Comment by godelski
7 months ago
> it seems fairly apparent now that AI has largely hit a brick wall in terms of the benefits of scaling
What's annoying is plenty of us (researchers) predicted this and got laughed at. Now that it's happening, it's just quiet.
I don't know about the rest, but I spoke up because I didn't want to hit a brick wall, I want to keep going! I still want to keep going! But if accurate predictions (with good explanations) aren't a reason to shift resource allocation then we just keep making the same mistake over and over. We let the conmen come in and people who get too excited by success that they get blind to pitfalls.
And hey, I'm not saying give me money. This account is (mostly) anonymous. There's plenty of people that made accurate predictions and tried working in other directions but never got funding to test how methods scale up. We say there's no alternatives but there's been nothing else that's been given a tenth of the effort. Apples and oranges...
> What's annoying is plenty of us (researchers) predicted this and got laughed at. Now that it's happening, it's just quiet.
You need to model the business world and management more like a flock of sheep being herded by forces that mostly don't have to do with what actually is going to happen in future. It makes a lot more sense.
Yet I'm talking about what did happen.
I'm saying we should have memory. Look at predictions people make. Reward accurate ones, don't reward failures. Right now we reward whoever makes the craziest predictions. It hasn't always been this way, so we should go back to less crazy
Practically no one is herded by what is actually going to happen, hardly even by what is expected to happen. Business pretends that it is driven by expectations, but is mostly driven by the past, as in financial statements. What is the bonus we can get this year? There is of course the strategic thinking, I don't want to discount that part of business, but it is not the thing that will drive most of these, AI as a cost saving measure, decisions. This is the unimaginative part of AI application and as such relegated to the unimaginative managers.
> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
It's all a big hype bubble and not only is no one in the industry willing to pop it, they actively defend against popping a bubble that is clearly rupturing on its own. It's endemic of how modern businesses no longer care about a proper 10 year portfolio and more about how to make the next quarter look good.
There's just no skin in the game, and everyone's ransacking before the inevitable fire instead of figuring out how to prevent the fire to begin with.
> What's annoying is plenty of us (researchers) predicted this and got laughed at. Now that it's happening, it's just quiet.
Those people always do that. Shouting about cryptocurrencies and NFTs from the rooftops 3-4 years ago, now completely gone.
I suspect they're the same people, basically get rich quick schemers.
Sure, you were right.
But if you had been wrong and we would now have had superintelligence, the upside for its owners would presumably be great.
... Or at least that's the hypothesis. As a matter of fact intelligence is only somewhat useful in the real world :-)
I am not sure the owners would keep being that in case of real superintelligence, though.