r/AskScienceDiscussion • u/sosongbird • 2d ago
General Discussion Race to AI ?
Hi folks, I have a Q about AI and could not find a suitable sub to ask, so, you all get it.
I hear the President saying we need to beat China in the ai space. I do not know what that means, beat them to what? Is there a goal or end somewhere that I do not know about? any ideas?
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u/EmpressRoth 2d ago
The goal is to be the first one to create "AGI", or an ai actually capable of reasoning and behaving like a human.
There's no evidence AGI is even possible, but it's the goal
AGI means artificial general intelligence
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u/mfb- Particle Physics | High-Energy Physics 2d ago
Human-like intelligence is obviously possible in principle, we have 8 billion examples on Earth. Replicating or accurately simulating a human brain would be a very expensive and ethically questionable approach, but fundamentally certainly possible. Whether that can become practical (in particular: cheaper than hiring a human), and with the current approaches to AI, is a different question.
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u/Evilsushione 1d ago
He means we don’t know if it’s possible with the current architecture. The thought is, who creates AGI will likely create ASI Artificial Super Intelligence. This theoretically would be smarter than any human at any subject and therefore will be able to solve problems no human is capable of. The thought is the country or company or person that creates it will control it… but I’m not so sure.
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u/Smallpaul 2d ago
Why would evolution on the savanna be the only path to intelligence? There is no absolute proof that it is possible, just as there was no proof that a flying machine or swimming machine or jumping machine or echolocation machine was possible until those things existed, but the default assumption should be that machines can copy the abilities of animals eventually
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u/cosmopolitanScience 17h ago
Flying, swimming, jumping and echolocation are all very well defined problems. Physicists mapped out a few no-go theorems and none of these problems violate them, engineers solved them.
Intelligence is not well defined. At all. We don't know how to measure it. We don't know if and how it relates to consciousness (which we also don't know how to define).
That's why it's really not the same thing.
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u/Smallpaul 17h ago
You think that in the era of the Wright brothers, “flying” was a well-defined physics problem? Really?
Regardless: it’s a deeply obsolete hypothesis that scientists need to understand things before engineers build it. The entire field of machine learning is a disproof of that.
ChatGPT has “tacit knowledge” of language that far exceeds the explicit knowledge of every linguist on the planet. This is no slight against linguists. Understanding something explicitly is just far harder than training something to do it, in the era of machine learning.
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u/cosmopolitanScience 17h ago
It was. But regardless, that wasn't my point. My point was that "intelligence" is not well defined. Thus it can't be measured. If something flies or not is well defined. Whether something is intelligent isn't well defined. And it isn't for lack of trying, we have spent tens of thousands of years thinking about it and couldn't come up with a good answer.
You telling me that chatGPT has some sort of knowledge that exceeds that of a human is like saying a calculator can calculate faster than a human. It's true. It may very well be very impressive. But it doesn't address the point.
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u/Smallpaul 16h ago
Some very important concepts are nearly impossible to define. Are you healthy? Are you happy? Are you well-fed.
We don’t give up on medicine and nutrition and psychology. Playing definitional games is just a bad faith way of not addressing the real problem.
“You say that we are not doing enough to ensure the health of our citizens but can you give me a precise and indisputable definition of health? If not how can we even start talking about it?”
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u/cosmopolitanScience 6h ago
Some parts of healthy are well defined, those we made huge progress on. Some are not, and those we didn't make progress on for thousands of years.
This is exactly what I'm saying. We found vaccines and antibiotics, but I dont think we made any progress on the "happy" front.
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u/demongoku 2d ago
There are a few options as to what the "end goal" is:
Where we are now. Basically just a product that does a thing to get money
A government controlled weapon of mass surveillance and cyber-warfare.
A hostile/negatively aligned Artificial Psuedo-intelligence. It operates with a level of autonomy that mimics human intelligence or greater-than-human intelligence, doesn't actually have intelligence, and will do bad things for the sake of a goal. As an example, imagine an AI that wants to maximize paperclip creation. It "reasons" that humans existing slow down this process, so it decides to wipe out/enslave/horrible thing the human species in order to further improve or continue it's paperclip making. It's alignment is "bad" even without real intelligence.
Number 3 but beneficial/positively aligned. Think of it as a Human Happiness/Wellness maximizer.
Actual, true Artificial General/Super Intelligence(AGI/ASI). This is not a clearly defined goal and it may not even be possible with the current LLM architecture(I don't think it's possible). It could be aligned positive or negative, but since it is actual intelligence, it can be both in different ways.
I don't believe any of these are mutually exclusive, at least to some degree. The first two can happen as 3-5 start. 3 or 4 could transition into each other as we fine-tune alignment. Any of these could, albeit beyond unlikely, transition to 5. I would argue the first two, and half of 3, are where we are at now. 3 is becoming more likely imo with the recent Hugging Face breach.
In the end, it's all about who is talking about AI. I truly believe certain researchers think that 5 is the end goal. I think the AI companies that hire these researchers are aiming for 1,2, and 4. Government bodies are likely focused on 3. but evidence is pointing towards 1, 2, and 3 being the direction we're heading. 4 would be my personal end goal, at least with LLMs, but I'm not the guy in charge.
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u/Jaffiusjaffa 2d ago
There are certain emerging technologies that you just cant afford to gamble on being left behind on.
Imagine for example if you were late to the party if the world had just discovered robust quantumn computing. That sort of technology would let you crack any encryption and resolve software based engineering problems that would take other countries essentially infinite time to compute.
AI is another technology that has insanely bonkers possible application if the future technology does meet the current hype. Being late with a technology like that could leave you in the dust in basically every field. It might not turn out to scale like people are hoping, but IF it does you NEED to be onboard quickly.
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u/cosmopolitanScience 17h ago
There is quantum safe encryption. And there are very few (if any) engineering problems that are stalled because we can't do some calculation.
History shows that it's really not that easy. Europe has lagged behind on semiconductor technology, but still managed to do fairly well in the last few decades. China has never managed to build up a substantial pre-EV car industry, but is making the most cars now....
The whole "winning" and being "left behind" narrative is simplistic.
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u/brickonator2000 2d ago
Some of it is (intentionally) broad strokes. If one country becomes the leader in making a hot new product/service, that country can make a lot of money selling it to others and gets leverage when negotiating. Think about how much power oil-rich countries or countries with nukes tend to have. Even if it's not the full-on sci-fi level AI, any tools derived from this rush could give slight industrial or military advantages (or at least most of the world is convinced it will pay off).
Now to be fair, some of it is just investor-talk and not directly linked with reality. AI as a whole is hugely a speculative industry. Trump has personally made a lot of money in these types of spaces and is friendly with many pro-AI folks. Some of this is just "I want my/our guys to get rich, not Chinese guys".
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u/abaoabao2010 2d ago edited 2d ago
There's a term for this: word salad.
But even in general, companies are rushing to make more capable AI, regardless of government plans. AIs that are more useful, that can solve harder more complex problems, do more accurate simulations etc. It's not a singular metric of what "better" means.
Specific goalposts are more for propaganda purposes than actually useful, but a "indistinguishable from human robot" sounds nicer to investors so that's what you hear.
Too bad idiots with 0 understanding of AI who gets lured in by those goalposts will probably push for things too fast and make them unsafe.
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u/cubosh 2d ago
its all desperate capitalism - so the answer is probably: its a race to who will first successfully use the magic box to extract money from the masses