But it’s not scary. It’s… marvelous, cringey, uncomfortable, awe-inspiring. What’s scary is not what AI can currently do, but what we expect from it. Can it do math yet? Can it play chess? Can it write entire apps from scratch? Can it just do my entire job for me?
We’re moving toward a world where every job will be modeled, and you’ll either be an AI owner, a model architect, an agent/hardware engineer, a technician, or just.. training data.
After an OpenAI launch, I think it's important to take one's feelings about the future impact of the technology with a HUGE grain of salt. OpenAI are masters of hype. They have been generating hype for years now, yet the real-world impacts remain modest so far.
Do you remember when they teased GPT-2 as "too dangerous" for public access? I do. Yet we now have Llama 3 in the wild, which even at the smaller 8B size is about as powerful as the [edit: 6/13/23] GPT-4 release.
As someone pointed out elsewhere in the comments, a logistic curve looks exponential in the beginning, before it approaches saturation. Yet, logistic curves are more common, especially in ML. I think it's interesting that GPT-4o doesn't show much of an improvement in "reasoning" strength.
It's glib to dismiss safety concerns because we haven't all turned into paperclips yet. LLMs and image gen models are having real effects now.
We're already at a point where AI can generate text and images that will fool a lot of people a lot of the time. For every college-educated young person smugly pointing out that they aren't fooled by an image with six-fingered hands, there are far more people who had marginal media literacy to begin with and are now almost defenceless against a tidal wave of hyper-scaleable deception.
We're already at a point where we're counselling elders to ignore late-night messages from people claiming to be a relative in need of an urgent wire transfer. What defences do we have when an LLM will be able to have a completely fluent, natural-sounding conversation in someone else's voice? I'm not confident that I'd be able to distinguish GPT-4o from a human speaker in the best of circumstances and I'm almost certain that I could be fooled if I'm hurried, distracted, sleep deprived or otherwise impaired.
Regardless of any future impacts on the labour market or any hypothesised X-risks, I think we should be very worried about the immediate risks to trust and social cohesion. An awful lot of people are turning into paranoid weirdos at the moment and I don't particularly blame them, but I can see things getting seriously ugly if we can't abate that trend.
Set a memorable verification phrase with your friends and loved ones. That way if you call them out of the blue or from some strange number (and they actually pick up for some reason) and you tell them you need $300 to get you out of trouble they can ask you to say the phrase and they'll know it's you if you respond appropriately.
I've already done that and I'm far less worried about AI fooling me or my family in a scam than I am about corporations and governments using it without caring about the impact of the inevitable mistakes and hallucinations. AI is already being used by judges to decide how long people should go to jail. Parole boards are using it to decide who to keep locked up. Governments are using it to decide which people/buildings to bomb. Insurance companies are using to deny critical health coverage to people. Police are using it to decide who to target and even to write their reports for them.
More and more people are going to get badly screwed over, lose their freedom, or lose their lives because of AI. It'll save time/money for people with more money and power than you or I will ever have though, so there's no fighting it.
Alternatively while it may be difficult to trick you directly, phishing the passphrase from a more naive loved one or bored coworker and then parroting it back to you is also a possibility. 'etc.
Phone scams are no joke and this is getting past the point where regular people can be expected to easily filter them out.
1. something you have
2. something you know
3. something you are
These three things are required for any authz.
We went from living in villages where everyone knew each other to living in big cities where almost everyone is a stranger.
We went from photos being relatively reliable evidence to digital photography where anyone can fake almost anything and even the line between faking and improving is blurred.
We went from mass distribution of media being a massive capital expenditure that only big publishers could afford to something that is free and anonymous for everyone.
We went from a tiny number of people in close proximity being able to initiate a conversation with us to being reachable for everyone who could dial a phone number or send an email message.
Each of these transitions caused big problems. None of these problems have ever been completely solved. But each time we found mitigations that limit the impact of any misuse.
I see the current AI wave as yet another step away from trusting superficial appearances to a world that requires more formal authentication protocols.
