I am increasingly starting to believe that all these rumors and “hush hush” PR initiatives about “reasoning AI” is an attempt to keep the hype going (and VC investments) till the vesting period for their stock closes out.
I wouldn’t be surprised if all these “AI” companies have come to a point where they’re basically at the limits of LLM capabilities (due to problems with its fundamental architecture) while not being able to solve its core drawbacks (hallucinations, ridiculously high capex and opex cost).
Yea this. It’s a weird time though. All of it is hype and marketing hoping to cover costs by searching for some unseen product down the line … even the original chatGPT feels like a basic marketing stunt: “If people can chat with it they’ll think it’s miraculous however useful it actually is”.
OTOH, it’s easy to forget that genuine progress has happened with this rush of AI that surprised many. Literally the year before AlphaGo beat the world champion no one thought it was going to happen any time soon. And though I haven’t checked in, from what I could tell, the progress on protein folding done by DeepMind was real (however hyped it was also). Whether new things are still coming or not I don’t know, but it seems more than possible. But of course, it doesn’t mean there isn’t a big pile of hype that will blow away in the wind.
What I ultimately find disappointing is the way the mainstream has responded to all of this.
- The lack of conversation about what we want this to look like in the end. There’s way too much of a passive “lets see where the technology and big-corp capitalism take us and hope it doesn’t lead to some sort of apocalypse”
- The very seamless and reflexive acceptance that an AI chat interface could be an all knowing authority for everything in life … was somewhat shocking to me. Obviously decades of “Googling” to get the answers to things has laid the groundwork for that, but still, there was IMO an unseemly acceptance of a pretty troubling future that indicated just how easily some dark timeline could arise.
IMHO there’s nothing amazing about a computer winning a board game. People act like Go is some mystery from the heavens, but it’s just a finite board with two different colored rocks. Big whoop in 2024.
Progress is definitely happening. One area that I am somewhat knowledgeable about is image/video upscaling. Neural net enhanced upscaling has been around for a while, but we are increasingly getting to a point where SD (DVD source, older videos from the 90s/2000s) to HD upscaling is working almost like in the science fiction movies. There are still issues of course, but the results are drastically better than simply scaling the source media by x2.
The framing of LLMs as some sort of techno-utopian “AI oracle” is indeed a damning reflection of our society. Although I think this topic is outside the scope of current “AI” discussions and would likely involve a fundamental reform of our broader social, economic, political and educational models.
Even the term “AI” (and its framing) is extremely misleading. There is no “artificial intelligence” involved in a LLM.
It’s the Elon Musk narrative making we’ve been seeing over and over again. It’s hype. They’re about to run out of input data because they’ve sucked up everything they could. The Internet is being fed a bunch of bad results that come from LLM produced output which enshittifies the Internet further. These companies are burning cash and grid energy while the world burns. Unless there’s a spectacular breakthrough, this can’t keep going on much longer.
Pit of despair, hype cycle, etc
I would like to know the energy consumption of this one before we open the floodgates yet again, OpenAI.
I highly doubt it. They may be able to simulate the appearance of reasoning, but I won’t believe that they’ve accomplished this goal until their robots start killing humans over ideological differences.
To be fair, it might be too late by then, but it also might be true that it’s not just the fairy tales with happy endings that are not realistic. No sense worrying about T-1000s coming for you in real life when that whole movie was mostly special effects, if the world is about to die then I don’t see it coming from machines. We don’t know where free will comes from or even if it’s just a math equation or something truly beyond explanation, but computers don’t seem to have it.
Scarily enough, the Quran (of all the things that implies, I am not saying this is actually reality, only that parallels should not fall into place that way under random chance) points out that this conclusion was engineered in some sense, that electronics were never going to give us godhood due to the limitations of reality. It’s kind of blunt in saying it, so I get why the skepticism needs to stay involved, but the idea is that our “household gods” of Siri and Alexa and such are really just basic circuitry compared to a housefly or mosquito, let alone to anything larger or capable of emotional attachment.
Sorry if this is preachy, I’m a writer who hasn’t done enough writing lately and I’m just at a stage where I feel like it’s too late for my writing to matter.
Yeah, no worries, I get it.
I’m a perennial optimist, so I look more at the Star Trek future than any of the dystopias, though dystopia is my favorite type of book (setting? genre?). In every dystopia, we get the same general theme of the human spirit pushing against evil, with the difference to other stories being the lack of success.
I think people take these warnings to heart and avoid worst of it. I don’t think we’ll get to the Star Trek utopia, but I think we’ll get closer than any of the various dystopias people concoct. Humans are late at responding to issues, but we generally do respond.
I think the same is true for AI. It’ll start as a helpful piece of tech, transform into a monster, then we’ll correct and control it. We’ve done that in the past with slavery, nuclear weapons, and fascism, and I think we’ll continue to overcome climate, AI, and other challenges, albeit much later than we should.
“Hey! That’s just a machine programmed to kill me, it’s not making the decision to kill me itself!”
