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Which current technology has the most potential?
(kbin.social)
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this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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Probably "AI". It's not actual like AI in films , but it is a great program that can analyze human language and extrapolate pretty interesting data from a wide variety of sources, then reformulate that data into a human language that is concise and useful. I am personally excited about the prospect of a personal AI that can run locally or in a truly private cloud services that can learn my speech, my habits, my interests, etc and be ready to provide me with customized data from the Internet or from it's observation of me.
It's a double edge sword though. While a tool like this should be used to discover more truth about the world we live in, there will be many bad actors trying to use it to manipulate and lie to achieve their nefarious goals. AI will also need to be trained to detect when something is fake, and I feel that this will become a never ending arms race.
Maybe this is just a contrarian view, but I see "AI" as a potential rather than a technology. Right now, transformer-based technologies are what most of us mean when we talk about AI, and it's not clear to me how much more potential that idea really has. When I look at how much energy it takes to set up something like GPT-4 I see us pushing hardware to its limit and yet the outcomes are still too often unsatisfying. Significant breakthroughs are needed somewhere in that architecture just to do the kind of things we're trying to do today at the fidelity we expect and without breaking the bank.
The technology we have today might be to AI what the phonograph was to audio recording. As a technology we hit the limits of its potential pretty quickly and then… we fixated. Entirely different technologies eventually led to the lossless spatial audio experiences we can enjoy today, and seem more likely to carry future potential for audio too.
In that analogy, GPT might just be like someone arranging 8 gramophones in a circle to mimic the kind of spatial audio experience available in some headphones now. Impressive in many ways, but directionally not the path where potential lies.
I agree. Many people are fixated on GPT because it is shiny and novel, but it is certainly not the pinnacle of what AI could be, or even close. One day, we will look back on calling GPT an “AI” like we would someone calling the first two tin cans on a string a “phone”. Accurate enough, but certainly a far cry from any modern phone.
AI has the capacity to be the most impactful overall to our daily lives, but like most things, advancement will continue to be limited by hardware.