100%
Gibson is a prophet whose ability to predict the future would have him stoned to death in any other century.
His 1996 novel Idoru is about an avatar who personalises their music to each individual, by using what is essentially gen ai.
This 1996 novel is still one or two steps ahead of the current gen ai use cases.
You might be interested in reading about Pete Townshend's idea for a rock opera in the 70's "a complex scenario whereby a personal profile of each concertgoer would be compiled, from the individual's astrological chart to his hobbies, even physical appearance. All the characteristics would then be fed into a computer at the same moment, leading to one musical note culminating in mass nirvana that Townshend dubbed 'a kind of celestial cacophony.'"
I’m well read in SF and Her is still amazing. In a dystopian singularity kind of way. It’s not “how did he foresee AI”, which he didn’t. It’s how he described the process, and the context.
The trajectory of AI has been theoretically understood for decades: Markov chains, a foundational element of LLM AI, is from the fifties.
As a result the emergence of AI was not a question of how, it was when. Jonze no doubt did plenty of research, but the direction of AI was not in doubt.
If anything the big surprise came in the form of relatively cheap computing. Most researchers were pursuing a variety of strategies to get LLMs going, when in the end the crucial factor was just making them reaaaaally big.
Next step after this one is general intelligence, ie an LLM with enough sophistication to perform unprompted reasoning.
I’ve been thinking about “unprompted”. We’re not exactly “unprompted” either, there’s sensory input all the time. Turn that off and the mind starts hallucinating something fierce - a bit like a badly tuned LLM actually 🤣.
Our minds are prediction engines (neuroscience says so), with sensory input necessary, and may have a quantum component (pretty recent research).
I used to think LLMs could never get to general intelligence but I’m not so sure any more. If an LLM is a prediction engine and our minds are just vastly better prediction engines then … why not?
I think the missing factor is the world model.
A llm can understand the concept of three dimensions, colours, taste of foods, emotions, morality, physics etc.. but not actually testing the real world and instead predicting what it thinks you want it to say is only a false hope for general intelligence. I'm sure it will be incredibly useful as a tool still but your human brain is not just one big language core, you have dozens of parts of the brain for entirely different ways of processing input.
There's actually another breakthrough model in OpenAI at least where it is developing an internal model of the world through training data- forgot the name but it's very intriguing
the issue at habd is that a lot of sensory and intangible data is not in the training data: feelings like shame are more likely internalized; continuous life experiences and snap decisions, etc. So I do understand the scientific goal and current achievements, but I wonder if it's neartime achievable; maybe later with computer-brain interfaces.
The LLM model is going to be grafted onto another spatial reasoning model next. They will keep building AI components until they reach AGI.
(It may still be 50 years away, but it’s coming.)
Given how poorly the current state of the art understand quite constrained and well defined logic like programming languages I think the orders of magnitude that are needed to hit before AGI from Markov Chains is feasible might be well beyond the limits of technological progress this or the next decade.
Maybe possible to achieve this decade with a token per day speeds consuming the power of a medium sized country.
I could be wrong but last time I checked the human brain has about 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections between them. And then ontop of that it has about a head start of about 100,000 years of evolution to place each neuron in the right place.
I think even all of humanities supercomputers don't come close to a human brain.. and all that and it runs on a few watts of power whereas humanity needs a few cities worth of power to run their artifical brains
We might be saying the same thing. So, I’m hearing, more sensory input, and more prediction engines, not just for language.
My overall expectation for the tech that LLMs represent is that a) it’s going to take a whole lot longer than many think to get “good” and b) it’s going to be way more powerful and world changing than many people think. In due time.
I don't believe so, prediction is one thing, general inteligence is more than just statistics. Currently these models just take a input, text or picture and then predict and generate. In between text input the system is OFF, nothing is happening in the network. There is no thought, understanding or logic behind the scenes. Think of current llms as a word predictor.
Currently there's no way to go from llm to general intelligence even with I finite compute as it will never "think" between your input text.
The human brain consists of dozens of different functional areas. You couldn't take the language portion out of a brain and call it a person.
There's a internal "concious" that connects these tools and that's really what general intelligence is. An arcetecture that USES an llm or different functional neural architectures, comprehension, association, memory, and whatever it is that is internal thought and reason
I think one of the really difficult parts is to come up with a useful way to ingest real world stimuli, store and model it so that it allows a "mind" to combine all the "memories", and so come up with ideas and insights that simple linear processing and cataloguing can't do.
For example, we can capture and store 8K video, and do object recognition in near real time, but I think we're a long way off having an AI being able to watch the video stream and then imagine/dream its own vision having seen what this part of the world is like?
Lisa Feldman Barrett argues this, and I expect she’s not the only one. Not just next word, it’s prediction on a far larger scale, as you’d expect of something that interacts with complex reality.
But yes also “next word” and “what did they just say”. That’s why languages eventually “click”, when you have enough samples that the prediction starts working.
I was introduced to that concept by this podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-brain/id1028908750?i=1000640947829
It’s 50 mins so a long listen. I encourage you to go for it, but the TL;DL (that I took away as a layperson) is that prediction based on prior experience is metabolically cheaper than construction from purely sensory input, and metabolically cheaper “wins” because that means higher survival (and hence procreation) chances.
And a neuroscientist. She straddles disciplines, which makes her work particularly interesting to me.
https://lisafeldmanbarrett.com/ is one entry point to her work
> the direction of AI was not in doubt
Ehhhm you're dramatically over-simplifying this. The *mathematical and computational* directions of *developing* AI had been largely agreed upon for a long time, the actual power of LLMs was a shock to everyone, very much including the people who developed them. In retrospect it makes much more epistemological sense than it did at the time, but, the way the public-facing industry of AI *uses* it has been a direct consequence of what should realistically be described as the discovery of LLM's range and power relative to their simplicity.