Passports were introduced long ago but never properly transitioned into the digital world. Using some unsigned PDF allegedly representing a utility bill as proof of address seems questionable as well. And the way in which social security numbers are used for authentication in the US is nothing short of bizarre.
So I think there are some very low hanging fruits in terms of authentication and digital signatures. We have all the tools to deal with the trust issues caused by generative AI. We just have to use them.
That's massive fast change, and we haven't culturally caught up to any of it yet.
That's how I look at where we're going with AI. Plunge along into the new arms race first and build the capacity, then later figure out the treaties and safeguards which we hope will keep our society safe (and by that I don't mean a Skynet-like AI-powered destruction, but the upheaval of our society potentially as impactful as the industrial revolution.)
Humanity will get through it, I'm sure. But I'm not confident it will be without a lot of pain and suffering for a large percentage of people. We also managed to survive 2 world wars in the last century--but it cost the lives of 100 million people.
So the question, I think, is how do we reclaim trust in a world where every kind of content can be convincingly faked? And I think the answer is by rebuilding trust between users such that we actually have reason to simply trust the users we're interacting with aren't lying to us (and that also goes for building trust in the platforms we use). In my mind, that means a shift to small federated and P2P communication since both of these enable both the users and the operators to build the network around existing real-world relationships. A federation network can still grow large, but it can do so through those relationships rather than giving institutional bad actors as easy of an entrance as anyone else.
This a problem with all technology. The mitigations are like technical debt but with a difference. You can fix technical debt. Short of societal collapse mitigations persist, the impacts ratchet upward and disproportionately affect people at the margin.
There's an old (not quite joke) that if civilization fell, a large percentage of the population would die of the effects of tooth decay.
The nature of this tech itself is probably what is getting most people - it looks, sounds and feels _human_ - it's very relatable and easy for a non-tech person to understand it and thus get creeped out. I'd argue there are _far_ more dangerous technologies out there, but no one notices and / or cares because they don't understand the tech in the first place!
The "yet" is carrying a lot of weight in that statement. It is now five years since the launch of GPT-2, three years since the launch of GPT-3 and less than 18 months since the launch of ChatGPT. I cannot think of any technology that has improved so much in such a short space of time.
We might hit an inflection point and see that rate of improvement stall, but we might not; we're not really sure where that point might lie, because there's likely to still be a reasonable amount of low-hanging fruit regarding algorithmic and hardware efficiency. If OpenAI and their peers can maintain a reasonable rate of improvement for just a few more years, then we're looking at a truly transformational technology, something like the internet that will have vast repercussions that we can't begin to predict.
The whole LLM thing might be a nothingburger, but how much are we willing to gamble on that outcome?
> it'd have to be impacting the real world
By writing business plans? Getting lawyers punished because they didn't realise that "passes bar exam" isn't the same as "can be relied on for citations"? By defrauding people with synthesised conversations using stolen voices? By automating and personalising propaganda?
Or does it only count when it's guiding a robot that's not merely a tech demo?
Maybe they didn't know, maybe none of their colleagues used it, their company didn't pay for it, or maybe all they need is an Excel update.
But I am confident that using Copilot would be faster than clicking through the sludge that are Microsoft Office help pages (third party or not.)
So I think it is correct to fear capabilities, even if the real world impace is still missing. When you invent an airplane, there won't be an airstrip to land on yet. Is it useless, won't it change anything?
It's still early, and I don't see much in corporate communications, for instance, but it will be quite the change.
It's worse than I thought. They've already managed to mimick the median HN user perfectly!
I fear that at some point the anonymity that made the internet great in the first place will be destroyed by this.
i remember seeing the change when GPT-2 was announced
I guess we need to have an AI secretary to take in all phonecalls from now on (spam folder will become a lot more interesting with celebrity phone calls, your dead relative phoning you etc)
And that's the case even if you've never ever posted anything on your social media - it could be family&friends, or employer, or if you're ever been in a public-facing job position that has ever done any community outreach, or ever done a public performance with your music or another hobby, or if you've ever walked past a news crew asking questions to bystanders of some event, or if you've ever participated in some contests or competitions or sports leagues, etc, all of that is generally findable in various archives.
