[SV_BubbleTime]

Good satire; thought it was real until I got to “We don’t know how our AI systems work, we don’t know what they can do,”

I look forward to the stupid phase of mistakes with AI. Because it surely has to be better than the past decade of free money devoted almost exclusively to advertising optimization and tightening of controls.

[twblalock]

This doesn't look like satire. Too much work went into it, and the author seems to be sincere.

[Animats]

“We don’t know how our AI systems work, we don’t know what they can do.”

That's not a joke. That's a real problem with the current versions of machine learning. You've got a huge collection of weights and no understanding of what they mean.

We've reached a strange place. Large language models have blown through the Turing Test. Yet this isn't AI. What we have is something that generates plausible-looking but not consistently correct text or images. Large language models have mechanized the Dunning-Kruger effect.

It's striking how plausible the output is. What this may demonstrate is that well-written text is mostly an average of a large body of text. This is similar to the discovery that if you average a large number of faces, you get a very good looking one. It's a discovery about the human perception system.

This may be a transient situation. Researchers are starting to figure out that inside those huge collections of weights, models sometimes emerge. Something that works like understanding or common sense may turn up in there. That may take a while.

Meanwhile, though, the business potential of automated blithering is going to result in this stuff being used for far too much.

[abathur]

I look forward to finding out how recursive all-AI chumboxes will try to pick the scabs of our psyche.

[returnInfinity]

AI really is a blackbox right now.