OK, so to be clear, I don't think this AI will harm us, not in its current configuration. The author of the article says the same. The concern is about a future AI, one which is capable of the sort of reasoning that humans can do. The main danger with today's AI is that they will be so commercially successful that it will drive enough investment into AI research that a more powerful AI is constructed.
Sure, I get that. But this has been worked on for decades in the background and only achievable now. It’s amazing and new to so many people, but this “sparks of agi” etc is all hype and honestly i think more damaging to people than ai possibly could be. You could suppose the earth would implode if we kept walking on it too, but nobody is going to stay sitting.
Maybe it's just a matter of perspective. I agree that this is something that's been worked on for decades; however, it's also the case that progress seems to be getting faster. The AI field now has a problem where AIs are improving faster than benchmarks can measure them, and new benchmarks get saturated almost as soon as they're introduced. [1]
The human mind is a mystery, we don't know how it works. But it works somehow. There are some algorithms it's using under the hood, as mysterious as they may be. We might be searching blindly in the dark, grabbing hold of anything that feels promising, and we're probably still far away from the "right way" of doing it, of getting a computer to think the way humans think. And I'm sure we won't find the whole thing at once; maybe we'll have reverse-engineered the visual cortex, but not the vestibular system, which perhaps works completely differently. But if we were getting closer to stumbling on the right solution, that rapid saturation of benchmarks is the kind of behaviour I would expect to see.
Comments
OK, so to be clear, I don't think this AI will harm us, not in its current configuration. The author of the article says the same. The concern is about a future AI, one which is capable of the sort of reasoning that humans can do. The main danger with today's AI is that they will be so commercially successful that it will drive enough investment into AI research that a more powerful AI is constructed.
Sure, I get that. But this has been worked on for decades in the background and only achievable now. It’s amazing and new to so many people, but this “sparks of agi” etc is all hype and honestly i think more damaging to people than ai possibly could be. You could suppose the earth would implode if we kept walking on it too, but nobody is going to stay sitting.
Maybe it's just a matter of perspective. I agree that this is something that's been worked on for decades; however, it's also the case that progress seems to be getting faster. The AI field now has a problem where AIs are improving faster than benchmarks can measure them, and new benchmarks get saturated almost as soon as they're introduced. [1]
The human mind is a mystery, we don't know how it works. But it works somehow. There are some algorithms it's using under the hood, as mysterious as they may be. We might be searching blindly in the dark, grabbing hold of anything that feels promising, and we're probably still far away from the "right way" of doing it, of getting a computer to think the way humans think. And I'm sure we won't find the whole thing at once; maybe we'll have reverse-engineered the visual cortex, but not the vestibular system, which perhaps works completely differently. But if we were getting closer to stumbling on the right solution, that rapid saturation of benchmarks is the kind of behaviour I would expect to see.
[1]: "Foundation models and the next era of AI", Microsoft Research, https://youtu.be/HQI6O5DlyFc?t=958