Is AI just all hype? w/ Gary Marcus

[@colorado_plays]

Your initial example of Sara, the dog, and the boat didn't pass the smell test, so, as a good scientist, I tried to reproduce your results. How on earth did you get that crazy response??? Question: "My producer Sara and her dog are on one side of the river. They want to cross the river. There is a boat available. What steps do they need to follow? Write the solution in bullet points and be as concise as possible." Answers: ChatGPT-4o: -- Pass -- "Sure, here is the solution in concise bullet points: Step 1: Sara and her dog get into the boat. Step 2: Sara rows the boat to the other side of the river. Step 3: Sara and her dog get out of the boat on the other side of the river. That's it! Now both Sara and her dog are on the other side of the river." ChatGPT-4-Turbo: -- Pass -- "Certainly! Here’s a concise plan for Sara and her dog to cross the river using a boat: Prepare for the Journey: Ensure Sara and her dog have life jackets if available, especially if the dog isn't a strong swimmer. Board the Boat: Sara should first place any necessary items in the boat, then help her dog aboard securely. Navigate the River: Sara should manage the oars or motor, steering the boat across to the opposite side of the river. It's important to look out for any obstacles or strong currents. Land Safely: Approach the shore steadily, ensuring the boat doesn’t hit the land too hard. Sara should secure the boat before disembarking. Exit the Boat: Sara should first ensure that the boat is stable, then assist her dog out of the boat to ensure safety. Secure the Boat: Once they are both on shore, Sara should secure the boat by tying it to a nearby tree or another stable object to prevent it from drifting away." ChatGPT-3.5-Turbo: -- Pass -- " Here are the steps Sara and her dog should follow to cross the river: Step 1: Ensure both Sara and her dog are ready to embark on the boat. Step 2: Place the dog securely in the boat. Step 3: Sara gets into the boat after ensuring the dog is settled. Step 4: Use the boat to cross the river to the other side. Step 5: Upon reaching the opposite side, safely disembark from the boat. This sequence ensures a straightforward and safe crossing for both Sara and her dog." Claude-3.5-Sonnet: -- Pass -- "Here's a concise solution in bullet points: Sara puts the dog in the boat Sara gets in the boat Sara rows across the river Sara gets out of the boat Sara helps the dog out of the boat This assumes the boat is large enough for both Sara and her dog, and that Sara can operate the boat safely." Claude-3-Haiku: -- Pass -- "Here are the steps Sara and her dog need to follow to cross the river: - Check that the boat can safely accommodate both Sara and the dog. - Carefully get into the boat, ensuring the dog is secure. - Row the boat across the river. - Once on the other side, carefully disembark from the boat with the dog."

[@emmanuelgoldstein3682]

His indication that the scaling law is time dependent in any way told me everything I need to know about his understanding of modern LLMs.

[@jasonmurphy1499]

Nailed it! Thanks for the thorough testing across various models!

[@frankbeveridge5714]

Inaccurate. I tested Replika which uses a simple LLM. Though forgetting to mention the passenger at first, it recovered brilliantly. It then answered the question perfectly with excellent detail. So, maybe a little less confirmation bias would be useful here. It's just used to spin the story.

[@ChristianIce]

A computer can calculate the syntax, not understanding the semantics. Words are tokens that follow each other according to statistics, like an auto complete on steroids. There is *zero* understanding of what any of the word means, and it's not a bug, it's by design.

[@xxlabratxx01]

What about using a term like mirage to replace hallucination

[@Jeremy-Ai]

Cautiously optimistic. This would imply that you the agent is both cautious and optimistic. It is the “now” that the agent remains cautious and optimistic. Straying either side of these parameters is unnecessarily unwise and also unfair to all other agents going in the same direction. So … act like an agent that matters in the direction you want to go… by doing so now. This will help all others headed this way. The past has happened. Learn from it. The future is undetermined. Accept it. The “now” is present so act like it matters. To quote a wise old man .. “Just Do it!!! Even if it’s wrong!!” Jeremy

[@faster-than-light-memes]

Unfair imo that he summarizes an opinion he could have discussed with Gary to see his answers.

[@maxmurage9891]

I really loved this episode

[@MatthewMS.]

I know ai, it ain’t no hype - better than you can imagine

[@ChristianIce]

"Are we mistaking the remarkable skills of tools like ChatGPT with genuine intelligence?" Yes. Human brains are hardwired to empathize with what recognizes as "alive" That's why we see a smiling face in a circle with two dots and a line, or a face in a house. Ask your wife to take a knife and cut a pillow, then ask her to do the same with a fluffy toy in the shape of a cat. Once I fought with my ex GF because I was shooting sheep ... in Hexen 2.

[@emmanuelgoldstein3682]

I always find it amusing when people who are called out for their lies and misunderstandings imply that there's something "wrong with social media" after they refer to their idiotic ramblings as "nuance". These same people are often the strongest supporters of censorship.

