Technology

The best ones can literally write pretty good code, and explain any concept on the Internet to you that you ask them to. If you don't understand a specific thing about their explanation, they can add onto their explanation, and they can respond in the style you want (explain as if I'm ten, explain as if I'm an undergrad, etc).

I use it literally every day for work in a somewhat niche field. I don't really agree that it's a "parlor trick".

Sam Altman (Creator of the freakish retina scanning based Worldcoin) would agree, it seems. The current path for LLMs and GPT seems to be in something of a bind, because to seriously improve upon what it currently does it needs to do something different, not more of the same. And figuring out something different could be very hard. https://www.wired.com/story/openai-ceo-sam-altman-the-age-of-giant-ai-models-is-already-over/

At least that's what I understand of it.

In humans, abstract thinking developed hand in hand with language. So despite their limitations, I think that at least early AGI will include an LLM in some way.

Good points.

One problem with replacing everything with AI that people don't think about: middle managers will start to be replaced too. There's no way to ask a LLM "why did you do that"? Fewer people will need to be managed.

The research has been stagnating.

It utterly baffles me how people can make that claim. AI image generation has exists for not even three years and back than it could do little more than deformed Avocado chairs and shrimp. This stuff has been evolving insanely fast, much quicker than basically any technology before.

Video with temporal consistency doesn’t want to come

We have barely even started training AIs on video. So far it has all been static images, of course they aren't learning motions from that and you can't expect temporal consistency when the AI has no concept of time, frames or anything video related. And anyway, the results so far look quite promising already. Generators for 3D models and stuff is in the works as well.

Far away from the shock we all got when AI suddenly learned to draw a picture from a prompt

What the heck do you expect? Of course going from nothing to ChatGPT/DALLE2 will be a bigger jump than going to GPT4/DALLE3 (especially considering most people skipped GPT1,2,3 and DALLE1), that doesn't mean both of them aren't substantially better than previous versions. By GPT5/DALLE4 you might really start to worry about if humans will still be necessary at all. We should be happy that we might still have a few more years left before AI renders us all obsolete.

And of course there is plenty of other research going on in the background for multi-modal models or robots that interact with the real world. Image generations and LLMs are obviously only part of the puzzle, you are not going to get an AGI as long as it is locked in a box and not allowed to interact with the real world. Though at the current pace, I'd also be very careful with letting AI out of its box.

I want to note that everything you talk about is happening on the scales of months to single years. That's incredibly rapid pace, and also too short of a timeframe to determine true research trends.

Usually research is considered rapid if there is meaningful progression within a few years, and more realistically about a decade or so. I mean, take something like real time ray tracing, for comparison.

When I'm talking about the future of AI, I'm thinking like 10-20 years. We simply don't know enough about what is possible to say what will happen by then.

I thought this season was way better than the season before it. I was glad they went with something different like the horror theme. The season prior was a shit show of boring tropes.

AI is nowhere near the point where it can...

ChatGPT is 10 months old, not even a whole year. And it was never fined tuned for story writing in the first place. A little bit premature to proclaim what AI can and can't do, don't you think?

“…and somehow, the Emperor returned!”

100% correct. The IRC channel I hang out in has a bot utilizing ChatGPT and it does a summary of the most recent conversations when someone joins.

Sometimes, it does a great job! It impresses me how well it's able to summarize multiple ongoing conversations in a succinct way.

...and often times, it gets shit quite wrong. Not the actual topics, those it's good at -- but it is outright terrible at correctly indicating who actually said what.

Granted this is all to be expected -- it's an LLM, not really AI.

OpenAI started out as a non-profit and has since than mostly switched to a for-profit company. ChatGPT was never open source.

Eh, I never bought this. The show has always been wildly uneven. The first season was very strong with two great episodes but the first episode is not great. The second season is pretty bad overall with the exception of Be Right Back. White Christmas was a good one off. The first Netflix season had some really strong showings with Nosedive, Shut Up And Dance and my personal favorite of the whole series San Junipero. I even thought season 4 was pretty decent overall. Also, banderanatch was actually pretty cool, especially if you really dug into all the paths.

The last 2 seasons, 5 & 6 were pretty bad overall with only one good episode each and some particularly bad ones. But honestly Charlie is probably just running out of ideas and I can't really blame him at this point. I suspect he's just trying different things. Sometimes big swings work and sometimes you just get Mazey Day.