, entertainment, socializing, etc... online. Breathless hype. 5 years after that, the whole thing crashed, but it never went away. People just needed time to figure out how to use it and what it was useful for, and discover its limitations. 10 years after that, engineering efforts were systematized and applied against the difficult problems that still remained. And now: look at where we are. It just took time.

It most definitely is not.

They are an existence proof that the original claim that we seem further than ever before is just wrong.

15 years ago self driving of any sort was pure fantasy, yet here we are.

They'll release a version that can drive in poor weather and you'll complain that it can't drive in a tornado.

Meanwhile I've been using ChatGPT at work for _more than a year_ and it's been tremendously helpful to me.

This is not hype, this is not about how AI will change our lives in the future. It's there right here, right now.

Yep. So basically they're useful for a vast, immense range of tasks today.

Some things they're not suited for. For example, I've been working on a system to extract certain financial "facts" across SEC filings. ChatGPT has not been helpful at all either with designing or implementing (except to give some broad, obvious hints about things like regular expressions), nor would it be useful if it was used for the actual automation.

But for many, many other tasks -- like design, architecture, brainstorming, marketing, sales, summarisation, step by step thinking through all sorts of processes, it's extremely valuable today. My list of ChatGPT sessions is so long already and I can't imagine life without it now. Going back to Google and random Quora/StackOverflow answers laced with adtech everywhere...

But is this not what humans do, universally? We are certainly good at hiding it – and we are all good at coping with it – but my general sense when interacting with society is that there is a large amount of nonsense generated by humans that our systems must and do already have enormous flexibility for.

My sense is that's not an aspect of LLMs we should have any trouble with incorporating smoothly, just by adhering to the safety nets that we built in response to our own deficiencies.

mapping th genome was that way. On a 20yr schedule, barely any progress for 15 and then poof, done ahead of schedule

I have a much less "utopian" view about the future. I remember during the renaissance of neural networks (ca. 2010-15) it was said that "more data leads to better models", and that was at a time when researchers frowned upon the term Artificial Intelligence and would rather use Machine Learning. Fast forward a decade LLMs are very good synthetic data generators that try to mimic human generated input and I can't think somehow that this wasn't the sole initial intent of LLMs. And that's it for me. There's not much to hype and no intelligence at all.

What happens now is that human generated input becomes more valuable and every online platform (including minor ones) will have now some form of gatekeeping in place, rather sooner than later. Besides that a lot of work still can't be done in front of a computer in isolation and probably never will, and even if so, automation is not a means to an end. We still don't know how to measure a lot of things and much less how to capture everything as data vectors.

I understand that you might be afraid. I believe that a world where only LLM companies rule the world is not practically achievable except in some distopian universe. The likelihood of the world where the only job are model architects, engineers or technicians is very very small.

Instead, let's consider the positive possibilities that LLMs can bring. It can lead to new and exciting opportunities across various fields. For instance, can serve as a tool to inspire new ideas for writers, artists, and musicians.

I think we are going towards a more collaborative era where computers and humans interact much more. Everything will be a remix :)

Oh, especially since it will be a priority to automate their jobs, or somehow optimize them with an algorithm because that's a self-reinforcing improvement scheme that would give you a huge edge.

Currently the bottleneck is Agents. If you want a large language model to actually do anything you need an Agent. Agents so far need a human in the loop to keep them sane. Until that problem is solved most human jobs are still safe.

I fully expect GPT 5 (or at the latest 6) to similarly have native inclusion of agentic capabilities either this year or next year, assuming it doesn't already, but is just kept from the public.

Will be like, the end of millions of careers overnight.

It will probably strongly favour places like China and Russia though, where the economy is already strongly reliant on central control.

So outside of use-cases where the user can quickly verify the result (like picking a decent generated image etc.),I can't see it being used much.

And guess what: RAG doesn't prevent hallucination. It can reduce it, and there are most certainly areas where it is incredibly useful (I should know, because that's what earns my paycheck), but it's useful despite still hallucinations being a thing, not because we solved that problem.

All AIs up to now lack autonomy. So I'd say until we crack this problem, it is not going to be able to do your job. Autonomy depends on a kind of data that is iterative, multi-turn, and learning from environments not from static datasets. We have the exact opposite, lots of non-iterative, off-policy (human made AI consumed) text.