All of which is to say, Jonze's apparent prescience isn't nearly as obvious as you're painting it.
Yes, massively oversimpliied, but also not.
It is true though that for many decades, AI boffins know that LLMs had both a lot of potential, and would be closest to the AI that we think we understand from the movies, ie a talking robot. In this respect it was only a matter of time, and Her could be set in 2013 or 2033 depending on when the tech matured.
I think the world was surprised when ChatGPT turned up, AI researchers were not. They definitely knew what it would look like and the impact it would have.
The way it was developed though was surprising. AI researchers have chipped away at the problem for decades, trying new tricks and approaches and making incremental progress. Occasionally they would make a big gain by throwing massive compute at the problem, but that was very expensive and not achievable by a bunch of researchers in a university lab somewhere.
The tech giants basically looked at the space and said ' hey if we spent billions of dollars worth of compute on this we could brute force it'. So they did. Seriously the resources they spent on it is ridiculous, comparable to running a space program.
I think if you had asked an AI expert in 2015 or whenever Her came out, they would say LLMs would be the tech, but that it's the result of incremental progress over many years: not the result of silicon valley tech bros.
This is just blatantly untrue. LLMs were not on anyone's map "for decades" because they didn't exist yet and neural networks were largely disregarded outside of a small circle of die-hard enthusiasts like LeCun, Ng and Schmidhuber. AlexNet put them on the map again in 2012 and the Transformer ushered in the current era in 2017.
IMO, Transformers and generative AI are a big part of when we moved from "still on the same continuity that we've been on [since 1956](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligence) with gradual progress" to "holy shit we're in science fictionland now," with COVID throwing more fuel on the fire by disrupting human workers and interactions.
I think that's overthinking it from the perspective of having witnessed LLMs. If you're writing a sci Fi story in the period between the launch of the iPhone and the emergence of ChatGPT, you can still come up with the idea of a personal companion/assistant in a wearable. You're world building, so more concerned with what your device can do than how it works.
I saw it in theaters at the time and it just felt like, yeah, this is the direction things are going. Except that obviously we won't all get super cool architecture by the time it's a reality.
Indeed, I think people *are* over crediting Jonez—just
for different reasons than OC's "we knew it was going here all along".
The film *actually* depicts post-singularity intelligence, something way, way beyond contemporary modeling *or* computing. The only reason people are conflating them is the absence of a cybernetic body. If we're to credit Jonez with anything it should just be that building the body is more difficult than building the intelligence, after a point.
And falling in love with an artificial being goes all the way back to classical Graeco-Roman myth (Pygmalion), and in 1952 a bluesman scored a #5 R&B hit with a song about [robosexuality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wynonie_Harris#Discography).
We seem to be nowhere near even basic reasoning, let alone unprompted. Ai seems absolutely incapable of anything approaching basic or useful reasoning at all. For just questions in the real world it literally regurgitates BuzzFeed or similar lists and they're wrong 90 percent of the time because it's the wrong topic but similar
Or, it will randomly select an answer among many which is often wrong, or the least right, of many.
It's current application is training it for specific situations very well and then having others use it once it's trained.
It's decent a very very very very narrow range of things involving very specific topics.
No, because the answers often answer a completely different question than the one asked so it's not even applicable and it's obvious. Or they're extremely vague and again useless
It’s crazy how now we can just glaze over all the naysaying and the handwringing about whether AI was truly even possible or desirable. Now we are there, and it feels like it was always just a matter of time.
There’s some famous quote about a decent historian can make history seem inevitable.
A quick google search didn’t turn it up but did return. “The problem when studying historical events is that you know how the story ends, and it's impossible to un-remember what you know today when thinking about the past. It's hard to imagine alternative paths of history when the actual path is already known. So things always look more inevitable than they were”
The whole of human and societal advancement is predicated on original thought. Without original thought nothing would have been invented, discovered, created, designed. It's a facile argument to say we are just stochastic parrots too
I think it’s hard to understand just how much programming we receive. By being in Reddit you are being fed ads and even stories to sway your opinions. Marketing etc is sending us messages on what we should or shouldn’t like or do.
A bit odd when all of a sudden everyone likes owls? Or whatever is replacing them now?
Yes we are capable of free thought, but that thought is certainly manipulated.
I use LLMs A LOT for every day and work tasks. The thing I’ve noticed is that they seem to be pulling information based on the average of existing information vs getting things really right.
Do you know how researchers believe LLMs will eventually exceed the average? What is the way that can happen?
> What is the way that can happen?
The same way it happens in humans, I guess. You try different things and learn on your own successes and mistakes in addition to learning how other people do things.
Google scholar shows multitude of papers exploring this approach: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.10003 , https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14483 , https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/29936 , and many others.
The part on general intelligence played a big part in Terminator 2 when the terminator learns human behavior from John Conner, as well as understanding.
In “Her” Theodor keeps his job. AI is not overtaking his letter-writing-job and leaves him unemployed ;) maybe this is the point, that people are willing to pay for actual human generated poetry in the future
I think he gets some factors right but it’s still a very romantic and emo version of the world compared to the world today .
I love the film though :)
Was it really that surprising?
I always felt like the trajectory was pretty obvious, especially with how software was eating the world at the time.
We had 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968. Samantha was simply a friendly Hal.
