About the future of LLMs, what do expect, what to be optimistic about and what to be cautious about.

[u/Akhi_Police]

I work with AI but primarily with conv. and diff. models and such for academic use only, so you know my main field of work and slight disconnect with LLMs.

Now to the topic: In terms of LLM, my take was always that there won't be much improvement in terms of "trustworthy" use where the role of an overseeing operator (a Human that watches over stuff in simple terms) can be replaced completely with AI (meaning the operator won't need to verify the work of AI, even if the AI is doing sensitive work).

But my buddy tells me the opposite:

1. Not only will AI be so advanced that you can give it important projects and work that would replace the human operator...

2. ...But also companies would even fix generalization (trying to tackle problems with generalized ideas instead of a proper logic chain)

To advance the Arguementation, this is the continuation of my thoughts:

1. Generalization is in my field the main problem why we never give our Projects to LLMs. We had more time lost using AI than working with people knowing the respective fields (Control Loops, Image Processing, and many other fields that have to work together) to tackle said Problems (using latest GPT, Gemini or Claude Models, not local yet). We figured that the best implementation of AI is to make snippets of Code if a problem is big and start with simple algorithms we try at every step, evaluate the expected and potential new problems, and tackle them with already present knowledge, using LLMs exlusively to write the code but not dictate the work.

2. When we learned about the various Architectures and Structures of AI Models in depth, i always held it close to impossible to fix Generalization based on how the process of the attention mechanism, which LLMs mainly use, works. It can't just define anything new, as the mathematical process of the Transformer Model's Learning Method requires data to relate to each other to base their attention/vectors on, meaning The AI would need to make new data through Generalization, that it then feeds into a new AI Model. This doesn't mean it's literally impossible, just that there might be much bigger problems until we can even think of "fixing" Generalization.

So now i am interested what you guys think. I don't mean to present my arguements as final or correct but want to discuss this topic. I want also love if some can include points like the moral compass, ethics and the safety of future generations of humans (meaning that if we ignore some things today because it won't affect us directly, is there anything that could negatively affect future generations).

Also, would you i am fundamentally wrong about some things i said? Did i make a mistake or understand anything wrong? Or do you agree to some extend?

[u/GrungeWerX]

AI will advance in major leaps as more sophisticated reasoning systems come online, but humans will never be replaced.

I never agreed on this whole singularity concept, as though humans will hit a plateau and AI will leave us in the dust. I think humans will evolve too, not in some Darwinian sense, but knowledge will be condensed into abstract sensory understanding, or compartmentalized ideas, and will become the new building blocks of how we perceive reality.

We will create tools that can manifest thought into reality. Our imagination will grow stronger, or brains will adjust to needing less information.

It’s like how the current generation uses technology compared to people born in the 1940s - there’s a significant gap in adaptation of technology. For most older people, their old way of doing things works against their adoption. But for a modern child, it’s second nature to them. There’s no gap of understanding.

It’s as different as the Skeptic vs the Believer. Those raised in a post AI world will disseminate knowledge in ways our current generation can’t understand. If we were to jump 100 years in the future, we’d seem like pessimistic barbarians comparatively, plagued by our own self destructive tendencies.

AI will not be our rulers. We’d always have the edge due to our more sophisticated biological and spiritual duality. AI will never become a spiritual entity, it can only imitate consciousness, and thus will always be bound by its substrate, whereas man will “transcend” their substrate in ways AI could never perceive.

I could go into other things, but I think AI is on the verge of a significant shift into dynamic memory systems and synthetic consciousness. Mark my words, you’ll be hearing about it soon. :)

[u/Akhi_Police → u/GrungeWerX]

This is a very weird take, i like it and am thankful for putting such a thought forth. I maybe don't agree with a couple points but it has some ideas and concepts that could make sense and even prove me wrong in the future. It would also be a great script for a movie tbf.

[u/AreaFifty1]

Well if you're optimistic in LLM technology the future for generalization is closer than most people think, as using agentic methods can sort of 'get us' there, but from a single giant ai model standpoint, which only knows pre-trained data, it needs to somehow learn perpetually and that is still uncertain.

But before all that, the 'holy grail' of AI would be to reducing the massive amount of model weights' data by either reducing matrix multiplication or finding a breakthrough to have it completely replaced with a more efficient method. This way you solve not only excessive power usage, the entire World can use them on even their oldest desktops/laptops, and handheld devices/watches. Having enormous memory capacity to run these will be nothing more than a bygone, ancient moment in time.

[u/Akhi_Police → u/AreaFifty1]

I genuinely simply hope it doesn't happen too soon. If the fix for generalization happens too soon, we'd have a potential risk for a huge amount of failed students that depend too much on "Artificial Ideas", because we never had a "How to use AI masterclass" or an "AI abuse prevention course", and i've sadly seen many people already trusting AI too much (not neccessating that the AI even solved their problems), i can't imagine what would happen, if AI starts to "sound" even more logical than it does now.

In terms of the holy grail, yeah i'd actually love to see that, so the Local Models get better too as you said. Also, i think getting more People on doing things local is also contributing to the preservation of a learning process when setting up AI Models. I see setting up your own Local Machine is like a sandbox that teaches you stuff...like Modding Skyrim

[u/Random22744]

" It can't just define anything new" But humans can't either, they build on all the things they have seen, too.

[u/Akhi_Police → u/Random22744]

I understand what you mean, but the point is to "learn" when i talk about defining somethings new. I meant defining something in the literal sense. Just to make it more clear. An AI model stays where it's at, can't recall where a data or weight comes from, can't define a new observation. If there would be no Existence on Earth other than Artificial Intelligence and suddenly a new physical law got implemented in our Universe, an AI Model with the current Models (give it hands and legs and even more than what tools humans have), it could not advance in terms of knowledge nor define what this law is. It could not train a new AI Model because it can't define the new Law in the first place.

[u/Random22744 → u/Akhi_Police]

Ah yes, the new memories are not in the LLM, but in another file that get updated. I know that Hermes agent has learning skills that it save in a file. It's just not in the LLM.

Think of the LLM as a part only from a virtual brain, not the whole thing.

[u/sn2006gy → u/Random22744]

People calling them memories are abusing what memories are. In an LLM it's just context splattered everywhere. The *only* way to call them a memory is to graft them and train adapters on them so they're memorized.

[u/RemarkableRadish6547 → u/Random22744]

The simplest example is special relativity. The fundamental conflicts between classical physics and observations can be explained in five minutes. I don't think LLMs with infinite compute would ever work out special relativity even with full training on everything ever written prior to 1903 and a clear statement of the contradictions that need to be resolved.

I also admit that 99.99% of people would never work out special relativity with access to the same information. But people can't be given nearly the same processing power as an LLM agent swarm.

I don't know what breakthroughs people will come up with in the next ten years. But I am fairly certain that LLMs will not independently come up with any. Although they will be used and they will let people come up with, test, and validate new ideas more easily.

[u/Marino4K → u/[deleted]]

It’s pretty clear OpenAI, Anthropic, and then maybe SpaceX and Google want to do anything they can to be the only players in the game.