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.