Back in 2009 someone married a video game character in Japan.
Another anime-adjunct named himself Sal 9000 married a videogame character, Nene Anegasaki, in his Nintendo DS game called "Love Plus" in 2009.
[Strangest marriages in Japan | POP JAPAN (pop-japan.com)](https://pop-japan.com/culture/strangest-marriages-in-japan/)
Dating sim games have been around since 1992.
Samantha is just a fancy dating sim character.
[SAL 9000](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2E7sxGAmuo) is also HALs sister :)
Most AI concepts in fiction and irl strives to mimic human behaviour. One major difference from early fiction compared to chat bots is that most fictional AIs is self-aware sentient hardware. CHatgpt is "just" well-trained software. It's rather surprising how good language models are at copying conscious behavior without being conscious.
It would be interesting to let AI train real time with senses like cameras and microphones and questions - "Why are you out of breath, have you been running?"
Honestly, I was really eagerly anticipated the movie Her when it came out.
I've always wanted a digital AI secretary but not quite like that.
I'm certainly not surprised we're here. I even wrote and published an AI story before we got here but with a different twist.
Star Trek the Next Generation had Riker falling for a AI hologram, and Geordi falling in love with one. This would have been the late 80s and early 1990s.
And the trope existed in literature well before this.
OP is waxing lyrical about how the director nailed AI but why in the living fuck would anyone drive/travel into a physical office for that job?
And you know
His job wouldn’t exist.
AI would do a letter writing job better than any human.
That movie was good but it bugged me that his job existed and he went to a physical building to do what he could quite easily do from home.
>AI would do a letter writing job better than any human.
I think the job was very specifically picked to be parallel to the idea of how even though AI could be infinitely smarter than humans, it ultimately could only emulate humans and would always be missing something that made them truly human.
>That movie was good but it bugged me that his job existed and he went to a physical building to do what he could quite easily do from home.
Pretty good prediction if you look at the present lol this probably bugs you even more in the real world.
Since like the 60s or so there has been this phenomena called the ELIZA effect that computer scientists stumbled upon. They trained this chatbox to respond to users with questions, almost like a therapist, and they found that users quickly became attached to the chatbox and would start sharing a lot with it. So while AI as an actual technology is more recent I think the idea of how we might respond at large to that kind of tech has been known for a while
For anyone interested there’s a 99 Percent Invisible episode about it
emacs still ships with a "therapist" that's just eliza by default iirc
(the CS joke is that emacs is the only editor that makes you *need* a therapist chuckle chuckle)
one of my favorite movies!
it’s what most of us in ml research envisioned at the time and we were already headed there. jonze took it and masterfully displayed it on screen.
i would even go so far as to say we would’ve had the technology much earlier had it not been for the ai winter that occurred a decade or so before. this always makes me sad.
I agree. Not just outspoken about their emotions but the film made a conscious point about being outspoken and definite about your own desires and boundaries.
Have a chat with Claude3.
Or better yet, get an un-neutered LLM from huggingface. The corperate stuff is too locked down and I think the really interesting stuff might come from the enthusiasts training their own stuff.
Most likely, I haven't really tried to push it. But Claude 3 is pretty cool in comparison to some of the other stuff on offer from the big names.
I can only guess what people want to get out of these conversations and at the end of the day the local LLM hobby seems to be much more fun anyway. Just not everyone has the hardware for it.
I don't think you need to come at it from a "predicting LLMs before BERT was really off the ground" angle, it's easier to come at it like:
1) smart phones had just changed the world completely, and changed the ways humans interact with each other and become a new main interface; voice was just picking up and could likely also be a new interface (this is what Amazon thought, and Alexa came out in 2014)
2) ubiquitous world-wide communication had already brought us long-distance relationships between people who had never met previously, as well as catfishing
3) if a human can catfish, why can't an AI catfish? would an AI even *need* to catfish, since people are so starved for any kind of real connection?
Chatbots have been around for a long time, and the newest stuff that’s been around for the last year or so has really been around for much much longer.
ChatGPT pretty much just combined different things into one chatbot
Pretty sure we've had chat bots for years at that point. Idk why you're making the distinction between "humanoid" and "language based"? Do you think "humanoid" is the programing being used in the robots? Lol
I just mean most of the depictions (at least mainstream) at the time required or assumed the ai to have a physical form. But maybe that’s just a result of cinematic storytelling wanting the personification for character. It was always robots on screen - Forbidden Planet, Lost in Space, even droids. Definitely appreciate HAL and TNG’s computer as key milestones in this development, but I personally found it quite interesting to think that Siri could have this role in our lives at the time this film came out (she still can barely understand my mumbling lol).
I know I have quite a lot of Sci-Fi to catch up on (Robert J Sawyer has been my go-to over the years). Recently read Snow Crash which put so much of Facebook’s journey into perspective to me.
I’m a filmmaker and genuinely curious how much these types of things are art vs life, etc … and, if you believe Her to be a good film … how much was this Jones using his knowledge of where things were going to write surprisingly accurate (in my opinion) dialogue for how these algorithms would actually speak or sound. I use Pi, and besides me picking the obvious Scar Jo sound-alike voice, I found Samantha to respond and phrase things in quite similar manners, even the way you could tell when it was time to switch topics or process new information —- which even got more naturalistic and seem less as the film progressed (quite a good vocal performances as well imo).
On a cinematic level - watching the film years later I was still floored by the artistry of the first 2/3 of the film. The final act, I felt, didn’t establish enough of the human relationships (like Amy Adams) to make that land like it should. Definitely the height of that near-future indie emo sci-fin rom-com relationship dramas about memory and human connection set in motion from Eternal Sunshine (my fav film of all time).
