Heard some people say that a so called “Human Zoo” is one of the best-case scenarios with pseudo-omniscient AI taking care of all of us. Supposedly that comes true, to what ends would humans continue to keep a population going, simply due to biological bias? You think humans would devolve in some way, or become intellectually atrophied?


This is very philosophical, but what is understanding of something? Isn’t it just relationships between different concepts? LLM currently encode information similarly in their multidimensional vector space. Where a “dog” vector would be close to “animal” “pet” “breed” etc vectors and those in turn to other similar concepts and so on. How different is it from human way of understanding?
Sure, that is true right now. But in not-so-distant future, it is not unreasonable to assume AI would be able to improve itself without as much (or any) human intervention. For example it could streamline training, automatically collect new data from across the world in real time. Be able to access its own weights in the model, increase improvement efficiency possibly exponentially even.
Today it is a statistical model
Tomorrow it is a statistical model
Check out the OpenAI peer review article on “AI Scaling Laws”, although it had its math corrected by the staff of DeepMind later on it still more or less correctly predicted the performance of every model since and predicts that we’re hitting a hard limit soon as training approaches infinite but returns become smaller and smaller. If you plot the performance as per their charts then the limit after INFINITE training with INFINITE sample data and INFINITE power used then you get about 94% accuracy, which is still less than any one singular human’s capabilities. So why train it when you can just go and get a random human?
Clearly this approach doesn’t work.
You mentioned a theoretical model which adjusts its own weights? We call that self-sampling which leads to feedback loops and model collapse.
In my OP, I did not mean specifically some LLM, but a hypothetical, scalable-past-human-capabilities synthetic brain.
I would argue that a human brain is a statistical model. Complex, but in the end it’s a black box that takes in input from senses, and spits out output in form of interaction with environment. I’m not saying we and LLMs are in any way alike, or that AI is alive. But I do not agree with postulation that a true artificial thinking machine is impossible to build within next 1B years or however long Earth stays habitable for complex life.
You’d be wrong. Humans are a series of logic gates which don’t strictly compare values odds. We actually kind of suck at statistics.