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sirico ,
@sirico@feddit.uk avatar

Theoretical physicist and a questionable one at that

Feathercrown ,

He’s a physicist. That doesn’t make him wise, especially in topics that he doesn’t study. This shouldn’t even be an article.

eestileib ,

Kaku is a quack.

ClemaX ,

Well, one could argue that our brain is a glorified tape recorder.

LapGoat ,
@LapGoat@pawb.social avatar

behold! a tape recorder.

holds up a plucked chicken

akd ,

archive.li/1R19f

Feathercrown ,

Thanks for good article link

trekky0623 ,

Remember the time Michio Kaku went on CBS to talk about Hurricane Harvey despite not being an expert on Hurricanes? He is a clout chaser who regularly steps outside his expertise to make hot takes for attention.

I also recommend this video that touches on Michio Kaku talking about things outside his expertise.

a_spooky_specter ,

He’s not even a top physicist, just well known.

MooseBoys , (edited )

Leading theoretical physicist Michio Kaku

I wouldn’t listen too closely to discount Neil deGrasse Tyson these days, especially in domains in which he has no qualifications whatsoever.

A2PKXG ,
@A2PKXG@feddit.de avatar

Just set your expectations right, and chat it’s are great. They aren’t intelligent. They’re pretty dumb. But they can say stuff about a huge variety of domains

spiritedpause ,

deleted_by_author

    •
    velvetinetouch ,

    They could know quite a lot, ML is still a rather shallow field compared to the more established sciences, it’s arguably not even a proper science yet, perhaps closer to alchemy than chemistry. Max Tegmark is a cosmologist and he has learned it well enough for his opinion to count, this guy on the other hand is famous for his bad takes and has apparently gotten a lot wrong about QC even though he wrote a whole book about it.

    NeoNachtwaechter ,

    That’s an incredibly cool explanation.

    flossdaily ,

    That’s an incredibly ignorant take.

    LLMs are the first glimmer of artificial GENERAL intelligence (AGI). They are the most important invention perhaps of all time.

    They will fundamentally change our society, our economy, and they pose an existential threat to mankind, not to mention begging existential questions about our purpose for existing at all in a world where very shortly computers will be able to out-think and out-create us.

    Quantum computers are … neat. They will allow us to solve problems conventional computers can’t. They may make current encryption models obsolete … but I haven’t heard any proposed usage of them that would be even a fraction as profound as AGI.

    AeroLemming ,

    They don’t really demonstrate general intelligence. They’re very powerful tools, but LLMs are still a form of specialized intelligence, they’re just specialized at language instead of some other task. I do agree that they’re closer than what we’ve seen in the past, but the fact that they don’t actually understand our world and can only mimic the way we talk about it still occasionally shines through.

    You wouldn’t consider Midjourney or Stable Diffusion to have general intelligence because they can generate accurate pictures of a wide variety of things, and in my opinion, LLMs aren’t much different.

    flossdaily ,

    I’ve been working extensively with gpt4 since it came out, and it ABSOLUTELY is the engine that can power rudimentary AGI. You can supplement it with other tools, and give it a memory… ZERO doubt in my mind that GPT4-powered are AGI.

    AeroLemming ,

    I disagree, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see! I do hope you’re wrong, as my experience with ChatGPT has shown me how incredibly biased it is and I would rather hope that once we do achieve AGI, it doesn’t have a political agenda in mind.

    flossdaily ,

    Biased in what way?

    AeroLemming , (edited )

    They seem to be patching it whenever something comes up, which is still not an acceptable solution because things keep coming up. One great example that I witnessed myself (but has since been patched) was that if you asked it for a joke about men, it would come up with a joke that degraded men, but if you ask it for a joke about women, it would chastise you for being insensitive to protected groups.

    Now, it just comes up with a random joke and assigns the genders of the characters in the joke accordingly, but there are certainly still numerous other biases that either haven’t been patched or won’t be patched because they fit OpenAI’s worldview. I know it’s impossible to create a fully unbiased… anything (highly recommend There is No Algorithm for Truth by Tom Scott if you have the interest and free time), but LLMs trained on our speech have learned our biases and can behave in appalling ways at times.