Why not an AI assistant in the browser to fend all the adversarial manipulation and spam AIs on the web? Going online without your AI assistant would be like venturing without a mask during COVID
I foresee a cat-and-mouse game, AIs for manipulation vs AIs for protection one upping each other. It will be like immune system vs viruses.
has been for years mon ami. i remember when they started talking about GPT-2 here, and then seeing a sea-change in places like reddit and quora
quite visible on HN, esp. in certain threads like those involving brands that market heavily, or discussions of particular countries and politics.
I don't think anyone has a good answer to that question, which is the problem in a nutshell. Job one is to start investing seriously in finding possible answers.
>We need to roll back to "don't trust anything online, don't share your identity or payment information online"
That's easy to say, but it's a trillion-dollar decision. Alphabet and Meta are both worthless in that scenario, because ~all of their revenue comes from connecting unfamiliar sellers with buyers. Amazon is at existential risk. The collapse of Alibaba would have a devastating impact on Chinese exporters, with massive consequent geopolitical risks. Rolling back to the internet of old means rolling back on many years worth of productivity and GDP growth.
Even when it comes to people like our parents, there are things we would trust them to do, and things that we would not trust them to do. But what happens when you have zero trusted elements in a category?
At the end of the day, the digital world is the real world, not some seperate place 'outside the environment'. Trying to treat digital like it doesn't exist puts you in a dangerous place to be deceived. For example if you're looking for XYZ and you manage to leak this into the digital world, said digital world may manipulate your trusted friends via ads, articles, the social media posts they see on what they think about XYZ before you ask them.
This tech is dangerous, and I'm currently of the opinion that its uses for malicious purposes are far better and more significant than LLM's replacing anyone's jobs. The bullshit asymmetry principle is very incredibly significant for covert ops and asymmetric warfare, and generating convincing misinformation has become basically free overnight.
Discovering an asteroid full of gold, with as much gold as half the earth to put a modest number, would have huge impact to the labour market. Anything conductive like copper, silver, mining jobs would all go away. Also housing would be obsolete as we would all live in golden houses. A huge impact to the housing market, yet it doesn't seem such a bad thing to me.
>We're already at a point where we're counselling elders to ignore late-night messages from people claiming to be a relative in need of an urgent wire transfer.
Anyone can prove their identity, or identities, over the wire, wire-fully or wire-lessly, anything you like. When i did go to university, i was the only one attending the cryptography class, no one else showed up for a boring class like this. I wrote a story about the Electrona Corp in my blog.
What i say to people for at least 2 years now, is that "Remember when governments were not just some cryptographic algorithms?" Yeah, that's gonna change. Cryptography is here to stay, it is not as dead as people think and it's gonna make a huge blast.
All this would do is crash the gold price. Also note that all the gold at our disposal right now (worldwide) basically fits into a cube with 20m edges (its not as much as you might think).
Gold is not suitable to replace steel as building material (because it has much lower strength and hardness), nor copper/aluminium as conductor (it's a worse conductor than copper and much worse in conductivity/weigth than aluminium). The main technical application short term would be gold plated electrical contacts on every plug and little else...
The thing about cryptography and government is that it's easy to imagine for a great technology to be adapted on the governmental level because of its greatness. But it is another thing to actually implement it. We live in a bubble, where almost anyone knows about cryptographic hashes and RSA, but for most of the people it is not the case.
Another thing is that political actors are tending to try to concentrate power in their own hands. No way they will delegate a decision making to any form of algorithm — being cryptographic or not.
Probably why it's not released yet. It's unsafe for phishing.
- It helps them sleep at night if their creation doesn't put millions of people out of work.
- Fear of regulation
The world learnt to deal with Nigerian Prince emails and nobody is falling to those anymore. Nothing was changed - no new laws or regulations needed.
Phishing calls have been going on without an AI for decades.
