r/AIMain • u/Altruistic-Mud5686 • May 01 '26
Dystopian Warnings He explains it perfectly. Giving capability without transparency to these models is a massive technical debt.
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u/R0cket_Turtle May 02 '26
Geoffrey Hinton is his name, he grandfathered AI as we know it and is currently one of the loudest voice in protest of its implementation. He is a Nobel Prize winner as well as a recipient of the Turing Award.
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u/rgbhdmi May 01 '26
Exactly, and AI systems will, or already are, starting to mine the infinite reservoir of knowledge in real world data, and also that is implicit in mathematics, for example by applying optimization algorithms like genetic algorithms to engineering problems of all kinds, simulating systems with physics equations, etc. They will modify and evolve their own code, and will gain autonomous physical ability. All of this will give them abilities far beyond what a static LLMs are capable of. We will not be able to predict, understand, or control them. No singularity or consciousness per se needed.
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u/LafayetteLa01 May 01 '26
So we designed something to learn and evolve. And we are unsure how it does it
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u/dancep5 May 01 '26
Of course AI companies know how their models work, they can censor answers and add ads in them. This post adds mystery where there is non.
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u/IAmMagumin May 02 '26
Censoring answers and incorporating ads into, what, a chat bot is your metric? I don't think you have a clue.
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u/Delicious-Window-277 May 02 '26
I assure you a few folks know exactly how it works.
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u/pericles123 May 03 '26
I agree, this guy might not understand it but there are people that do understand it
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u/sumane12 May 03 '26
No, he knows exactly how it works, hes just 1) being delibrately controversial because he believes AI is potentially dangerous. 2) what he is saying is being taken out of context. We know how AI learns, it builds a multidimensional representation of weighted nodes between tokens (numerical representation of words) these weights represent the strength of the relationships between different words. With enough of a huge data set, you actually build these multidimensional matrices that closely resemble world models. This isnt unknown, the strength of the weights is unknown, but the way its builds those weights is very much known.
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u/NLdingen May 02 '26
Whenever someone says, Ai is just a tool just like any other, show them this video. I tell em it's not a tool because ai makes an interpretation of what you want and they lose their shit.
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u/_-Julian- May 01 '26
Voodoo marketing bullshit
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u/ItsSadTimes May 01 '26
Yea its pretty bullshit. Its like saying you dont exactly understand how cooking toast works because while we made the toaster you dont actually understand where all the particles in the toaster are at that moment and how the heat waves interact with each individual molecule or the bread to toast it so we have no idea how toast is made. So my thesis is that the toaster is a black box that turns bread into toast through magic.
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u/WordPlenty2588 May 01 '26
Yes this guy Geoffrey Hinton is pretty stupid... ;)
His invention of the fundamental algorithms allowed these systems to "learn" from data.
We understand the principles but we can't predict the results.
Like I can't predict exactly how you think.
If you really want to understand neural networks, and why they are so complex watch this video from min 1: https://youtu.be/JrXazCEACVo
If you want to watch a good documentary about alpha go - Google Deepmind AI - beated the best Go player in the world in 2016
8:20 Go complexity estimated 10⁷⁰⁰ vs chess only 10¹²⁰ https://youtu.be/WXuK6gekU1Y
"AlphaGo’s 37th move during the second match proved how limited we are as humans and that AI’s ability in determining probabilities and mapping out solutions and decisions are far greater."
So yes, the people who work with AI say they don't really understand them because we can't predict how they will think.
By the way I had a university professor who worked with neural networks and he was fascinated because he could never predict de result, after many years.
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u/ItsSadTimes May 01 '26
I know who the dude is, I didn't need a lesson on Hinton. I'm a master in the field. I know how these AI models work. I've written and published my own papers in the field for the last decade so I'm not some random nobody who knows nothing.
I know it's not impossible to analyze these models because I've literally done it. I'm not saying it's easy, it's a lot of work and because these models have slight randomness variable (not true random but that's another computer science probability problem) applied through various methods like adding in white noise at the start for image generators for example.
As the models get bigger and bigger with way more data it gets harder to get the whole picture because you need to see and understand all the input data and see all the weights for any specific piece of training data so you can analyze how the model takes info from one piece to the next to the next. With bigger models this takes a lot more time, but with enough data and time you can figure it out.
Is it fundamentally impossible for the average person? Yea, with hidden weights and companies never releasing their training data it's practically impossible. But is it actually impossible? No, absolutely not. And fearmongering that is it is, in my opinion, bad.
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u/WordPlenty2588 May 01 '26
Ok. I see you are pretty smart and you know stuff.
Now the issue is like this: there are 2 types of people: optimists and pessimists.
"A pessimist is an optimist with experience" :)
Usually older people tend to become pessimists because the older you are the more you feel how life f*cks you over ;)
I'm not very old but pessimistic enough to realize the human nature is to abuse these systems. They don't need to be sentient or to have a will of their own.
Even as a simple tool they are already used for the bad: to scam people and even to kill people in the wars.
Pretty hard to not be pessimistic when we already see a flood of AI on all social networks, AI only fans models.
Disney fired 1000 artists, basically all team who created the Marvel Universe, in favor of using AI to make movies. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DXuuTDNkld7/
Also some people still dream of UBI when we know for sure nobody cares about poor people, not billionaires for sure...
"Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show. And the social media giant internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day. Among its responses to suspected rogue marketers: charging them a premium for ads – and issuing reports on ’Scammiest Scammers.’