    AwakenedLink ,

    Worse, the majority of the data used by LLMs comes from the internet; a place that often brings out the worst and most polarized sides of us.

    AeroLemming ,

    That’s also very true. It’s a big problem.

    _wintermute ,

    Flexing that sci-fi knowledge real hard, my dude.

    The AI that you’re describing probably won’t even be possible (if it even is possible. We don’t even fully understand human intelligence/brains yet) until quantum computing is ubiquitous so your whole argument is illogical.

    For my own silly sci-fi take, I believe our brains are probably closer to quantum computing than traditional computing.

    flossdaily ,

    I have worked extensively to build out gpt-4 and give it memory and other attributes.

    I have no doubt at all that with supplemental modules to expand its context, it’s absolutely an AGI.

    Feathercrown ,

    The AI that you’re describing probably won’t even be possible until quantum computing is ubiquitous

    …What? No, why would that be a requirement? Unless you just mean that QC is easier so it will come first by chance?

    Goodman ,

    I wouldn’t call this guy a top physicist… I mean he can say what he wants but you shouldn’t be listening to him. I also love that he immediately starts shilling his quantum computer book right after his statements about AI. And mind you that this guy has some real garbage takes when it comes to quantum computers. Here is a fun review if you are interested scottaaronson.blog/?p=7321.

    The bottom line is. You shouldn’t trust this guy on anything he says expect maybe string theory which is actually his specialty. I wish that news outlets would stop asking this guy on he is such a fucking grifter.

    hoodlem , (edited )

    I wouldn’t call this guy a top physicist… I mean he can say what he wants but you shouldn’t be listening to him.

    Yeah I don’t see how he has any time to be a “top physicist” when it seems he spends all his time on as a commenter on tv shows that are tangentially related to his field. On top of that LLM is not even tangentially related.

    PixelProf ,

    I understand that he’s placing these relative to quantum computing, and that he is specifically a scientist who is deeply invested in that realm, it just seems too reductionist from a software perspective, because ultimately yeah - we are indeed limited by the architecture of our physical computing paradigm, but that doesn’t discount the incredible advancements we’ve made in the space.

    Maybe I’m being too hyperbolic over this small article, but does this basically mean any advancements in CS research are basically just glorified (insert elementary mechanical thing here) because they use bits and von Neumann architecture?

    I used to adore Kaku when I was young, but as I got into academics, saw how attached he was to string theory long after it’s expiry date, and seeing how popular he got on pretty wild and speculative fiction, I struggle to take him too seriously in this realm.

    My experience, which comes with years in labs working on creative computation, AI, and NLP, these large language models are impressive and revolutionary, but quite frankly, for dumb reasons. The transformer was a great advancement, but seemingly only if we piled obscene amounts of data on it, previously unspeculated of amounts. Now we can train smaller bots off of the data from these bigger ones, which is neat, but it’s still that mass of data.

    To the general public: Yes, LLMs are overblown. To someone who spent years researching creativity assistance AI and NLPs: These are freaking awesome, and I’m amazed at the capabilities we have now in creating code that can do qualitative analysis and natural language interfacing, but the model is unsustainable unless techniques like Orca come along and shrink down the data requirements. That said, I’m running pretty competent language and image models on 12GB of relatively cheap consumer video card, so we’re progressing fast.

    Edit to Add: And I do agree that we’re going to see wild stuff with quantum computing one day, but that can’t discount the excellent research being done by folks working with existing hardware, and it’s upsetting to hear a scientist bawk at a field like that. And I recognize I led this by speaking down on string theory, but string theory pop science (including Dr. Kaku) caused havoc in people taking physics seriously.

    joe ,
    @joe@lemmy.world avatar

    My opinion is that a good indication that LLMs are groundbreaking is that it takes considerable research to understand why they give the output they give. And that research could be for just one prediction of one word.

    PixelProf ,

    For me, it’s the next major milestone in what’s been a roughly decade-ish trend of research, and the groundbreaking part is how rapidly it accelerated. We saw a similar boom in 2012-2018, and now it’s just accelerating.