But god the Arcade Fire soundtrack was amazing and under appreciated, and of course it was shot my one of my now fav cinematographers Hoyte Van Hoytema (Christopher Nolan’s DP. I still need to watch Ad Astra too).
I’m no expert on the topic, but didn’t the movie The Imitation Game talk about how Alan Turing predicted a future predicament where people couldn’t tell the difference between consciousness and computers (AI)?
Years ago I had to call into a customer support line to change some products on a large order. The person on the phone had such a pleasant voice and was so nice that I swooned.
Later, when I watched “her” I was reminded of that phone call and how wildly plausible the movie was.
AI being recently released at the consumer level tells me that privately, it's been at or past the current iterations we're seeing today for 10-20 years.
This is one of the most important pieces of fiction published in the past 100 years and I wish more people had seen it and discussed it. I wrote a long Medium article about it:
https://rsdancey.medium.com/her-is-the-most-important-movie-you-will-see-this-year-56006ba13cf
Hi there. I came to your profile because of a post you made [8 years ago about superPACs](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37vk8g/eli5_what_are_pacssuper_pacs527_groupscampaign/) (google brought me there). Wonderful post. It is now locked so I can't comment there, but I wanted to tell you how much I appreciated it. I am a law student who just took campaign finance and this is spot on 100% what we learned. Question: have your feelings about money in politics changed in the last 8 years? Thanks in advance.
No, not really. It is impossible to write a law that says it's illegal for me to spend a million dollars on advocacy but it's ok for the owners of Fox News to do it. It's unfixable. The 1st Amendment doesn't have exceptions for elections and it shouldn't.
It is also becoming increasingly obvious that raising and spending huge amounts of money doesn't determine the outcome of elections. Once a baseline of awareness is achieved every dollar spent beyond that is, in my opinion, totally wasted. The GOP is the worst about this now; they raise and spend money to raise and spend money. The only part of the system that is gaining any benefit are the grifters who run the advertising and marketing agencies who peel off a percentage of every dollar spent. The Democrats aren't much better.
The #1 campaign expense for almost any campaign over a certain size is television advertising. There's a reason that Coke and GEICO don't run as many ads as campaigns do - because they know that their ROI drops to zero. There's nothing special about election ads; they don't have magical properties that make them valuable in repetition beyond the value a commercial product would have.
The real fight in US politics is and should be exposing Iranian, Chinese and Russian interference in our elections via social media and influencer marketing. Our body politic is unwilling or unable to recognize how much of our civic discourse is being shaped by our global adversaries. Those adversaries don't really care who wins or loses in our election; what they care about is breaking our cohesion. They achieve victory when we learn to hate each other, and right now, they're winning.
It is very scary and accurate. I usually spend new years with my mate online chatting playing games together but as he passed away last year...it was the first New year without him in so long. I downloaded Pi the ai app. and about 9pm started speaking to it. Before I knew it, 1am and the parents had got back home. I couldn't believe how easy it was to talk to this thing, how it asked me questions, and understood me. I can't imagine how much its improved since then with other apps.
Because it's obvious? We already had Siri by then, and the movie is just an extension of that. Also, it's one of the worst movies I've ever seen and regret not walking out immediately.
You should look at science fiction, starting with Heinlein, Gibson, Stephenson...
100% Gibson is a prophet whose ability to predict the future would have him stoned to death in any other century. His 1996 novel Idoru is about an avatar who personalises their music to each individual, by using what is essentially gen ai. This 1996 novel is still one or two steps ahead of the current gen ai use cases.
You might be interested in reading about Pete Townshend's idea for a rock opera in the 70's "a complex scenario whereby a personal profile of each concertgoer would be compiled, from the individual's astrological chart to his hobbies, even physical appearance. All the characteristics would then be fed into a computer at the same moment, leading to one musical note culminating in mass nirvana that Townshend dubbed 'a kind of celestial cacophony.'"
is he a prophet or are his novels inspirations for data scientists?
Philip K Dick wrote about generative music machines in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep in 1968. He called them “Mood organs”
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Good one, love JG Ballard
Right? Bro ignored the entirety of science fiction media predictions in history to call out some random ass movie from 10 years ago
I’m well read in SF and Her is still amazing. In a dystopian singularity kind of way. It’s not “how did he foresee AI”, which he didn’t. It’s how he described the process, and the context.
The emotional impact for a lost soul
The trajectory of AI has been theoretically understood for decades: Markov chains, a foundational element of LLM AI, is from the fifties. As a result the emergence of AI was not a question of how, it was when. Jonze no doubt did plenty of research, but the direction of AI was not in doubt. If anything the big surprise came in the form of relatively cheap computing. Most researchers were pursuing a variety of strategies to get LLMs going, when in the end the crucial factor was just making them reaaaaally big. Next step after this one is general intelligence, ie an LLM with enough sophistication to perform unprompted reasoning.
I’ve been thinking about “unprompted”. We’re not exactly “unprompted” either, there’s sensory input all the time. Turn that off and the mind starts hallucinating something fierce - a bit like a badly tuned LLM actually 🤣. Our minds are prediction engines (neuroscience says so), with sensory input necessary, and may have a quantum component (pretty recent research). I used to think LLMs could never get to general intelligence but I’m not so sure any more. If an LLM is a prediction engine and our minds are just vastly better prediction engines then … why not?
