HACKER Q&A
📣 andrewstuart

Imagine an AI trained on every word written or spoken by everyone


I'm guessing China is developing such an AI right now. They have the means and the motivation to capture every written or spoken word of every Chinese citizen. Probably every TikToker too!

Presumably this all goes into a giant, up to the minute training data set.

I wonder what such an AI could be used for, any speculation?


  👤 wageslave99 Accepted Answer ✓
Isn't it true that almost all information is garbage? Stephen Hawking said:

> So the rate of biological evolution in humans, is about a bit a year. By contrast, there are about 50,000 new books published in the English language each year, containing of the order of 100 billion bits of information. Of course, the great majority of this information is garbage, and no use to any form of life. But, even so, the rate at which useful information can be added is millions, if not billions, higher than with DNA.

Source (https://qz.com/1229362/stephen-hawking-argued-that-humans-ev...)


👤 muzani
Well, it's not practical because the data collection just doesn't exist. But let's consider it.

A lot of AI behaviours today is just emergent. Studies show that the results improve with more data. It seemed unlikely, and that there would be a cap somewhere, but apparently we haven't hit it yet.

However Meta has some kind of AI and a ton of data and yet theirs is extremely bad. So bad that people quit FB over it. I would assume that Meta has a tech team as competent as "China" and more data than TikTok, but they're not faring well.


👤 seydor
Most human conversation is trivial and repetitive. Extremely low signal. Even GPTs afaik got better after being trained in Code, which , unlike conversation, actually does something.

👤 johlits
We should send AI to space, let it train on whatever and come back and teach us. Humans too boring.

👤 iExploder
oh god please no, if we are going out with a blast at least filter out what the AI will remember of us

training set 1: "THEY TOOK OUR JOBS!" "THEY TOOK ER JERBS!" "TERK YER JERB!"


👤 rafiki6
That's pretty much what GPT is.

👤 gloyoyo
Then you be the emperora'.