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Comment by mclightning | Hacker News Reader

That's super interesting. When GPT-3 came out, I wrote an article inspired by it. That we could one day build an AI that acts like AGI, by a crazy vast amount of multimedia training data, collected by willing users to participate in ever improving AI interactions;

https://medium.com/swlh/bicameral-mind-humanoid-robot-with-g...

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When I was a first year AI student beginning of the 90s I asked my professor what would happen if we just made a massive neural network and trained it with all information in the world. He said it cannot happen as it it impossible.

This reminds me of a major US newspaper declaring heavier-than-air flying machines a million years away mere months before the Wright brothers experiments.

It is impossible; the GPT family of AIs is trained on text, which is a tiny subset of all the information in the world.

The “unphysical” nature of its training is one reason it can so easily “hallucinate” about impossible things as though they were real.

If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Arthur C. Clarke

Considering the computational resources available at the time, he was not that wrong. Research into artificial neuronal networks has always been held back by available computational power.

Agreed, but as a professor I believe one needs to be looking in the future. It was not that far out, but yeah it was an AI winter. We were stuck until 2012 basically. That's a long time.

Easier said than done.

I'm a professor in an AI field, and I can tell you that neither myself nor the colleagues I regularly have scientific discussions with could imagine ten years ago that something like ChatGPT would be possible in 2022. I suppose there might be a minority who called it, but recent advances in deep learning absolutely whooshed past the predictions of the overwhelming majority of people in the field.

Ah yes, that's what I was trying to say. I was the worst sceptic of AI; I never did anything with AI with it after getting my masters. I just went for money, programming and managing programming.

For me [1] this is the most mindboggling thing I have seen in my life and I don't think people realise what it means. And yes, it wooshed passed anything I thought possible in my lifetime. I hate that it's 'not be evil', 'anti thought crime' etc but it is really incredible what it does.

[0] https://twitter.com/luyben/status/1600663169353015297 [1] https://brainfisheatfishbrain.com/about/

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