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.

  • ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’m not sure I’d say it’s plateaued today but I definitely think machine learning is going to hit a wall soon. Some tech keeps improving until physical limits stop progress but I see generative AI as being more like self-driving cars where the “easy” parts end up solved but the last 10% is insanely hard.

    There’s also the economic reality of scaling. Maybe the “hard” problems could, in theory, be easily solved with enough compute power. We’ll eventually solve those problems but it’s going to be on Nvidia’s timeline, not OpenAI’s.

    • nossaquesapao@lemmy.eco.br
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      1 year ago

      Generative ai is a bit different from self driving cars in the sense that they’re tolerant to failures. This may give more room for improvements when compared to other applications.

      • AeroLemming@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, AI’s biggest weakness right now is that it just doesn’t work sometimes. It’s very unreliable, but whether or not it’s too unreliable depends on what exactly you need it for. The scope of LLMs is limited by this unreliability, but generative AI is wonderful at doing things that either don’t need to be perfect all the time or can simply be redone if there’s a mistake. That’s why it’s putting artists out of work, but not automating the boring, really important stuff yet.

    • erwan@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Yes, especially when you consider that the human brain runs on 15W of power!

  • scarabic@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Let me save you a click: he doesn’t say anything interesting about why he thinks this.

  • Pxtl@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I hope so. Theyve already got scary implications for creative parts of the economy.

    That said, we’re in the Cambrian explosion of the tech. As it plateaus, the next step will be enhanced tooling and convenience around it. Better inputs than just text, better, more applications in new spaces, etc.

    • Random_Character_A@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Now now. He only hired assholes and monsters to execute immoral MS mob style tactics, while he played the great innocent altruist.

  • oldfart@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Not a single comment yet stating how Gates is a great human being because of his foundation, and how all you haters should fuck the fuck off? sigh, let me the first one.

    • oldfart@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Just to make things extremely clear, the above comment has been sarcastic. He’s an awful person.

    • banneryear1868@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      You mean his tax haven?

      I mean they’ve done some good things, but the capitalist system that gave him his wealth is the same one that causes poverty and his foundation isn’t working to change that.

  • Mio@feddit.nu
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    1 year ago

    But we have more areas to apply this to. I still can’t ask my PC to do some work, like Unistall OneDrive or change a setting in the OS. Send a message on Teams. Where is Jarvis?

    • Toribor@corndog.social
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      1 year ago

      Having Generative AI make API calls on your behalf is a work in progress across pretty much every industry. It’ll make complex tasks across multiple services a lot easier but it’s definitely going to cause weird unpredictable behavior too.

      • dukk@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        I wouldn’t trust it do everything yet, but it sure as hell would be useful to retrieve information. Wish I could just ask it “Hey, is the door locked?” and get an answer.

        Maybe it could suggest actions, but I wouldn’t want to have it do anything without manual human confirmation, it’s too unreliable.

  • r00ty@kbin.life
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    1 year ago

    On the one hand, I don’t really know enough about AI to comment. What I do remember is that, Bill Gates said the Internet was just a fad in the 90s. This comment caused myself and others problems promoting the Internet in workplaces because those in charge for some reason put some weight to his words. :p

  • trackcharlie@lemmynsfw.com
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    1 year ago

    I think he could be right about generative AI, but that’s not a serious problem given we’re moving beyond generative AI and into virtual intelligence territory.

    Generative ai right now requires someone (or something) to initiate it with a prompt, but according to some of the latest research papers in OpenAI as well as the drama that happened recently surrounding the leadership, it appears that we’re moving beyond the ‘generative’ phase into the ‘virtual intelligence’ phase.

    It’s not going to be ‘smart’ it will be knowledgeable (and accurate, hopefully). That is to say VI’s will be useful as data retrieval or organization but not necessarily data creation (although IIRC the way to get around this would be to develop a VI that specifically only works on creating ideas but we’d be moving into AGI territory and I don’t expect we’ll have serious contenders for AGI for another decade at least).

    The rumours abound surrounding the OpenAI drama, the key one being the potential for accidentally developing AGI internally (I doubt this heavily). The more likely reason is that the board of directors had a financial stake in Nvidia and when they found out altman was working on chips specifically for AI that were faster, lower cost, and lower power consumption than current nvidia trash (by literally tens of thousands of dollars), they fired him to try and force the company onto their preferred track (and profit in the process, which IMO, kind of ironic that a non-profit board of directors has so many ‘closed door’ discussions with nvidia staff…)

    This is just the thoughts of a comp-sci student with a focus on artificial intelligence systems.

    If interested in further reading:

    https://www.ibm.com/blog/understanding-the-different-types-of-artificial-intelligence/

    https://digitalreality.ieee.org/publications/virtual-intelligence-vs-artificial-intelligence

    https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/what-we-really-want-in-a-leader/202204/why-you-need-to-focus-on-virtual-intelligence

    Keep in mind that because it’s still early days in this field that a lot of terms haven’t reached an established consensus across academia yet, so you’ll notice variations in how each organization explains what “x” type of intelligence is.

  • The Menemen!@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Maybe, but I am sure the tools the AIs can use will improve making the AIs jobs easier and thus the AI more efficient. I hope he is right tbh.

    Eww, as a long time Linux user I need to take a shower now. I feel dirty.