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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   21773 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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To sum it up, to train superhuman performance you need superhumanly good data.

It isn't clear we need superhumanly good data. Humans can make novel discoveries if they have a sufficiently good understanding of existing data and sufficiently good mental horsepower to use that data, i.e. extrapolate from their set of 'training data' and accurately test those extrapolations to discover new, useful data.

It seems like we just need to get an AI to approximately Von Neumann level and if it starts making good contributions to various fields at that point we can have it solve problems that hold up AI development. We're seeing hints of this now with Alphafold 3 and AlphaProteo.

Right now, the one thing that appears to be a hard hurdle for AIs are navigating real world environments, where there is far more chaos and variables that don't interact with each other linearly.

It can be difficult to see a new true innovation coming when every single company starts slapping "AI Powered!" as a feature on their products, but I think the case that AI will make surprising leaps in the next few years is stronger than it will inexplicably stagnate.

It isn't clear we need superhumanly good data.

It is.

Humans can make novel discoveries if they have a sufficiently good understanding of existing data and sufficiently good mental horsepower to use that data

LLMs and similar systems aren't human, not in the slightest.

It seems like we just need to get an AI to approximately Von Neumann level

They're nowhere near that. People are happy they can count letters correctly.

As stated, be really nice if there was a sound case for why this won't change in the near future.

The jump to where we are was sudden and surprising, the next one could be as well.

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