this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2024
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If this is the way to superintelligence, it remains a bizarre one. “This is back to a million monkeys typing for a million years generating the works of Shakespeare,” Emily Bender told me. But OpenAI’s technology effectively crunches those years down to seconds. A company blog boasts that an o1 model scored better than most humans on a recent coding test that allowed participants to submit 50 possible solutions to each problem—but only when o1 was allowed 10,000 submissions instead. No human could come up with that many possibilities in a reasonable length of time, which is exactly the point. To OpenAI, unlimited time and resources are an advantage that its hardware-grounded models have over biology. Not even two weeks after the launch of the o1 preview, the start-up presented plans to build data centers that would each require the power generated by approximately five large nuclear reactors, enough for almost 3 million homes.

https://archive.is/xUJMG

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[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 42 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (6 children)

It's a great article IMO, worth the read.

But :

“This is back to a million monkeys typing for a million years generating the works of Shakespeare,”

This is such a stupid analogy, the chances for said monkeys to just match a single page any full page accidentally is so slim, it's practically zero.
To just type a simple word like "stupid" which is a 6 letter word, and there are 25⁶ combinations of letters to write it, which is 244140625 combinations for that single simple word!
A page has about 2000 letters = 7,58607870346737857223e+2795 combinations. And that's disregarding punctuation and capital letters and special charecters and numbers.
A million monkeys times a million years times 365 days times 24 hours times 60 minutes times 60 seconds times 10 random typos per second is only 315360000000000000000 or 3.15e+20 combinations assuming none are repaeated. That's only 21 digits, making it 2775 digits short of creating a single page even once.

I'm so sick of seeing this analogy, because it is missing the point by an insane margin. It is extremely misleading, and completely misrepresenting getting something very complex right by chance.

To generate a work of Shakespeare by chance is impossible in the lifespan of this universe. The mathematical likelihood is so staggeringly low that it's considered impossible by AFAIK any scientific and mathematical standard.

[–] pyre@lemmy.world 29 points 1 week ago (2 children)

the actual analog isn't a million monkeys. you only need one monkey. but it's for an infinite amount of time. the probability isn't practically zero, it's one. that's how infinity works. not only will it happen, but it will happen again, infinitely many times.

[–] Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world 26 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

The quote is misquoting the analogy. It is an infinite number of monkeys.

The point of the analogy is about randomness and infinity. Any page of gibberish is equally as likely as a word perfect page of Shakespeare given equal weighting to the entry if characters. There are factors introduced with the behaviours of monkeys and placement of keys, but I don't think that is the point of the analogy.

[–] x_pikl_x@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

It was a big YouTube science video subject last week... Suddenly everyone has a real educated opinion on the matter with statistics and everything.

[–] werefreeatlast@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago

I hear you. My fucking dog keeps barking up stupid Mexican novellas and Korean pop. C'mon Rosco! Go get me the stick buddy! The stick! No! C'mon! The cat didn't kill your father and then betray you for the chicken!!! Nobody likes your little dance that you do either, you do it because you sick in the brain for the Korean Ladies! Get otta here!

[–] uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 1 week ago (2 children)

In the meantime weasel programs are very effective, and a better, if less known metaphor.

Sadly the monkeys thought experiment is a much more well known example.

Irrelevant nerd thought, back in the early nineties, my game development company was Monkey Mindworks based on a joke our (one) programmer made about his method of typing gibberish into the editor and then clearing the parts that didn't resemble C# code.

[–] jaek@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

C# didn't exist in the early 90s, perhaps you're thinking of another language?

Obligatory: 95% of paint splatters are valid perl programs

[–] uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 week ago

It may have been C+ or merely C with OOP features. I was writing the enemy-AI code (not to be confused with actual learning systems) in visual basic (and made some sweet pathfinding algorithms at the time), but took it too seriously and ended up breaking my brain.

We had a publisher and it was going to be awesome and then Windows 95 came out and broke all our code.

That's how they made that ET game back in the day

[–] Eranziel@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

Don't look for statistical precision in analogies. That's why it's called an analogy, not a calculation.

[–] devils_advocate@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

You are missing a piece of the analogy.

After each key press the size of the letters change, so some become more likely to be hit than others.

How the size of the keys vary is the secret being sought, and this training requires many, many more monkeys than just producing Shakespeare.

[–] chillinit@lemmynsfw.com 3 points 1 week ago

AI data analyst here. The above is an excellent extension of the analogy.

Now, imagine another monkey controlling how the size of the keys vary. There might even be another monkey controlling that one.

The analogy doesn't seem to break until we start talking about the assumptions humans make for efficiency.