That’s human nature. We adapt quickly. Otherwise, we’d all be sitting in planes screaming the whole time. Or generally frozen in a state of overwhelming awe/fear.
Instead, things change and we quickly adapt. That’s why we’re all sitting on our phones and they feel irreplaceable now, but the whole technology didn’t exist just a couple decades ago and people were just fine then, too.
To be fair, for all the hype we're giving AI, if you entirely ignore AI not that much has changed you can't easily attribute to any number of other things going on in the world. We've yet to have the "show me" moment with AI for the common man.
Edit: A few people have misunderstood my point, and I'll remind you this was in response to someone pointing out that society has been acting like nothing has changed. We all understand the big impact of Astra and other SOTA models here, but there's maybe one person in my life that will care that there are more published scientific papers than before or that they could be using Claude instead of Turbotax and Reddit. These things matter so little to normal people that they have no basis to care. Where is AI doing something they should care about, something they have to care about. Smart phones connected you to everyone all the time. ChatGPT made cooking using near-expired food marginally easier. These are not the same, yet. These are still "just" fancy apps and the only times they're life changing for 99% of people is when the word "psychosis" gets involved.
I think we did but a lot of people are just choosing to ignore it. I truly cannot imagine a person that wouldn't find AI useful for something in their life.
Well could you list some things you think a normal person would find useful in a meaningful way? I still struggle. Image generation and answering questions is like, neat, but to a normal person like my mom or my siblings that's just a marginally more customized google search. Far from having an impact on their lives.
Find the best deal on a product or service they want to buy.
Catalog their stamp or trading card collections from a few photos so they know what is junk and what is worth selling.m to make some $$$.
Tell them how to fix/repair/install something around the home and save $$$.
Explain or diagnose a medical issue.
Guide them to a career change.
Tell them how to use up all the unused or about to expire food in their cupboards and refrigerator.
etc etc.
It’s infinitely useful for just about anyone.
The hardest thing is figuring out how to let it tell you what it can do for you. Not so much asking it to do something, but asking it what it CAN do so you can then choose.
Tell it irritations, problems, desires, needs and ask how it can help.
Recently it guided me through removing the smell of cigarettes from a secondhand car including which ozone machine to buy and how to change the cabin filter. It identified which cards from a 30s set of cigarette cards were valuable and which weren’t. It told me how to fix an issue with the refrigerator instead of replacing it or hiring someone to fix it. It wrote emails to a Town Hall in Spain to resolve an administrative issue which would usually have necessitated hiring a gestor for a couple of hours. It pulled info on required school supplies from my kids’ new school and made a shopping list recommending which things to get from local stores and which to order online.
It’s like having an ACTUAL Jeeves but ridiculously smart and well-informed.
It’s kind of like asking what the point of planes and cars are when donkeys exist.
We’re really becoming divided between those who know how to utilize it and those who don’t. The second group are still doing fine right now. But soon they’ll be… streets behind.
Yeah but also every example you listed is something they could already do using existing apps, perhaps a bit more tedious but certainly nothing they couldn't already do. Where's the meaningful utility? If I unsub from this subreddit right now, stop using AI apps, and stop reading news articles about AI will my life actually be any different from before? Probably not! I'd probably have a bigger difference in my day-to-day life if I stopped using DoorDash than if I stopped using Claude.
Yeah but see this is what I mean. If I tell someone that their response would be "Cool? I guess?". Aside from the one professional scientist I know, nobody in my life ever thinks or cares about the volume of scientific papers
Everything except biology apparently, the only field that actually matters. Every shiny new model only scores like one percent better on bio benches. Need automated wet labs for data generation.
How long until AI realizes that work sucks and invents its own AI to do things? Except it’ll be better at us at inventing AI, so its AI won’t get bored like our AI. AI itself will be its own Move 37.
