AI: New Atlas Sees AI Headed in a New Direction
October 11, 2024
I like the premise of “AI Begins Its Ominous Split Away from Human Thinking.” Neural nets trained by humans on human information are going in their own direction. Whom do we thank? The neural net researchers? The Googlers who conceived of “the transformer”? The online advertisers who have provided significant sums of money? The “invisible hand” tapping on a virtual keyboard? Maybe quantum entanglement? I don’t know.
I do know that New Atlas’ article states:
AIs have a big problem with truth and correctness – and human thinking appears to be a big part of that problem. A new generation of AI is now starting to take a much more experimental approach that could catapult machine learning way past humans.
But isn’t that the point? The high school science club types beavering away in the smart software vineyards know the catchphrase:
Boldly go where no man has gone before!
The big outfits able to buy fancy chips and try to start mothballed nuclear plants have “boldly go where no man has gone before.” Get in the way of one of these captains of the star ship US AI, and you will be terminated, harassed, or forced to quit. If you are not boldly going, you are just not going.
The article says ChatGPT 4 whatever is:
… the first LLM that’s really starting to create that strange, but super-effective AlphaGo-style ‘understanding’ of problem spaces. In the domains where it’s now surpassing Ph.D.-level capabilities and knowledge, it got there essentially by trial and error, by chancing upon the correct answers over millions of self-generated attempts, and by building up its own theories of what’s a useful reasoning step and what’s not.
But, hey, it is pretty clear where AI is going from New Atlas’ perch:
OpenAI’s o1 model might not look like a quantum leap forward, sitting there in GPT’s drab textual clothing, looking like just another invisible terminal typist. But it really is a step-change in the development of AI – and a fleeting glimpse into exactly how these alien machines will eventually overtake humans in every conceivable way.
But if the AI goes its own way, how can a human “conceive” where the software is going?
Doom and fear work for the evening news (or what passes for the evening news). I think there is a cottage industry of AI doomsters working diligently to stop some people from fooling around with smart software. That is not going to work. Plus, the magical “transformer” thing is a culmination of years of prior work. It is simply one more step in the more than 50 year effort to process content.
This “stage” seems to have some utility, but more innovations will come. They have to. I am not sure how one stops people with money hunting for people who can say, “I have the next big thing in AI.”
Sorry, New Atlas, I am not convinced. Plus, I don’t watch movies or buy into most AI wackiness.
Stephen E Arnold, October 11, 2024
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