cross-posted from: https://lemmy.intai.tech/post/43759
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/949452
OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Sam Altman are in massive trouble. OpenAI is getting sued in the US for illegally using content from the internet to train their LLM or large language models
People talk about OpenAI as if its some utopian saviour that’s going to revolutionise society. When in reality its a large corporation flooding the internet with terrible low-quality content using machine learning models that have existed for years. And the fields it is “automating” are creative ones that specifically require a human touch, like art and writing. Language learning models and image generation isn’t going to improve anything. They’re not “AI” and they never will be. Hopefully when AI does exist and does start automating everything we’ll have a better economic system though :D
The thing that amazes me the most about AI Discourse is, we all learned in Theory of Computation that general AI is impossible. My best guess is that people with a CS degree who believe in AI slept through all their classes.
we all learned in Theory of Computation that general AI is impossible.
I strongly suspect it is you who has misunderstood your CS courses. Can you provide some concrete evidence for why general AI is impossible?
Evidence, not really, but that’s kind of meaningless here since we’re talking theory of computation. It’s a direct consequence of the undecidability of the halting problem. Mathematical analysis of loops cannot be done because loops, in general, don’t take on any particular value; if they did, then the halting problem would be decidable. Given that writing a computer program requires an exact specification, which cannot be provided for the general analysis of computer programs, general AI trips and falls at the very first hurdle: being able to write other computer programs. Which should be a simple task, compared to the other things people expect of it.
Yes there’s more complexity here, what about compiler optimization or Rust’s borrow checker? which I don’t care to get into at the moment; suffice it to say, those only operate on certain special conditions. To posit general AI, you need to think bigger than basic block instruction reordering.
This stuff should all be obvious, but here we are.
We can simulate all manner of physics using a computer, but we can’t simulate a brain using a computer? I’m having a real hard time believing that. Brains aren’t magic.
Computer numerical simulation is a different kind of shell game from AI. The only reason it’s done is because most differential equations aren’t solvable in the ordinary sense, so instead they’re discretized and approximated. Zeno’s paradox for the modern world. Since the discretization doesn’t work out, they’re then hacked to make the results look right. This is also why they always want more flops, because they believe that, if you just discretize finely enough, you’ll eventually reach infinity (or infinitesimal).
This also should not fill you with hope for general AI.