    Before 2011/2012, if your network was too deep, too many layers, it would just breakdown and give pretty random results - it couldn’t learn - so they had to perform relatively simple tasks. Then a few techniques were developed that enabled deep learning, the ability to really stretch the amount of patterns a network could learn if given enough data. Suddenly, things that were jokes in computer science became reality. The move from deep networks to 95% image recognition ability, for example, took about 1 years to halve the error rate, about 5 years to go from about 35-40% incorrect classification to 5%. That’s the same stuff that powered all the hype around AI beating Go champions and professional Starcraft players.

    The Transformer (the T in GPT) came out in 2017, around the peak of the deep learning boom. In 2 years, GPT-2 was released, and while it’s funny to look back on now, it practically revolutionized temporal data coherence and showed that throwing lots of data at this architecture didn’t break it, like previous ones had. Then they kept throwing more and more and more data, and it kept going and improving. With GPT-3 about a year later, like in 2012, we saw an immediate spike in previously impossible challenges being destroyed, and seemingly they haven’t degraded with more data yet. While it’s unsustainable, it’s the same kind of puzzle piece that pushed deep learning into the forefront in 2012, and the same concepts are being applied to different domains like image generation, which has also seen massive boosts thanks in-part to the 2017 research.

    Anyways, small rant, but yeah - it’s hype lies in its historical context, for me. The chat bot is an incredible demonstration of the incredible underlying advancements to data processing that were made in the past decade, and if working out patterns from massive quantities of data is a pointless endeavour I have sad news for all folks with brains.

    Anduin1357 ,
    @Anduin1357@lemmy.world avatar

    Do you have any further reading on this topic? This has been such an amazing read.

    PixelProf ,

    Hmm… Nothing off the top of my head right now. I checked out the Wikipedia page for Deep Learning and it’s not bad, but quite a bit of technical info and jumping around the timeline, though it does go all the way back to the 1920’s with it’s history as jumping off points. Most of what I know came from grad school and having researched creative AI around 2015-2019, and being a bit obsessed with it growing up before and during my undergrad.

    If I were to pitch some key notes, the page details lots of the cool networks that dominated in the 60’s-2000’s, but it’s worth noting that there were lots of competing models besides neural nets at the time. Then 2011, two things happened at right about the same time: The ReLU (a simple way to help preserve data through many layers, increasing complexity) which, while established in the 60’s, only swept everything for deep learning in 2011, and majorly, Nvidia’s cheap graphics cards with parallel processing and CUDA that were found to majorly boost efficiency of running networks.

    I found a few links with some cool perspectives: Nvidia post with some technical details

    Solid and simplified timeline with lots of great details

    It does exclude a few of the big popular culture events, like Watson on Jeopardy in 2011. To me it’s fascinating because Watson’s architecture was an absolute mess by today’s standards, over 100 different algorithms working in conjunction, mixing tons of techniques together to get a pretty specifically tuned question and answer machine. It took 2880 CPU cores to run, and it could win about 70% of the time at Jeopardy. Compare that to today’s GPT, which while ChatGPT requires way more massive amounts of processing power to run, have an otherwise elegant structure and I can run awfully competent ones on a $400 graphics card. I was actually in a gap year waiting to go to my undergrad to study AI and robotics during the Watson craze, so seeing it and then seeing the 2012 big bang was wild.

    Goodman ,

    He is trying to sell his book on quantum computers which is probably why he brought it up in the first place

    PixelProf ,

    Oh for sure. And it’s a great realm to research, but pretty dirty to rip apart another field to bolster your own. Then again, string theorist…

    jaden ,

    A physicist is not gonna know a lot more about language models than your average college grad.

    JoBo ,

    That’s absolute nonsense. Physicists have to be excellent statisticians and, unlike data scientists, statisticians have to understand where the data is coming from, not just how to spit out simple summaries of enormously complex datasets as if it had any meaning without context.

    And his views are exactly in line with pretty much every expert who doesn’t have a financial stake in hyping the high tech magic 8-ball. On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots.

    Jerkface ,

    Okay but LLMs have multiplied my productivity far more than any tape recorder ever could or ever will. The statement is absolute nonsense.

    JoBo , (edited )

    Do you imagine that music did not exist before we had the means to record it? Or that it had no effect on the productivity of musicians?

