Why are we in an AI arms race? What's actually at stake?

[davel@lemmy.ml]

BTW, Sam Altman is gay and an immigrant. He is betraying his own kind on multiple levels.

Altman was born in Chicago. If you want to call him an immigrant, then 99% of us are.

But more importantly, Altman’s “kind” is neither of those things: it’s his class, namely the capitalist class, with which he has class solidarity.

[chuckleslord@lemmy.world]

The issue I have is there is no surpassing to happen here. We've platued on possible AI milestones, so the only new move will be the next big thing... which is impossible to predict when it'll happen.

[fckreddit@lemmy.ml]

I guess you are right. Think of it this way, LLMs are doing great at solving specific sets of problems. Now, people in charge of the money think that LLMs are the closest thing to an intelligent agents. All they have to do is reduce the hallucinations and make it more accurate by adding more data and/or tweaking the model.

Our current incentive structure reward results over everything else. That is the primary reason for this AI race. There are people who falsely believe that by throwing money at LLMs they can make it better and eventually reach true AGI. Then, there are others who are misleading the money men, even when they know the truth.

But, just because something is doing great at some limited benchmark doesn't mean that model can generalise it to all the infinite situations. Again look at my og comment for why it is so. Intelligence is multi-faceted and multi dimensional.

This is unlike space race in one primary way. In space race, we understood the principals for going to space well enough since the time of Newton. All we had to do was engineer the rocket. For example, we knew that we have to find the fuel that can generate maximum thrust per kg of fuel oxygen mixture burnt. The only question was what form it would. Now you could just have many teams look for many different fuels to answer this question. It is scalable. Space race was an engineering question.

Meanwhile, AI is a question of science. We don't understand the concept of intelligence itself very well. Focussing on LLMs solely is a mistake because the progress here might not even translate well and maybe even harm the larger AI research.

There are in scientific community who believe that we might never be able to understand intelligence because to understand it a higher level of intelligence is needed. Again, not saying it is true. Just that there are many ideas and viewpoints present with regards to AI and intelligence in general.

[dangling_cat@lemmy.blahaj.zone]

Yeah you are right. I remembered the wrong thing

[0liviuhhhhh@lemmy.blahaj.zone]

Absolutely overvalued.
Companies overcharging on military contracts by orders of magnitude is the standard. Hell, the air force was buying mugs for over $1k/mug not too long ago, I'm not sure if they ever actually did anything about it but I remember it being reported on a couple of years ago.

The US is scary because of its nuclear arsenal. Most of the $850B budget goes to the contractors solely for R&D, sustained production is rare, and even the "sustained" results in at most 200 units.

AI has been proven to show bias because the data its trained on shows bias but the us doesn't care as long as that bias is pointed at the "enemy" (read: anyone south of Texas or east of Ukraine) so that enemy can be most effectively eliminated. We're not leading in any development, production, or ethics, we're just paying rich assholes to make indiscriminate killing machines unbound by morals and easily scapegoated when things go wrong.

I see people actually in the military constantly complaining about how far behind technologically the military is. Only the special forces/CIA/seals/etc get the really cool toys

[yogthos@lemmy.ml]

I think a bunch of ignorant politicians in the US think that's going to be their ticket for competing with China because they refuse to invest into workers. They're basically betting that AI would allow them to automate a lot of the jobs, and that's how they'll get back on top.

[ephera@lemmy.ml]

Well, they're not actually open-source. The models are freely available, but the training data is not, so it's not actually possible for competitors to reproduce the same result.

[ephera@lemmy.ml]

I think, people who say that believe that we're close to actually-intelligent AI (or artificial general intelligence, AGI). And when we get there, it's possible that we might suddenly be able to automate lots of complex tasks, possibly even shove it onto robots and have it take on physical labor and things like that.

It's the wet dream of capitalists, because they don't need to employ anyone anymore. And I guess, folks are also afraid that such AI could be used for war.

[droplet6585@lemmy.ml]

No. We are not.

With typical capitalist efficiency, the titans of industry are going to boil off half an ocean in an ignorant attempt to simulate a human brain that requires what, about 2 kilowatt-hours of relatively clean chemical energy a day?

Never mind there being no shortage of said brains.

[reagansrottencorpse@lemmy.ml]

Who the fuck do they think they will sell things to if no one has any money but them