27 Comments
Feb 18, 2023·edited Feb 18, 2023Liked by Gary Marcus

Reminds me of the story in P.T. Barnum's autobiography of launching a "lottery" to get rid of a bunch of old bottles and blackened tinware. The intrigue served as a distraction. "The tickets went like wildfire," he wrote. "Customers did not stop to consider the nature of the prizes." Bing's "P.T. Barnum" play took advantage of the huge hype wave on ChatGPT, then Google allowed themselves to feel pressured into playing the game, too.

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Feb 17, 2023Liked by Gary Marcus

It is unavoidable this will crash, I think. When that happens (as it has happened before), the world will switch — again — from optimism to pessimism. These are both shallow (so typically human) reactions. What we need, though, is realism. Which is not particularly easy to establish, given how human minds work.

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Haha. I've always felt that we've been in an AI winter since the beginning of the field in the 1950s and spring never came. The AI gods have decreed that, unless humanity figures out how to build an intelligent robot that can walk into an unfamiliar kitchen and fix a breakfast of bacon and eggs, orange juice and coffee, the AI winter will continue.

As my French friend is fond of saying, "Merde! Ça arrive quand, le printemps ?"

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Funny; I woke up to your morning post saying the same thing and I lived through the second AI winter from the late 80's. But too many $ bets might make this a shallow "trough of disillusionment".

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Along with the failure to meet expectations, there is too much money on this bet. This can cause that any small improvement will be carefully protected by the big players to gain some "market advantage". This will cause a research publications slowdown and accelerate the AI winter: https://aboutailatam.substack.com/p/ai-winter-is-coming

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I suspect that they will find useful applications for LLMs so perhaps not a winter. Cold snap perhaps? Adjustment period for sure.

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Replied on Twitter this time b/c my eye roll at Mr. Goebel's comment was just too big for Substack.

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I, too, smell frost in the air.

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Only in the comments section of Gary Marcus' Substack do I get to play the part of relative AI optimist.

For all the limitations and weaknesses of LLMs, I expect to see development and refinement of LLMs in their strengths continue. Basic coding assistance, carrying out dull and simple coding tasks, writing form letters, summarizing inputs, simple pastiche, and riffing on ideas and themes. Those who have higher ambitions than LLMs can provide will have to focus their work elsewhere.

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For reasoning and explanations, please see www.executable-english.net

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Siri, remind me of this in 6 months.

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Do these marketing people on Twitter really think we are stupid?

I certainly believe that there is cetainly an AI spring to replace those marketing puppets by ChatGPT, apart from that we still have the artificial stupidity as always.

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What is the compelling benefit of AI that justifies creating what could turn out to be yet another existential threat? If you wish to be a critic, go for the throat. :-)

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Hi there,

I have been reading your posts about the problems with current approaches to AI, and I appreciated your explanations. However, I think that it would be more fruitful if you actually contributed to solving at least some of the issues rather than keeping pointing out the problems. If not you, than who?

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To think that they are separate/different is wishful. Constructing meaning from point cloud or camera data, word sequence data etc involve more than mere symbol-shoving. Faking intelligence isn't the same as being intelligent.

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Damage control has already started. From Roose's article:

In an interview on Wednesday, Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer, characterized my chat with Bing as “part of the learning process,” as it readies its A.I. for wider release.

“This is exactly the sort of conversation we need to be having, and I’m glad it’s happening out in the open,” he said. “These are things that would be impossible to discover in the lab.”

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