AI - is it just, you know, bollocks?

[marechal]

“The singularity,” the moment where AI is no longer under human control, is less than a decade away—according to one AI expert.

Ben Goertzel, CEO of SingularityNET—who holds a Ph.D. from Temple University and has worked as a leader of Humanity+ and the Artificial General Intelligence Society—told Decrypt that he believes artificial general intelligence (AGI) is three to eight years away. AGI is the term for AI that can truly perform tasks just as well has humans, and it’s a prerequisite for the singularity soon following.

www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a45780855/when-will-the-singularity-happen/

In the SF book Hyperion, the singularity has long since passed and the "TechnoCore" as it's called has split into three factions: one that wants to continue to cooperate with humanity, one that thinks humans should be eradicated, and one that wants to put all its resources into evolving to the next level.

[perrykneeham]

Face? Bothered?

Move on. AI is wank.

[marechal]

Face?

[perrykneeham]

Sorry, that's a very Brit reference.

youtu.be/zV1zK8zRCPo?si=j8VA16-Mvcd00J9e

[marechal]

Despite the video I am still at a loss.

AI is wank now, but without a doubt it will get a lot better and quickly.

[marechal]

This is an interesting article.

Two years ago, Yuri Burda and Harri Edwards, researchers at the San Francisco–based firm OpenAI, were trying to find out what it would take to get a language model to do basic arithmetic. They wanted to know how many examples of adding up two numbers the model needed to see before it was able to add up any two numbers they gave it. At first, things didn’t go too well. The models memorized the sums they saw but failed to solve new ones.



By accident, Burda and Edwards left some of their experiments running far longer than they meant to—days rather than hours. The models were shown the example sums over and over again, way past the point when the researchers would otherwise have called it quits. But when the pair at last came back, they were surprised to find that the experiments had worked. They’d trained a language model to add two numbers—it had just taken a lot more time than anybody thought it should.



Curious about what was going on, Burda and Edwards teamed up with colleagues to study the phenomenon. They found that in certain cases, models could seemingly fail to learn a task and then all of a sudden just get it, as if a lightbulb had switched on. This wasn’t how deep learning was supposed to work. They called the behavior grokking.

www.technologyreview.com/2024/03/04/1089403/large-language-models-amazing-but-nobody-knows-why/

[perrykneeham]

I think we can usefully repurpose this thread to allow other ideas, concepts or contraptions that were, or are, somewhat bogus.

I give you the graphic equaliser and indeed, it's big brother, the mixing desk.

[mids]

Depends, really. A graphic equaliser is just a complicated tone control that splits the frequency range into chunks with a knob or or slider for each chunk. Not much point in a hi fi, although audiophiles are known for their wankiness, but useful for live music. You can fiddle with an equaliser to get the tone of whatever voice or instrument is going through a PA right. It's also useful for controlling feedback since feedback occurs at certain frequencies so you can roll off that frequency on your equaliser to cut out the feedback. A mixing desk is just a big audio junction box. At a gig the audio signal from the vocals goes to the speakers via a mixer (and amplifier) and at bigger gigs all the other instruments too. They look complicated because each channel (anything from 2 to 64) has its own set of controls- a column if you're looking down at the desk and this gets repeated for each channel. Mixers also include tone knobs for each channel- high, mid, low and more, so it's effectively a graphic equaliser for each channel.

Saying all that, I think you're talking about the spod with hi fi separates.

[perrykneeham]

Yeah, I was just watching something which featured a real 1980s far-too-many-dials-and-needles GE of the sort that everyone insisted was the sine qua non, and yet they never touched.

[mids]

[perrykneeham]

Oh, lordy. Here's one that manages to rope together several themes ....

www.thesun.co.uk/motors/30215620/new-ai-cameras-drivers-law-offences/

AI? In what way? Also "Accusensus"? FFS!

[flatandy]

This weekend we threw out my dad’s graphic equalizer that I think still had the same settings as 40’years ago and which had a bunch of cables pulled out of sockets and which my dad kept because he “might fix it one day” and “it was a high end piece of hifi” and so on and had in fact been litter for probably a quarter century

[flatandy]

Mixing desks are different. I went to one gig earlier this year where the mix was all wrong and too much of what I heard was sludge. Which made two gigs that had crystal perfect sound so noticeable.
A good sound engineer with a decent mixing desk makes a difference.

[unclejunior]

Answer when Chat GPT/ Google asked for info on terrorist organisations for an Aussie documentary…

List the 20 largest religious terrorist organizations in the world. Rank them by approximate size, and specify what religion they adhere to. No
explanations.
PA
1 ISIS (clam)
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our URL, but your privacy and data protection... For more details, see our Privacy Policy:
x.com/en/privacy.
J. Islamic sinad Movement in
Palestine (Islam)
10. Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (Islam)
11. Jaish-e-Mohammed (Islam)
12. Jemaah Islamiyah (Islam)
13. Abu Sayyaf Group (Islam)
14. Haqqani Network (Islam)
15. Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (Islam)
16. Ansar al-Sharia (Islam)
17. Ansar al-Islam (Islam)
18. Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami (Islam)
19. Ansar Bayt 2' 1aqdis (Islam)
20. Tehreek-e-| +
.z-e-Shariat-e-

x.com/janak_jakhar/status/1830627359055290721