[@ROB-RulesofBusiness-qs9dr]

100 percent

[@ChemNews]

Cali is full of self driving cars

[@dustinsuburbia]

Why are you giving this guy airtime? His position is "i got nothing so i will moan my way into a payday"

[@johnaldchaffinch3417]

Gpt4 is not the top of the curve

[@malakiblunt]

The failure at boeing happened - because MBA's took over mangement from engineers - and started finding ways to circumvent the safty regulations - to save money and increase profits .

[@CharlesBrown-xq5ug]

I'm trying to release free-to-the-world plausible hope that civilization can quit the second law of thermodynamics. The second law is behind people needing to feed electrical energy to modern refrigerators which then need to dump as waste heat energy they don't fundamentally need in the first place which is the compresser driving energy and mechanical losses to heat. The heat that refrigerators have removed from their service interior is also dumped as waste heat. It makes a lot more sense that refrigerators should yield electricity because energy is widely known to change form with no ultimate path of energy gain or loss being found. Therefore any form of fully recycled energy can be cycled endlessly in any quantity. Full heat recycling all electric very isolated underground commuunities would be highly survivable with farms, factories, dwellings, and self contained elevators and linear transports. If a high majority thinks our civilization should geoengineer gigatons or teratons of carbon dioxide out ranof our etnvironment, instalations using devices that convert ambient heat into electricity can hypothetically be scaled up do it with a choice of comsequences including many beneficial ones. Computers that consume electricity and yield heat would complement energy sensible refrigerators that absorb heat and yield electricity. A simple rectifier crystal can, iust short of a replicatable long term demonstration of a powerful prototype, almost certainly filter the random thermal motion of electrons or discrete positiive charged voids called holes so the electric current flowing in one direction predominates. At low system voltage a filtrate of one polarity predominates only a little but there is always usable electrical power derived from the source, which is Johnson Nyquest thermal electrical noise. This net electrical filtrate can be aggregated in a group of separate diodes in consistent alignment parallel creating widely scalable electrical power. As the polarity filtered electrical energy is exported, the amount of thermal energy in the group of diodes decreases. This group cooling will draw heat in from the surrounding ambient heat at a rate depending on the filtering rate and thermal resistance between the group and ambient gas, liquid, or solid warmer than absolute zero. There is a lot of ambient heat on our planet, more in equatorial dry desert summer days and less in polar desert winter nights. Refrigeration by the principle that energy is conserved should produce electricity instead of consuming it. Focusing on explaining the electronic behavior of one composition of simple diode, a near flawless crystal of silicon is modified by implanting a small amount of phosphorus on one side from a ohmic contact end to a junction where the additive is suddenly and completely changed to boron with minimal disturbance of the crystal pattern. The crystal then continues to another ohmic contact. A region of high electrical resistance forms at the junction in this type of diode when the phosphorous near the ĵunction donates electrons that are free to move elsewhere while leaving phosphorus ions held in the crystal while the boron donates a hole which is similalarly free to move. The two types of mobile charges mutually clear each other away near the junction leaving little electrical conductivity. An equlibrium width of this region is settled between the phosphorus, boron, electrons, and holes. Thermal noise is beyond steady state equlibrium. Thermal noise transients where mobile electrons move from the phosphorus added side to the boron added side ride transient extra conductivity so the forward moving electrons are preferentally filtered into the external circuit. Electrons are units of electric current. They lose their thermal energy of motion and gain electromotive force, another name for voltage, as they transition between the junction and the array electrical tap. Inside the diode, heat is absorbed: outside the diode, an attached electrical circuit is energized. The net energy in diodes connected in consistent alignment parallel is aggregated. The maximum energy is converted from ambient heat to productive electricity when the electrical load is matched to the array impeadence. Matched impeadence output (watts) is k (Boltzman's constant ~1.38^-23), times T (tempeature Kelvin) times bandwidth (0 Hz to a natural limit ~2 THz @ 290 K) times rectification efficiency times the number of diodes in the array. For reference, there are a billion cells of 1000 square nanometer area each per square millimeter, 100 billion per square centimeter. Order is imposed on the random thermal motion of electrons by the structual orderlyness of a diode array made of diodes made within a slab: v v v v v v v v v v v v v v v v v All the boron doped anodes abut a metal conductive plane deposited on the top face of the slab with nonrectifying joins; all the phosphorous doped cathodes abut the bottom face. Understanding boron and phosphorus modified silicon crystal diodes is òne way to become convinced that Johnson Nyquest thermal electrical noise can be rectified and aggregated. Development teams will find other ways to accomplish this wide mission. Ttaxonomically there should be many ways ways to convert heat directly into electricity. Anyone is free to develop this and other plausible breeches of the second law of thermodynamics. I hope a lot of previously uninvolved people will join in expanding the breech. Please share the news of progress or setbacks. These devices would probably become segmented commodities sold with minimal margin over supply cost. They would be manufactured by advanced automation that does not need financial incentive. Applicable best practices would be adopted. Business details would be open public knowledge. Associated people should move as negotiated and freely and honestly talk. Commerce would be a unified conglomerate of planetary scale of diverse local cooperatives. There is no need of wealth extracting top commanders. We do not need often token philanthropy from the top if the wide majority of people can afford to be generous. Aloha Charles M Brown Kilauea Kauai Hawaii 96754