AI evolves - powerfully - in predictable directions

When Chat GPT burst onto an unsuspecting world last year there was a rush of activity in several spaces: wannabe AI rivals hastened to proclaim MeeeeTooooo; doomsayers proclaimed that AI / LLM on this scale marked the end for the professional classes and white collar employment in general; and a certain class of populist (or would-be populist) ‘thinkers’ proclaimed that machines could never match good ol’ Human Beans, that there was no ‘machine intellect’ at work, move-along-nothing-to-see-here etc.  Meanwhile, Joe Public amused himself by getting some truly extraordinary results (well, staggering results, actually) from these free tools, as well as tricking them into hilarious bishes, seized upon eagerly by the ‘thinkers’ as grist to their mill.

Over the following months, a number of significant things have happened in this fast-moving sphere.

1.  Scale – and energy use!

The MeToo contingent is large (Amazon, MS, Meta, Alphabet etc, and without doubt several Chinese concerns), well-funded, and very very keen not to get left behind.  They are truly piling in.  From my perspective, the interesting feature of this is the sheer amount of energy these systems consume – and we’ve only just started.  All these behemoths (the Western ones, that is) claim to want to use only ‘green’ electricity but they’ve already hoovered up any of that on the market, plus as much dedicated nuke capacity as they can negotiate for – and it’s not remotely enough: they’ll remain FF-powered for many a long moon. 

Some indications of the scale.  The current definition of a ‘worldscale’ data centre represents 1 GW of electricity demand.  You just know that’s a number that will be eclipsed as soon as possible.  Secondly, the last generation (i.e. 2023!) of LLNs cost about $3-400m  to ‘train’.  The next generation (2024) will take over $1bn to ‘train’.  A high proportion of that dosh is spent on high-intensity energy consumption.  And that’s just for now.  Ongoing energy demand won’t be negligible; and newer, yet larger LLMs will be leapfrogging each other for a long while to come.  (I wonder what the practical limiting factor will turn out to be?  And how long it will take to debottleneck it?)  One thing’s for sure: they ain’t gonna be constrained by sticking with green electricity.

2.  Correction of early failings

One of the things early ‘critics’ of LLM out put gleefully seized upon was that written answer to carefully posed ‘prompts’, whilst being fairly good in their own right, had the amusing habit of including footnotes that were to entirely fictitious, made-up, non-existent references.  It’s a simple and readily understandable function of how LLMs work.

This never impressed me as a serious or definitive failing.  OK, these early pubic LLMs “knew” that footnotes were expected, and made up some plausible-looking ones accordingly.  One might imagine a bright primary-school kid doing something similar when trying to imitate the style of a realistic-looking journal article for some reason; and being thought of as quite imaginative for so doing!  Ooh, and you’ve even put in some footnotes and www-links!   But the next version of that kid, a few years later, would know what a real footnote-link was all about.  What, conceptually, could be easier for a putative next-generation LLM than to “remember” where it learned its text-predictive stuff from, and list it appropriately in the footnotes? 

Except, this is a fast-moving space!  And that next-gen LLM already exists: it’s a new one called Perplexity.  Kerching.  Next problem?

3.  Never as good as humans ..?   The Turing Test

Folks, without much fanfare the Turing Test has now been passed.  A set-piece, properly-controlled experiment was run at the University of Reading (a cunning plot by one department conning another!) in which undetected fake students – actually bots – got higher average exam marks than real thicko human students.  And there’s the Turing Test delivered, haha!  This is so earth-shattering, the worrying classes haven’t even responded to it yet!

So now I think we need a creative round of updated worries, to keep up with these exciting developments.

ND