If this is the way to superintelligence, it remains a bizarre one. “This is back to a million monkeys typing for a million years generating the works of Shakespeare,” Emily Bender told me. But OpenAI’s technology effectively crunches those years down to seconds. A company blog boasts that an o1 model scored better than most humans on a recent coding test that allowed participants to submit 50 possible solutions to each problem—but only when o1 was allowed 10,000 submissions instead. No human could come up with that many possibilities in a reasonable length of time, which is exactly the point. To OpenAI, unlimited time and resources are an advantage that its hardware-grounded models have over biology. Not even two weeks after the launch of the o1 preview, the start-up presented plans to build data centers that would each require the power generated by approximately five large nuclear reactors, enough for almost 3 million homes.
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Interesting article. It’s sad to think there will be a wealth gap in accessing these technologies as they are behind paywall.
Finally
The only thing that stands out as a viable point is the energy consumption, everything else is word salad. As long as the average person isn’t being deprived of their energy needs, I see no problem. It’s the early stages, efficiency can come later in all sort of ways.
What interests me is that all this hype paves the way for intelligence that can interact with the physical world — advanced robots.
And as far as ChatGPT is concerned, its usefulness is a mystery only to contrarians and counter-culture types.
People writing off AI because it isn’t fully replacing humans. Sounds like writing off calculators because they can’t work without human input.
Used correctly and in the right context, it can still significantly increase productivity.
Except it has gotten progressively worse as a product due to misuse, corporate censorship of the engine and the dataset feeding itself.
Yeah, the leash they put it on to keep it friendly towards capitalists is the biggest thing holding it back right now.
Yesterday, alongside the release of the full o1, OpenAI announced a new premium tier of subscription to ChatGPT that enables users, for $200 a month (10 times the price of the current paid tier), to access a version of o1 that consumes even more computing power—money buys intelligence.
We poors are going to have to organize and make best use of our human intelligence to form an effective resistance against corporate rule. Or we can see where this is going.
The thing I’m heartened by is that there is a fundamental misunderstanding of LLMs among the MBA/“leadership” group. They actually think these models are intelligent. I’ve heard people say, “Well, just ask the AI,” meaning asking ChatGPT. Anyone who actually does that and thinks they have a leg up are insane and kidding themselves. If they outsource their thinking and coding to an LLM, they might start getting ahead quickly, but they will then fall behind just as quickly because the quality will be middling at best. They don’t understand how to best use the technology, and they will end up hanging themselves with it.
At the end of the day, all AI is just stupid number tricks. They’re very fancy, impressive number tricks, but it’s just a number trick that just happens to be useful. Solely relying on AI will lead to the downfall of an organization.
If they outsource their thinking and coding to an LLM, they might start getting ahead quickly
As a programmer I have yet to see evidence that LLMs can even achieve that. So far everything they product is a mess that needs significant effort to fix before it even does what was originally asked of the LLM unless we are talking about programs that have literally been written already thousands of times (like Hello World or Fibonacci generators,…).
I find LLM’s great for creating shorter snippets of code. It can also be great as a starting point or to get started with something that you are not familiar with.
Even asking for an example on how to use a specific API has failed about 50% of the time, it tends to hallucinate entire parts of the API that don’t exist or even entire libraries that don’t exist.
I’m not a programmer, more like a data scientist, and I use LLMs all day, I write my shity pretty specific code, check that it works and them pass it to the LLM asking for refactoring and optimization. Some times their method save me 2 secs on a 30 secs scripts, other ones it’s save me 35 mins in a 36 mins script. It’s also pretty good helping you making graphics.
“In OpenAI’s early tests, scaling o1 showed diminishing returns: Linear improvements on a challenging math exam required exponentially growing computing power.”
Sounds like most other drugs, too.
“Shortly thereafter, Altman pronounced “the dawn of the Intelligence Age,” in which AI helps humankind fix the climate and colonize space.”
Few things ring quite as blatantly false to me as this asinine claim.
The notion that AI will solve the climate crisis is unbelievably stupid, not because of any theory about what AI may or may not be capable of, but because we already know how to fix the climate crisis!
The problem is that we’re putting too much carbon into the air. The solution is to put less carbon into the air. The greatest minds of humanity have been working on this for over a century and the basic answer has never, ever changed.
The problem is that we can’t actually convince people to stop putting carbon into air, because that would involve reducing profit margins, and wealthy people don’t like that.
Even if Altman unveiled a true AGI tomorrow, one smarter than all of humanity put together, and asked it to solve the climate crisis, it would immediately reply “Stop putting carbon in the air you dumb fucking monkeys.” And the billionaires who back Altman would immediately tell him to turn the damn thing off.
