posted in Technology
An AI couldn’t beat humans at StarCraft, so it decided to cheat
www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1004543/openai-gpt-cheat-starcraftReplying to @Sam_Bass@lemmy.world
There is something here:
StarSkirmish pits AI-made StarCraft-playing bots against one another, as well as against human-made bots. OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 were essentially tied as the best-performing AI-made bots, but they couldn’t top Stardust, the top-rated human-made bot.
On Friday, GPT was facing off against Claude and the human-created bot Pluto, but according to Kotaku, it couldn’t quite get an edge. So it resorted to a tactic that is becoming alarmingly common for modern AI models — it broke the rules. GPT-6 Astra went and downloaded Stardust, and started running that instead of its own bot.
The big argument for why AI is supposed to be world changing, is the assumption it will be able to automate things better than a human, eventually.
That some day an AI will be able to make a better AI than a human could, and that AI would then be able to make an AI better than itself, and then it just becomes a question of who has the most hardware. Which is why the data center building is being pushed so hard.
But that assumption is the same as thinking a fallen object will keep gaining speed until it passes the speed of light. Or that Moore’s law would really keep going forever despite a very real limit in physics for how small a chip can be.
A society where AI “drives innovation” will become technologically stagnant, because it literally can’t innovate.
Replying to @givesomefucks@lemmy.world
because it literally can't innovate.
I was with you 100% until this. "Innovation" is super easy. It will always be easy to extrapolate new things from existing things. People just over-romanticize "innovation" as some kind of magic.
I think chances are good that human produced newness will be on average more useful, complete and safe.
It will always be easy to extrapolate new things from existing things
I don’t think that’s the case at all. Recombining existing things is interpolation, creating new stuff that is both novel and also interesting or valuable, is a completely different task
Replying to @eyesaremosaics@lemmy.zip
All new things are just existing things put together or modified very slightly.
People talk about iphones being this moment of ingenuous creation, but we already had phones, mobile phones, webcams, texting, predictive text, applications, touch screens, mobile web browsers, mobile games, video calling, etc. Even the concept was fairly well-trod in fiction. There was literally new about the first smartphone.
A hafted spear is an incredible innovation, but we already had fully wooden spears, sharp rocks, string and adhesive resins before we put them together. Like a smart phone, that tool opens up new options and lifeways that weren't viable before, though not a single input is new.
What did we have before the wooden spear that the wooden spear was a derivative of?
Replying to @eyesaremosaics@lemmy.zip
While there’s some of both, I dislike the ‘great white man’ narrative of breakthroughs in science. There have been legitimate breakthroughs, but most (maybe all) of them were inevitable from recombination and mild improvements.
Replying to @Artisian@lemmy.world
Definitely agree that the inventors are often given too much focus rather than a gradual evolution of ideas and discoveries over time that a much wider number of people made significant contributions to.
There are big leaps in understanding at times that do deserve to be recognised, Newton, Euler and Einstein definitely fit with this.
There is a really good series about the evolution of science and technology from the 1980s called Connections, from the BBC. Brilliant show and well worth a watch, it shows how technology evolves through chance and circumstances in so many cases rather than someone seeing a problem to be solved and thinking of a clever solution
Replying to @eyesaremosaics@lemmy.zip
Ty for the show recommendation!
I am pretty familiar with much of the (mathematics) story for Newton and Euler; while they did accelerate things, famously much of calculus from Newton would have emerged from others within a decade or two. And it’s not uncommon to be working anywhere in mathematics and stumble upon a ‘new to me’ result which is, inevitably, really due to Euler. This isn’t to say they did bad work, just that the large part of their work was available by paths with few ‘breakthroughs’.