Submitted by ryusan8989 t3_yzgwz5 in singularity
SoylentRox t1_ix0pvgm wrote
Reply to comment by TemetN in 2023 predictions by ryusan8989
do you have a prediction from last year? Didn't this image generation stuff come out of left field this year?
I am wondering if your predictions are way too conservative.
Those of us who survive next year will find out, but the last year has seemed suspicious to me. Too many advances, they work too well. Not empty promises and hype as usual but stuff that is starting to work.
If the singularity hypothesis is correct this pattern is going to continue - progress on AI itself accelerating as AI is chain reacting with itself. And if correct then progress will accelerate until the end.
TemetN t1_ix0s6u3 wrote
Kind of and not really? I (along with everyone else) was awaiting DALLE-2, but the explosion did come out of left field. That said, I don't think I had a prediction on that, and my only predictions prior to that were either high level (AGI median 2024) or framed differently (I have a number of predictions on Metaculus from that period for example).
As for whether they're 'too conservative', honestly while it'd be nice, I can't (or at least won't) make predictions without some basis for extrapolation. So things that are out of the blue (such as the aforementioned explosion of image generation models) aren't really likely to show up in that context. I can acknowledge they happen, but they aren't easily modeled generally speaking.
was_der_Fall_ist t1_ix1ebvz wrote
I agree that the past year has been “suspicious” and suggests that we may see even faster rates of progress in the coming years. If the singularity hypothesis, as you put it, is correct, 2023 should include even more profound advancements than we’ve seen so far. If it doesn’t, then we’ve got something wrong in our thinking.
SoylentRox t1_ix1f1g2 wrote
Agree mostly. One confounding variable is the coming recession may cut funding. I don't know how much gain we are getting from "singularity feedback". What this is as AGI gets closer, AGI subcomponents become advanced enough to speed up the progress towards AGI itself. As concrete examples, autoML is one and the transformer is another and mass ai accelerator compute boards is a third. Each of those is a component that a true AGI will have a more advanced version inside itself, and each speeds up progress.
The other form of singularity feedback as it becomes increasing obvious the AI is very near in calendar time, more money will be spent on it because of a higher probability of making ROI. You might have heard huggingface, a startup that duplicated openais work with stable diffusion but better, has a paper value of a billion dollars basically overnight.
This is similar to how as humanity got closer to a nuke multiple teams were trying in multiple countries.
Anyways if Singularity gain is say 2x, and funding gets cut to 1/4, then in 2023 we will see half progress.
Just as an example. If the gain is 10x the funding cut will be meaningless.
And obviously gain scales to well technically infinity though since the singularity is a physical process it will not be quite that high as the actual singularity happens, and presumably AGIs advance themselves and technology in lockstep until we hit the laws of physics.
That last phase would I guess be limited by energy input and the speed of computers.
was_der_Fall_ist t1_ixgc64a wrote
> The other form of singularity feedback [is that] as it becomes increasing obvious the AI is very near in calendar time, more money will be spent on it because of a higher probability of making ROI.
In my thinking, if we are as close to transformative AI as we seem to be from recent trends, the inevitable increase in funding should nullify any effect of an economic recession, so the stagnation of critical research would likely require more catastrophic intervention.
The people in charge of funding AI research (that is, the CEOs and other leadership of all relevant companies) are, almost universally, extremely interested in spending a lot of money on AI research, and they have the funds to do it even in a recession.
SoylentRox t1_ixgnzr5 wrote
In theory. In practice, Intel held a layoff for their AI accelerator teams. Amazon let go a lot of Amazon Robotics and Alexa workers. Argo AI closed.
While yeah more pure AI plays like Hugging Face raised on a unicorn valuation.
It seems to be mixed outcomes.
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