Comment by delegate

14 days ago

It's worth remembering that this is all happening because of video games !

It is highly unlikely that the hardware which makes LLMs possible would have been developed otherwise.

Isn't that amazing ?

Just like internet grew because of p*rn, AI grew because of video games. Of course, that's just a funny angle.

The way I see it, AI isn't accidental. Its inception has been in the first chips, the Internet, Open Source, Github, ... AI is not just the neural networks - it's also the data used to train it, the OSes, APIs, the Cloud computing, the data centers, the scalable architectures.. everything we've been working on over the last decades was inevitably leading us to this. And even before the chips, it was the maths, the physics ..

Singularity it seems, is inevitable and it was inevitable for longer than we can remember.

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delegate

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BatteryMountain  14 days ago

Remember that games are just simulations. Physics, light, sound, object boundaries - it not real, just a rough simulation of the real thing.

You can say that ML/AI/LLM's are also just very distilled simulations. Except they simulate text, speech, images, and some other niche models. It is still very rough around the edges - meaning that even though it seems intelligent, we know it doesn't really have intelligence, emotions and intentions.

Just as game simulations are 100% biased towards what the game developers, writers and artists had in mind, AI is also constrained to the dataset they were trained on.

sealeck  14 days ago

I think it's a bit hard to say that this is definitively true: people have always been interested in running linear algebra on computers. In the absence of NVIDIA some other company would likely have found a different industry and sold linear algebra processing hardware to them!

dwd  14 days ago

Google DeepMind can trace part of it's evolution back to a playtester for the video game Syndicate who saw an opportunity to improve the AI of game NPCs.

tim333  13 days ago

Sci-fi ideas of robots have been around for ages and work on AI and the term singularity kicked off around 1950, so a while ago - well before chips or me being born.