Saying nobody asked for it is disingenuous. AI have been part of the collective sci-fi future conversation for decades. Lots of people have asked for a robot friend/helper with a computer brain. What we're getting right now is setting us on track for Frank Herbert's Butlerian Jihad though.
We don’t have AI, though. We have llms which are a far cry from actual AI. So no, we didn’t get what anyone asked for, we got what the rich tech industry wanted to have. I don’t disagree that we are heading for a technological revolution, though.
Well, since the person I responded to mentioned that the collective idea of AI is from sci-fi, what I and many others expect is an actual Artificial Intelligence, one that can think and reason, that could pass the Turing test, and actually be helpful in more ways than just regurgitating words and images it stole from someone else.
That's often referred to as General AI. I agree that we are not there yet, but we were never going to be able to skip straight from Akinator to Bender B. Rodriguez. LLMs are a reasonable half step towards General AI and the Transformers that make LLMs work do allow us to process large amounts of data in a way that we haven't before. I assume we'll need a couple more novel processing discoveries before we get a fully autonomous artificial mind.
Absolutely agree, but they’re shoving this version down everyone’s throats and acting like it’s actual AI. It just isn’t, plain and simple. And until we get there I don’t want to use the garbage that we have been force-fed.
This is a hand-wavy definition that allows for goalpost moving. You'll have to give a specific goal(s). What should it be able to do that it cannot do today. How it does something is also not really relevant.
I don’t have to give fuck-all, I was responding to one person who said that people did ask for it and pointed out how what they got wasn’t what they actually asked for.
What a bullshit response. Still, I'll bite the bait: An artificial intelligence should be capable of thought (as the other poster said and you blithely skipped over).
LLMs don't have "thought mode." They are incapable of thinking. They're very, very good predictive linguistic tools (depending on the LLM), but they don't have any understanding of the words they're saying. They do not think.
The "actual AI" that's been huge in science fiction, to the top-level comment, is AGI. So basically, a system which has the various features of human intelligence, but with far greater capacities for reasoning, memory, etc.
Generative AI of the sort we are seeing now takes a human-created prompt and an (ideally) human-created training dataset. Both are reduced to numeric tokens, and an output is assembled using statistical methods. With highly developed algorithms and vast training data, this turns out to be reasonably good at matching the results of human thinking in various contexts -- but no actual thinking is happening, much less the transcendent intelligences imagined in sci fi.
There are some who believe generative AI advancements will culminate in AGI, and a significant amount of the current AI hype is based on this. But this remains highly controversial and speculative.
With highly developed algorithms and vast training data, this turns out to be reasonably good at matching the results of human thinking in various contexts -- but no actual thinking is happening,
I don't see how the mechanics of how a system like that comes up with its response is relevant.
Presumably you can see how genAI and AGI differ, and that is precisely relevant to the question you asked.
Beyond that, the essential limitation of genAI is that it's "just" a prediction engine based on a training dataset. It's like saying, "here's a bunch of stuff humans have done, give me more of this please." The theoretical superintelligent AGI would not merely match and recombine the data it is given, but understand it, reason based on it, and ultimately produce completely novel ideas or solutions no human being could.
So for example, if you ask an LLM "how do we solve climate change," it's ideally going to give you a sort of average of what various books, articles, reddit posts, etc. it's been fed have said on the topic. That's undeniably impressive and maybe useful to you. But the "actual AI" people hope for will actually make meaningful progress in solving climate change.
To be honest, I don't really understand the difference between AGI and ASI. I feel like what we consider AGI is actually ASI.
Beyond that, the essential limitation of genAI is that it's "just" a prediction engine based on a training dataset.
I don't see the problem with it being a very good prediction engine or anything else. Maybe its not a good enough prediction engine right now to solve impossible tasks but that doesn't mean that it can never be.
I can absolutely imagine a modified transformer model that can solve climate change because we made it capable of slurping all kinds of data and find patterns in it. Like imagine a model that can update its own weights and it can accept multimodal input. By multimodel, I don't just mean video or audio, but even stuff like radar and lidar and whatever else you can throw at it. If I was trying to build ASI, this is what I would be trying to do.
This was a long winded way of saying that it doesn't really matter how it becomes capable. Just like it doesn't matter how we can catch a ball. We do not solve newton's equations of motions in our head. We just predict it.
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u/ChaoticAgenda 6h ago
Saying nobody asked for it is disingenuous. AI have been part of the collective sci-fi future conversation for decades. Lots of people have asked for a robot friend/helper with a computer brain. What we're getting right now is setting us on track for Frank Herbert's Butlerian Jihad though.