"Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,[3] and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. This confidence must be well justified and increase with the magnitude of a system's potential effects. OpenAI's recent statement regarding artificial general intelligence, states that "At some point, it may be important to get independent review before starting to train future systems, and for the most advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for creating new models." We agree. That point is now."
"The new AI Index report notes that in 2023, AI still struggled with complex cognitive tasks like advanced math problem-solving and visual commonsense reasoning. However, 'struggled' here might be misleading; it certainly doesn't mean AI did badly.
Performance on MATH, a dataset of 12,500 challenging competition-level math problems, improved dramatically in the two years since its introduction. In 2021, AI systems could solve only 6.9% of problems. By contrast, in 2023, a GPT-4-based model solved 84.3%. The human baseline is 90%. "
"Applying to some of the most common customer and food service jobs in the country now requires a long and bizarre personality quiz featuring blue humanoid aliens, which tells employers how potential hires rank in terms of "agreeableness" and "emotional stability."
If you've applied to a job at FedEx, McDonald's, or Darden Restaurants (the company that operates multiple chains including Olive Garden) you might have already encountered this quiz, as all these companies and others are clients of Paradox.ai, the company which runs the test and helps them with other recruiting tasks."
"Their findings show that currently, only about 23 percent of wages paid for tasks involving vision are economically viable for AI automation. In other words, it's only economically sensible to replace human labor with AI in about one-fourth of the jobs where vision is a key component of the work. "
"It's an interesting question. I'm almost not sure how to answer it, because there is no thinking happening on the part of an LLM. A large language model takes the prompts and the text that you give it and tries to come up with something that is responsive and useful in relation to that text. And what's interesting is that certain people - I'm thinking of Mark Andreessen most prominently - have talked about how amazing this is conceptually from an education perspective, because with LLMs you will have this infinitely patient teacher. But that's actually not what you want from a teacher. You want, in some sense, an impatient teacher who's going to push your thinking, who's going to try to understand what you're bringing to any task or educational experience, lift up the strengths that you have, and then work on building your knowledge in areas where you don't yet have it. I don't think LLMs are capable of doing any of that.
As you say, there's no real thinking going on. It's just a prediction machine. There's an interaction, I guess, but it's an illusion. Is that the word you would use?
Yes. It's the illusion of a conversation. "