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The GPT Era Is Already Ending (www.theatlantic.com)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by [email protected] to c/technology

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If this is the way to superintelligence, it remains a bizarre one. “This is back to a million monkeys typing for a million years generating the works of Shakespeare,” Emily Bender told me. But OpenAI’s technology effectively crunches those years down to seconds. A company blog boasts that an o1 model scored better than most humans on a recent coding test that allowed participants to submit 50 possible solutions to each problem—but only when o1 was allowed 10,000 submissions instead. No human could come up with that many possibilities in a reasonable length of time, which is exactly the point. To OpenAI, unlimited time and resources are an advantage that its hardware-grounded models have over biology. Not even two weeks after the launch of the o1 preview, the start-up presented plans to build data centers that would each require the power generated by approximately five large nuclear reactors, enough for almost 3 million homes.

https://archive.is/xUJMG

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[–] pyre 11 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

why do you keep changing the parameters? yeah, if you exclude the possibility of something happening it won't happen. duh?

that's not what's happening in the infinite monkey theorem. it's random key presses. that means every character has an equal chance of being pressed.

no one said the monkey would eventually start painting. or even type arabic words. it has a typewriter, presumably an English one. so the results will include every possible string of characters ever.

it's not a common misconception, you just don't know what the theorem says at all.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

if you exclude the possibility of something happening it won't happen

That's exactly my point. Infinity can be constrained. It can be infinite yet also limited. If we can exclude something from infinity then we have shown that an infinite set does NOT necessarily include everything.

[–] pyre 4 points 2 days ago

this has nothing to do with the matter

[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

so the results will include every possible string of characters ever.

That's just not true. One monkey could spend eternity pressing "a". It does't matter that he does it infinitely. He will never type a sentence.

If the keystrokes are random that is just as likely as any other output.

Being infinite does not guarantee every possible outcome.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

Any possibility, no matter how small, becomes a certainty when dealing with infinity. You seem to fundamentally misunderstand this.

[–] pyre 5 points 2 days ago

no. you don't understand infinity, and you don't understand probability.

if every keystroke is just as likely as any other keystroke, then each of them will be pressed an infinite number of times. that's what just as likely means. that's how random works.

if the monkey could press a for an eternity, then by definition it's not as likely as any other keystroke. you're again changing the parameters to a monkey whose probability of pressing a is 1 and every other key is 0. that's what you're saying means.

for a monkey that presses the keys randomly, which means the probability of each key is equal, every string of characters will be typed. you can find the letter a typed a million times consecutively, and a billion times and a quadrillion times. not only will you find any number of consecutive keystrokes of every letter, but you will find it repeated an infinite number of times throughout.

being infinite does guarantee every possible outcome. what you're ruling out from infinity is literally impossible by definition.