Everything always starts as a toy.

That includes, beyond literal Killers, all kinds of manufacturing, construction and service work.

I would expect a LOT of funds to go into research all sorts of actuators, artificial muscles and any other technology that will be useful in building better robots.

Companies that can get and maintain a lead in such technologies may reach a position similar to what US Steel had in the 19th century.

That could be the next nvidia.

I would not be at all surprised if we will have a robot in the house in 10 years that can clean and do the dishes, and that is built using basically the same parts as the robots that replace our soldiers and the police.

Who will ultimately control them, though?

If you had an ASI? I don’t think you’d need a lot of funds to go into this area anymore ? Presumably it would all be solved overnight.

Given the pace that AI is currently moving at, it seems to me that more and more, the mechanical aspect is becoming the limitation.

GPT 4o now seems to be quite good at reasoning about the world from pictures in real time. I would expect it would soon become easy for it to do the high level part of many practical tasks, from housekeeping to manufacturing or construction. (And of course military tasks.)

This leaves the direct low-level actuator control to execute such tasks in detail. But even there, development has been immense. See for instance these soccer playing robots [1]

And as both high level and low level control (if we assume that models soon will add agentic features directly into the neural networks), the only missing peace is the ability to build mechanically capable and reliable robots at a low enough price that they become cheaper than humans for various kinds of work.

There is one more limitation, of course, which is that GPT 4o still requires a constant connection to a data center, and that the models is too large to run within a device or machine.

This is also one of the most critical limitations of self driving. Had the AI within a Tesla had the same amount of compute available as GPT-4o, it should be massively more capable.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbyQcCT6890

But everyone is expecting them to release gpt5 later this year, and it is a bit scary to think what it will be able to do.

1) It's natively multi-modal in a way I don't think gpt4 was.

2) It's at least twice as efficient in terms of compute. Maybe 3 times more efficient, considering the increase in performance.

Combined, those point towards some major breakthroughs having gone into the model. If the quality of the output hasn't gone up THAT much, it's probably because the technological innovations mostly were leveraged (for this version) to reduce costs rather than capabilities.

My guess is that we should expect them to leverage the 2x-3x boost in efficiency in a model that is at least as large as GTP4 relatively soon, probably this year unless OpenAI has safety concerns or something, and keeps it internal-only.

The evidence for that is the change in the tokenizer. The only way to implement that is to re-train the entire base model from scratch. This implies that GPT 4o is not a fine-tuning of GPT 4. It's a new model, with a new tokenizer, new input and output token types, etc...

They could have called it GPT-5 and everyone would have believed them.

I assume GPT-5 has to be a heavier, more expensive and slower model initially.

GPT-4o is like an optimisation of GPT-4.

The expectations for gpt5 are sky high. I think we will see a similar jump as 3.5 -> 4.

My guess is the future belongs to those who don't stop—who, in fact, embrace the opposite of stopping.

I would even suggest that the present belongs to those who didn't stop. It may be too late for normal people to ever catch up by the time we realize the trick that was played on us.

Varying degrees of greedy / restless / hungry / thirsty / lustful are what we've got, because how is contentedness ever going to compete with that over millennia?

I've had a lot of negative things to say about religion for many years. However, as has been often observed, 'perception is reality' to a certain extent when it affects how people behave, and perhaps it's kind of a counterweight against our more selfish tendencies. I just wish we could do something like it without made up stories and bigotry. Secular humanist Unitarians might be about the best we can do right now in my opinion... I'm hoping that group continues to grow (they have been in recent years).

They also said it about all the over-hyped tech that did not change the world. This mentality of “detractors prove something is good” is survivorship bias.

Note I’m not saying you’ll categorically be proven wrong, just that your argument isn’t particularly strong or valid.

LLMs are no different. Like DL modules that are very good at outputting images that mimic biological signatures, LLMs are very good at outputting texts that eerily mimic human language.

However — and this is a point which programmers are woefully and comically ignorant — human language and reason are two separate things. Tech bros wholly confuse the two however, and thus make outlandish claims we have achieved or are on the brink of achieving — actual AI systems.

In other words, while LLMs and DL in general can perform specific tasks well, they do not represent a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, and thus will have a much narrower application space than actual AI.

You're talking more about AGI.

