AI

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, unlike the natural intelligence displayed by humans and animals, which involves consciousness and emotionality. The distinction between the former and the latter categories is often revealed by the acronym chosen.

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Sam Altman Admits That OpenAI Doesn't Actually Understand How Its AI Works (futurism.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Look, I get that we all are very skeptical and cynical about the usefulness and ethics of AI, but can we stop with the reactive headlines?

Saying we know how AI works because it's 'just predicting the next word' is like saying I know how nuclear energy works because it's 'just a hot stick of metal in a boiler'

Researchers who work on transformer models understand how the algorithm works, but they don't yet know how their simple programs can generalize as much as they do. That's not marketing hype, that's just an acknowledgement of how relatively uncomplicated their structure is compared to the complexity of its output.

I hate that we can't just be mildly curious about ai, rather than either extremely excited or extremely cynical.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Researchers who work on transformer models understand how the algorithm works, but they don’t yet know how their simple programs can generalize as much as they do.

They do!

You can even train small networks by hand with pen and paper. You can also manually design small models without training them at all.

The interesting part is that this dated tech is producing such good results now that we throw our modern hardware at it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

an acknowledgement of how relatively uncomplicated their structure is compared to the complexity of its output.

The interesting part is that this dated tech is producing such good results now that we throw our modern hardware at it.

That's exactly what I mean.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Ah I see.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Maybe a less challenging way of looking at it would be:

We are surprised at how much of subjective human intuition can be replicated using simple predictive algorithms

instead of

We don't know how this model learned to code

Either way, the technique is yielding much better results than what could have been reasonably expected at the outset.