[lacksconfidence]

The problem is this is what people are being told is happening. I've talked to laypeople that think chatgpt is a superintelligent thing they get 100% truthful answers from. I saw a podcast last week from a PhD (in an unrelated field) claiming AGI will be here in 2027. As long as there are people out there claiming AI is everything, there will be people that look at whats available and say no, it's not actually that (yet).

[keeganpoppen]

respectfully, i feel i am alone in this opinion, but i’m not even remotely convinced that there isn’t a “superintelligent being” hiding in plain sight with tools that we already have at hand. people always grouse about the quality of LLM outputs, and then you realize that they (tend to) think that somehow the LLM is supposed to read their minds and deliver the answer they “didn’t need, but deserved”… i’d take my chances being dumped in 12 th century england getting bleated at in old english over being an LLM that has to suffer through a three sentence essay about someone’s brilliant, life-altering startup idea, having to grapple with the overwhelming certainty that there is absolutely no conceivable satisfactory answer to a question poorly conceived.

for all we (well, “i”, i guess) know, “superintelligence” is nothing more than a(n extremely) clever arrangement of millions of gpt-3 prompts working together in harmony. is it really so heretical to think that silicon + a semi-quadrillion human-hour-dollars might maybe have the raw information-theoretical “measurables” to be comparable to those of us exalted organic, enlightened lifeforms?

clearly others “know” much more than i do about the limits of these things than me. i just have spent like 16 hours a day for ~18 months talking to the damned heretic with my own two hands— i am far from an authority on the subject. but beyond the classical “hard” cases (deep math, … the inevitability of death …?), i personally have yet to see a case where an LLM is truly given all the salient information in an architecturaly useful way in which “troublesome output”. you put more bits into the prompt, you get more bits out. yes, there’s, in my opinion, an incumbent conservation law here— no amount of input bits yields superlinear returns (as far as i have seen). but who looks at an exponential under whose profoundly extensive shadow we have continued to lose ground for… a half-century? … and says “nah, that can never matter, because i am actually, secretly, so special that the profound power i embody (but, somehow, never manage to use in such a profound way as to actually tilt the balance “myself”) is beyond compare, beyond imitation— not to be overly flip, but it sure is hard to distinguish that mindset from… “mommy said i was special”. and i say this all with my eyes keenly aware of my own reflection.

the irony of it all is that so much of this reasoning is completely contingent on a Leibniz-ian, “we are living in the best of all possible worlds” axiom that i am certain i am actually more in accord with than anyone who opines thusly… it’s all “unscientific”… until it isn’t. somehow in this “wtf is a narcissus” society we live in, we have gone from “we are the tools of our tools” to “surely our tools could never exceed us”… the ancient greek philosopher homer of simpson once mused “could god microwave a burrito so hot that even he could not eat it”… and we collectively seem all too comfortable to conclude that the map Thomas Acquinas made for us all those scores of years ago is, in fact, the territoire…

[adampk]

'you put more bits into the prompt, you get more bits out.'

I think your line there highlights the difference in what I mean by 'insight'. If I provided in a context window every manufacturing technique that exists, all of base experimental results on all chemical reactions, every known emergent property that is known, etc, I do not agree that it would then be able to produce novel insights.

This is not an ego issue where I do not want it be able to do insightful thinking because I am a 'profound power'. You can put in all the context needed where you have an insight, and it will not be able to generate it. I would very much like it to be able to do that. It would be very helpful.

Do you see how '“superintelligence” is nothing more than a(n extremely) clever arrangement of millions of gpt-3 prompts working together in harmony' is circular? extremely clever == superintelligence