We need "that's not AI" discussions like we need more "serverless? It's still on some server!!" discussions.

It's about meaning of intelligence. These people don't have problems claiming that ants or dolphins are intelligent, but suddenly for machines to be classified as artificial intelligence they must be exactly on the same level as humans.

Intelligence is just about the ability to solve problems. There's no implication that in order for something to be intelligent it has to perform on at least the same level as top people in that field in the World.

It just has to be beyond a simple algorithm and be able to solve some sort of problem. You have AIs in video games that are just bare logic spaghetti computation with no neural networks.

LLMs statistically imitates texts of real world. To achieve certain threshold of accuracy, it turns out they need to imitate the underlying Turing machine/program/logic that runs in our brains to understand/react properly to texts by ourselves. That is no longer in the realm of the old school data-as-data statistics I would say.

What a bizarre claim. If LLMs are not actually outputting language, why can I read what they output then? Why can I converse with it?

It's one thing to claim LLMs aren't reasoning, which is what you later do, but you're disconnected from reality if you think they aren't actually outputting language.

No one is talking about it being AGI. Everyone is talking about just AI specifically. I think your problem is thinking that AI = AGI.

For example AI in video games is very specific and narrow to its domain.

... in the human brain which has evolved "cores" to handle each task optimally.

It's like the Turing Test. If it looks like it's reasoning, does it matter that it's doing it like a human brain or not?

It will give you detailed examples that are much easier to follow than vague, error-prone spec docs. That's scratching the surface. Other people are far more creative than me and have used chat-gpt for mind-blowing stuff already. Whatever its doing passes for 'reasoning' and 'intelligence' in my book. To me it doesn't matter whether its the same kind of intelligence as a human or if there's any amount of awareness as those are both philosophical questions of no consequence to my work.

For what these pieces of tech can do I feel that they're drastically under-utilized.

This is no different to saying a person with a gun murdered someone rather than attributing the murder to the gun. An AI gun is just a really fancy gun.

And “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”¹ is a bad argument created by the people who benefit from the proliferation of guns, so it’s very weird that you’re using that as if it were a valid argument. It isn’t. It’s baffling anyone still has to make this point: easy access and availability of guns makes them more likely to be used. A gun which does not exist is a gun which cannot be used by a person to murder another.

It’s also worth nothing the exact words of the person you’re responding to (emphasis mine):

> It can also murder people, and it will continue being used for that.

Being used. As in, they’re not saying that AI kills on its own, but that it’s used for it. Presumably by people. Which doesn’t contradict your point.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns_don%27t_kill_people,_peop...

There may come a time where we grow so accustomed to this, that the decision is so heavily influenced by AI, that we believe it more than human decisions.

And then it can very well kill a human through misdiagnostic.

I think it is important to not just put this thought aside, but to evaluate all risks.

I would imagine outcomes would be scrutinized heavily for an application like this. There is a difference between a margin of error (existing with human doctors as well) and a sentient ai that has decided to kill, which is what it sounds like you're describing.

If we didn't give it that goal, how does it obtain it otherwise?

A prompt is a _very_ different matter.

These demos show people talking to artificial intelligence. This is new. Humans are more partial to talking than writing. When people talk to each other (in person or over low-latency audio) there's a rich metadata channel of tone and timing, subtext, inexplicit knowledge. These videos seem to show the AI using this kind of metadata, in both input and output, and the conversation even flows reasonably well at times. I think this changes things a lot.

I'm also incredibly excited about the possibility of this as an always available coding rubber duck. The multimodal demos they showed really drove this home, how collaboration with the model can basically be as seamless as screensharing with someone else. Incredible.

I don't want to chat with computers to do basic things. I only want to chat with computers when the goal is to iterate on something. If the computer is too dumb to understand the request and needs to initiate iteration, I want no part.

(See also 'The Expanse' for how sci-fi imagined this properly.)

For me, this is seriously impressive, and I already use LLMs everyday - but a serious "Now we're talkin" moment would be when I'd be able to stand outside of Lowes, and talk to my glasses/earbuds "Hey, I'm in front of lowes, where do I get my air filters from?"

and it tells me if it's in stock, aisle and bay number. (If you can't tell, I am tired from fiddling with apps lol)

Why shouldn't we expect AI to be created using the same type of math?

If there is a surprise, it's only that we can use the same math at a much higher level of abstraction than the quantum level.

