AI is at its best when it makes the boring verbose parts easier.
Readit Newsapi commented on AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder blundergoat.com/articles/... · Posted by u/weaksauce
api commented on Noam Chomsky's wife responds to Epstein controversy aaronmate.net/p/noam-chom... · Posted by u/Red_Tarsius
Ah yes, Noam Chomsky, the famous right wing authoritarian.
That's the thing though. Paperclips transcend ideology.
That and I'm not sure what Chomsky actually advocated. He was a tireless critic of American and Western imperial ambitions, but what would he replace them with? I get the impression it'd be some kind of authoritarian command economy socialism, which anyone with half a brain knows will turn into a totalitarian system where the ones running it are "more equal" than everyone else. These days, knowing what I know now, I wonder if he's always just been a Russian asset or useful idiot.
I've never been a Chomsky fan anyway. His criticisms are sometimes valid but it's easy to criticize. It's orders of magnitude harder to propose better alternatives. Being a witty and incisive critic is easy compared to fixing.
LLMs have also indirectly proven a lot of his linguistic theories wrong. We didn't crack natural language with NLP and grammars. We cracked it by loosely imitating biology.
api commented on Noam Chomsky's wife responds to Epstein controversy aaronmate.net/p/noam-chom... · Posted by u/Red_Tarsius
One of the crazy things about these files is: it’s clear that the root motivation for a huge number of these guys is just to get with very young girls (and sometimes boys).
Nothing sophisticated. Nothing inspired. Just what the most atavistic parts of the brain stem want.
They were billionaires and high ranking academics and politicians. They could have done so many things but that’s where a huge portion of their energy went. It was clearly one of the most important things to them.
Makes me think of the paperclip maximizers idea. We are paperclip maximizers. This is how a paperclip maximizer would behave. They could extend health and life and explore the universe, but paperclips. Must make paperclips.
I also get the impression that the reason a lot of these guys are attracted to authoritarian right wing ideology, neo-monarchism, etc. is the same. It’s because it would let them have little girls without pesky enlightenment notions like rights or woke nonsense about equality getting in the way.
Gotta make paperclips. Burn the world to make paperclips.
api commented on The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/1vuio0pswjnm7
Pretty good article until the bizarre post-script where they fall back on the tired "people derive meaning from their work" for why UBI is bad.
UBI doesn’t mean people don’t work. It means work is partially decoupled from basic needs.
People would work for two reasons. One is to make extra money and afford a lifestyle beyond what UBI provides. The second is to… do things that are meaningful. If people derive meaning from work then that’s why they’ll work.
Some people will just sit around on UBI. Those are the same people who sit around today on welfare or dead end bullshit jobs that don’t really produce much value.
I’m not totally sold on UBI but there’s a lot of shallow bad arguments against it that are pretty easy to dismiss.
api commented on The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/1vuio0pswjnm7
> That implies combined hyperscaler cloud and AI revenue going from: $330B today to $1.2T within 3 years :-))
You’re ignoring the fact that gaming is going to the cloud.
That industry is bigger than Hollywood.
Desktop computers will invariably follow.
The RAM shortage will drive the transition.
For instance, my wife uses her personal laptop about four days a year.
People like that won’t be buying personal desktops or laptops, five years from now. The RAM shortage will drive a transition into thin clients.
I already see it with our kids. They use an iPhone, unless they need to type. Then they use an iPad with a BT keyboard.
The RAM shortage is extremely temporary. It’ll last as long as it takes for new capacity to come online. RAM shortages and price spikes have happened many times before.
Eventually China will catch up in EUV fabrication and flood the market with cheap silicon. When that happens a terabyte of RAM will cost what 128gb costs now.
> I think the religiosity of the US is an illusion.
I grew up in the Bible Belt around Baptists and Evangelicals and even a few Pentecostals. I assure you it isn't an illusion.
While there may be some outliers and grifters, particularly where religion intersects with politics (I doubt Trump believes in God half as much as Evangelicals believe in him) the vast majority of these people absolutely do believe what they say, and that they're right with God.
If you took Jesus' teachings and stripped the name off, would most of these people agree with them? Things like welcoming the foreigner and treating them as one of your own, not judging others, etc.?
I don't think using the name and trappings of a religion as a cultural label and dog whistle is the same as sincere belief.
Dead Comment
api commented on Learning from context is harder than we thought hy.tencent.com/research/1... · Posted by u/limoce
I agree, the fundamental problem is we wouldn't be able to understand it ("AGI"). Therefore it's useless. Either useless or you let it go unleashed and it's useful. Either way you still don't understand it/can't predict it/it's dangerous/untrustworthy. But a constrained useful thing is great, but it fundamentally has to be constrained otherwise it doesn't make sense
The way I see it, we build technology to be what we are not and do what we can’t do or things we can do but better or faster.
An unpredictable fallible machine is useless to us because we have 7+ billion carbon based ones already.
api commented on Learning from context is harder than we thought hy.tencent.com/research/1... · Posted by u/limoce
How would you keep controls - safety restrictions - Ip restrictions etc with that, though? the companies selling models right now probably want to keep those fairly tight.
This is why I’m not sure most users actually want AGI. They want special purpose experts that are good at certain things with strictly controlled parameters.
I just hope we don't all start relying on current[1] AI so much that we lose the ability to solve novel problems ourselves.
[1] (I say "current" AI because some new paradigm may well surpass us completely, but that's a whole different future to contemplate)
To some extent AI is an entirely different approach. Screw elegance. Programmers won’t adhere to an elegant paradigm anyway. So just automate the process of generating spaghetti. The modularity and reuse is emergent from the latent knowledge in the model.