Really only around 80 years between the first machines we’d consider computers and today’s LLMs, so I’d say that’s pretty damn impressive
Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities
Gabu@lemmy.world 8 months ago
That’s a pretty shit take. Humankind spent nearly 12 thousand years figuring out the combustion engine. It took 1 million years to figure farming. Compared to that, less than 500 years to create general intelligence will be a blip in time.
kboy101222@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Harbinger01173430@lemmy.world 8 months ago
That’s why the sophon was sent to disrupt our progress. Smh
melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Llm’s are not a step to agi. Full stop. Lovelace called this like 200 years ago.
Gabu@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Pray tell, when did we achieve AGI so that you can say this with such conviction? Oh, wait, we didn’t - therefore the path there is still unknown.
melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Okay, this is no more a step to AGI than the publication of ‘blindsight’ or me adding tamarind paste to sweeten my tea.
Harbinger01173430@lemmy.world 8 months ago
When the Jewish made their first mud golem ages ago?
evranch@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
We may not even “need” AGI. The future of machine learning and robotics may well involve multiple wildly varying models working together.
LLMs are already very good at what they do (generating and parsing text and making a passable imitation of understanding it).
We already use them with other models, for example Whisper is a model that recognizes speech. You feed the output to an LLM to interpret it, use the LLM’s JSON output with a traditional parser to feed a motion control system, then back to an LLM to output text to feed to one of the many TTS models so it can “tell you what it’s going to do”.
Put it in a humanoid shell or a Spot dog and you have a helpful robot that looks a lot like AGI to the user. Nobody needs to know that it’s just 4 different machine learning algorithms in a trenchcoat.
melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee 8 months ago
passable imitation of understanding
Okay so there are things they’re useful for, but this one in particular is fucking… Not even nonsense.
Also, the ml algos exponentiate necessary clock cycles with each one you add.
So its less a trench coat and more an entire data center
And it still can’t understand; its still just sleight of hand.
evranch@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
And it still can’t understand; its still just sleight of hand.
Yes, thus “passable imitation of understanding”.
The average consumer doesn’t understand tensors, weights and backprop. They haven’t even heard of such things. They ask it a question, like it was a sentient AGI. It gives them an answer.
Passable imitation.
You don’t need a data center except for training, either. There’s no exponential term as the models are executed sequentially. You can even flush the huge LLM off your GPU when you don’t actively need it.
I’ve already run basically this entire stack locally and integrated it with my home automation system, on a system with a 12GB Radeon and 32GB RAM. Just to see how well it would work and to impress my friends.
You yell out “$wakeword, it’s cold in here. Turn up the furnace” and it can bicker with you in near-realtime about energy costs before turning it up the requested amount.
Honytawk@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
To create general AI, we first need a way for computers to communicate proficiently with humans.
LLMs are just that.
melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Its not though. It’s autocorrect. It is not communication. It’s literally autocorrect.
weker01@feddit.de 8 months ago
That is not an argument. Let me demonstrate:
Humans can’t communicate. They are meat. They are not communicating. It’s literally meat.
twig@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
This is some pretty weird and lowkey racist exposition on humanity.
Humankind isn’t a single unified thing. Individual cultures have their own modes of subsistence and transportation that are unique to specific cultural needs.
It’s not that it took 1 million years to “figure out” farming. It’s that 1 specific culture of modern humans (biologically, humans as we conceive of ourselves today have existed for about 200,000 years, with close relatives existing for in the ballpark of 1M years) started practicing a specific mode of subsistence around 23,000 years ago. Specific groups of indigenous cultures remaining today still don’t practice agriculture, because it’s not actually advantageous in many ways – stored foods are less nutritious, agriculture requires a fairly sedentary existence, it takes a shit load of time to cultivate and grow food (especially when compared to foraging and hunting), which leads to less leisure time.
Also where did you come up with the number 12,000 for “figuring out” the combustion engine? Genuinely curious. Like were we “working on it” for 12k years? I don’t get it. But this isn’t exactly a net positive and has come with some pretty disastrous consequences. I say this because you’re proposing a linear path for “humanity” forward, when the reality is that humans are many things, and progress viewed in this way has a tendency toward racism or at least ethnocentrism.
But also yeah, the point of this meme is “artists are valuable.”
nBodyProblem@lemmy.world 8 months ago
This is some pretty weird and lowkey racist exposition on humanity.
Getting “racism” from that post is a REAL stretch. It’s not even weird, agriculture and mechanization are widely considered good things for humanity as a whole
Humankind isn’t a single unified thing. Individual cultures have their own modes of subsistence and transportation that are unique to specific cultural needs.
