[wheels]

And if it was a 30% stake in OpenAI for that $7 trillion (kind of a standard VC round percentage) that would put OpenAI's valuation at about the same of all of the 7000-ish NASDAQ companies (including almost all public tech companies) combined.

[lumost]

There was probably a point of maximum hype ~12 months ago, or right after the launch of GPT-4 where the belief of imminent singularity was running high.

[bugbuddy]

But, singularity is still imminent. Right? Where on the spectrum of completely useless/no AI to singularity are we at?

[alsetmusic]

Considering that what is currently passed as AI is really just statical probability of string words together that is completely unable to apply logic or reason… we ain't even close.

[fwipsy]

I don't know if we ever will get a singularity, but if we do the last comment before we're obliterated will be something along these lines.

[sqeaky]

I like the three comments above this one all seem to massively disagree or at least give off argument energy, but they all seem totally correct and don't directly contradict each other.

[heavensteeth]

And atheists will speak similarly of the rapture before it happens. Repent!

[falcor84]

When they said repent, repent

I wonder what they meant

[babkayaga]

statisticsl probability in which distribution? stringing words is not at all how gpt works.

[soulofmischief]

I'd recommend educating yourself on the last few years of neural network development before spreading misinformation.

LLMs have been shown to be capable of embedding logic and reasoning. There is nothing preventing a sequence generator from learning stochastic reasoning skills. Modern LLMs don't even just output language tokens. The latent information stored in the hidden layers is far more abstract than just language.

[turtlesdown11]

did you not read https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05229

"We hypothesize that this decline is due to the fact that current LLMs are not capable of genuine logical reasoning; instead, they attempt to replicate the reasoning steps observed in their training data."

[soulofmischief]

They've presented a hypothesis warranting further study.

Here is an article where a model's learned ability to carry out modular addition is recovered. https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.05217

As you can see, the jury's still out.

[joquarky]

Didn't Godel demonstrate that language can only approximate reality?

[soulofmischief]

LLMs are a special type of transformer model, however several recent models have been multimodal, allowing for a variety of input and output type. So the question is if a neural network can approximate reality, not LLMs.

Though really, all embedded models of reality are approximate by nature, and based on stochastic empirical data. The real tradeoff with probability-based neural networks is whether a rigid algorithmic approach or a more flexible, but stochastic, approach solves the problem at hand.

[bckr]

It’s gonna require N more hype cycles (bearing in mind that usefulness is the expected endpoint of the hype cycle)

[Terr_]

> (bearing in mind that usefulness is the expected endpoint of the hype cycle)

I think for the people doing it, the expected endpoint is more about raising the price of shares they hold until they've been sold.

[bckr]

Hype cycles ride on real progress that’s first blown out of proportion, then under-appreciated. LLMs are still magic AF. We are just so tired of hearing about them and how they’re going to change everything.

[netdevnet]

The singularity is always just around the corner. It's like a whale in a casino. The big reward is always just around the corner. You need to drop a few more coins and soon you will be rich

[cdchn]

We'll get the singularity within 2 years of perfecting self-driving cars.

[adastra22]

The singularity ain't real, buddy.

[lupusreal]

What is singularity anyway? I thought it was just some hypothetical point in time where making accurate predictions about the future becomes infeasible.

[michaelt]

The singularity is a sci-fi end-of-days story. It speculates that at some point we'll invent an AI that's about as smart as a human, and smart enough to design a better version of itself.

Then a week later it'll come up with a version of itself that's twice as smart. A week later that version will come up with a version that's twice as smart again, making it 4x as smart as a human. A week after that, it'll come up with a version that's twice as smart again, 8x as smart as a human. And so on. A year later it'll be a trillion times smarter than a human.

The AI will then either solve all our problems, invent fusion power and faster-than-light travel, and usher in a Star Trek style post-scarcity world of infinite resources and luxury, or it'll take over and create a Terminator style oppressive dystopia where the few surviving humans survive on rats we roast over a barrel in our underground bunker.

[dr_dshiv]

At geological or biological timescales, that’s what the emergence of language did. AI can all be viewed as part of the accelerating returns of language…

[fragmede]

There's a dystopian definition in the other comment but usually, when people say they're looking forwards to the singularity, they're referring to a version of the future where robots and computers are able to do most of not all jobs, so humans no longer have to work, and can spend all their time doing whatever, usually phrased as painting, singing, dancing, and the other leisure-type activities. Bettering themselves and helping humanity. The utopian, post-scarcity Federation from Star Trek, if you've seen it.

[adastra22]

But without offering an objective model for how that could happen, it’s just wish-fulfillment fantasy.

The Singularity is the rapture of the nerds, and is about as likely to happen as the second coming of Jesus.

[kfarr]

There are many competing definitions which is why these comment threads devolve.

[soulofmischief]

The technological singularity was first described by John von Neumann. Are you suggesting you understand something about technology that one of the most intelligent technologists to ever walk the earth didn't?

[staticman2]

Does it matter how smart someone is when they make things up?

We see this in AI talk all the time "Dude is really good at coding and math, he's smart. We should totally listen to him when he makes things up like a 12 year old who just watched Terminator."

[soulofmischief]

Great question, and what you're referring to is an appeal to authority, which is a common logical fallacy. It absolutely warrants further examination.

In the case of von Neumann, I mention him because he is the one who introduced the concept to the public. It is something he spent a great deal of time thinking about. He spent his life working around technology and had some incredible insights. Many consider him the smartest person to ever live, though in my opinion there are plenty contenders. He made key contributions to the development of computers, nuclear tech, quantum mechanics, mathematics and more. [0]

So I believe all of this truly does lead credence to the idea, at least enough to warrant sufficient research before dismissal. It's not his authority I appeal to, it's his experience. He didn't obsess over this idea for no reason, and his well-documented achievements aren't comparable to random flash-in-the-pan tech executives.

[0] https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-von-Neumann

[haliskerbas]

Only a few thousand days away. /s