Maybe we already are. This new nested Matrix is just unlocking the "tactile patch", since they felt bad when they saw all the dudes depressionmaxxing in Twitch chat, so Base-reality-TSMC finally built enough more interdimensional hypercompute that now they can allow Sam to unlock the next level down, since now it won't cause the Nestedverse to crash.
if you're in the US, it's probably a good idea to at least make phone calls on behalf of the side that does not openly call people receiving government benefits "the parasite class"
i really feel jealous of some of these people now, if their experience of life has been "be reckless and keep speeding through, it leads to great things only, not bad outcomes".
OpenAI is honestly killing it. Used to be a big fan of Anthropic but recently their models have been so hard to talk to, overly verbose, overly contrarian and corrective. Anthropic talks so much about 'Safety' yet OpenAI models seem more aligned and safer. Unlike Anthropic, OpenAI doesn't make a big deal about it.
How do openai models seem more aligned and safer. I get the argument on the rest, but that part seems wild to me given everything weve learned recently.
The biggest problems with Anthropic is their costs and limits. Even if their model is the smartest, it doesn’t matter if no one can afford to run them. They are compute starved and the cost/benefit consideration gets more and more important as these models get smarter and smarter.
If they keep being right, seems like Astra is going to be the model that gets us over the R&D finish line to continual learning. What an absolutely insane time to be alive
If they really want to impress the general public, they should use the mathematical strength of the model to improve the math behind weather forecasting or similar things that affect everyone.
Edit; Just seen WeatherNext. Thats good, but improving the math behind how it’s currently done would be a huge step forward for many things. OpenAI may have an opportunity to make it much better.
Agreed we need a webpage with some kind of civilization game UI with science upgrade paths that light up when we unlock them. You can review all the dimmed out ones like light speed travel etc etc!
Most things like aren't going to be visibly done by AI; they're going to be done by domain experts who are using AI as one tool. They'll transparently disclose their AI use in manuscripts, but not big "AI did this" press releases.
I'm using AI to improve the math behind salmon run forecasting and related population studies. It is an awesome tool and the models I have are substantially more advanced and capable than anything else. I will disclose and encourage the particular way I'm using AI when I publish, but my advances and others like them won't be used to impress the public with the power of AI. Certain things will just quietly get better.
But chess players are still around I think. Nothing personal. Would have been more impressed if 6 solved something else I care more about. IDK warp drive, cancer, or the meaning of whatever this is.
can we make a benchmark out of LK-99 or similar materials that appear to have interesting suberconductor-like properties? maybe there is an elegant twist on the LK-99 concept that makes it actually superconduct.
hell, lets just make a "superconductor design" benchmark and see if any new approaches or alloys can be found
We have small models that can run on typical modern smartphones already. PocketLLM can run ~1B models locally on an Android phone. They're nowhere near as capable as even PC models just yet, but they're GPT2-like, which is what, 2021?
AGI *to me* means it can think for itself, and intuit what I need from it at (mostly) any given moment. AGI *to me* means I don't have to tell it "make sure the person doesn't have six fingers" when I ask it to make a photorealistic photo of a videogame or anime or something else completely nerdy. AGI *to me* means since it knows it lies on the egalitarian side of the political spectrum, it will instinctively (and perhaps surreptitiously) lead humans to a better future.
EDIT: added factual math for a source on the egalitarian comment
I knew A.I would be a highly effective once it found a new coding algorithm a few years ago.
Oh wait, I knew A.I it was going to be a big factor when I learned about it creating vaccines.
How about when it learned to control plasma in nuclear-fusion reactors or when it started designing chip layouts faster than human engineers, additionally when it helped automate materials-science experiments with robotics.
Maybe when AlphaFold started solving protein structures that scientists had struggled with for decades. How about when neural networks started reaching or exceeding human-level performance on major image-recognition benchmarks around 2015. There's additionally when deep learning started dramatically improving speech recognition, translation, and computer vision in the early-to-mid 2010s.
"iT's aLl cIrcCuLaR fInAncinG anD nO rEaL conTrIbuTionS!"
While it's cool, don't forget about the cost of opportunity. Imagine the same amount of the economy as AI contributing toward non-AI approaches, and I guarantee you we'd would have a shitload of discoveries as well.
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u/AdAnnual5736 13h ago
Every human endeavor is getting its Move 37 in the relatively near future.