Where Asymptote?: Trying to Think About GPT-LLM-ML
GPT-LLM-ML: Smart observations from Matt Friedman on Ben Thompson’s StraTECHery podcast:
Nat Friedman: The Human Component of AI <https://stratechery.com/2023/an-interview-with-nat-friedman-and-daniel-gross-about-the-human-component-of-ai/>: ‘The central question of AI right now is… is the asymptote…. If it’s near and not too much higher, then this is a transformative technology… gold rush… something normal… Browser Wars 2.0 or something like that…. If we’re not near an asymptote… then it’s hard to know what happens next, and we’re probably going to have a very different civilization…. Online… over the last 15 years or so… [was among many other things] a reordering [of] our society at the fundamental genetic level in terms of how people meet and pair, and I think we can expect AI to do some version of that in any scenario…. No one knows…. Intelligence in people is a purely material phenomenon…. If you believe in human ingenuity and the techno-capital machine… you have to believe we’ll get better and better at replicating this physical-intelligence process… and [eventually] exceed… human capacity…. The question is, “How soon is it?” and, “What’s the gap?”…. With new innovations and the next level of scale and huge new investments, we’ll probably continue to see growth, and whether it asymptotes or not, or when, hard to say…
Back up. Modern “AI” is, I now think, seven things. And calling it “AI” is a source of confusion. It is not “artificial intelligence”. It is Transformer models, large-language models, and machine-learning models. And the seven things are:
Auto-complete for everything on ‘roids.
The post-crypto boom way of separating gullible VCs from their money for the benefit of engineers, speculators, utopians, and grifters.
Very large-scale very high-dimension regression and classification analysis.
Natural-language interface to databases–so far, specifically, databases of coding examples.
The intersectional combination of (3) and (4) surveying the internet, in the form of ChatGPT, DALL-E, and so forth.
Highly verbal electronic-software pets, and coaches.
The latest of the so-many outbreaks of American religious cults that we have seen regularly since the First Great Awakening of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield in the 1730s.
To expand: