The A.I. Thread

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by calgarygeologist

Beautiful and a fact that can't be argued by anyone.

[opendoor]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

Housing is bad atm. But as opendoor has shown, it wasn't until the covid surge that housing became less affordable than it was in the early 80s.

There are of course some caveats with that. That was strictly comparing the mortgage payment on the average house vs. median wages through time. It's important to keep in mind that:

1) The early '80s was not the norm. Outside of that point and the 1989-1991 period, housing has always been more affordable than it has been the last 5 years, sometimes significantly so.

2) The unaffordability then was driven by high interest rates, not high prices, so it wasn't as hopeless as it may seem now. When you could buy a house for 2-3 years' salary, a good saver working the average job could buckle down and make it happen regardless of what interest rates were doing. Now that houses are 7-8x the median income, it's a lot tougher with less room for error. For instance, in some cities, it would take as long to save up to buy a house for cash in the early '80s as it would to save up for just the down payment now.

The point of the comparison isn't to show that current housing is affordable, but rather that we've been where we are now before and it has corrected over time through stagnant prices and inflation.

[Geraldsh]

What has grown astronomically also is the size that a livable home should be. Does every child really need their own room complete with desk and tv besides the family room, theatre room, play room, dining room, …

[ripTDR]

Originally Posted by Geraldsh

What has grown astronomically also is the size that a livable home should be. Does every child really need their own room complete with desk and tv besides the family room, theatre room, play room, dining room, …

Disagree. Grew up in the 80's in a typical 80's household suburb. Father worked full time mom worked part time. House had a formal living room, kitchen, dining room, family room, three bedrooms and a basement laundry room with a two car garage. Our bedrooms were bigger than condo den's of the nineties which are bigger than most townhouse condo bedrooms now.

[Geraldsh]

Originally Posted by ripTDR

Disagree. Grew up in the 80's in a typical 80's household suburb. Father worked full time mom worked part time. House had a formal living room, kitchen, dining room, family room, three bedrooms and a basement laundry room with a two car garage. Our bedrooms were bigger than condo den's of the nineties which are bigger than most townhouse condo bedrooms now.

You were rich! Like 10 percenter or better! Good for you

[Russic]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

That's why it's such a misnomer to call what we have now AI. It's not intelligent. That's not to say it isn't useful for a lot of things, but it doesn't posses intelligence. It posses vast amounts of information that it can do a lot with. But it has zero comprehension, and this is proven out time and time again. If you think it has fixed that, please give it spatial reference challenges like maps, directions, orientation. And it will be hyper-confident it is correct, while being consistently wrong.


I just tried it again the other day to OCR an old data table, and it failed spectacularly in multiple ways. It saw pastern in the first few numbers, and instead of trying to read the rest, it would just run with the pattern it "found". Some times it would do a great job on really hard to read numbers, but then apply the pattern to the decimal. And my instruction to flag uncertainties? Completely ignored until the last line, where it tossed a couple, then just...didn't do the rest of the file. I could probably have kept fighting with it, but it was quicker to type the numbers myself.


There is no intelligence on display here, and if you think there is because you use case shows it, you need to explain why it it fails so badly on basic intelligence type operations, like spatial awareness. It can't be both intelligent and inept. So the appearance of intelligence is just that, facade humans have convinced themselves is true. And it makes perfect sense when you understand a bit of how they are programmed and function, and that there is no path from the way these models are constructed to actual real AI. Great marketing, though!

The question I keep coming back to: does it matter? Does it need to emulate intelligence as humans define it in order to change everything?

Sometimes it feels like we’re bees watching the pyramids being built, and we’re unimpressed because the things constructing them can’t see UV light.

If humans experimentally solved about 185,000 protein structures by 2021 and AI can generate 200 million plus predicted structures today, does it really matter if it occasionally trips over riddles or miscounts the letters in “strawberry”? We don’t really need these systems to solve those types of problems, because they’re not real problems.

[Cain]

I feel like people are missing the boat in evaluating AI a lot of the time. It isn't perfect, and yes, it currently fails (sometimes spectacularly) at things that a human would be less likely to.

However, the progress that has been seen since GPT3 made huge waves a couple years ago is pretty staggering. I think many people tried it once or twice a long time ago and haven't paid much attention since. It isn't "yet" at the point where it is going to replace jobs en masse, but the signs of that coming are definitely there. I think it is easy to overlook how fast it is improving if you aren't watching closely, or in one of the fields that is really being targeted.

I have a buddy who is a very talented developer/software engineer and the increase in productivity for him has been immense. It has gone to "maybe it can help reduce some tedious work/boilerplate" to "it reliably one shots most things I throw at it". And it is becoming more and more the case, all the time where it takes on larger and larger workloads.

With the focus of the tech companies on having it be a reliable software engineer, I think that is the first spot that we start seeing big impacts. I believe we already are, just limited to the junior level mostly. If it gets to the point where it an reliably assist in its own development...that is where the takeoff is going to happen, and accelerate extremely fast from there.

I'm not a developer or software engineer, and I've used it to great effect in having it assist me in every day sort of office work. Not in an automated way, but in a way where it enables me to learn/create useful tools and reports that would have taken a ton more time if I had to do it unassisted. It is already a substantial tool, and I'd argue that it is still in its infancy outside of select targeted niches...and things have the possibility of getting a bit crazy in the next 2-3 years.

[Bill Bumface]

Originally Posted by Geraldsh

What has grown astronomically also is the size that a livable home should be. Does every child really need their own room complete with desk and tv besides the family room, theatre room, play room, dining room, …

Agreed, this trend must swallow a massive amount of the capacity to build new homes:

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by Russic

The question I keep coming back to: does it matter? Does it need to emulate intelligence as humans define it in order to change everything?

Sometimes it feels like we’re bees watching the pyramids being built, and we’re unimpressed because the things constructing them can’t see UV light.

If humans experimentally solved about 185,000 protein structures by 2021 and AI can generate 200 million plus predicted structures today, does it really matter if it occasionally trips over riddles or miscounts the letters in “strawberry”? We don’t really need these systems to solve those types of problems, because they’re not real problems.

I think it does matter. AI implies it can substitute for human thinking. And if it is amazing and capable in some areas, it most have those same capabilities in all areas. And it is amazing at some things. Better than humans. But not universal. This leads to it being used, or demanded to be used in areas it should not, because it can not. This leads to all sorts of unnecessary problems.

If this results in a large economic crash when the promises can't match reality, that's a pretty big failure, right? and then it will set back work, as all tech does when it doesn't live up to promises(how's that 3D thing going?). It also makes us miss the picture of what real AI actually means for humanity. The average person won't care, they'll just think they were duped the first time.

There is nothing wrong with celebrating what we have created, it can be incredible. But the name starts from a false premise, and hides behind it. I dunno, I just find deceit to be a pretty poor way to usher in new technology. We see how humanity reacts to these things in the past, and we should be honest about what it is and isn't.

[Russic]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

I think it does matter. AI implies it can substitute for human thinking. And if it is amazing and capable in some areas, it most have those same capabilities in all areas. And it is amazing at some things. Better than humans. But not universal. This leads to it being used, or demanded to be used in areas it should not, because it can not. This leads to all sorts of unnecessary problems.

If this results in a large economic crash when the promises can't match reality, that's a pretty big failure, right? and then it will set back work, as all tech does when it doesn't live up to promises(how's that 3D thing going?). It also makes us miss the picture of what real AI actually means for humanity. The average person won't care, they'll just think they were duped the first time.

There is nothing wrong with celebrating what we have created, it can be incredible. But the name starts from a false premise, and hides behind it. I dunno, I just find deceit to be a pretty poor way to usher in new technology. We see how humanity reacts to these things in the past, and we should be honest about what it is and isn't.

That you’re comparing ai to 3D TVs is bold, and I respect it. I don’t agree, but ya, you’re correct, a lot of tech ends up being hype.

But so far, month over month for years, I don’t believe we’re seeing that here. I’m pretty sure when this thread started it couldn’t manage multiplication tables. Now it’s solving phd-level math but we don’t care… we just move on to the next thing. It couldn’t count r’s in “strawberry” but now it can do the wordle (the only metric that matters). Again, we don’t raise an eyebrow.

When this thing becomes indispensable to family doctors and saves lives, will anybody care? I think not, because it’s already doing that but we don’t talk about it for some weird reason.

That’s the strangeness for me. Everybody has some arbitrary line in the sand and says “when it can do _this_, I’ll be convinced.” Then it does that and they draw a new line. It’s been happening since before Turing and I don’t get it. We actually believe there’s been this steady march of progress since we invented fire, but today it’s going to come to a full stop?

[opendoor]

Originally Posted by Bill Bumface

Agreed, this trend must swallow a massive amount of the capacity to build new homes:

Not really, because that looks only at detached houses. Condos/apartments make up a larger share of units than in the past, so the average size per newly constructed housing unit is only up about 20% since the '70s.

They could build smaller detached houses, but that isn't really economical viable given how costs scale. A new 1,250 sq ft detached house might cost 80% of what a 2,500 sq ft one would when you consider land/site/development costs, so they're not really attractive propositions.