> Hallucinations are exceptionally rare now, since they now rely on searching for answers rather than what was in its training data.
Well, I wouldn't go that far, but the hallucinations have moved up to being about more complicated things than they used to be.
Also, I've seen a few recent ones that "think" (for lack of a better word) that they know enough about politics to "know" they don't need to search for current events to, for example, answer a question about the consequences of the White House threatening military action to take Greenland. (The AI replied with something like "It is completely inconceivable that the US would ever do this").
I happen to think it is also useful to discuss "intelligence" and "consciousness", but nevertheless think these things are unconnected to the economic impact.
The obvious question is, if you can really offer "a guaranteed minimum return of 17.5%", why can't you find anyone willing to lend you the same money for merely half that return, given that would still be a fantastic investment by most standards if you could really guarantee it?
That example is completely false: how much rain will fall is absolutely a computable function, just a very difficult and expensive function to evaluate with absurdly large boundary conditions.
This is in the same sense that while it is technically correct to describe all physically instantiated computer programs, and by extension all AI, as being in the set of "things which are just Markov chains", it comes with a massive cost that may or may not be physically realisable within this universe.
Rainfall to the exact number of molecules is computable. Just hard. A quantum simulation of every protein folding and every electron energy level of every atom inside every cell of your brain on a classical computer is computable, in the Church-Turing sense, just with an exponential slowdown.
The busy beaver function, however, is actually un-computable.
You just compute the brains of a bunch of immortal mathematics. At which point it's "very difficult and expensive function to evaluate with absurdly large boundary conditions."
One of the most consequential aspects of the busy beaver game is that, if it were possible to compute the functions Σ(n) and S(n) for all n, then this would resolve all mathematical conjectures which can be encoded in the form "does ⟨this Turing machine⟩ halt".[5] For example, there is a 27-state Turing machine that checks Goldbach's conjecture for each number and halts on a counterexample; if this machine did not halt after running for S(27) steps, then it must run forever, resolving the conjecture.[5][7] Many other problems, including the Riemann hypothesis (744 states) and the consistency of ZF set theory (745 states[8][9]), can be expressed in a similar form, where at most a countably infinite number of cases need to be checked.[5]
"Uncomputable" has a very specific meaning, and the busy beaver function is one of those things, it is not merely "hard".
> You just compute the brains of a bunch of immortal mathematics. At which point it's "very difficult and expensive function to evaluate with absurdly large boundary conditions."
Humans are not magic, humans cannot solve it either, just as they cannot magically solve the halting problem for all inputs.
That humans come in various degrees of competence at this rather than an, ahem, boolean have/don't have; plus how we can already do a bad approximation of it, in a field whose rapid improvements hint that there is still a lot of low-hanging fruit, is a reason for techno-optimism.
Most long-term gamblers will tell you that the first games they played, they won. This is a real thing, yet we cannot apply it by making one bet and then stopping, because so are the probabilities being fair and un-biased.
What squares these two things is that most of the people who played and lost their first games, did not get addicted to gambling.
In more words, "of course it's stupid, it's as complex as a mid-sized rodent where we taught it purely by selective breeding on getting answers right while carefully preventing any mutations which made their brains any bigger".
It's basically plotting the dots of all easily accessible written word to find your words, finding the words that are answers to your words and then charting a line through them no matter how scattered those points may be, and spitting that back out. It doesn't "know" anything nor is it reasoning even if the results are similar.
You have to come into it with the same "these people are only stupid and lack the experience to answer my questions despite thinking they do, they lack the world view to even process how I arrived at the parameters of my question(s)" apprehension like you would if asking reddit about some hazardous thing that would make them all screech. AI is the margarine to that butter.
It's a technology with potential to deliver great value, but there are limitations...
Not to put too fine a point on your metaphor, but the different training methods deployed by ChatGPT vs Claude, for example, changes that a bit regarding who did the “selective breeding”, arguably nurture vs nature, respectively
If human psychology worked like that, lotteries wouldn't be a thing. Nor prayer. There wouldn't be horoscopes in newspapers, nor homeopathy.
One of the various oddities going on with LLMs in particular is them being trained with feedback from users having a chance to upvote or downvote responses, or A/B test which of two is "better". This naturally leads to things which are more convincing, though this only loosely correlates to "more correct".
No shit. Why do people in this thread keep telling me that people are stupid like that's a news flash to me? The fact remains that it is stupid, and especially for educated people like the laywers/doctors/etc mentioned upthread, it's sufficiently obvious stupidity that there's no excuse. Yes, I know, that describes a lot of other stupidity. Much of our history as a species is inexcusable.
Edit: though I should be clear: people demonstrably do often learn to discount obviously unreliable sources. Not all the time, but pretty often in the easily verifiable cases, especially where they don't have a major emotional stake.
We can already grow brain organoids cheaply and easily enough to be a YouTuber's long-running series, so even if biological somehow gets cheaper than silicon, it still isn't going to be a revived complete human brain from someone who died 50 years earlier and probably retired 20 years before that.
I mean, imagine someone who got themselves cryonically preserved in 1976 getting either revived or uploaded today: what job would they be able to get? Almost no office job is the same now as then; manufacturing involves very different tools and a lot of CNC and robotic arms; agriculture is only getting more automated and we've had cow-milking robots for 20-30 years; cars may have changed the least in usage if not safety, performance, and power source; I suppose that leaves gardening… well, except for robot lawnmowers, anyone who can hire a gardener can probably afford a robo-mower?
Tldr is that for some very limited tasks it might still be preferable to use a human mind, especially if you can run it at 1000x cognitive speed. Or.....it might not. It's sci-fi at this point.
It shouldn't remind you of that, my point is there's little economic use for uploads like this: if thinking meat is cheaper than thinking silicon, train some fresh thinking meat with an electrode array or whatever; if thinking silicon is cheaper, train some fresh thinking silicon.
Non-economic use, that's different of course. Digital afterlife and so on, but as a consumer, not a supplier of anything.
Well, I wouldn't go that far, but the hallucinations have moved up to being about more complicated things than they used to be.
Also, I've seen a few recent ones that "think" (for lack of a better word) that they know enough about politics to "know" they don't need to search for current events to, for example, answer a question about the consequences of the White House threatening military action to take Greenland. (The AI replied with something like "It is completely inconceivable that the US would ever do this").
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