Is the AI “Revolution” Overblown? | Robert Wright & Timothy B. Lee

0:00 Tim’s got a new podcast, and NonZero is hiring
3:07 Is large language model progress reaching a plateau?
14:56 Some shortcomings of AI today
25:18 Human cognition compared to AI
33:03 The impressive progress of "multimodal" AI
41:09 Heading to Overtime

Discussed in Overtime:
Elon’s “Colossus” supercomputer.
How soon will AI transform the world?
AI personal assistants and other “agents.”
Do techies overestimate AI’s near-term impact?
China hawkism in the AI community.

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Timothy B. Lee (Full Stack Economics, Understanding AI, AI Summer). Recorded January 14, 2025.

[therainman]

I believe Tim misinterpreted the result he referred to, where doubling the size of the ARC images caused performance to drop. This was not an indicator that the models have trouble with abstraction; rather it was evidence in quite the opposite direction: that the only reason current frontier models struggle on ARC at all is because their vision abilities lag behind their text abilities. We’ve long known that the models tend to be much smarter when dealing with text than with images, as vision has not yet developed as far as text. The point is to show increasing the size of the images simply taxes the models’ visual processing more, such that they will perform worse on the exact same reasoning task, if you give their vision system more that it must process. However. The underlying _reasoning task_ is the same regardless of the image size. IMO this shows that as soon as the frontier AI models’ vision catches up with their text processing abilities, ARC will likely no longer be a challenge for them.

[tylermoore]

Google's new Titans paper already addresses some of the shortcomings mentioned by Tim.

[cwcarson]

Tom Hanks' mother is Janet Marylyn Frager. Janet Marylyn Frager's son is John Travolta - chatgpt 15/01/2025

[donaldrobertson]

Perhaps print journalists should be known as text journalists going forward

[johnstewart]

Frankenstein: It seems as though a dumb universe made us and now we are making something like us. And, that something involves a trick where you juggle six balls at the same time.

[jd]

must be rough working in the tech industry while named tim b lee

[jangelbrich]

AI does neither _know_ nor _understand_ anything. It makes only statistically best guesses. Hence many results are wrong.

[aleksandero]

When i hear dudes telling what's not going to happens and what's going to happen instead... i'm out!!!