logoalt Hacker News

x312today at 1:40 AM1 replyview on HN

This is increasingly the consensus I see also on the academic side of AI/safety research. Specifically that AI poses an existential risk to humanity.

This was a fringe belief until recently, but the progress of AI in research is impossible to ignore. Epecially in math, where not only has AI outstripped humans in generative ability, but is able to create scientific knowledge which is beyond the capacity of human comprehension.

There's clearly no intelligence task that AIs can't do due to some magic fundamental constraint. And it's hard to imagine a world where current limitations like poor sample efficiency or lack of continual learning won't eventually be solved.

Total AI compute is estimated to grow somewhere in the 1-10 million-fold range in the next decade. Please don't underestimate the phase change that's still coming.

Sure, maybe there's some plateau due to RL being fundamentally limited in some surprising way, but this is nothing but a hope.


Replies

platinumradtoday at 1:52 AM

> There's clearly no intelligence task that AIs can't do due to some magic fundamental constraint.

Yes there is: write an English paragraph that doesn't make me want to claw my eyes out. LLMs are not better than human mathematicians (or security researchers) in all respects, just some specific ways (e.g. not having to take a lunch break) that make them good at exhaustively searching for an answer, given the right constraints.

show 1 reply