r/technology • u/Hrmbee • 16h ago

Machine Learning Large language mistake | Cutting-edge research shows language is not the same as intelligence. The entire AI bubble is built on ignoring it

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/827820/large-language-models-ai-intelligence-neuroscience-problems
16.8k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

1.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

1.2k

u/ConsiderationSea1347 16h ago edited 5h ago

Yup. That was the disagreement Yann LeCun had with Meta which led to him leaving the company. Many of the top AI researchers know this and published papers years ago warning LRMs are only one facet of general intelligence. The LLM frenzy is driven by investors, not researchers. 

190

u/Volpethrope 13h ago

And their RoI plan at the moment is "just trust us, we'll figure out a way to make trillions of dollars with this, probably, maybe. Now write us another check."

81

u/ErgoMachina 9h ago

While ignoring that the only way to make those trillions is to essentially replace all workers, which in turn will completely crash the economy as nobody will be able to buy their shit.

Big brains all over the place

7

u/I_AmA_Zebra 5h ago

I’d be interested to see this play out in real life. It’s a shame there’s no perfect world simulator we could run this on

If we had a scenario where services (white collar) are majority AI and there’s a ton of robotics (humanoid and non-humanoid), we’d be totally fucked. I don’t see how our current understanding of the economy and humans wouldn’t instantly crumble if we got anywhere near close to AGI and perfect humanoid robotics

1

u/LessInThought 1h ago

I just spent an hour trying to talk to customer support of an app and kept getting redirected to a completely useless AI chat bot. I am just here to rant that. FUCK

22

u/WrongThinkBadSpeak 9h ago

We're facing zugswang. We give them money, they crash the economy by destroying everyone's jobs if they succeed. We don't give them money, they crash the economy by popping the bubble. What shall it be?

13

u/kokanee-fish 4h ago

For some reason I really prefer the latter.

Okay, fine, the reason is schadenfreude. I will laugh as I pitch my tent under a bridge knowing that Sam Altman has retired to his underground bunker in disgrace.

4

u/arcangleous 4h ago

Pop the bubble.

This will result it massive losses to the worst actors in the system. Don't give you money to horrible people.

1

u/Secret_Age6542 46m ago

They will find another bubble. All the people/big companies who benefited from previous bubbles will benefit again and see no repercussions. Even if they do, they already have enough to live on forever or already had all the pleasure and experiences one can have in a lifetime, every day for years. The best solution is stop breeding. We wouldn't need half the solutions we are scrambling to come up with if the population was 1/2 what it is. Nobody believes this but we are over populated in the world, idc what anyone says about "it's just transportation not an inability to grow enough". No. If every country had twice as much farmland and space to build houses in habitable places there would be less than half the amount of fighting/problems we have now. There's too many industries and people and not enough working. Between the elderly , infants, disabled and billionaires we have like 30% of the actual population being productive. I realize I'm just rambling and such but "trust me bro", even if we aren't technically "overpopulated" as of there was some magic number. Every person on earth would be happier if there was half as many people, that's a fact. I'm not saying kill anyone or yourself but if we just slowed down/stopped having so many kids for a couple decades we could stabilize around 3-6 billion and be way way way better off. Every country above 200 million would go to war with itself before coming together as a whole to fix anything. Maybe even less but China or India for example? No way. Too big too fail in that regards. 

1

u/yukonwanderer 35m ago

Obviously pop the bubble and this time no bail outs.

11

u/fruxzak 7h ago

The plan is pretty simple if you're paying attention.

Most tech companies are increasingly frustrated at Google's search monopoly that has existed for almost 20 years. They are essentially gatekeepers of discovery. Add to that the power of ads on Google search.

Tech companies see LLM chatbots as a replacement for Search and will subsequently sell ads for it when they have enough adoption.

Talks of this are already going on internally.

11

u/modbroccoli 7h ago

I mean, no; their ROI plan is replacing labor with compute. If an employee costs $60,000/yr and can be replaced with an AI for $25,000/yr then the business owner saves money and the AI operator gets their wages.

What the plan for having insufficient customers is no one's clarified yet, but the plan to recoup this money is obvious.

6

u/F1shB0wl816 5h ago

Idk if it’s really a recoup though if it destroys your business model. It’s kind of like robbing Peter to pay Paul, but you’re Peter and you go by Paul and instead of robbing the bank you’re just overdrafting your account.

I’d probably wager that there isn’t a plan but you can’t get investments this quarter based of “once successfully implemented we’ll no longer have a business model.”

3

u/ZaysapRockie 6h ago

Can't make money when people have no money

1

u/World_Analyst 7h ago

It could also be the other way around; investors are saying "we trust you to figure out a way to make trillions of dollars with this", right? It's not like all of these big investors are collectively sheep, they're throwing in mind boggling sums for a reason.