Just to put Bill Gates thoughts on AI into perspective, this was his comment on an AMA 9 years ago to the question
"What kind of technological advancement do you wish to see in your lifetime?":
> The big milestone is when computers can read and understand information like humans do. There is a lot of work going on in this field - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, academia,... Right now computers don't know how to represent knowledge so they can't read a text book and pass a test.
https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/im_bill_gates_...
Irrespective of how it all turns out, I'm personally incredibly excited to be alive during it. In many ways, it is the ultimate milestone.
We'll probably see the explanation of the Fermi paradox.
Wow. First time I can't see stuff on Reddit without an account :(
If you don't mind the new UI (arguably worse than the old), you can see it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/comment/dea5fl...
The old UI is worth signing up for using a completely anonymous throwaway email address. You just need to verify it once, and then you never need access to the email address ever again. I don't know why people seem to find that so difficult, but they do. It's the same reason why reddit bans are a complete joke.
I've never seen anyone say they can't figure out how to access Reddit or that it's too hard so it might not be a difficulty thing and instead the rejection of the ux forcing them to log in before they see the content that was previously accessible and that was posted on Reddit (compared to a competitor) under that assumption.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
The issue here is that they've changed Old Reddit to require a login going forward.
> Version 3.0.0 has been rewritten from scratch to keep old Reddit working while logged out
https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect
Doesn't work either, still asks to sign in.
Sounds odd. Works just fine for me. I'm blocked if I disable it, but can access when I enable it.
Yes, it's a shame. It's in part due to scrapers and AI. There's a wealth of relevant knowledge inside Reddit, and agents aren't able to easily check there for updates on recent topics.
> It's in part due to scrapers and AI.
It has nothing to do with that, scrapers can still scrape new reddit. This is just a hostile action to move visitors to a site that shows more ads.
[flagged]
Not a moral judgement, just it was good before and now it sucks. Just my opinion, the horror!
How ironic. The reason you can't read the comment:
"> The big milestone is when computers can read and understand information like humans do. There is a lot of work going on in this field - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, academia,... Right now computers don't know how to represent knowledge so they can't read a text book and pass a test."
Is because reddit is threatened enough by "computers that can read and understand information like humans do" the he's locked out of it!
don't blame Ai for reddit's predatory practices
https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/im_bill_g...
Machines can read the info better than humans now!
I logged in just to share the entire comment for you:
>The big milestone is when computers can read and understand information like humans do. There is a lot of work going on in this field - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, academia,... Right now computers don't know how to represent knowledge so they can't read a text book and pass a test.
>Another whole area is vaccines. We need a vaccine for HIV, Malaria and TB and I hope we have them in the next 10-15 years.
But there is a malaria vaccine?
https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/php/public-health-strategy/malar...
Nitter got shut down yesterday too
Brave New Internet
Fascinating. Can't help but wonder how things will change over the next decade or so.
For the worse. Just the same old stuff in faster cars and smellier air, to quote Ford Perfect.
It's Ford Prefect
Well it’s just the one breakthrough that we needed — specifically, it was solving the frame problems. Now the dam has burst and we’re in for ‘turbulence’.
I don't like meta comments usually, but unless I have a bad case of deja-vu, isn't this comment (and much of this discussion) way older than 3 hours?
They removed the other thread because people were calling out Epstein stuff
That's the sort of thing that should be discussed!
It's not invalid, but it's completely unrelated to his opinions about A.I.
[dead]
In January after 8 years (17 years in tech overall) at the same govt IT firm in the Mid-Atlanic region I was laid off. I quickly enrolled in healthcare classes and starting my clinical rotation for low level healthcare position ($25 an hour hopefully vs. multiples in tech) in September. Also, I will be doing my clinical Radiology rotation this time next year. Still won't be making the same money but i dont see a future in creative tech anymore when anyone can type to create graphics, songs, web designs, websites, iPhone apps, etc. This note of his reinforces what I thought I should do and what I am doing is the right path.
If you're interested in healthcare IT look into becoming an Epic admin. Hospitals and clinics want RNs with a tech background for those roles, and they pay really well (~150k here in CA)
what is RN?
Registered Nurse
yeah in time im hoping to mix my 17 years in creative tech with my new healthcare career. Hopefully get back to the money I was making, but humbled and happy to start at the bottom again for stability and always have a job waiting if needed. At least until the healthcare field gets filled with others like me.
