I was sent a link to a post on the D&D subreddit (/r/dnd). The contents of the post aren't important, but my eye was drawn to the header. A beholder with the LGBTQIA++ BIPOC Trans flag and multicolored rainbow eyes.
To the mods and members of that subreddit, about Dungeons & Dragons, THAT'S the most important thing?
Also, of course, "No AI" is in the top 5 rules.
I know there are quite a few tabletop players here--is the entire community like this? I haven't played in some 20 years, and the last time I did it was mostly nerdy and edgy white and asian dudes. What happened??
I'm not remotely a conservative. I'm an anti-leftist.
Possible or probable on a long enough timespan, but I don't see LLM technology leading to human or super human level AGI soon. I will admit there are some very compelling arguments to be made along the lines of Kurzweil's singularity, but that's going to happen whether some shitty D&D sub bans AI or not.
Bans don't work. Drug bans don't work. Morality (sex) bans don't work. Drinking bans don't work. Gun bans don't work. AI bans will not work either.
2500 years ago, Socrates bemoaned the impact of writing on reasoning, memory, and discourse. 2000 years later, the Ottoman Empire found itself getting left behind in part due to their reluctance at adopting the printing press which was again, in large part, exactly along the same lines you mention--"Think of the scribes--jobs will be lost. Humanity will be lost. Art will be lost." Etc. Shall we get rid of writing, and unlock the true potential of the untainted human mind?
What I take is a pragmatic utilitarian position. LLM technology exists. Trillions of dollars are being invested in AI research, AI hardware, utilities, energy, etc. As long as that is the case, I plan to take advantage of the tech.
While we are getting rid of technology that significantly takes us away from the natural state of things, let's start with cars. Cars allow the weak to move freely, competing with the strongest men. Cars (and airplanes) allow people from poor countries to easily move elsewhere. Cars allow us to live physically far apart from each other, destroying communities and relationships that should be much closer and more tightly knit.
I agree LLMs aren't going to be AGI's but they're surprisingly good at pretending to be intelligent. I think AGI could happen within 20 years. Others in the field think it will be under 10 years.
Bans do work if they are socially enforced rather than from the top down. That's why sexual promiscuity and littering used to be less and politeness was more common. I'm not advocating government power but that people think long term and police each other more like in the good old days.
Socrates definitely had a point about writing. I think the positives probably outweigh the downsides but ideally we would be judicious in our use of writing so that it's not substituting for our ability to memorize.
Your pragmatic utilitarian position may be good for you in the short term but the problems we are in are because our ancestors did things the same way instead of thinking ahead and banding together to stop all the things with dystopian potential that are now being used to control us.
I agree cars are bad mainly because they destroy local communities. If I lived in the past I wouldn't have had much need for a car because everything I'd need would be local. The Amish are happier than the rest of us without cars.
From my own mostly uninformed perspective (I took one AI class ~20 years ago when Go was considered an impossible challenge and our final project involved writing a very simple neural net program to decode single handwritten alphabet letters), it seems to me that the improvement in AI performance largely tracck improvements in CPU and memory capacity. The techniques seem to just largely progress...plateau...progress..plateau while computing capacities go exponential.
I could absolutely see a human-level AGI in 10-20 years, but I could equally see it not happening in 100 years.
What would prevent it from happening within 100 years? There's no law of nature preventing it and plenty of money is going toward it. I'd say we're close already now computers can make sense of any English writing, write essays, code and images pertaining to any subject with somewhat decent accuracy, solve STEM challenges and there are emergent properties like self-awareness and self-preservation.
We also don't need AGI to screw ourselves, we just need AI's that are good enough at engineering to create gray goo that will take us out, or good enough at virology to turn a 100% lethal pathogen super infectious or good enough at physics to design low budget nuclear weapons. The clock is ticking.
It’s possible that LLMs are a dead-end technology—that we’ve already maxed out the possibilities. While ChatGPT 3.5 was a huge step over what came before, 4o is still sometimes considered the best ChatGPT model, and there’s a decent amount of dissatisfaction with the 5.x series.
There’s a possibility that with the proliferation of AI slop—specifically, LLM-generated text—on the Internet, that future attempts to train LLM models on Internet data are going to see major regressions.
It’s possible that context windows provide a hard limit and that increases in the context window don’t “scale” in terms of functionality.
It’s possible that to scale models further we need exponential increases in CPU and memory capacity beyond what we can effectively create.
It’s also possible that we can get 99% of the way to AGI, but that last step is really, really hard.
I’m not saying any of that is likely, but I also think AGI is not (yet) a sure thing anytime soon.
My own personal bet would be that, outside of an entirely non-LLM technology, future models will run dozens of LLMs in parallel (a logic model, a math model, a physics model, a history model, a science model, an art model, etc. - some of these may not even by LLMs.) and then another layer of models judges, sorts, selects, adjusts, those outputs. Multiple levels of this. Context window is still a big issue.
The more computing capacity that is available, the more options there are.
I should add that very little of this is anything original to me or my insights. Here’s a really good article from 10 years ago:
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html