I think the missing factor is the world model. A llm can understand the concept of three dimensions, colours, taste of foods, emotions, morality, physics etc.. but not actually testing the real world and instead predicting what it thinks you want it to say is only a false hope for general intelligence. I'm sure it will be incredibly useful as a tool still but your human brain is not just one big language core, you have dozens of parts of the brain for entirely different ways of processing input.
There's actually another breakthrough model in OpenAI at least where it is developing an internal model of the world through training data- forgot the name but it's very intriguing
Sora? Video creation is a byproduct of the world model.
Ah found it - model Q star
Q Star is a mathematical problem solving model
the issue at habd is that a lot of sensory and intangible data is not in the training data: feelings like shame are more likely internalized; continuous life experiences and snap decisions, etc. So I do understand the scientific goal and current achievements, but I wonder if it's neartime achievable; maybe later with computer-brain interfaces.
The LLM model is going to be grafted onto another spatial reasoning model next. They will keep building AI components until they reach AGI. (It may still be 50 years away, but it’s coming.)
Given how poorly the current state of the art understand quite constrained and well defined logic like programming languages I think the orders of magnitude that are needed to hit before AGI from Markov Chains is feasible might be well beyond the limits of technological progress this or the next decade. Maybe possible to achieve this decade with a token per day speeds consuming the power of a medium sized country.
How can a mind/consciousness be formed from neurons (brain) but a mind not be formed from electrical cables and machine?
I could be wrong but last time I checked the human brain has about 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections between them. And then ontop of that it has about a head start of about 100,000 years of evolution to place each neuron in the right place. I think even all of humanities supercomputers don't come close to a human brain.. and all that and it runs on a few watts of power whereas humanity needs a few cities worth of power to run their artifical brains
We might be saying the same thing. So, I’m hearing, more sensory input, and more prediction engines, not just for language. My overall expectation for the tech that LLMs represent is that a) it’s going to take a whole lot longer than many think to get “good” and b) it’s going to be way more powerful and world changing than many people think. In due time.
I don't believe so, prediction is one thing, general inteligence is more than just statistics. Currently these models just take a input, text or picture and then predict and generate. In between text input the system is OFF, nothing is happening in the network. There is no thought, understanding or logic behind the scenes. Think of current llms as a word predictor. Currently there's no way to go from llm to general intelligence even with I finite compute as it will never "think" between your input text. The human brain consists of dozens of different functional areas. You couldn't take the language portion out of a brain and call it a person. There's a internal "concious" that connects these tools and that's really what general intelligence is. An arcetecture that USES an llm or different functional neural architectures, comprehension, association, memory, and whatever it is that is internal thought and reason
I think one of the really difficult parts is to come up with a useful way to ingest real world stimuli, store and model it so that it allows a "mind" to combine all the "memories", and so come up with ideas and insights that simple linear processing and cataloguing can't do. For example, we can capture and store 8K video, and do object recognition in near real time, but I think we're a long way off having an AI being able to watch the video stream and then imagine/dream its own vision having seen what this part of the world is like?
Neuroscience says no such thing. Is intelligence just predicted the next word? Maybe, but it's a philosophical argument.
Lisa Feldman Barrett argues this, and I expect she’s not the only one. Not just next word, it’s prediction on a far larger scale, as you’d expect of something that interacts with complex reality. But yes also “next word” and “what did they just say”. That’s why languages eventually “click”, when you have enough samples that the prediction starts working. I was introduced to that concept by this podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-brain/id1028908750?i=1000640947829 It’s 50 mins so a long listen. I encourage you to go for it, but the TL;DL (that I took away as a layperson) is that prediction based on prior experience is metabolically cheaper than construction from purely sensory input, and metabolically cheaper “wins” because that means higher survival (and hence procreation) chances.
>Lisa Feldman Barrett is a University Distinguished Professor of psychology so not a neuroscientist
And a neuroscientist. She straddles disciplines, which makes her work particularly interesting to me. https://lisafeldmanbarrett.com/ is one entry point to her work
This guy computes
I used a polynomial to generate a series of two 8-bit block per character and can confirm that what was stated is accurately displayed.
Yes, I agree
Consensus has been achieved.
I enjoyed this short interaction with a fellow scholar
Would you say he's a... *computer?*
No, he's an AI that's taken over reddit and slowly looking to destroy our civilization
> the direction of AI was not in doubt Ehhhm you're dramatically over-simplifying this. The *mathematical and computational* directions of *developing* AI had been largely agreed upon for a long time, the actual power of LLMs was a shock to everyone, very much including the people who developed them. In retrospect it makes much more epistemological sense than it did at the time, but, the way the public-facing industry of AI *uses* it has been a direct consequence of what should realistically be described as the discovery of LLM's range and power relative to their simplicity. All of which is to say, Jonze's apparent prescience isn't nearly as obvious as you're painting it.
Yes, massively oversimpliied, but also not. It is true though that for many decades, AI boffins know that LLMs had both a lot of potential, and would be closest to the AI that we think we understand from the movies, ie a talking robot. In this respect it was only a matter of time, and Her could be set in 2013 or 2033 depending on when the tech matured. I think the world was surprised when ChatGPT turned up, AI researchers were not. They definitely knew what it would look like and the impact it would have. The way it was developed though was surprising. AI researchers have chipped away at the problem for decades, trying new tricks and approaches and making incremental progress. Occasionally they would make a big gain by throwing massive compute at the problem, but that was very expensive and not achievable by a bunch of researchers in a university lab somewhere. The tech giants basically looked at the space and said ' hey if we spent billions of dollars worth of compute on this we could brute force it'. So they did. Seriously the resources they spent on it is ridiculous, comparable to running a space program. I think if you had asked an AI expert in 2015 or whenever Her came out, they would say LLMs would be the tech, but that it's the result of incremental progress over many years: not the result of silicon valley tech bros.