ANY group of humans beyond the individual is purely just a social construct and classing humans into a single group is no less sensible than grouping people by culture, family, tribe, country etc.
It’s not that it took 1 million years to “figure out” farming. It’s that 1 specific culture of modern humans (biologically, humans as we conceive of ourselves today have existed for about 200,000 years, with close relatives existing for in the ballpark of 1M years) started practicing a specific mode of subsistence around 23,000 years ago. Specific groups of indigenous cultures remaining today still don’t practice agriculture, because it’s not actually advantageous in many ways – stored foods are less nutritious, agriculture requires a fairly sedentary existence, it takes a shit load of time to cultivate and grow food (especially when compared to foraging and hunting), which leads to less leisure time.
Agriculture is certainly more efficient in terms of nutrition production for a given calorie cost. It’s also much more reliable. Arguing against agriculture as a good thing for humanity as a whole is the thing that’s weird.
twig@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
I’m really not “arguing against agriculture,” I’m pointing out that there are other modes of subsistence that humans still practice, and that that’s perfectly valid. There are legitimate reasons why a culture would collectively reject agriculture.
But in point of fact, agriculture is not actually more efficient or reliable. Agriculture does allow for centralized city states in a way that foraging/hunting/fishing usually doesn’t, with a notable exception of many indigenous groups on the western coast of turtle island.
A study positing that in fact, agriculturalists are not more productive and in fact are more prone to famine: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3917328/
But the main point I was trying to make is that different expressions of human culture still exist, and not all cultures have followed along the trajectory of the dominant culture. People tend to view colonialism, expansion and everything that means as inevitable, and I think that’s a pretty big problem.
GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
The first heat engines were fire pistons, which go back to prehistory, so 12k to 25k years sounds about right. The next application of steam to make things move happened about 450 BC, about 2.5k years ago. Although not a direct predecessor to the ICE, they all are heat engines.
twig@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
Fire pistons are so damn cool. Yeah, that makes sense then.
Harbinger01173430@lemmy.world 8 months ago
This kind of thinking is dangerous and will hinder planetary unification…
twig@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
All I’m trying to point out is that distinct cultures are worthy of respect and shouldn’t be glossed over.
But be real with me: can you think of a single effort for “planetary unification” that wasn’t a total nightmare? I sure can’t.
Harbinger01173430@lemmy.world 8 months ago
This attitude is what prevents us from unifying…smh
Valmond@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Humanity didn’t spend those times figuring out those things though. Humanity grew that time to make it happen (and AI is younger than 500y IMO).
Also, we are the same persons today than people were then. We just have access to what our parents generation made and so on.
Gabu@lemmy.world 8 months ago
AI is younger than 500y IMO
Hence “will be a blip in time”
we are the same persons today than people were then. We just have access to what our parents generation made and so on.
Completelly disconnected and irrelevant to anything I wrote.
eskimofry@lemm.ee 8 months ago
less than 500 years to create general intelligence will be a blip in time.
You jynxed it. We aren’t gonna be around for 500 years now are we?
braxy29@lemmy.world 8 months ago
i think you’re missing the point, which i took as this - what arts and humanities folks do is valuable (as evidenced by efforts to recreate it) despite common narratives to the contrary.
Gabu@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Of course it’s valuable. So is, e.g., soldering components on a circuit board, but we have robots for doing that at scale now.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Do you think robots will ever become better than humans at creating art, in the same way they’ve become better than us at soldering?
naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
feel free to audit my comments to confirm my distinct lack of gpt enthusiasm but that question is unanswerable.
What is “creating art”? A distinctly human thing? then trivially no. Idk how many people go with this interpretation though. Although I think many artists and art appreciators do at least some of the time.
Is it drawing pretty pictures? Probably too reductive for even the most hardline tech enthusiasts but computers are already very good at this. If I want to say get my face in something that looks like an old timey oil painting computers are way faster than humans.
Is it making things that make us feel something? They can probably get pretty good at this. Although it’s unclear how novel the results will be most people aren’t exposed to most art so you could probably produce novel feelings on an individual level pretty well.
Art is so fuzzy and used with such a range of definitions it’s not really clear what this is asking.
Even if they’re better the future might still suck. Machines are technically better at all the components of carpentry than humans but I’d rather furniture wasn’t souless minimalist MDF landfill garbage and carpenters could still earn a living. Even if that means my chairs were a bit uneven.
xkforce@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Yep.
exocrinous@startrek.website 8 months ago
Not if climate change drives humans extinct before they can make those improvements
Gabu@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Quite easily, yes. Unlike humans, with their limited lifespans and slow minds, Artificial Inteligence could create hundreds of different paintings in the time it’d take me to finish one.