The upshot of this is that LLMs are quite good at the stuff that he thinks only humans will be able to do. What they aren't so good at (yet) is really rigorous reasoning, exactly the opposite of what 20th century people assumed.
LLM's are just the latest form of "AI" that, for a change, doesn't quite fit Asimov's mold. Perhaps it's because they're being designed to replace humans in creative tasks rather than liberate humans to pursue them.
It's been quite a while since anyone in the developed world has had to wash clothes by slapping them against a rock while standing in a river.
Obviously this is really wishing for domestic robots, not AI, and robots are at least a couple of levels of complexity beyond today's text/image/video GenAI.
There were already huge issues with corporatisation of creativity as "content" long before AI arrived. In fact one of our biggest problems is the complete collapse of the public's ability to imagine anything at all outside of corporate content channels.
AI can reinforce that. But - ironically - it can also be very good at subverting it.
Maybe some day I will, but I find it hard to believe it, given a LLM just copies its training material. All the creativity comes from the human input, but even though people can now cheaply copy the style of actual artists, that doesn't mean they can make it work.
Art is interesting because it is created by humans, not despite it. For example, poetry is interesting because it makes you think about what did the author mean. With LLMs there is no author, which makes those generated poems garbage.
I'm not saying that it can't work at all, it can, but not in the way people think. I subscribe to George Orwell's dystopian view from 1984 who already imagined the "versificator".
Oh, come on. Who can't love the "classic" song, I Glued My Balls to My Butthole Again[0]?
I mean, that's AI "creativity," at its peak!
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPlOYPGMRws (Probably NSFW)
A friend demoed Suno to me, a couple of days ago, and it did generate lyrics (but not NSFW ones).
And often they get caught up supporting the latest fake AI craze that they dont get to research AGI.
This really seems like an "akshually" argument to me...
Nobody is denying that there are dishwashers and washing machines, and that they are big time savers. But is it really a wonder what people are referring to when they say "I want AI to wash my dishes and do my laundry"? That is, I still spend hours doing the dishes and laundry every week, and I have a dishwasher and washing machine. But I still want something to fold my laundry, something that lets me just dump my dishes in the sink and have them come out clean, ideally put away in the cabinets.
> Obviously this is really wishing for domestic robots, not AI
I don't mean this to be an "every Internet argument is over semantics" example, but literally every company and team I know that's working on autonomous robots refers heavily to them as AI. And there is a fundamental difference between "old school" robotics, i.e robots following procedural instructions, and robots that use AI-based models, e.g https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/gemini-robotics-brings... . I think it's doubly weird that you say that today's washing machines "has at least some very basic AI in it" (I think "very basic" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there...), but don't think AI refers to autonomous robots.
Somehow I doubt that the reason gen AI is way ahead of laundry-folding robots is because it's some kind of big secret about how to fold a shirt, or there aren't enough examples of shirt folding.
Manipulating a physical object like a shirt (especially a shirt or other piece of cloth, as opposed to a rigid object) is orders of magnitude more complex that completing a text string.
Well sure, there’s also a computer recording, storing, and manipulating the songs I record and the books I write. But that’s not what we mean by “AI that composes music and writes books.”
This isn’t a quibble about the term “AI.” It’s simply clear from context that we’re talking about full automation of these tasks initiated by nothing more than a short prompt from the human.
(This should already be clear given that robots do exist, and we do call them robots, as you yourself noted, but never mind that for now.)
It’s not even about the level of mechanical or computational complexity. Automobiles have a lot of mechanical and computational complexity, but also aren’t called robots (ignoring of course self-driving cars).
My point is just that the availability of training data is vastly different between these cases. If we want better AI we're probably going to have to generate some huge curated datasets for mundane things that we've never considered worth capturing before.
It's an unfortunate quirk of what we decide to share with each other that has positioned AI to do art and not laundry.
Compare that to the parodies made by someone like "Weird Al" Yankovic. And I get that these tools will get better, but the best parodies work due to the human performer. They are funny because they aren't fake.
This goes for other art forms. People mention photography a lot, comparing it with painting. Photography works because it captures a real moment in time and space; it works because it's not fake. Painting also works because it shows what human imagination and skill with brushes can do. When it's fake (e.g., not made by a human painting with brushes on canvas, but by a Photoshop filter), it's meaningless.
lol no, what it has it's a finite state machine, you don't want undefined or new behaviour in user appliances
I don't mean to sound insensitive, but, how? Literal hours?
My point is simply that we absolutely do not refer to a home dishwasher as a robot. Nor an old thermostat with a bimetallic strip and a mercury switch. Nor even a normal home PC.