You can be skeptical and call back. If you know your friends or family you should be able to find an alternative way to get in touch always without too much effort in the modern connected world.
Just recently a gang in Spain was arrested for "son in trouble" scam. No AI used. Most of the parents are not fooled in this.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68931214
The AI might have some marginal impact, but it does not matter in the big picture of scams. While it is worrisome, it is not a true safety concern.
I second that. I remember when Google search first came out. Within a few days it completely changed my workflow, how I use the Internet, my reading habits. It easily 5 ~ 10x the value of Internet for me over a couple of weeks.
LLMs is doing nothing of the sort for me.
ChatGPT does this again for me. I am routinely getting zero useful results on the first page or two of Google searches, but AI is answering or giving me guidance quickly.
Maybe this would not seem such an improvement if Google's results were like they were 10 years ago and not barely usable blogspam
To me, this just sounds like Google Search has become shit, and since Google simply isn't going to give up the precious ad $$$ that the current format is generating, the next best thing is ChatGPT. But this is different from saying that ChatGPT is a similar step up like Search was.
For what it's worth, I agree with you that Google Search has become unusable. Google basically destroyed it's best product (for users), by turning it into an ad riddles shovelware cesspit.
That ChatGPT is similarly good like Google Search used to be, is a tragedy. Basically we had a conceptually simple product that functioned very well, and we are replacing it with a significantly more complex product.
The cool kids in those days used Metacrawler, which meta searched all the search engines.
That's not to say it won't have more significant impact in the future; I wouldn't know. But so far, I've yet to see the hype get realised.
Don't use it for things you're already an expert in, it can't compare to you yet.
Use it for learning new things, or for things you aren't very good at and don't want to bother with. For these it's incredible.
Perhaps.
> Do you remember when they teased GPT-2 as "too dangerous" for public access? I do. Yet we now have Llama 3 in the wild, which even at the smaller 8B size is about as powerful as the [edit: 6/13/23] GPT-4 release.
The statement was rather more prosaic and less surprising; are you sure it's OpenAI (rather than say all the AI fans and the press) who are hyping?
"""This decision, as well as our discussion of it, is an experiment: while we are not sure that it is the right decision today, we believe that the AI community will eventually need to tackle the issue of publication norms in a thoughtful way in certain research areas.
…
We are aware that some researchers have the technical capacity to reproduce and open source our results. We believe our release strategy limits the initial set of organizations who may choose to do this, and gives the AI community more time to have a discussion about the implications of such systems."""
I disagree here also: the company has openly acknowledged that this is a risk to be avoided with regards to safety related legislation, what they've called for looks a lot more like "we don't want a prisoner's dilemma that drives everyone to go fast at the expense of safety" rather than "we're good everyone else is bad".
I spend a part of yesterday evening sorting my freshly dried t-shirts into 4 distinct piles. I used OpenAI Vision (through BeMyEyes) from my phone. I got a clear description of each and every piece of clothing, including print, colours and brand. I am blind BTW. But I guess you are right, no impact at all.
> Yet we now have Llama 3 in the wild
Yes, great, THANKS Meta, now the Scammers have something to work with. Thats a wonderful achievement which should be praised! </sarcasm>
That is a really great application of this tech. And definitely qualifies as real-world impact. Thanks for sharing that!
People read too many sci-fi books and then project their fantasies on to real-world technologies. This stuff is incredibly powerful and will have social effects, but it’s not going to replace every single job by next year.
Have you tried asking it to generate a regex to transform your list into a CSV?
Now we have devs asking AI to generate regex formulas and pasting it into code without much concern on its validity.
I can't help but notice the huge amount of hindsight and bad faith that it demonstrated here. Yes, now we are aware that the internet did not drown in a flood of bullshit (well, not noticeably more), when GPT-2 was released.
But was it obvious? I certainly thought that there was a chance that the amount of blog spam that could be generated effortlessly might just make internet search unusable. You are declaring "hype", when you could also say "very uncertain and conscientious". Is this not something we want people in charge to be careful with?