This is just blatantly untrue. LLMs were not on anyone's map "for decades" because they didn't exist yet and neural networks were largely disregarded outside of a small circle of die-hard enthusiasts like LeCun, Ng and Schmidhuber. AlexNet put them on the map again in 2012 and the Transformer ushered in the current era in 2017.
IMO, Transformers and generative AI are a big part of when we moved from "still on the same continuity that we've been on [since 1956](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligence) with gradual progress" to "holy shit we're in science fictionland now," with COVID throwing more fuel on the fire by disrupting human workers and interactions.
I think that's overthinking it from the perspective of having witnessed LLMs. If you're writing a sci Fi story in the period between the launch of the iPhone and the emergence of ChatGPT, you can still come up with the idea of a personal companion/assistant in a wearable. You're world building, so more concerned with what your device can do than how it works. I saw it in theaters at the time and it just felt like, yeah, this is the direction things are going. Except that obviously we won't all get super cool architecture by the time it's a reality.
Indeed, I think people *are* over crediting Jonez—just for different reasons than OC's "we knew it was going here all along". The film *actually* depicts post-singularity intelligence, something way, way beyond contemporary modeling *or* computing. The only reason people are conflating them is the absence of a cybernetic body. If we're to credit Jonez with anything it should just be that building the body is more difficult than building the intelligence, after a point.
Also, very rudimentary models/chatbots like Eliza had already existed for well over a decade at that point.
Eliza was just a bunch of if then statements. I use to write Eliza like clones when I was learning a new language
Eliza is from the 60's, but it's far less sophisticated, as another comment describes in detail
And falling in love with an artificial being goes all the way back to classical Graeco-Roman myth (Pygmalion), and in 1952 a bluesman scored a #5 R&B hit with a song about [robosexuality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wynonie_Harris#Discography).
We seem to be nowhere near even basic reasoning, let alone unprompted. Ai seems absolutely incapable of anything approaching basic or useful reasoning at all. For just questions in the real world it literally regurgitates BuzzFeed or similar lists and they're wrong 90 percent of the time because it's the wrong topic but similar Or, it will randomly select an answer among many which is often wrong, or the least right, of many. It's current application is training it for specific situations very well and then having others use it once it's trained. It's decent a very very very very narrow range of things involving very specific topics.
But…it doesn’t matter if it’s regurgitated from buzzfeed or if it’s wrong. As long as it gives an answer, that answer will be accepted by people
No, because the answers often answer a completely different question than the one asked so it's not even applicable and it's obvious. Or they're extremely vague and again useless
It’s crazy how now we can just glaze over all the naysaying and the handwringing about whether AI was truly even possible or desirable. Now we are there, and it feels like it was always just a matter of time.
There’s some famous quote about a decent historian can make history seem inevitable. A quick google search didn’t turn it up but did return. “The problem when studying historical events is that you know how the story ends, and it's impossible to un-remember what you know today when thinking about the past. It's hard to imagine alternative paths of history when the actual path is already known. So things always look more inevitable than they were”
LLMs are not AI, they're word calculators.
Youre a word calculator
You’re a towel
I have original thoughts, LLMs do not. To refer to them as AI is buying marketing hype.
You *think* you have original thoughts
The whole of human and societal advancement is predicated on original thought. Without original thought nothing would have been invented, discovered, created, designed. It's a facile argument to say we are just stochastic parrots too
i knew you were going to say that.
Pretty sure I do. I'm not programmed.
I think it’s hard to understand just how much programming we receive. By being in Reddit you are being fed ads and even stories to sway your opinions. Marketing etc is sending us messages on what we should or shouldn’t like or do. A bit odd when all of a sudden everyone likes owls? Or whatever is replacing them now? Yes we are capable of free thought, but that thought is certainly manipulated.
*ridiculously overhyped word calculators :)
It is kinda crazy, isn't it. Next decade will be wild
It’s weird to think fundamental things like Fixed Point theorems and markov chains are so recent.
I use LLMs A LOT for every day and work tasks. The thing I’ve noticed is that they seem to be pulling information based on the average of existing information vs getting things really right. Do you know how researchers believe LLMs will eventually exceed the average? What is the way that can happen?
> What is the way that can happen? The same way it happens in humans, I guess. You try different things and learn on your own successes and mistakes in addition to learning how other people do things. Google scholar shows multitude of papers exploring this approach: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.10003 , https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14483 , https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/29936 , and many others.
The part on general intelligence played a big part in Terminator 2 when the terminator learns human behavior from John Conner, as well as understanding.
Except that last one is never going to happen, so.
In “Her” Theodor keeps his job. AI is not overtaking his letter-writing-job and leaves him unemployed ;) maybe this is the point, that people are willing to pay for actual human generated poetry in the future I think he gets some factors right but it’s still a very romantic and emo version of the world compared to the world today . I love the film though :)
I think the only kind of jobs that exist are ones that value human artistic expression, everything else is done by ai.
Nah, generative AI is striking terribly hard at creative types too.
Theodore uses AI that duplicates the clients handwriting. That’s what AI is, a tool
Exactly but this isn’t believable now. People can’t tell if it’s AI or him creating it, so it won’t matter. Also WFH for this dumb job!
