this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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Bill Gates feels Generative AI has plateaued, says GPT-5 will not be any better::The billionaire philanthropist in an interview with German newspaper Handelsblatt, shared his thoughts on Artificial general intelligence, climate change, and the scope of AI in the future.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hehe. I’m imagining sitting 100 human test subjects down in a lab setting and asking them what 2+2 is, and then telling them they’re wrong when they answer 4. I don’t know how many of them would guess again but I know it’s not zero. Meanwhile, GPT can probably give a better answer to any advanced math or science query than the majority of humans.

I’m a writer and a language nerd and I watch people all the time use words incorrectly because they think they know what they mean, but they really don’t. They’re just regurgitating them in what they think is the same situation they heard them. They don’t “understand” the word and are just guessing and churning out crap.

I don’t have a dog in this race but I think it’s interesting how people judge artificial intelligence with too much credit given to what goes on with human intelligence. Most people who say it’s “just a next word predictor” read that phrase somewhere and are regurgitating it, not at all dissimilarly to what LLMs do. They use phrases like “it doesn’t actually understand” without being able to define, with any clarity or precision, and without resorting to examples, what would actually impress them as real intelligence.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

GPT can probably give a better answer to any advanced math or science query than the majority of humans

Only if that answer is already out there and in the model. So pretty much a Google search away.

GPT isn't coming up with new math or science facts (at least not real ones).

It literally is a word predictor, an insanely complex one, it's the best way to describe it. If you start with layers, parameters and so on most people lose interest. But there's some really good explanations around.

Generic AI (real AI) has internal logic, can learn and improve itself and can do self motivated actions. Chat GPT can tell you exactly how to create an account and order something from Amazon, but despite being able to put that text out it will never be able to actually follow them itself.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Only if that answer is already out there and in the model.

That's not true. I wanted a vba script for Excel. I don't know vba or excel so I spent hours searching Google for help. There were explanations of functions but no working code. I tried GPT for the fun of it and it spit back working code. Code that was nowhere on the Internet.

It was able to put together functions into working code based on the definition of functions, not simply cutting and pasting what somebody else had already written.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Only if that answer is already out there

Again, pretty similar to the vast majority of humans. How many times in your science education did you learn ann equation that you’d already figured out on your own previously?

And to be fair, GPT doesn’t have hands and the ability to conduct experiments. So we have to, in a sense, judge its success on an apples to apples basis of what it, and we, do with the corpus of written knowledge.

In contrast to humans, GPT has at least read it all ;) (I say this in jest - I know it doesn’t have access to everything, but humans are too lazy to read, for the most part, even things they have access to).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Chat GPT can tell you exactly how to create an account and order something from Amazon, but despite being able to put that text out it will never be able to actually follow them itself.

This is a really good ELI5 explanation of its limit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That would still give it too much credit in that case. It's purely an input output system. You put text in (the prompt), you get text out (the result). If there is no input from you, there is no output. It doesn't have any intrinsic functionality that runs on its own.

Maybe a bit too much for an ELI5.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

How is it a definitional limit on its intelligence that it can’t use interfaces designed for people with hands? You also cannot send an http request with your lips no matter how you try - that’s just not an interface made for you.

Bots can 100% operate websites and take online actions, conduct quality tests, write fake reviews. That doesn’t mean they are intelligent. I just can’t see how it has any bearing either way whether ChatGPT can place an Amazon order.