Even in this thread people talk about "Oh I use ChatGPT rather than Google search because Google is just stuffed with shit". And on HN there are plenty of discussions about huge portion of reddit threads being regurgitated older comments.
Job seekers currently in college have no idea what is about to hit them in 3-5 years.
In any other industry where just need an average margin of error close to a human's work and verification is much easier than generating possible outputs, the market will change drastically.
They won't "take 1 hour of time", they try it once or twice and give up.
Planning is different in that it is an essential part of agency. That's what Q* is supposed to add. My guess is that planning is the next type of functionality to be added to GPT. I wouldn't be surprised if they already have a version internally with such functionality, but that they've decided to hold it back for now for reasons such as safety (some may care about the election this year) or simply that the inference costs are so huge they cannot possibly expose it publicly.
Really philosophy seems to be one of the least important subjects right now. Hardly anyone learns about it in school.
If it was so important to success in the wild than it would stand to reason we all work hard at improving our reasoning skills, but very few do.
These did not provide useful life-lessons for me.
(The philosophy A-level I did voluntarily seemed to be 50% "can you find the flaws in this supposed proof of the existence of god?")
Even now, they're shipping text-image 4o but not the new voice while leaving old-voice up and confusing/disappointing a whole lot of people. This is a pretty big marketing blunder.
I remember for a good 2-3 months in 2023 ALL you could see on tiktok / youtube shorts was just garbage about 'how amazing' ChatGPT was. Like - video after video and I was surprised of the repeat content being recommended to me... No doubt openAI (or something) was behind that huge marketing push
We were naive to think we could have nice things for free.
But OpenAI is having a hard time retaining/increasing ChatGPT users. Also, Alphabet's stock is about as valuable as it's ever been. So I don't think we have evidence that this is really challenging Google's search dominance.
But ChatGPT has really hurt Google's brand image.
The questions I still ask Google, have a lot of monetary value (restaurants, cloths, movie, etc).
But I agree seems SO often helps more than Google-AI.
Maybe that is GPT-5.
And this release really is just incremental improvements in speed, and tying together a few different existing features.
Go ask any teacher or graphician.
Maybe not GPT-2, but in general LLMs and other generative AI types aren't without their downsides.
From companies looking to downsize their staff to replace them with software, to the work of artists/writers being devalued somewhat, to even easier scams and something like the rise of AI girlfriends, which has also gotten some critique, some of those can probably be a net negative.
Even when it's not pearl clutching over the advancements in technology and the social changes that arise, I do wonder how much my own development work will be devalued due to the somewhat lowered entry barrier into the industry and people looking for quick cash, same as with boot camps leading to more saturation. Probably not my position individually (not exactly entry level), but the market as a whole.
It's kind of at a point where I use LLMs for dev work not to fall behind, cause the productivity gains for simple problems and boilerplate are hard to argue with.
I feel like everyone who makes this claim doesn't actually have any data to backup it up.
~8 years ago when self driving technology was all the rage and every major company was getting on board with ever more impressive technological demos, it seemed entirely reasonable to expect that we'd all be in a world of complete self driving imminently. I remember mocking somebody online around the time who was pursuing a class C/commercial trucking license. Yet now a decade later, there are more truckers than ever and the tech itself seems further away than ever before. And that's because most have now accepted that progress on such has basically stalled out in spite of absolutely monumental efforts at moving forward.
So long as LLMs regularly hallucinate, they're not going to be useful for much other than tasks that can accept relatively high rates of failure. And many of those generally creative domains are the ones LLMs are paradoxically the weakest in - like writing. Reading a book written by an LLM would be cruel and unusual punishment given then current state of the art. One domain I do see them completely taking over is search. They work excellently as natural language search engines, and "failure" in such is very poorly defined.
I think what maybe seems not obvious amidst the hype is that there is a hell of a lot of engineering left to do. The fact that you can squash the weights of a neural net down to 3 bits per param and it still works -- is evidence that we have quite a way to go with maturing this technology. Multimodality, improvements to the UX of it, the human-computer interface part of it. Those are fundamental tech things, but they are foremost engineering problems. Getting latency down. Getting efficiency up. Designing the experience, then building it out.
