We've almost wiped ourselves out in a nuclear war in the 70ies. If that would have happened, would it have been worth it? Probably not.
Beyond immediate increase in inequality, which I agree could be worth it in the long run if this was the only problem, we're playing a dangerous game.
The smartest and most capable species on the planet that dominates it for exactly this reason, is creating something even smarter and more capable than itself in the hope it'd help make its life easier.
My guess as an amateur neuroscientist is that what we call intelligence is just a 'measurement' of problem solving ability in different domains. Can be emotional, spatial, motor, reasoning, etc etc.
There is no special sauce in our brain. And we know how much compute there is in our brain– So we can roughly estimate when we'll hit that with these 'LLMs'.
Language is important in a human brain development as well. Kids who grow up deaf grow up vastly less intelligent unless they learn sign language. Language allow us to process complex concepts that our brain can learn to solve, without having to be in those complex environments.
So in hindsight, it's easy to see why it took a language model to be able to solve general tasks and other types deep learning networks couldn't.
I personally wouldn't be surprised if we start to see benchmarks around this type of cooperation and ability to orchestrate complex systems in the next few years or so.
Most benchmarks really focus on one problem, not on multiple real-time problems while orchestrating 3rd party actors who might or might not be able to succeed at certain tasks.
But I don't think anything is prohibiting these models from not being able to do that.
To give you an example– I've used it for legal work such as an EB2-NIW visa application. Saved me countless of hours. My next visa I'll try to do without a lawyer using just LLMs. I would never try this without having LLMs at my disposal.
As a hobby– And as someone with a scientific background I've been able to build an artificial ecosystem simulation from scratch without programming experience in Rust: https://www.youtube.com/@GenecraftSimulator
I recently moved from fish to plants and believe I've developed some new science at the intersection of CS and Evolutionary Biology that I'm looking to publish.
This tool is extremely useful. For now– You do require a human in the loop for coordination.
My guess is that these will be benchmarks that we see within a few years: How good an AI coordinate multiple other AIs to build, deploy and iterate something that functions in the real world. Basically manager AI.
Because they'll literally be able to solve every single one shot problem so we won't be able to create benchmarks anymore.
But that's also when these models will be able to build functioning companies in a few hours.
Beyond immediate increase in inequality, which I agree could be worth it in the long run if this was the only problem, we're playing a dangerous game.
The smartest and most capable species on the planet that dominates it for exactly this reason, is creating something even smarter and more capable than itself in the hope it'd help make its life easier.
Hmm.