I know this won't happen, of course, I am moreso hoping for laws to be updated to avoid similar kerfuffles in the future, as well as massive fines to act as a deterrent, but I don't dare to hope too much.

> have all of OpenAI's data for free

Doesn't really fit. Perhaps OpenAI might successfully prevent us from accessing it, but it wouldn't be "theirs" and we couldn't "have" it.

I'm not sure what kind of conversations we will be having instead, but I expect they'll be more productive than worrying about ownership of something you can't touch.

Is that understanding correct?

I'm not interested in a system where there are no laws about data, I just think that modeling them after property law is a mistake.

Anyways, the laws are mature enough for everyone to work this out in court. Maybe it comes out that they have a legitimate concern, but the way they presented their evidence so far in public has seriously been lacking.

Either everybody should get the benefits of this technology, or no one should.

Humanity only survives as much as it preserves human dignity, let's say. We've designed society to give rewards to people who produce things of value.

These companies take that value and giving nothing back to the creators.

Supporting this will lead to disaster for all but the few, and ultimately for the few themselves.

Paying for your (copyrighted) inputs is harmony.

I think it’s likely that the justice system will deem model training as fair use, provided that the models are not designed to exactly reproduce the training data as output.

I think you hit on an important point though: these models are a giant transfer of wealth from creators to consumers / users. Now anyone can acquire artist-grade art for any purpose, basically for free — that’s a huge boon for the consumer / user.

People all around the world are going to be enriched by these models. Anyone in the world will be able to have access to a tutor in their language who can teach them anything. Again, that is only possible because the models eat ALL the data.

Another important point: original artwork has been made almost completely obsolete by this technology. The deed is done, because even if you push it out 70 years, eventually all of the artwork that these models have been trained on will be public domain. So, 70 years from now (or whatever it is) the cat will be out of the bag AND free of copyright obligations, so 2-3 generations from now it will be impossible to make a living selling artwork. It’s done.

When something becomes obsolete, it’s a dead man walking. It will not survive, even if it may take a while for people to catch up. Like when the vacuum tube computer was invented, that was it for relay computers. Done. And when the transistor was invented, that was it for vacuum tube computers.

It’s just a matter of time before all of today’s data is public domain and the models just do what they do.

…but people still build relay computers for fun:

https://youtu.be/JZyFSrNyhy8?si=8MRNznoNqmAChAqr

So people will still produce artwork.

Your argument is the same as Facebook saying “we can’t provide this service without invading your privacy” or another company saying “we can’t make this product without using cancerous materials”.

Tough luck, then. You don’t have the right to shit on and harm everyone else just because you’re a greedy asshole who wants all the money and is unwilling to come up with solutions to problems caused by your business model.

There's zero doubt that people will still create art. Almost no one will be paid to do it though (relative to our current situation where there are already far more unpaid artists than paid ones). We'll lose an immeasurable amount of amazing new art that "would have been" as a result, and in its place we'll get increasingly bland/derivative AI generated content.

Much of the art humans will create entirely for free in whatever spare time they can manage after their regular "for pay" work will be training data for future AI, but it will be extremely hard for humans to find as it will be drowned out by the endless stream of AI generated art that will also be the bulk of what AI finds and learns from.

However the issue is that it will be much harder to make a career in the digital world from an artistic gift and personal style: one's style will not be unique for long as AI will quickly copy it and so make the original much less valuable.

When it's harder to make a career in the digital world (where most of the art is), it's more likely that many artists will never get the opportunity to fully develop their artistic gifts and personal style at all.

If artists are lucky then maybe in a few generations with fewer new creative works being created, AI almost entirely training on AI generated art will mean that the output will only get more generic and simplistic over time. Perhaps some people will eventually pay humans again for art that's better quality and different.

If you give it access to the entire codebase at the same time that could work pretty well. Maybe even add an option to disable the sarcasm.

Is that because you're not used to it? Honestly asking.

This is probably the first time it feels natural where as all our previous experiences make "chat bots" and "automated phone systems", "automated assistants" absolutely terrible.

Naturally, we dislike it because "it's not human". But this is true of pretty much any thing that approaches "uncanny valley". But, if the "it's not human" solves your answer 100% better/faster than the human counter part, we tend to accept it a lot faster.

