An old article from NYMag: You Are Not a Parrot And a chatbot is not a human. Gary Marcus is, as always, pungent but prescient: Peak bubble The bad news: AI is going pretty much as I expected
I landed on it when, just out of curiosity, I went looking for a reason that Vivaldi Browser does not include an AI Assistant in the sidebar - almost everyone nowadays does. Firefox, Brave, DuckDuckGo. Here are some nice reads on the topic: Why Vivaldi won’t follow the current AI trend? Vivaldi takes a stand: keep browsing human
A superb essay on the similarities between AGI believers and those who believe in Psychic powers, mind reading etc. Some quotes from above: Somebody raised to believe they have high IQ is more likely to fall for this than somebody raised to think less of their own intellectual capabilities. Subjective validation is a quirk of the human mind. We all fall for it. But if you think you’re unlikely to be fooled, you will be tempted instead to apply your intelligence to “figure out” how it happened. This means you can end up using considerable creativity and intelligence to help the psychic fool you by coming up with rationalisations for their “ability”. And because you think you can’t be fooled, you also bring your intelligence to bear to defend the psychic’s claim of their powers. Smart people (or, those who think of themselves as smart) can become the biggest, most lucrative marks. Whereas the sceptic who thinks less of themselves is more likely to just go: Whereas the sceptic who thinks less of themselves is more likely to just go: “That’s a neat trick. I don’t know how you pulled it off. Must be very clever.” And just move on. .... Given that there are billions of dollars at stake in the tech industry, it would be tempting to assume that the statistical illusion of intelligence was intentionally created by people in the tech industry. I personally think that’s extraordinarily unlikely. A popular response to various government conspiracy theories is that government institutions just aren’t that good at keeping secrets. Well, the tech industry just isn’t that good at software. This illusion is, honestly, too clever to have been created intentionally by those making it. The field of AI research has a reputation for disregarding the value of other fields, so I’m certain that this reimplementation of a psychic’s con is entirely accidental. It’s likely that, being unaware of much of the research in psychology on cognitive biases or how a psychic’s con works, they stumbled into a mechanism and made chatbots that fooled many of the chatbot makers themselves. Remember what I wrote above about psychics frequently having conned themselves, that many of them aren’t even aware of their own scam? The same applies here. I think this is an industry that didn’t understand what it was doing and, now, doesn’t understand what it did. That’s why so many people in tech are completely and utterly convinced that they have created the first spark of true Artificial General Intelligence.
We have a few AI related threads but not one dedicated to this topic - which I think is important to keep an eye on. These are the relevant threads we have so far on the subject of artificial intelligence: Experimenting with ChatGPT kimi k2 - MoE (mixture of experts) language model Quantum chips I have moved some of the posts I made in the first thread above to this one.
On hype, and the unbearable banality of ChatGPT’s poetry ChatGPT’s Poetry is Incompetent and Banal: A Discussion of (Porter and Machery, 2024) [PDF]
Gary Marcus (alongside Noam Chomsky) are perhaps the biggest sceptics of AI evangelist Sam Altman and his hyperbolic claims: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/gary-marcus-vs-sam-altman-on-gpt