If you don't mind, can you share what healthcare position you were able to start without prior healthcare background?
For what it's worth I'm also drawn to radiology tech - I guess because it's one of the most "techy" fields out there in healthcare? Hope all goes well for you.
Unfortunately radiology is also one area of healthcare being highly targeted for AI replacement of humans.
Well not radiology technicans as they are required to use equipment on patients to get diagnostic data. AI could possibly reduce the amount of radiologists (they are doctors) jobs.
Thank you and it's a competitive field to get into just look for schools out in the middle of nowhere and wherever for easier entry into a program.
I think we all wish you good fortune and wellness on your journey. But some of us are sticking around knowing that taste is something AI will never be able to define. Let them have their (copied) graphics, songs, web designs, websites, iPhone apps, etc…
[flagged]
Yes, exactly why you should not put belief in someone who has proven themselves to make poor predictions. He's even further removed from the zeitgeist 9 years later.
Daniel Kokotajlo had the closest prediction for our current world, 5 years ago: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-2026-...
You should adjust that these are the kind of the people with the most prescient accuracy for where we are going again. Their world model is more accurate.
Kokotajlo authored: https://ai-2040.com/
where is the error? 9 years ago (2017) 'attention is all you need' hasn't been written yet, no llms exist. his take is literally 'it would be cool if something like llms existed', seems fine (if anything, vaguely predictive) to me.
As for Kokotajlo, he's a good SF author, but I don't think it's nearly as good a prediction as it appears at first glance.
Like any SF, he's correct about some things, and way, way off base about others. Specifically, he was mostly correct about short-term (1-2 year horizon) technical aspects, but anyone familiar with how transformers work would have guessed those. I'm not even in AI/rationalia land, but believe I was having these exact conversations by 2021. Specifically about multimodality and steam-of-consciousness ['chain of thought' reasoning]. He is spot-on about chip shortages (to my eyes, his most well-done prediction).
Other thoughts are a storytelling device, like a well-told horoscope. He makes non-categorical statements that were already happening as if they categorically will become a new thing. But really he's just going off the current trend that everyone knows, and thus will be nearly-impossible to falsify. For example, 'People who still remember 2021 think of it as the golden days, when conformism and censorship and polarization were noticeably less than they are now. Just as it is normal for newspapers to have a bias/slant, it is normal for internet spaces of all kinds—forums, social networks, streams, podcasts, news aggregators, email clients—to have some degree of censorship (some set of ideas that are prohibited or at least down-weighted in the recommendation algorithms) and some degree of propaganda.' Sounds scary! But it is literally just saying 'polarization and marketing specialization will continue to deteriorate'.... which, duh. In essence, you could make this statement for 2018-> 2021, or for 2008->2018 and 'feel' just as correct!
Other key thoughts were somewhat off. Specifically, 'It now costs an order of magnitude less compute (compared to 2020) to pre-train a giant model' is kind-of-true, in that it costs less now, but the models have gotten so much bigger that the prices haven't actually gone down much. Might be changing soon, but definitely several years off.
The scariest central prediction that the political stuff rests on is 'After years of tinkering and incremental progress, AIs can now play Diplomacy as well as human experts'. This part, as far as I can tell, is just not true and hasn't changed.
And, well, 2026 predictions are just not correct at all. Some examples: 'Mormons create a “Christian Coalition” internet stack, complete with its own email client, social network, payment processor, news aggregator, etc.' -- basically untrue. I know a few ex-mormons, such a thing is not prolific.
'The US and many other Western governments are gears-locked' The US is far from gears-locked, in fact, it's full-steam ahead to er, well, something.
'“Should I wear shorts today?” “Order some more toothpaste, please. Oh, and also an air purifier.” “Is this cover letter professional-sounding?”' -- kind of correct, but in practice most people just do the last one. I'm not aware of many that give chatgpt agents credit card access (refer to the famous vending machine experiment). But predicting this with GPT3 is not that crazy, cause people were already doing that.
Personally, I am much more biased towards the METR timelines/way of thinking: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/deesrjitvXM4xYGZd/metr-measu...
I found Kokotajilo's response comment to this kind of, idk, immature, and not especially mathematical.