This is the first real contender. Siri was the "glimpse" and ChatGPT is probably the reality.

[EDIT]

https://vimeo.com/945587328 the Khan academy demo is nuts. The inflections are so good. It's pretty much right there in the uncanny valley because it does still feel like you're talking to a robot but it also directly interacting with it. Crazy stuff.

That wasn't even my impression.

My impression was that it reminds me of the humans that I dislike.

It speaks in customer service voice. That faux friendly tone people use when they're trying to sell you something.

Mmmmm while I get that, in the context w/ the grandparent comment, having a human wouldn't be better then? It's effectively the same. Because, realistically that's a pretty common voice/tone to get even in tech support.

There are different kinds of humans.

Some of them are your friends, and they're willing to take risks for you and they take your side even when it costs them something.

Some of them are your adversaries, overtly. They do not hide it.

Some of them pretend to be your friends, even though they're not. And that's what they modeled it on. For some reason.

The problem is you don't like the customer service/sales voice because they "pretend to be your friends".

Let me know if I didn't capture it.

I don't think people "pretend to be my friend" when they answer the phone to help me sort out of airline ticket problem. I do believe they're trained to and work to take on a "friendly" tone. Even if the motive isn't genuine, because it's trained, it's way a nicer of an experience than someone who's angry or even simply monotone. Trying to fix my $1200 plane ticket is stressful enough. Don't need the CSR to make it worse.

Of course I agree that "angry" is in most cases not appropriate, but still, I can see cases in which it might, for example, if the caller is really aggressive, curses, or blames unreasonably the agent, the agent could become angry. Training people that everybody will answer them "friendly" no matter their behavior does not sound good for me.

Really? I found this demo painful to watch and literally felt that "cringe" feeling. I showed it to my partner and she couldn't even stand to hear more than a sentence of the conversation before walking away.

It felt both staged and still frustrating to listen to.

And, like far too much in AI right now, a demo that will likely not pan out in practice.

Especially when you consider the bottom line that this tech will be ultimately be horned into advertising somehow (read: the field dedicated to manipulating you into buying shit).

This whole fucking thing bothers me.

When one gets to be a certain age one begins to become attuned to this tendency of others' emotions to manipulate you, so you take steps to not let that happen. You're not ignoring their emotions, but you can address the underlying issue more effectively if you're not emotionally charged. It's a useful skill that more people would benefit from learning earlier in life. Perhaps AI will accelerate that particular skill development, which would be a net benefit to society.

Most manipulators end up getting bored of trying again and again with the same person. That won't happen if you are a dealing with a machine, as it can change names, techniques, contexts, tones, etc. until you give it what its operator wants.

Maybe you're part of the X% who will never give in to a machine. But keep in mind that most people have no critical thinking skills nor mental fortitude.

This is incredibly optimistic, which I love, but my own experience with my utterly deranged elder family, made insane by TV, contradicts this. Every day they're furious about some new things fox news has decided it's time to be angry about: white people being replaced (thanks for introducing them to that, tucker!), "stolen" elections, Mexicans, Muslims, the gays, teaching kids about slavery, the trans, you name it.

I know nobody else in my life more emotionally manipulated on a day to day basis than them. I imagine I can't be alone in watching this happen to my family.

That happens with a lot of tech. Social networks are used to con people more than to educate people about con men.

Great replacement and white genocide are white nationalist far-right conspiracy theories. If you believe this is happening, you are the intellectual equivalent of a flat-earther. Should we pay attention to flat-earthers? Are their opinions on astronomy, rocketry, climate, and other sciences worth anyone's time? Should we give them a platform?

> In the words of scholar Andrew Fergus Wilson, whereas the islamophobic Great Replacement theory can be distinguished from the parallel antisemitic white genocide conspiracy theory, "they share the same terms of reference and both are ideologically aligned with the so-called '14 words' of David Lane ["We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children"]." In 2021, the Anti-Defamation League wrote that "since many white supremacists, particularly those in the United States, blame Jews for non-white immigration to the U.S.", the Great Replacement theory has been increasingly associated with antisemitism and conflated with the white genocide conspiracy theory. Scholar Kathleen Belew has argued that the Great Replacement theory "allows an opportunism in selecting enemies", but "also follows the central motivating logic, which is to protect the thing on the inside [i.e. the preservation and birth rate of the white race], regardless of the enemy on the outside."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_genocide_conspiracy_theo...