    Vinyl happened before tape but in the early days of computers, tape was what we used to save data and code. Kids TV programmes used to play computer tapes for you to record at home, distributing the code in an incredibly efficient way.

    Spzi ,

    Kids TV programmes used to play computer tapes for you to record at home, distributing the code in an incredibly efficient way.

    Could you expand on this? Sounds interesting.

    JoBo , (edited )

    They just played the tapes on TV, kinda screechy, computer-y sounds. They’d tell you when to press record on your cassette player before they started. You’d hold it close to the TV speakers until it finished playing, then plug the cassete player in to your computer, and there’d be some simple free game to play. I didn’t believe it would work but it did. I still don’t believe it worked. But it did.

    There must be a clip somewhere on the internet but my search skills are nowhere near good enough to find one.

    JoBo , (edited )

    [New comment instead of editing the old so that you see it]

    I managed to find a video of an old skool game loading. That’s what it sounded like when you loaded a program and it’s exactly what they’d play on the TV so you could create your tape.

    Spzi ,

    Thank you very much for the effort! I also searched for text or video, but found none.

    I understand now what you previously meant, streaming code via TV.

    That’s what it sounded like when you loaded a program and it’s exactly what they’d play on the TV so you could create your tape.

    Now I have a new confusion: Why would they let the speaker play the bits being processed? It surely was technically possible to load a program into memory without sending anything to the speaker. Or wasn’t it, and it was a technical necessity? Or was it an artistic choice?

    JoBo ,

    I assume it was because they used ordinary tape recorders, that people would otherwise use as dictaphones or to play music. I guess there wasn’t a way to transfer the data silently because the technology was designed to play sound? We had to wait for the floppy disk for silent-ish loading. Ish because they click-clacked a lot, but that was moving parts rather than the code itself.

    PipedLinkBot ,

    Here is an alternative Piped link(s): piped.video/watch?v=7Qz9a8kYYkA

    Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

    I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.

    DingoBilly ,

    Your statement and the original one can both be in sync with another.

    Microsoft Word is just a glorified notepad but it still improves my productivity significantly.

    And everyone will have different uses depending on their needs. Chatgpt has done nothing for my productivity/usually adds work as I have to double check all the nonsensical crap it gives me for example and then correct it.

    LibertyLizard , (edited )

    I think describing word processors as glorified notepads would also be extremely misleading, to the extent that I would describe that statement as incorrect.

    fidodo ,

    Those are all gross oversimplifications. By the same logic the internet is just a glorified telephone, the computer is a glorified abacus, the telephone is just a glorified messenger pigeon. There are lots of people who don’t understand LLMs and exaggerate its capabilities but dismissing it is also bad.

    Chickenstalker ,

    Nope. Biologists also use statistical models and also know where the data is coming from etc etc. They are not experts in AI. This Michio Kaku guy is more like the African American Science Guy to me, more concerned with being a celeb.

    JoBo , (edited )

    Biologists are (often) excellent statisticians too, you’re correct. That’s why the most successful quants are biologists or physicists, despite not having trained in finance.

    They’re not experts in (the badly misnamed) AI. They’re experts in the statistical models AI uses. They know an awful lot more than the likes of Sam Altman and the AI-hypers. Because they’re trained specialists, not techbro grifters.

    jaden ,

    I had that paper in mind when I said that. Doesn’t exhibit a very thorough understanding of how these models actually work.

    A common argument is that the human brain very well may work the exact same, ergo the common phrase, “I’m a stochastic parrot and so are you.”

    JoBo ,

    That’s a Sam Altman line and all it shows is that he does not know how knowledge is acquired, developed, or applied. He has no concept of how the world actually works and has likely never thought deeply about anything in his life beyond how to grift profitably. And he can’t afford to examine his (professed) beliefs because he’s trying to cash out on a doomed fantasy before too many people realise it is doomed.

    ComradeKhoumrag ,
    @ComradeKhoumrag@infosec.pub avatar

    I disagree, physics is the foundational science of all sciences. It is the science with the strongest emphasis on understanding math well enough to derive the equations that actually take form in the real world

    jaden ,

    Therefore, if you know physics, you know everything.

    FlyingSquid ,
    @FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

    More people need to learn about Racter. This is nothing new.

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