25 years ago, early tech demos on the internet were promising that everyone would do their shopping, entertainment, socializing, etc... online. Breathless hype. 5 years after that, the whole thing crashed, but it never went away. People just needed time to figure out how to use it and what it was useful for, and discover its limitations. 10 years after that, engineering efforts were systematized and applied against the difficult problems that still remained. And now: look at where we are. It just took time.
It most definitely is not.
Let me know when you can get a Waymo to drive you from New York to Montreal in winter.
They are an existence proof that the original claim that we seem further than ever before is just wrong.
15 years ago self driving of any sort was pure fantasy, yet here we are.
They'll release a version that can drive in poor weather and you'll complain that it can't drive in a tornado.
Meanwhile I've been using ChatGPT at work for _more than a year_ and it's been tremendously helpful to me.
This is not hype, this is not about how AI will change our lives in the future. It's there right here, right now.
The person I originally responded to stated, "We’re moving toward a world where every job will be modeled, and you’ll either be an AI owner, a model architect, an agent/hardware engineer, a technician, or just.. training data." And that far less likely than us achieving L5 self driving (if not only because driving is quite simple relative to many of the jobs he envisions AI taking over), yet L5 self driving seems as distant as ever as well.
Yep. So basically they're useful for a vast, immense range of tasks today.
Some things they're not suited for. For example, I've been working on a system to extract certain financial "facts" across SEC filings. ChatGPT has not been helpful at all either with designing or implementing (except to give some broad, obvious hints about things like regular expressions), nor would it be useful if it was used for the actual automation.
But for many, many other tasks -- like design, architecture, brainstorming, marketing, sales, summarisation, step by step thinking through all sorts of processes, it's extremely valuable today. My list of ChatGPT sessions is so long already and I can't imagine life without it now. Going back to Google and random Quora/StackOverflow answers laced with adtech everywhere...
The other day, I saw a demo from a startup (don't remember their name) that uses generative AI to perform financial analysis. The demo showed their AI-powered app basically performing a Google search for some companies, loosely interpreting those Google Stock Market Widgets that are presented in such searches, and then fetching recent news and summarizing them with AI, trying to extract some macro trends.
People were all hyped up about it, saying it will replace financial analysts in no time. From my point of view, that demo is orders of magnitude below the capacity of a single intern who receives the same task.
In short, I have the same perception as you. People are throwing generative AI into everything they can with high expectations, without doing any kind of basic homework to understand its strengths and weaknesses.
But is this not what humans do, universally? We are certainly good at hiding it – and we are all good at coping with it – but my general sense when interacting with society is that there is a large amount of nonsense generated by humans that our systems must and do already have enormous flexibility for.
My sense is that's not an aspect of LLMs we should have any trouble with incorporating smoothly, just by adhering to the safety nets that we built in response to our own deficiencies.
mapping th genome was that way. On a 20yr schedule, barely any progress for 15 and then poof, done ahead of schedule
I have a much less "utopian" view about the future. I remember during the renaissance of neural networks (ca. 2010-15) it was said that "more data leads to better models", and that was at a time when researchers frowned upon the term Artificial Intelligence and would rather use Machine Learning. Fast forward a decade LLMs are very good synthetic data generators that try to mimic human generated input and I can't think somehow that this wasn't the sole initial intent of LLMs. And that's it for me. There's not much to hype and no intelligence at all.
What happens now is that human generated input becomes more valuable and every online platform (including minor ones) will have now some form of gatekeeping in place, rather sooner than later. Besides that a lot of work still can't be done in front of a computer in isolation and probably never will, and even if so, automation is not a means to an end. We still don't know how to measure a lot of things and much less how to capture everything as data vectors.
Currently the bottleneck is Agents. If you want a large language model to actually do anything you need an Agent. Agents so far need a human in the loop to keep them sane. Until that problem is solved most human jobs are still safe.
