26 months of ridicule and failure
The wall is reliability.
The ridicule is of me; the failure is of the lords of deep learning to resolve what ails their AI.
The ridicule started with my infamous “Deep Learning is Hit a Wall” essay (recently reevaluated here); the deep learning world hated it so much they went a-meming; my personal favorite was always Joscha Bach’s stomping robot — reposted this morning by Elon Musk to his audience of millions. (Kindly, he spelled my name correctly, and even attributed the quote correctly, which is a lot more than I can say of some people I know.)
But what Musk overlooked is the ravages of time.
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But here’s the thing, what I said then to Bach still holds, 100%, 26 months later
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For all the daily claims of “exponential progress”, and for all the tens of billions that have been invested since, reliability is still a dream, and of course toxicity and hallucinations are still with us. Worse, we are no closer to a solution to the alignment problem now than we were then.
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For not so good measure, one of the few people who recognized, early, the potential dangers of unaligned AGI, Musk, has switched teams, flipping from calling for a pause to going all in on—and wildly overhyping—a technology that remains exactly as incorrigible as it ever was.
He of all people should know better.
Gary Marcus has warning people about the limits of deep learning, including hallucinations, since 2001.
I will never understand how (outside of outstanding hubris) anyone ever thought the crap on the internet would produce AGI. It’s a never ending game of whack-a-mole, where it seems like the leaders are fooling themselves and (trying) to fool everyone else. And damaging the environment.
The Information’s most recent podcast blames the internet as entertainment, which is an interesting addition to the conversation.
Folks have to realize that A.I is human sourced and anything human source is not infallible! Failure is human..... and so is making it right. However, A.I is selling a utopian vision of perfection. All of these A.I 's are based on human output! So this illusion that has become a delusion needs to told to the masses but that won't happen because it is bathed in innovation which is now a word that has been bastardized.