this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
98 points (90.2% liked)
Technology
57432 readers
3957 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I feel like people who shit on AI so much live in a different reality than I do.
I'll put the big caveats here: I hate venture capital, I think people are over hyping less likely risks (creating skynet) while underplaying more likely ones (taking people's jobs, flooding the Internet with shitty content/misinformation). All AI gets stuff wrong some of the time.
That said, I've been impressed with what it can do and use it more days than not. I don't see a fundamental reason why AI wouldn't be effective at controlling a robot body. Currently something like chatGPT responds after a user types a prompt. But what if the prompt was just audio/video/sensory input every fraction of a second? I don't think this is far fetched, if you threw enough money at it.
So the line of reasoning I'm taking is that current ai is just a statistical model. It's useful for plenty of stuff, but it just doesn't do things well that don't lend themselves to a statistical approach, for instance it can kinda "luck" it's way through basic math problems because there's a lot of examples in its training set but it's fundamentaly not doing the kind of forward reasoning/chaining that is required to actually solve problems that aren't very commonly seen.
In the case of a robot body, where are they going to get the training set required to fully control it? There isn't a corpus of trillions of human movements available to scrape on the web. As mentioned in this thread, you can get certain types of a ai to play video games but that's relatively easy because the environment is simple, virtual, and reproducible. In the real world you have to account for things like sample variation between actuators, forces you didn't expect, and you don't have infinite robots if it breaks itself trying to learn a motion. Boston dynamics uses forms of ai but they're not strictly the types that are exploding right now and don't necessarily translate well.
Actually controlling the robot body could be a subsystem - as others have said here, AI has been used to control video games or even robotic devices, but that's different than LLMs like chatgpt.
If the LLM is the "brain" it can send commands to the body subsystem. In a similar way to right now where chatgpt can do a web search or upload a file. Those capabilities aren't fundamentally part of the LLM, they're kind of like an API call.
Spend a few evenings on learning ML, then read about internals of some of the bigger models. Even chatGPT. It's not too hard.
That'll give you some reasons.
Please state any reasons you have here, since we're talking here.
OK.
It's just a family of extrapolators, enhanced with various tricks, similar to those used in variable-length codes.
It can't reason, build logical structures, it doesn't have abstract thinking or any thinking.
It may be used as one of the building blocks for real AGI like 100 years from now, but the existing thing is not that, and there's no way it'll become that via small incremental changes.
Thanks! I don't know what you mean by your first paragraph.
You're right that it's not near being an AGI. But it doesn't need to be to be used in a robot form and perform some useful tasks.
Right now I can ask chatgpt to take a block of code in Ruby and output the equivalent in Python, and it will do it, and for the most part it's correct.
I could envision telling an AI robot to sort this pile of parts by type, or pick up all the sticks in the yard, etc. I think we could make something like that now without any significant technological breakthroughs. It might get stuff wrong sometimes, but I envision it as having an intern, not creating a new god. Of course these companies may promise much more in their marketing.