I fully expect GPT 5 (or at the latest 6) to similarly have native inclusion of agentic capabilities either this year or next year, assuming it doesn't already, but is just kept from the public.
Will be like, the end of millions of careers overnight.
It will probably strongly favour places like China and Russia though, where the economy is already strongly reliant on central control.
I think you may be literally right in the opposite sense to what I think you intended.
China (and maybe Russia) may be able to use central control to have an advantage when it comes to avoiding disasterous outcomes.
But when it comes to the rate of innovation, the US may have an advantage for the usual reasons. Less government intervention (due to lobbyism) combined with having several corporations actively competing with each other to be first/best usually leads to faster innovation. However, the downside may be the it also introduces a lot more risk.
The obvious way to to that is for it to plan a set of actions and evalute each possible way to reach some goal (or avoid an anti-goal). Kind of what AlphaZeros is doing for games. Q* is rumored to be a generalization of this.
not quite sure that sanity is a business requirement
I understand that you might be afraid. I believe that a world where only LLM companies rule the world is not practically achievable except in some distopian universe. The likelihood of the world where the only job are model architects, engineers or technicians is very very small.
Instead, let's consider the positive possibilities that LLMs can bring. It can lead to new and exciting opportunities across various fields. For instance, can serve as a tool to inspire new ideas for writers, artists, and musicians.
I think we are going towards a more collaborative era where computers and humans interact much more. Everything will be a remix :)
Oh, especially since it will be a priority to automate their jobs, or somehow optimize them with an algorithm because that's a self-reinforcing improvement scheme that would give you a huge edge.
GPT-4? Not that well. AI? Definitely
https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphageometry-an-olymp...
So outside of use-cases where the user can quickly verify the result (like picking a decent generated image etc.),I can't see it being used much.
And guess what: RAG doesn't prevent hallucination. It can reduce it, and there are most certainly areas where it is incredibly useful (I should know, because that's what earns my paycheck), but it's useful despite still hallucinations being a thing, not because we solved that problem.
Regardless, we’ve seen accuracy of ~98% with simple context-based prompting across every category of generation task. Don’t take my word for it, a simple search would show the effectiveness of “n-shot” prompting. Framing it as “it _can_ reduce” hallucinations is disingenuous at best, there really is no debate about how well it works. We can disagree on whether 98% accuracy is a solution but again I’d assert that for >50% of all possible real world uses for an LLM 98% is acceptable and thus the problem can be colloquially referred to as solved.
If you’re placing the bar at 100% hallucination-free accuracy then I’ve got some bad news to tell you about the accuracy of the floating point operations we run the world on
All AIs up to now lack autonomy. So I'd say until we crack this problem, it is not going to be able to do your job. Autonomy depends on a kind of data that is iterative, multi-turn, and learning from environments not from static datasets. We have the exact opposite, lots of non-iterative, off-policy (human made AI consumed) text.
But everyone is expecting them to release gpt5 later this year, and it is a bit scary to think what it will be able to do.
1) It's natively multi-modal in a way I don't think gpt4 was.
2) It's at least twice as efficient in terms of compute. Maybe 3 times more efficient, considering the increase in performance.
Combined, those point towards some major breakthroughs having gone into the model. If the quality of the output hasn't gone up THAT much, it's probably because the technological innovations mostly were leveraged (for this version) to reduce costs rather than capabilities.
My guess is that we should expect them to leverage the 2x-3x boost in efficiency in a model that is at least as large as GTP4 relatively soon, probably this year unless OpenAI has safety concerns or something, and keeps it internal-only.
The evidence for that is the change in the tokenizer. The only way to implement that is to re-train the entire base model from scratch. This implies that GPT 4o is not a fine-tuning of GPT 4. It's a new model, with a new tokenizer, new input and output token types, etc...
They could have called it GPT-5 and everyone would have believed them.
The expectations for gpt5 are sky high. I think we will see a similar jump as 3.5 -> 4.
I assume GPT-5 has to be a heavier, more expensive and slower model initially.
GPT-4o is like an optimisation of GPT-4.
