Geoffrey Hinton

You're dealing with an exponential, but you're approximating it with something linear or quadratic.

Sometimes it's quadratic, right?

If you approximate an exponential like that, what you'll discover is that you make correct predictions about what you'll be able to predict a few years down the road.

But 10 years down the road... You're completely hopeless.

You just have no idea what's going to happen.

We have no idea what's going to happen.

It's deep in the fog.

Wow.

But we should be thinking hard about it.

There is that, but let me make it worse.

Suppose it was just linear.

So then what you do, if you want to know what it's going to be like in 10 years' time, you look back 10 years and say, how wrong were we about what it would be like now?

Well, 10 years ago, nobody would have predicted.

Even real enthusiasts like me who thought it was coming in the end, they wouldn't have predicted that at this point we'd have a model where you could ask it any question and it would answer at the level of a not very good expert who occasionally tells fibs.

And that's what we've got now.

And you wouldn't have predicted that 10 years ago.

Okay.

They shouldn't be called hallucinations.

They should be called confabulations, if it's with language models.

Psychologists have been studying them in people since at least the 1930s, and people confabulate all the time.