[sailingparrot]

> and the folks predicting we're just around the corner have been recognized once again as shysters, hucksters, and charlatans

Why? Can you see the future? No one (serious) was claiming that GPT-4 is superintelligence, it’s about the rate of improvement.

There has only been 6 years between GPT-1 and GPT-4, and each iteration brought more and more crazy emergent behaviour. We still don’t see any sign of the scaling laws slowing down.

I work in ML research, and personally don’t believe ASI is just around, but I talk everyday to researcher that believe so, they don’t say that to swindle anyone’s money (they have extremely well paid 9 to 5 jobs at Goog/MS/OAI, they aren’t trying to raise money from VCs), they only believe so due to the rate of improvement.

Claiming, barely 18 months after GPT-4, when we haven’t yet seen any result from the next jump in scale, that it’s all baloney is a bit premature.

Btw in research time, 10 years from now is « around the corner ».

Now for the VC-chasing folks, their motivation is an entirely different story.

[dekhn]

I'm pretty good at estimating the future; I started working in ML around 1993 and my last work in ML was on TPU hardware at Google (helping researchers solve deep problems when hardware goes wonky), and a number of my ideas (like AlphaFold's capabilities) were predicted by me at CASP in ~2003.

I just continue to think that Vinge was a bit optimistic both on the timeline and acceleration rate. Everybody who cares about this should read https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html and consider whether we will reach the point where ML is actively improving its own hardware (after all, we do use ML to design next gen ML hardware, but with humans in the loop).

[sailingparrot]

Sure, you can think a lot of people are too optimistic (and as stated in my previous post I agree with you), but calling them shysters, hucksters, and charlatans implies a hidden motive to lie for personal gains, which isn’t there (again, in the ML research side). No one working on GPT-2 thought it would be such a leap on GPT-1, no one working on GPT-3 knew that that was the scale at which 0 shot would start emerging, no one working on GPT-4 thought it was going to be so good, so let’s just not pretend we now what GPT-5 or 6 scale model will and won’t do. We just don’t know, we all have our guesses but that’s just what it is, a guess. People making a different guess might be wrong ultimately, that doesn’t make them charlatans.

[dekhn]

OK, fair. I will stop saying shysters, hucksters, and charlatans when referring to Hinton (https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/why-neural-net... and https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/technology/ai-google-chat...). Perhaps "doomsayer" is the most apt term?

Altman, however, whenever I read what he says, I think falls within the "snake oil salesman" spectrum, although again, that's not precisely the word. A person who intentionally overstates the capabilities (and future capabilities) of a system with the intended goal of personal gain.