Everything always starts as a toy.
That includes, beyond literal Killers, all kinds of manufacturing, construction and service work.
I would expect a LOT of funds to go into research all sorts of actuators, artificial muscles and any other technology that will be useful in building better robots.
Companies that can get and maintain a lead in such technologies may reach a position similar to what US Steel had in the 19th century.
That could be the next nvidia.
I would not be at all surprised if we will have a robot in the house in 10 years that can clean and do the dishes, and that is built using basically the same parts as the robots that replace our soldiers and the police.
Who will ultimately control them, though?
If you had an ASI? I don’t think you’d need a lot of funds to go into this area anymore ? Presumably it would all be solved overnight.
Companies that have a head start at that point, may get a huge first-mover advantage. Also, those companies also very well may have the capability to leverage AI in product development, just like everyone else.
And just as important as the products themselves is the manufacturing capacity to build them at scale. Until we have massive numbers of robots in service, building such infrastructure is likely to be slow and expensive.
EDIT: Also, once we really have the kind of Godlike ASI you envision, no human actions really matter (economically) anymore.
Given the pace that AI is currently moving at, it seems to me that more and more, the mechanical aspect is becoming the limitation.
GPT 4o now seems to be quite good at reasoning about the world from pictures in real time. I would expect it would soon become easy for it to do the high level part of many practical tasks, from housekeeping to manufacturing or construction. (And of course military tasks.)
This leaves the direct low-level actuator control to execute such tasks in detail. But even there, development has been immense. See for instance these soccer playing robots [1]
And as both high level and low level control (if we assume that models soon will add agentic features directly into the neural networks), the only missing peace is the ability to build mechanically capable and reliable robots at a low enough price that they become cheaper than humans for various kinds of work.
There is one more limitation, of course, which is that GPT 4o still requires a constant connection to a data center, and that the models is too large to run within a device or machine.
This is also one of the most critical limitations of self driving. Had the AI within a Tesla had the same amount of compute available as GPT-4o, it should be massively more capable.
This is no different to saying a person with a gun murdered someone rather than attributing the murder to the gun. An AI gun is just a really fancy gun.
There may come a time where we grow so accustomed to this, that the decision is so heavily influenced by AI, that we believe it more than human decisions.
And then it can very well kill a human through misdiagnostic.
I think it is important to not just put this thought aside, but to evaluate all risks.
I would imagine outcomes would be scrutinized heavily for an application like this. There is a difference between a margin of error (existing with human doctors as well) and a sentient ai that has decided to kill, which is what it sounds like you're describing.
If we didn't give it that goal, how does it obtain it otherwise?
A prompt is a _very_ different matter.
And “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”¹ is a bad argument created by the people who benefit from the proliferation of guns, so it’s very weird that you’re using that as if it were a valid argument. It isn’t. It’s baffling anyone still has to make this point: easy access and availability of guns makes them more likely to be used. A gun which does not exist is a gun which cannot be used by a person to murder another.
It’s also worth nothing the exact words of the person you’re responding to (emphasis mine):
> It can also murder people, and it will continue being used for that.
Being used. As in, they’re not saying that AI kills on its own, but that it’s used for it. Presumably by people. Which doesn’t contradict your point.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns_don%27t_kill_people,_peop...
What's scary and cringey are your delusions.
My guess is the future belongs to those who don't stop—who, in fact, embrace the opposite of stopping.
I would even suggest that the present belongs to those who didn't stop. It may be too late for normal people to ever catch up by the time we realize the trick that was played on us.
Varying degrees of greedy / restless / hungry / thirsty / lustful are what we've got, because how is contentedness ever going to compete with that over millennia?
I've had a lot of negative things to say about religion for many years. However, as has been often observed, 'perception is reality' to a certain extent when it affects how people behave, and perhaps it's kind of a counterweight against our more selfish tendencies. I just wish we could do something like it without made up stories and bigotry. Secular humanist Unitarians might be about the best we can do right now in my opinion... I'm hoping that group continues to grow (they have been in recent years).
