Comment Re:If you're educating students for an "AI Era" (Score 1) 103
At present, no. I've done a number of experiments with LLMs' capabilities with generating fiction, and while they are impressive for a beginner writer -- because fo the lack of spelling and grammar mistakes, they are nowhere near being able to write competent fiction.
This is because they don't model reader or character minds, they're based on word probabilities, like a predictive text keyboard. The engineers can compensate for for this to a surprising degree by feeding it data to recognize specific situations (e.g. the car wash is 100 feet from my driveway; should I drive or walk?). But this is turd-polishing.
Comment If you're educating students for an "AI Era" (Score 4, Insightful) 103
AI technology practice isn't foundational. Critical thinking is. The closer AIs come to being able to do something that looks like them doing our thinking for us, the more capable we have to be at thinking without them. A human who can't outthink an AI adds nothing to an AI-human partnership.
This proposed school is a typical scheme by people who think because they have been educated, they understand how the education works. This is like thinking because you eat, you know how to cook. Project work in education is nothing new; it goes back well over a century. And in real life, you may get a STEM degree, but your real education in engineering comes from real life work. But that doesn't mean classes in calculus and physics don't do anything for you.
Or English classes, for that matter. Nobody doubts the value of project work in education, particularly *androgogy* -- the education of adults. But for *pedagogy* you have to establish foundational skills as the student matures intellectually and socially. Entering the high school years, a typical student has had *no* training in critical thinking skills. To develop critical thinking skills in an area, you need both general skills (epistemologicla literacy: research, location of orignial sources, dealing with conflicting evidence) and domain specific training in that area. In other words, *liberal arts* training is foundational in an AI-saturated world. "Liberal Arts" -- from *artes liberales*: literally the skills necessary to be a free person.
But I think these people have at least got the problem right: as AI drives the cost of elaborate projects down, we all have more projects in our future. Big, elaborate, faultlessly plausible-looking projects which may or may not have actual value.
Where they are completely wrong is the solution, which is to organize education around practicing using AI to make impressive projects. In a word of AI-enamored dunces this will put you at the head of a very sorry class of ignoramuses. The answer is to build fundamental cognitive and intellectual skils at every stage of a student's development. Project work is surely part of that, but it's just a technique, not a solution.
In a nutshell, the academy is training students to be the next step down the evolutionary scale from code monkeys. More like the pigeons B.F. Skinner trained in WW2 to peck at a screen, in an attempt to create a primitive guided missile without computers. They want to create "main characters"; and they'll probably create a few. There are always a few natural autodidacts in any moderately large group. But what they are set up is to produce a bunch of fragile, economically privileged narcissists trained to cover their lack of education with impressive-looking AI slop.
Comment Re: Jacob Coxon is a nobody (Score 1) 105
OK bub.
Jacob Coxon is the equivalent of a Walmart cashier this industry, and you are interviewing him on his opinions of supply chain logistics. That's whats going on.
Do what you want, believe what you want, I could not care less.
Comment Re: Jacob Coxon is a nobody (Score 1) 105
IDGAF what Altman says, I actually work in this space and know far more than this kid, and you apparently.
Comment Re: Jacob Coxon is a nobody (Score 1) 105
This is like saying an engineer who makes parts for the Pratt-Witney engine is qualified to fly A220.
Doing research on AI safety is so disconnected from real use of AI agents it's hard to describe.
Comment Re: Jacob Coxon is a nobody (Score 1) 105
When LLMs have a memory longer than an hour, I will become more concerned.
For anyone who is actually very deep in AI *in the real world*, not just heads down in foundation labs - the hyperbole is off the charts on all of this. We are NOWHERE NEAR the exponential yet. These labs can't even get AI to improve their own software reliably, let alone do other things reliably.
Yann is the most sane of them all because he recognizes we need some massive breakthroughs if we want to achieve real AGI. LLM tech has hit its limit, unless someone cracks memory and continuous training.
Comment Jacob Coxon is a nobody (Score 2, Insightful) 105
Coxon has never had an actual job. He is a "researcher" in his mid-20s whose only two jobs have been at OpenAI and Anthropic, in both cases at the bottom rung of the totem pole.
These are the only two jobs he has ever held. He has never used these technologies in the real world.
He has never seen how incredibly limited they are at performing even the most basic of tasks due to their limitations.
He is not speaking from a position of any kind of authority or even specialized knowledge.
He is a nobody.
Comment All the AI guys hitting the brakes (Score 2) 105
Comment Re:Adversarial patterns FTW! (Score 1) 100
Honestly, AI technology has gotten good enough that those types of things won't fool it anymore. Captchas take longer for a human than it does for an AI model with vision, and the human is more likely to make a mistake.
The point is, sure, their system may suck right now, but if adversarial patterns became common, they're a model update away from fixing it. Might need better hardware on the device, so at most you'll cost them some money, but it won't get us our privacy back.
Comment Wait til something terrible happens! (Score 1) 172
Comment LOL, more expensive! (Score 1) 122
Comment Re: Not an expert (Score 1) 88
Which I've always hated because it makes no sense. If space itself inflated, what did it inflate into?
There is no such thing as "space", apart from "spacetime.". You can go, "there's a lot of space between our sun and Alpha Centauri" but if you were moving in that direction at close to the speed of light, instead you'd go, "hey, these two stars are super close to each other." Arbitrarily so: you can make them as close as you like, you can put as much energy into changing your frame your reference to make them centimeters or millimeters apart if you want to. Where did all that space go?
You can't really talk about space expansion in the instinctual model we have in our brains as 'space.' That's not "reality" it's a useful model of reality that our brains create to help us accomplish things, but using that to counteract general relativity results *which are testable and have been verified in a variety of ways* is like saying a description of what's going on in CPUs and GPUs don't make sense because it doesn't match up with the video game you're seeing displayed on the monitor. That's an interpretation of states in the computer, in the same way everything you see and experience is an interpretation of reality.
Comment I've said that for years! (Score 1) 41
Comment Re:Get off my cyber lawn (Score 1) 28
It's a way of reframing sloppy practices as a signal to your investors that your software has become powerful. Most of the horror stories about AI showing signs of becoming hyperintelligent are coming from the companies themselves, which should tell us something.