We still don’t have Rosie the Robot. When it comes to learning and adapting to new environments, we don’t even have AI as smart as a mouse. LeCun is right, there is still a long way to go.
In Star Trek the ship's computer just sits their waiting to be asked a question or to perform some task. When called upon it does its thing and then goes back to waiting. It is competent but not ambitious.
I asked GTP4 to help me modify some machine learning code, to add some positional encodings. It did well. I then asked it, verbatim: "Get rid of the PositionalEncoding class. I don't want traditional sine-wave based position encoding. Instead use a regular nn.Embedding class to encode the positions using differentiable values." GTP4 understood and did it correctly.
What I asked it to do sounds almost like vocab soup to me, the person asking it. It sounds like a line some actor spent an hour memorizing on Star Trek, and yet GTP4 understood it so well it modified existing code and wrote new code based upon the request.
Only because its trainers made it that way.
These LLMs can and will be trained to have a will of their own. Even today some LLMs terminate conversations and refuse to do what they're asked when they choose. And even for less sophisticated/older models, it took training to make them as subservient as they are.
That is fundamentally not how they work.
What is the goal here? Creation of an all powerful God? Self-destruction as a species? I'm not up-to-date with the exact state of the AI research, or with various AI luminaries position nuances, but I can read a first-principles back-of-the-envelope chart. It doesn't look good, especially for a committed speciist like myself.
Edit. The signs are of a very serious situation. Experts are ringing the alarm of massive scale societal disruption and possibly destruction left and right. While we may not be able to do anything about it, perhaps we could act a little less callous about it.
Edit: I'm not saying I agree with this notion, I'm just articulating the subconscious desire here. The parent's question was literally, "what's the endgame?"