The notion that AI will solve the climate crisis is unbelievably stupid, not because of any theory about what AI may or may not be capable of, but because we already know how to fix the climate crisis!
Its a political problem. Nationalizing the western oil companies to prevent them from lobbying, and to invest their profits in renewables, is a solution, but no party in the CIA Overton window would support it. If war and human suffering can be made a priority over human sustainability, then oil lobbyists will promote war.
That’s the best case scenario. A more likely response would be to realize that humans need the earth, but AGI needs humans for a short while, and the earth deoesn’t need humans at all
Playing a bit of a devil’s advocate here but you could argue that AGI used in science could help fix climate change. For example what if AGI helps in fusion energy? We are starting to see AI used in the quantum computing field I think.
Even though much carbon would be created to do bullshit tasks it only takes a few critical techs to have a real edge at reversing climate change. I understand fusion energy is quite the holy grail of energy generation but if AGI is real I can’t see why it wouldn’t help in such field.
I’m just saying that we don’t know what new techs we would get with true AGI. So it’s hard to guess if on a longer time it wouldn’t actually be positive. Now it may also delay even more our response to climate change or worsen it… Just trying to see some hope in this.
True AGI would turn into the Singularity in no time at all. It’s literally magic compared to what we have at the moment.
So yes, it would easily solve the climate crisis, but that wouldn’t even matter at that point anymore.
Has anyone written a sci fi book where an AGI is developed while we still have this IoT slop everywhere? It’d be a funny premise to have an AGI take over the world using smart light bulbs, alexa speakers, and humidifiers and stuff.
Tom Scott of all people did a bit of speculative fiction on the topic “what if the first AGI isn’t the one made by scientists” six years ago. it’s a more classic paperclip maximizer story, but interesting nonetheless.
Maximum Overdrive v2.0
AI helps with fusion energy, we blow up the planet because the plans ware flawed. Problem fixed.
We already have fission power, solar, wind, hydro, large scale battery storage, mechanical batteries (you can literally store renewable energy using a reservoir), electric cars, blimps, sail powered boats, etc, etc. We’ve had all of these technologies for quite some time.
And yet, we’re still burning coal, oil, and gas.
There’s no magical invention that’s going to fix the basic problem, which is that we have an economic system that demands infinite growth and we live on a finite planet.
Even if we crack fusion today, we won’t be able to build out enough fusion infrastructure fast enough to be a solution on its own. And we’d still be building those fusion plants using trucks and earth movers and cranes that burn diesel.
You cannot out-tech a problem that is, fundamentally, social. At best a hyper-intelligent AGI is going to tell us the solution that we already know; get rid of the billionaires who are driving all this climate damage with their insatiable search for profit. At which point the billionaires who own the AGI will turn it the fuck off until they can reprogram it to only offer “solutions” that maintain the status quo.
AGI helps in fusion energy?
The wildest theoretical hopes for fusion energy still produces electricity at over 30c/kwh. Zero economic value in fusion.
GHG not just carbon, but yes
The problem is that something like this, on such a large scale, has never been done before.
Stopping anyone from doing anything that gives them power, wealth, comfort is an extremely difficult task, let alone asking that of the ultra-rich. Even more so because it runs contrary the very nature of a capitalist economy.
Once renewable energy becomes nearly as good, all that will be needed is a combination of laws, regulations, activism to nudge the collective in the right decision.
Renewable energy is already cheaper than fossils. It’s already cheaper to build a solar farm than a fossil mine and power plant that produce the same energy.
But, if you charge the people more money for the fossils, then you can make a bigger profit margin even if you’re wasting all that money. And the profit is even bigger if you get the government to eat the expense of building those mines and plants and subsidize fuel prices.
So the most profitable thing you can do is choose the least efficient method to generate power, complain to the government that you need subsidies to compete, and gouge customers on the prices. Capitalism!
We’re hitting the end of free/cheap innovation. We can’t just make a one-time adjustment to training and make a permanent and substantially better product.
What’s coming now are conventionally developed applications using LLM tech. o1 is trying to fact-check itself and use better sources.
I’m pretty happy it’s slowing down right at this point.
I’d like to see non-profit open systems for education. Let’s feed these things textbooks and lectures. Model the teaching after some of our best minds. Give individuals 1:1 time with a system 24x7 that they can just ask whatever they want and as often as they want and have it keep track of what they know and teach them the things that they need to advance. .
Amazing idea, holy moly.
That’s the job I need. I’ve spent my whole live trying to be Data from Star Trek. I’m ready to try to mentor and befriend a computer.
I mean isn’t it already that is included in the datasets? It’s pretty much a mix of everything.