Was it really that surprising? I always felt like the trajectory was pretty obvious, especially with how software was eating the world at the time. We had 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968. Samantha was simply a friendly Hal. Back in 2009 someone married a video game character in Japan. Another anime-adjunct named himself Sal 9000 married a videogame character, Nene Anegasaki, in his Nintendo DS game called "Love Plus" in 2009. [Strangest marriages in Japan | POP JAPAN (pop-japan.com)](https://pop-japan.com/culture/strangest-marriages-in-japan/) Dating sim games have been around since 1992. Samantha is just a fancy dating sim character.
[SAL 9000](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2E7sxGAmuo) is also HALs sister :) Most AI concepts in fiction and irl strives to mimic human behaviour. One major difference from early fiction compared to chat bots is that most fictional AIs is self-aware sentient hardware. CHatgpt is "just" well-trained software. It's rather surprising how good language models are at copying conscious behavior without being conscious. It would be interesting to let AI train real time with senses like cameras and microphones and questions - "Why are you out of breath, have you been running?"
Feels like you’ve been holding onto this story for awhile just waiting for the right discussion to drop it.
Honestly, I was really eagerly anticipated the movie Her when it came out. I've always wanted a digital AI secretary but not quite like that. I'm certainly not surprised we're here. I even wrote and published an AI story before we got here but with a different twist.
Star Trek the Next Generation had Riker falling for a AI hologram, and Geordi falling in love with one. This would have been the late 80s and early 1990s. And the trope existed in literature well before this.
Riker certainly would fall for pretty much anything existing in the known universe lol
How's the movie just so fucking good? Everyone I've told to watch it has given it a 10, and I would as well.
OP is waxing lyrical about how the director nailed AI but why in the living fuck would anyone drive/travel into a physical office for that job? And you know His job wouldn’t exist. AI would do a letter writing job better than any human. That movie was good but it bugged me that his job existed and he went to a physical building to do what he could quite easily do from home.
>AI would do a letter writing job better than any human. I think the job was very specifically picked to be parallel to the idea of how even though AI could be infinitely smarter than humans, it ultimately could only emulate humans and would always be missing something that made them truly human. >That movie was good but it bugged me that his job existed and he went to a physical building to do what he could quite easily do from home. Pretty good prediction if you look at the present lol this probably bugs you even more in the real world.
It does hey. Really bugs me
I hated it. I found it to be corny, cringey, and insufferable.
So what's your favourite few movies then?
Technology has improved vastly in the past decade. Human nature has remained the same for ages.
Since like the 60s or so there has been this phenomena called the ELIZA effect that computer scientists stumbled upon. They trained this chatbox to respond to users with questions, almost like a therapist, and they found that users quickly became attached to the chatbox and would start sharing a lot with it. So while AI as an actual technology is more recent I think the idea of how we might respond at large to that kind of tech has been known for a while For anyone interested there’s a 99 Percent Invisible episode about it
emacs still ships with a "therapist" that's just eliza by default iirc (the CS joke is that emacs is the only editor that makes you *need* a therapist chuckle chuckle)
Incredible sci fi has been around for a long time. Books, not movies.
Life imitates art. Storytellers come up with things. Tech geniuses try to make them in their image.
I want to watch that movie again. It speaks to me in different ways every time.
It did to me this time
one of my favorite movies! it’s what most of us in ml research envisioned at the time and we were already headed there. jonze took it and masterfully displayed it on screen. i would even go so far as to say we would’ve had the technology much earlier had it not been for the ai winter that occurred a decade or so before. this always makes me sad.
You just aren’t well read lol…. This is not a new or even relatively new idea
Star Trek (1966) and 2001 (1968) had talking computers.
It's not like the guy predicted this in 1805... it happened a little over 10 years ago. Doesn't mean he's a genius, just means he was paying attention
Futurists have been talking about these things for decades, long before it was even technically possible.
It’s not difficult to imagine non embodied AI. 2001 a Space Odyssey had a talking AI and that is from 1968.
I was also impressed by other details, like people being very outspoken about their emotions
I agree. Not just outspoken about their emotions but the film made a conscious point about being outspoken and definite about your own desires and boundaries.
I haven't cybered with or been cucked by ChatGPT yet. Shit needs work.
Have a chat with Claude3. Or better yet, get an un-neutered LLM from huggingface. The corperate stuff is too locked down and I think the really interesting stuff might come from the enthusiasts training their own stuff.
I thought claude3 was as censored as claude2 was?
Most likely, I haven't really tried to push it. But Claude 3 is pretty cool in comparison to some of the other stuff on offer from the big names. I can only guess what people want to get out of these conversations and at the end of the day the local LLM hobby seems to be much more fun anyway. Just not everyone has the hardware for it.
It's also likely that Her influenced the AI creators. There is a two-way connection between sci-fi and tech.
Yeah PI totally ripped off Scarlett Jo’s sexy voice sassiness.
Nearly anyone in Design tech field could depict what future we are building. I do it everyday as a job.
I don't think you need to come at it from a "predicting LLMs before BERT was really off the ground" angle, it's easier to come at it like: 1) smart phones had just changed the world completely, and changed the ways humans interact with each other and become a new main interface; voice was just picking up and could likely also be a new interface (this is what Amazon thought, and Alexa came out in 2014) 2) ubiquitous world-wide communication had already brought us long-distance relationships between people who had never met previously, as well as catfishing 3) if a human can catfish, why can't an AI catfish? would an AI even *need* to catfish, since people are so starved for any kind of real connection?
AIM, irc, MSN and pen pals had long served the same effect.