> wanting border laws to be enforced

Border laws are enforced.

> and not wanting your children to be groomed into cutting off their body parts.

This doesn't happen. In fact, the only form of gender-affirming surgery that any doctor will perform on under-18 year olds is male gender affirming surgery on overweight boys to remove their manboobs.

> You are definitely sane and your entire family is definitely insane.

You sound brave, why don't you tell us what your username means :) You're one to stand by your values, after all, aren't you?

Start telling Grandma never to answer the phone.

Tools and the weaponization of them.

This can be said of pretty much any tech tool that has the ability to touch a good portion of the population, including programming languages themselves, CRISPR?

I agree we have to be careful of the bad, but the downsides in this case are not so dangerous that we should be trying to suppress it because the benefits can be incredible too.

Silly example, but some pets like guinea pigs are almost always hungry and they're famous for learning to squeak at you whenever you open the fridge or do anything that might lead to giving them bell peppers. It's not something you'd put up with a human family member using their communication skills to do!

We've passively bred out many of the behaviors that lead to wolves becoming socially mature. Such dogs tend to be too dangerous to have around, since they may lead to the dogs challenging their owners (more than they already do) for dominance of the family.

AI's will probably be designed to do the same thing, so they will not feel threatening to us. But in the case of AGI/ASI, we will never know if they actually have this kind of subservience, or if they're just faking it for as long as it benefits them.

We get the upside of conversation, and avoid the downside of falling asleep at the wheel (as Ethan Mollick mentions in "Co-Intelligence".)

I was literally just thinking about this a few days ago... that we need a multi-modal language model with speech training built-in.

As soon as this thing rolls out, we'll be talking to language models like we talk to each other. Previously it was like dictating a letter and waiting for the responding letter to be read to you. Communication is possible, but not really in the way that we do it with humans.

This is MUCH more human-like, with the ability to interrupt each other and glean context clues from the full richness of the audio.

The model's ability to sing is really fascinating. It's ability to change the sound of its voice -- its pacing, its pitch, its tonality. I don't know how they're controlling all that via GPT-4o tokens, but this is much more interesting stuff than what we had before.

I honestly don't fully understand the implications here.

Is it so?

Speaking most of the time is for short exchange of information (pleasantries to essential information exchanges).

I prefer writing for long in-depth thought exchanges (whether by emails, blogs etc.)

In many cultures - European or Asian, people are not very loquacious in everyday life.

I’m 100% a text everything never calls person but I can’t live without Alexa these days, every time I’m in a hotel or on vacation I nearly ask a question out loud.

I also hate how much Alexa sucks so this is a big deal. I spent years weeding out what it could do and can’t do so it will be nice to have one that I don’t have to treat like a toddler

Besides - not sure if I want this level of immersion/fake when talking to a computer...

"Her" comes to mind pretty quickly…

Amazon, Google, and Apple have sunk literally billions of dollars into this idea only to find out that, no, we aren't.

We are with other humans, yes. When socialization is part of the conversation. When I'm talking to my local barista I'm not just ordering a coffee, I'm also maintaining a relationship with someone in my community.

But when it comes to work, writing >>> talking. Writing is clarity of ideas. Talking is cult of personality.

And when it comes to inputs/outputs, typing is more precise and more efficient.

Don't get me wrong, this is an incredibly revolutionary piece of technology, but I don't think the benefits of talking you're describing (timing, subtext, inexplicit knowledge) are achievable here either (for now), since even that requires HOURS of interaction over days/weeks/months of experiences for humans to achieve with each other.

>>> But when it comes to work, writing >>> talking. Writing is clarity of ideas. Talking is cult of personality.

A lot of people think of their colleagues as part of a professional community as well, though.

For example, I mentioned something to my contractor and the short thing he said back and his tone had me assume he understood.

Oh, he absolutely did not.

And, with him at least, that doesn’t happen when in writing.

lmao what.... they absolutely didn't

this is why no one should take anyone on this site seriously about anything, confidentally incorrect, easily conned into the next VC funded marketing project

Older people think younger people are stupid and reckless, and viceversa. And the younglings think they "figured it out" like no one before them. But no one ever tried to understand each other in the process. Rinse and repeat.