I always find Superintelligence inevitability interesting. And the author dismisses George Hotz argument about supply chains and the way that in order for ASI to truly take off it has to dominate not just the world of bits but atoms as well.
But I imagine there’s this problem that measuring intelligence in AI is not the same as measuring intelligence in humans. How is fable not already super intelligence. How is it not way smarter than the 99th percentile human? In terms of speed, broad ability and pattern matching behavior. If intelligence is loosely correlated with lifetime income, Anthropic billions in revenue should be a decent measure that LLMs are way smarter than most folks.
Because sometimes I think the inconvenient truth is that when people ask, you don’t think we’ll have AI that’s smarter than humans. It feels to me like we had AI that was smarter than humans a long time ago that somewhere around GPT three or GPT four we had AGI and if we already have AGI and we already have AI that’s smarter than humans then maybe the real question is is intelligence not his intelligence actually the right measurement for what we’re trying to achieve.
Or maybe it’s that ASI inevitability claims to be a very general argument, when it’s a very specific argument (or vice versa)
The AI inevitability argument seems to be something like - are you so anthropocentric and unimaginative that you can’t see a world where human creations outdo humans.
When the specific claim is more like “The specific technology of large language models will hard takeoff in the next few years”
There are infinite years ahead of us. Maybe hard takeoff is coming! And maybe it’s a thousand years away.
matthewtromp•2h ago
I don't really see why ASI wouldn't be able to dominate the world of atoms. All it needs is some humanoid robots, or even just humans willing to do what it says. That seems pretty achievable to me! We're already working on humanoid robots.
Fable is pretty smart, yeah! That's one of the things that concerns me. So far it seems like its intelligence isn't totally general. It's great at coding, and great at finding connections between facts, and great at making/critiquing arguments, but maybe it's not quite great at e.g. making complicated strategies to take over the world. But I think there's good reasons to believe that, as models get smarter and smarter, they will get better and better at stuff like that. And that worries me!
The history of AI is littered with people saying "yeah sure, AI can do X, but it will never be able to do Y, because Y is a fundamental part of the human condition." We're running out of Ys in this sentence!
mikgp•2h ago
But I imagine there’s this problem that measuring intelligence in AI is not the same as measuring intelligence in humans. How is fable not already super intelligence. How is it not way smarter than the 99th percentile human? In terms of speed, broad ability and pattern matching behavior. If intelligence is loosely correlated with lifetime income, Anthropic billions in revenue should be a decent measure that LLMs are way smarter than most folks.
Because sometimes I think the inconvenient truth is that when people ask, you don’t think we’ll have AI that’s smarter than humans. It feels to me like we had AI that was smarter than humans a long time ago that somewhere around GPT three or GPT four we had AGI and if we already have AGI and we already have AI that’s smarter than humans then maybe the real question is is intelligence not his intelligence actually the right measurement for what we’re trying to achieve.
Or maybe it’s that ASI inevitability claims to be a very general argument, when it’s a very specific argument (or vice versa)
The AI inevitability argument seems to be something like - are you so anthropocentric and unimaginative that you can’t see a world where human creations outdo humans.
When the specific claim is more like “The specific technology of large language models will hard takeoff in the next few years”
There are infinite years ahead of us. Maybe hard takeoff is coming! And maybe it’s a thousand years away.
matthewtromp•2h ago
Fable is pretty smart, yeah! That's one of the things that concerns me. So far it seems like its intelligence isn't totally general. It's great at coding, and great at finding connections between facts, and great at making/critiquing arguments, but maybe it's not quite great at e.g. making complicated strategies to take over the world. But I think there's good reasons to believe that, as models get smarter and smarter, they will get better and better at stuff like that. And that worries me!
The history of AI is littered with people saying "yeah sure, AI can do X, but it will never be able to do Y, because Y is a fundamental part of the human condition." We're running out of Ys in this sentence!