Technology

59882 readers

5257 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

457

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

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

157 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [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.