Majority of AI Researchers Say Tech Industry Is Pouring Billions Into a Dead End
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It's because customers don't want it or care for it, it's only the corporations themselves are obsessed with it
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The actual survey result:
Asked whether "scaling up" current AI approaches could lead to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), or a general purpose AI that matches or surpasses human cognition, an overwhelming 76 percent of respondents said it was "unlikely" or "very unlikely" to succeed.
So they're not saying the entire industry is a dead end, or even that the newest phase is. They're just saying they don't think this current technology will make AGI when scaled. I think most people agree, including the investors pouring billions into this. They arent betting this will turn to agi, they're betting that they have some application for the current ai. Are some of those applications dead ends, most definitely, are some of them revolutionary, maybe
Thus would be like asking a researcher in the 90s that if they scaled up the bandwidth and computing power of the average internet user would we see a vastly connected media sharing network, they'd probably say no. It took more than a decade of software, cultural and societal development to discover the applications for the internet.
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Meanwhile a huge chunk of the software industry is now heavily using this "dead end" technology
I work in a pretty massive tech company (think, the type that frequently acquires other smaller ones and absorbs them)
Everyone I know here is using it. A lot.
However my company also has tonnes of dedicated sessions and paid time to instruct it's employees on how to use it well, and to get good value out of it, abd the pitfalls it can have
So yeah turns out if you teach your employees how to use a tool, they start using it.
I'd say LLMs have made me about 3x as efficient or so at my job.
I think the human in the loop currently needs to know what the LLM produced or checked, but they'll get better.
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Why do many sig figs for 5 and 1.3 though?
Some parts of the world (mostly Europe, I think) use dots instead of commas for displaying thousands. For example, 5.000 is 5,000 and 1.300 is 1,300
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Wait til you realize that's just what art literally is...
You're confusing ai art with actual art, like rendered from illustration and paintings
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The cope on this site is so bad sometimes. AI is already revolutionary.
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Don't be an ass and realize that ai is a great tool for a lot of people. Why is that so hard to comprehend?
What's hard for you to comprehend about my comment?
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As an experienced software dev I'm convinced my software quality has improved by using AI. More time for thinking and less time for execution means I can make more iterations of the design and don't have to skip as many nice-to-haves or unit tests on account of limited time. It's not like I don't go through every code line multiple times anyway, I don't just blindly accept code. As a bonus I can ask the AI to review the code and produce documentation. By the time I'm done there's little left of what was originally generated.
As an experienced software dev, I know better than to waste my time writing boilerplate that can be vomited up by an LLM, since somebody else has already written it and I should just use that instead.
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The cope on this site is so bad sometimes. AI is already revolutionary.
That may be true technologically. But if the economics don't add up it's a bubble.
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Some parts of the world (mostly Europe, I think) use dots instead of commas for displaying thousands. For example, 5.000 is 5,000 and 1.300 is 1,300
I knew the context, was just being cheesy.
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There are some nice things I have done with AI tools, but I do have to wonder if the amount of money poured into it justifies the result.
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The actual survey result:
Asked whether "scaling up" current AI approaches could lead to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), or a general purpose AI that matches or surpasses human cognition, an overwhelming 76 percent of respondents said it was "unlikely" or "very unlikely" to succeed.
So they're not saying the entire industry is a dead end, or even that the newest phase is. They're just saying they don't think this current technology will make AGI when scaled. I think most people agree, including the investors pouring billions into this. They arent betting this will turn to agi, they're betting that they have some application for the current ai. Are some of those applications dead ends, most definitely, are some of them revolutionary, maybe
Thus would be like asking a researcher in the 90s that if they scaled up the bandwidth and computing power of the average internet user would we see a vastly connected media sharing network, they'd probably say no. It took more than a decade of software, cultural and societal development to discover the applications for the internet.
I agree that it's editorialized compared to the very neutral way the survey puts it. That said, I think you also have to take into account how AI has been marketed by the industry.
They have been claiming AGI is right around the corner pretty much since chatGPT first came to market. It's often implied (e.g. you'll be able to replace workers with this) or they are more vague on timeline (e.g. OpenAI saying they believe their research will eventually lead to AGI).
With that context I think it's fair to editorialize to this being a dead-end, because even with billions of dollars being poured into this, they won't be able to deliver AGI on the timeline they are promising.
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Some parts of the world (mostly Europe, I think) use dots instead of commas for displaying thousands. For example, 5.000 is 5,000 and 1.300 is 1,300
Yeah, and they're wrong.
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That may be true technologically. But if the economics don't add up it's a bubble.
It's neither, and business majors shouldn't have voting rights as non-sapient humans.
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Some parts of the world (mostly Europe, I think) use dots instead of commas for displaying thousands. For example, 5.000 is 5,000 and 1.300 is 1,300
But usually you don't put three 000 because that becomes a hint of thousand.
Like 2.50 is 2€50 but 2.500 is 2500€
Is there an ISO standard for this stuff?
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It's neither, and business majors shouldn't have voting rights as non-sapient humans.
Not that I like it. It's just how it is.
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Like all the previous bubbles of scam that were kinda interesting or fun for novelty and once money came pouring in became absolut chaos and maddening.
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Yeah, and they're wrong.
Says the country where every science textbook is half science half conversion tables.
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You skipped possibility 3, which is actively happening ing:
Advancements in tech enable us to produce results at a much much cheaper cost
Which us happening with diffusion style LLMs that simultaneously cost less to train, cost less to run, but also produce both faster abd better quality outputs.
That's a big part people forget about AI: it's a feedback loop of improvement as soon as you can start using AI to develop AI
And we are past that mark now, most developers have easy access to AI as a tool to improve their performance, and AI is made by... software developers
So you get this loop where as we make better and better AIs, we get better and better at making AIs with the AIs...
It's incredibly likely the new diffusion AI systems were built with AI assisting in the process, enabling them to make a whole new tech innovation much faster and easier.
We are now in the uptick of the singularity, and have been for about a year now.
Same goes for hardware, it's very likely now that mvidia has AI incorporating into their production process, using it for micro optimizations in its architectures and designs.
And then those same optimized gpus turn around and get used to train and run even better AIs...
In 5-10 years we will look back on 2024 as the start of a very wild ride.
Remember we are just now in the "computers that take up entire warehouses" step of the tech.
Remember that in the 80s, a "computer" cost a fortune, took tonnes of resources, multiple people to run it, took up an entire room, was slow as hell, and could only do basic stuff.
But now 40 years later they fit in our pockets and are (non hyoerbole) billions of times faster.
I think by 2035 we will be looking at AI as something mass produced for consumers to just go in their homes, you go to best buy and compare different AI boxes to pick which one you are gonna get for your home.
We are still at the stage of people in the 80s looking at computers and pondering "why would someone even need to use this, why would someone put one in their house, let alone their pocket"
I want to believe that commoditization of AI will happen as you describe, with AI made by devs for devs.
So far what I see is "developer productivity is now up and 1 dev can do the work of 3? Good, fire 2 devs out of 3. Or you know what? Make it 5 out of 6, because the remaining ones should get used to working 60 hours/week."All that increased dev capacity needs to translate into new useful products. Right now the "new useful product" that all energies are poured into is... AI itself. Or even worse, shoehorning "AI-powered" features in all existing product, whether it makes sense or not (welcome, AI features in MS Notepad!). Once this masturbatory stage is over and the dust settles, I'm pretty confident that something new and useful will remain but for now the level of hype is tremendous!
