BrickedKeyboard

joined 1 year ago
[–] BrickedKeyboard@awful.systems 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Current the global economy doubles every 23 years. Robots building robots and robot making equipment can probably double faster than that. It won't be in a week or a month, energy requirements alone limit how fast it can happen.

Suppose the doubling time is 5 years, just to put a number on it. So the economy would be growing a bit over 16 times faster than it was previously. This continues until the solar system runs out of matter.

Is this a relevant event? Does it qualify as a singularity? Genuinely asking, how have you "priced in" this possibility in your world view?

[–] BrickedKeyboard@awful.systems 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Serious answer not from yudnowsky: the AI doesn't do any of that. It helps people cheat on their homework, write their code and form letters faster, and brings in revenue. AI owner uses the revenue and buys gpus. With the GPUs they make the AI better. Now it can do a bit more than before and then they buy more GPUs and theoretically this continues until the list of tasks the AI can do includes "most of the labor in a chip fab" and GPUs become cheap and then things start to get crazy.

Same elementary school logic but I mean this is how a nuke works.

[–] BrickedKeyboard@awful.systems 0 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Sure, but they were 4 function calculators a few months ago. The rate of progress seems insane.

[–] BrickedKeyboard@awful.systems 0 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Just to engage with the high school bully analogy, the nerd has been threatening to show up with his sexbot bodyguards that are basically T-800s from terminator for years now, and you've been taking his lunch money and sneering. But now he's got real funding and he goes to work at a huge building and apparently there are prototypes of the exact thing he claims to build inside.

The prototypes suck...for now...

[–] BrickedKeyboard@awful.systems 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (10 children)

1, 2 : since you claim you can't measure this even as a thought experiment, there's nothing to discuss 3. I meant complex robotic systems able to mine minerals, truck the minerals to processing plants, maintain and operate the processing plants, load the next set of trucks, the trucks go to part assembly plants, inside the plant robots unload the trucks and feed the materials into CNC machines and mill the parts and robots inspect the output and pack it and more trucks...culminating in robots assembling new robots.

It is totally fine if some human labor hours are still required, this cheapens the cost of robots by a lot.

  1. This is deeply coupled to (3). If you have cheap robots, if an AI system can control a robot well enough to do the task as well as a human, obviously it's cheaper to have robots do the task than a human in most situations.

Regarding (3) : the specific mechanism would be AI that works like this:

Millions of hours of video of human workers doing tasks in the above domain + all video accessible to the AI company -> tokenized compressed description of the human actions -> llm like model. The llm like model thus is predicting "what would a human do". You then need a model to transform the what to robotic hardware that is built differently than humans, and this is called the "foundation model": you use reinforcement learning where actual or simulated robots let the AI system learn from millions of hours of practice to improve on the foundation model.

The long story short of all these tech bro terms is robotic generality - the model will be able to control a robot to do every easy or medium difficulty task, the same way it can solve every easy or medium homework problem. This is what lets you automate (3), because you don't need to do a lot of engineering work for a robot to do a million different jobs.

Multiple startups and deepmind are working on this.

[–] BrickedKeyboard@awful.systems 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I'm trying to find the twitter post where someone deepfakes eliezer's voice into saying full speed ahead on AI development, we need embodied catgirls pronto.

[–] BrickedKeyboard@awful.systems 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

academic AI researchers have passed him by.

Just to be pedantic, it wasn't academic AI researchers. The current era of AI began here : https://www.npr.org/2012/06/26/155792609/a-massive-google-network-learns-to-identify

Academic AI researchers have never had the compute hardware to contribute to AI research since 2012, except some who worked at corporate giants (mostly deepmind) and went back into academia.

They are getting more hardware now, but the hardware required to be relevant and to develop a capability that commercial models don't already have keeps increasing. Table stakes are now something like 10,000 H100s, or about 250-500 million in hardware.

https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-gemini-eats-the-world-gemini

I am not sure MIRI tried any meaningful computational experiments. They came up with unrunnable algorithms that theoretically might work but would need nearly infinite compute.

[–] BrickedKeyboard@awful.systems 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Consider a flying saucer cult. Clearly a cult, great leader, mothership coming to pick everyone up, things will be great.

...What if telescopes show a large object decelerating into the solar system, the flaw from the matter annihilation engine clearly visible. You can go pay $20 a month and rent a telescope and see the flare.

The cult uh points out their "sequences" of writings by the Great Leader and some stuff is lining up with the imminent arrival of this interstellar vehicle.

My point is that lesswrong knew about GPT-3 years before the mainstream found it, many OpenAI employees post there etc. If the imminent arrival of AI is fake - like the hyped idea of bitcoin going to infinity or replacing real currency, or NFTs - that would be one thing. But I mean, pay $20 a month and man this tool seems to be smart, what could it do if it could learn from it's mistakes and had the vision module deployed...

Oh and I guess the other plot twist in this analogy : the Great Leader is saying the incoming alien vehicle will kill everyone, tearing up his own Sequences of rants, and that's actually not a totally unreasonable outcome if you could see an alien spacecraft approaching earth.

And he's saying to do stupid stuff like nuke each other so the aliens will go away and other unhinged rants, and his followers are eating it up.

 

First, let me say that what broke me from the herd at lesswrong was specifically the calls for AI pauses. That somehow 'rationalists' are so certain advanced AI will kill everyone in the future (pDoom = 100%!) that they need to commit any violent act needed to stop AI from being developed.

The flaw here is that there's 8 billion people alive right now, and we don't actually know what the future is. There are ways better AI could help the people living now, possibly saving their lives, and essentially eliezer yudkowsky is saying "fuck em". This could only be worth it if you actually somehow knew trillions of people were going to exist, had a low future discount rate, and so on. This seems deeply flawed, and seems to be one of the points here.

But I do think advanced AI is possible. And while it may not be a mainstream take yet, it seems like the problems current AI can't solve, like robotics, continuous learning, module reuse - the things needed to reach a general level of capabilities and for AI to do many but not all human jobs - are near future. I can link deepmind papers with all of these, published in 2022 or 2023.

And if AI can be general and control robots, and since making robots is a task human technicians and other workers can do, this does mean a form of Singularity is possible. Maybe not the breathless utopia by Ray Kurzweil but a fuckton of robots.

So I was wondering what the people here generally think. There are "boomer" forums I know of where they also generally deny AI is possible anytime soon, claim GPT-n is a stochastic parrot, and make fun of tech bros as being hypesters who collect 300k to edit javascript and drive Teslas*.

I also have noticed that the whole rationalist schtick of "what is your probability" seems like asking for "joint probabilities", aka smoke a joint and give a probability.

Here's my questions:

  1. Before 2030, do you consider it more likely than not that current AI techniques will scale to human level in at least 25% of the domains that humans can do, to average human level.

  2. Do you consider it likely, before 2040, those domains will include robotics

  3. If AI systems can control robotics, do you believe a form of Singularity will happen. This means hard exponential growth of the number of robots, scaling past all industry on earth today by at least 1 order of magnitude, and off planet mining soon to follow. It does not necessarily mean anything else.

  4. Do you think that mass transition where most human jobs we have now will become replaced by AI systems before 2040 will happen

  5. Is AI system design an issue. I hate to say "alignment", because I think that's hopeless wankery by non software engineers, but given these will be robotic controlling advanced decision-making systems, will it require lots of methodical engineering by skilled engineers, with serious negative consequences when the work is sloppy?

*"epistemic status": I uh do work for a tech company, my job title is machine learning engineer, my girlfriend is much younger than me and sometimes fucks other dudes, and we have 2 Teslas..