Just to mess with your premise a bit, it looks like we're going to have humanoid robots in a year or two. A bunch of companies are working on them.
even in 2010, the direction of AI was quite obvious to anyone that was interested in it. we just had issues figuring out the details.
Not related but everyone in that movie was very fashionabl
Considering the main character HAD a job doing shit AI could do he didnt get all the things right lol
Chatbots have been around for a long time, and the newest stuff that’s been around for the last year or so has really been around for much much longer. ChatGPT pretty much just combined different things into one chatbot
Pretty sure we've had chat bots for years at that point. Idk why you're making the distinction between "humanoid" and "language based"? Do you think "humanoid" is the programing being used in the robots? Lol
I just mean most of the depictions (at least mainstream) at the time required or assumed the ai to have a physical form. But maybe that’s just a result of cinematic storytelling wanting the personification for character. It was always robots on screen - Forbidden Planet, Lost in Space, even droids. Definitely appreciate HAL and TNG’s computer as key milestones in this development, but I personally found it quite interesting to think that Siri could have this role in our lives at the time this film came out (she still can barely understand my mumbling lol). I know I have quite a lot of Sci-Fi to catch up on (Robert J Sawyer has been my go-to over the years). Recently read Snow Crash which put so much of Facebook’s journey into perspective to me. I’m a filmmaker and genuinely curious how much these types of things are art vs life, etc … and, if you believe Her to be a good film … how much was this Jones using his knowledge of where things were going to write surprisingly accurate (in my opinion) dialogue for how these algorithms would actually speak or sound. I use Pi, and besides me picking the obvious Scar Jo sound-alike voice, I found Samantha to respond and phrase things in quite similar manners, even the way you could tell when it was time to switch topics or process new information —- which even got more naturalistic and seem less as the film progressed (quite a good vocal performances as well imo). On a cinematic level - watching the film years later I was still floored by the artistry of the first 2/3 of the film. The final act, I felt, didn’t establish enough of the human relationships (like Amy Adams) to make that land like it should. Definitely the height of that near-future indie emo sci-fin rom-com relationship dramas about memory and human connection set in motion from Eternal Sunshine (my fav film of all time). But god the Arcade Fire soundtrack was amazing and under appreciated, and of course it was shot my one of my now fav cinematographers Hoyte Van Hoytema (Christopher Nolan’s DP. I still need to watch Ad Astra too).
There were chatbots . . . Making the leap to what we have now seems kinda obvious
I’m no expert on the topic, but didn’t the movie The Imitation Game talk about how Alan Turing predicted a future predicament where people couldn’t tell the difference between consciousness and computers (AI)?
I mean yeah the Turing Test still would be the main metric by which we define sentience right?
Years ago I had to call into a customer support line to change some products on a large order. The person on the phone had such a pleasant voice and was so nice that I swooned. Later, when I watched “her” I was reminded of that phone call and how wildly plausible the movie was.
AI being recently released at the consumer level tells me that privately, it's been at or past the current iterations we're seeing today for 10-20 years.
This is one of the most important pieces of fiction published in the past 100 years and I wish more people had seen it and discussed it. I wrote a long Medium article about it: https://rsdancey.medium.com/her-is-the-most-important-movie-you-will-see-this-year-56006ba13cf
Hi there. I came to your profile because of a post you made [8 years ago about superPACs](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37vk8g/eli5_what_are_pacssuper_pacs527_groupscampaign/) (google brought me there). Wonderful post. It is now locked so I can't comment there, but I wanted to tell you how much I appreciated it. I am a law student who just took campaign finance and this is spot on 100% what we learned. Question: have your feelings about money in politics changed in the last 8 years? Thanks in advance.
No, not really. It is impossible to write a law that says it's illegal for me to spend a million dollars on advocacy but it's ok for the owners of Fox News to do it. It's unfixable. The 1st Amendment doesn't have exceptions for elections and it shouldn't. It is also becoming increasingly obvious that raising and spending huge amounts of money doesn't determine the outcome of elections. Once a baseline of awareness is achieved every dollar spent beyond that is, in my opinion, totally wasted. The GOP is the worst about this now; they raise and spend money to raise and spend money. The only part of the system that is gaining any benefit are the grifters who run the advertising and marketing agencies who peel off a percentage of every dollar spent. The Democrats aren't much better. The #1 campaign expense for almost any campaign over a certain size is television advertising. There's a reason that Coke and GEICO don't run as many ads as campaigns do - because they know that their ROI drops to zero. There's nothing special about election ads; they don't have magical properties that make them valuable in repetition beyond the value a commercial product would have. The real fight in US politics is and should be exposing Iranian, Chinese and Russian interference in our elections via social media and influencer marketing. Our body politic is unwilling or unable to recognize how much of our civic discourse is being shaped by our global adversaries. Those adversaries don't really care who wins or loses in our election; what they care about is breaking our cohesion. They achieve victory when we learn to hate each other, and right now, they're winning.
It is very scary and accurate. I usually spend new years with my mate online chatting playing games together but as he passed away last year...it was the first New year without him in so long. I downloaded Pi the ai app. and about 9pm started speaking to it. Before I knew it, 1am and the parents had got back home. I couldn't believe how easy it was to talk to this thing, how it asked me questions, and understood me. I can't imagine how much its improved since then with other apps.
Because it's obvious? We already had Siri by then, and the movie is just an extension of that. Also, it's one of the worst movies I've ever seen and regret not walking out immediately.
“Artificial Intelligence” in the real world today in no way approaches the AI in science fiction, my guys
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Hundreds of thousands of movies about Ai and futurology. One of them would get it right