Jimmy

I think asking some basic troubleshooting questions is helpful.

Is your product worth paying for? Is it even worth someone’s time to look at it or download it for free?

Is it the type of thing that you yourself have paid for in the past? (E.g. if you’re making infographics about cooking, ask yourself, when’s the last time you gave someone money because of their cooking infographics). Would you pay for your own product?

If you can’t imagine a scenario where you would pay for your own product, then why would anyone else?

Naturally, the first step for AI mathematics would be generating proofs of theorems that humans have already deemed interesting, rather than the AI generating entirely new research directions all by itself.

Certainly it’s an interesting problem to think about how one would formalize the notion of interesting/important mathematics. But it’s not necessary to solve that problem in order for AI to start having a big impact on how mathematics is done.

There’s a very simple solution, of course: turn off the computer and physically interact with real people.

>Each time this happens, the AGI pessimists raise the bar (a little) for what constitutes AGI.

Let’s say I have a coworker. We write code together, but we also hang out outside of work sometimes, maybe go for a couple rounds of golf, maybe discuss our shared passion for indie rock, he tells me his opinions on current news events or what’s going on with his family, all the ordinary sorts of things that people do.

When we get to the point where I have to reasonably wonder if my coworker is a biological human, or an AI masquerading as a human, then we have undoubtedly achieved AGI.

Not that we actually have to flood society with an army of cybernetic humans, of course. It’s just that AGI would enable such a thing, in principle.

Do you think you’ll see true AGI in your lifetime? I certainly don’t think I’ll see it in mine.

No other domain of the sciences is “complete” yet. There are still unanswered questions in physics, biology, neuroscience, every field. Why are people so sure that AI will be the first field to be “completed”, and in such an astoundingly short amount of time on a historical scale?

I agree. People will be quick to say that that’s just your nostalgia talking, but taken to an extreme, that argument would entail that culture and patterns of behavior never change, which is equally implausible.

Well, no, I wouldn’t say that my post was about “intention”. I could imagine, in principle, someone saying “hey GPT-3, write me a philosophical masterpiece” or “write me a hit novel” and it does. No intentionality required. It’s just that in actuality, it can’t do that yet.

Between this and DALL-E 2, I’ve been ruminating on David Hilbert’s old quip about a student: “For a mathematician, he did not have enough imagination. But now he is a poet, and everything is fine.”

As someone with experience in both STEM and the arts, I don’t feel particularly bad about saying that some “creative” pursuits are more creative than others, and my rough thesis is that the ones on the higher end of the scale are the ones that will take longer to fall to AI.

Representational painting is, at the end of the day, a somewhat mechanical problem, so it’s not too surprising that AI is rapidly catching up to humans there. “Draw me a cat eating ice cream on the beach” is a fairly well-defined request with a clear range of acceptable solutions.

I think the creativity exhibited in a long-form written work like say, Plato’s “Republic”, is of a much higher degree than your average painting or short poem. Not only is it an aesthetically beautiful work, but it contains a great deal of novel (for its time) intellectual content as well, filtered through the personal perspective of the author, and organized in an elaborate logical structure. When it comes to these types of large-scale creative works, AI hasn’t even begun to tackle the problem yet.

I don’t really disagree. I’m not a luddite and I don’t advocate for turning off the internet. Computers are certainly here to stay. It’s an extremely complex issue, and I don’t have all the answers, or even know how to phrase all the questions.

I do think society needs to take a proactive role in deciding how it wants to interact with technology though. There’s a certain laissez faire, almost defeatist attitude that you see from a lot of the tech crowd, that goes something like “technology will do what it does, and it will change our lives how it sees fit, and we are powerless to stop it.” But if that was the case, we couldn’t have gun control laws, or environmental protection laws, or restrictions on nuclear technology. Technology may continue to develop, but it’s still up to us how we choose to use it.

Sorry, that may have been poorly worded. I wanted to preempt the objection of “well, you say you don’t want to be dependent on smartphones, but then you’ll just be dependent on some other type of computer”. I wanted to make it clear that the problem is about rethinking our relationship with computing in general, not just with smartphones.

I simply won’t use any service that requires a phone and doesn’t allow other options. I am opposed to a future in which phones are a necessity of life rather than merely a convenience.

And to the people who say “but desktops/laptops are already a necessity of life” - yes, and that’s a problem. We need to be actively thinking of ways to roll things back, rather than allowing technology to become more and more integrated into life.

Yours don't?

>Honestly, I'd assume that pretty much any of these flaws are more fixable than you'd expect.

The first 90% of the project takes 90% of the time, the last 10% of the project takes the other 90% of the time.

I don't think it's wise to speculate at this point on what problems are "actually easy" or "actually hard", or how long it'll take to achieve certain milestones. I don't think that even the people at the forefront of this research have any way of knowing for sure.

>So what?

DALL-E 2 is very impressive. So impressive that many people have wondered if all commercial artists will be out of a job as soon as DALL-E 2 is made publicly available. These limitations form a strong argument that DALL-E 2 is not ready to completely replace human artists just yet. This is particularly relevant if you're an artist, or if you're in the market for one.

>Instead, we're only interested in finding the logically valid theorems which serve the above purpose of explaining the patterns in the world concisely.

That's just empirically false though. Take the "perfectoid spaces" mentioned in the article. Do you think mathematicians are interested in them because they "explain the patterns in the world concisely"? No, they're interested in them because of their mathematical significance, and their applications to problems within mathematics. Mathematicians are not physicists.