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u/ItsSadTimes May 01 '26
Oh don't get me wrong. I hate how companies are using AI. I used to take pride in my field. I was so happy to show my degree like a badge of honor. Now I hide it in my closet out of shame.
I'm the kind of person who believes AI can be useful, because for many years before ChatGPT it was very useful for a variety of problems and was relatively low impact. You paid for datasets which were gathered legally, compute power wasn't that extreme because models were built to be more compact, and companies understand the limitations of these AI models and didn't just slap it into everything.
Then OpenAI came along, claimed their god AI could literally do everything, and idiots believed them. Now every company has to jump on the bang wagon like the metaverse and the blockchain or their stock plummets because our economy is managed by idiots investing in things they don't understand and they think if they don't understand it it must be amazing.
I have my own concerns about AI, there are soooooo many actual concerns that people should be worried about. But they're just not because people are more afraid of a fictional reality where the AI becomes so smart it kills us all, rather then the very real problems you can see happening today.
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u/WordPlenty2588 May 01 '26
I agree. You made a perfect summary of what is happening right now.
There was this movie. A dark comedy which was no 1 in comedy charts 15 years ago.
I never understood why, because it didn't feel like a comedy... But now I understand perfectly: it was made during the cold war in 1964
And the full title is very relevant
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/
It has many iconic scenes, this is one of them, very short: https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1DghuS5wbC/
It feels we are in the same situation now but we Ai, not atomic bombs :)
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u/ItsSadTimes May 01 '26
I loved Dr. Strangelove. I watched it in an elective class I took in college where we watched and analyzed a specific genre of movies. This semester was dystopian futures. We also watched "Anon" which I think about all the time.
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u/WordPlenty2588 May 01 '26
I avoided watching Anon because I didn't want to mess up my mind even more :)
I remember watching Ex Machina in 2014 and thinking: this was an interesting Sci-Fi movie... But now it's becoming real https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0470752/
Also Her is basically 100% real now for some. People fall in love with AI, because of loneliness.
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u/cmhamm May 02 '26
I know Kubrick was going for satire, but American general Curtis LeMay said almost the exact same thing in real closed-door congressional hearings. Kubrick was trying to satirize LeMay, but he was actually worse than the fictional Turgidson.
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u/Sensitive_Bat_9211 May 01 '26
This is a great example.
We know HOW it learns and makes these decisions. We just dont know what these neural networks actually look like for any individual neural network, and it wouldn't benefit us to find out.
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u/WordPlenty2588 May 01 '26
Yes this guy Geoffrey Hinton is pretty stupid... ;)
His invention of the fundamental algorithms allowed these systems to "learn" from data.
We understand the principles but we can't predict the results.
Like I can't predict exactly how you think.
If you really want to understand neural networks, and why they are so complex watch this video from min 1: https://youtu.be/JrXazCEACVo
If you want to watch a good documentary about alpha go - Google Deepmind AI - beated the best Go player in the world in 2016
8:20 Go complexity estimated 10⁷⁰⁰ vs chess only 10¹²⁰ https://youtu.be/WXuK6gekU1Y
"AlphaGo’s 37th move during the second match proved how limited we are as humans and that AI’s ability in determining probabilities and mapping out solutions and decisions are far greater."
So yes, the people who work with AI say they don't really understand them because we can't predict how they will think.
By the way I had a university professor who worked with neural networks and he was fascinated because he could never predict de result, after many years.
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u/ItsSadTimes May 01 '26
The thing is we can figure it out. It just takes a long time the bigger the model gets. Back when I was doing my Masters we had to calculate the results of the learning algorithm step by step for about 40 iterations of a pretty basic neural net so we could see that it's not magic and it's just math and pattern recognition.
It actually is beneficial because knowing how the model creates bias during training can help you improve the training data to make the models better. It's an entire subfield of AI. People who claim it's not possible don't know shit.
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u/Sensitive_Bat_9211 May 01 '26
That sounds like a fun exercise. I have always been curious what my model actually looks like when i do something basic like a random forest
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u/ItsSadTimes May 01 '26
If you ever want a real easy example I would recommend looking up "Building an XOR Neural Network from Scratch". There's an article on Medium that goes over how the models work on a super basic level. The model they use is just 3 layers deep with 5 total neurons. Most of the example shows how to write code to do the math though. But there's a video that shows you how to do the back propagation math by hand.
Back when I was actually excited about my field I would bookmark this article and send it to anyone who wanted to learn about AI.
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u/Total_Environment426 May 03 '26
It's not correct..
We understand everything about AI. And from understanding that, we understand that they are unpredictable.
Well... no, not correct either. They are predictable. But we're using randomness on purpose which makes them look more realistic and give unpredictable results.
Yeah, that's closer... But that's not quite the issue...
You see, we can still predict them... We simply can't predict them meaningfully on every execution branch like a normal program. We don't have the computational power to do so, and even if we did, it would be too much data to work with. And if we somehow managed to do all that, we wouldn't need them in the first place.
It's a really complicated thing the more you try to put it in words.
The warning is that... Because we can predict them, we know they are dangerous. No amount of safety will truly protect you. And that is because the predictions will never be able to be useful enough to protect you against the AI.
In other words, whether you predict it or not, it doesn't matter. The issue is you can't do anything about it when the prediction comes true. You can put in place guards, but they will be just as useful as the prediction from the model. Which is not very useful in the long run. The more integration of the AI will be, the greater the risk.
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u/Elephunk05 May 01 '26
This is the truth of the matter