[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.