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kajumix commented on LLM Daydreaming   gwern.net/ai-daydreaming... · Posted by u/nanfinitum
ashdksnndck · 8 months ago
I’m not sure we can accept the premise that LLMs haven’t made any breakthroughs. What if people aren’t giving the LLM credit when they get a breakthrough from it?

First time I got good code out of a model, I told my friends and coworkers about it. Not anymore. The way I see it, the model is a service I (or my employer) pays for. Everyone knows it’s a tool that I can use, and nobody expects me to apportion credit for whether specific ideas came from the model or me. I tell people I code with LLMs, but I don’t commit a comment saying “wow, this clever bit came from the model!”

If people are getting actual bombshell breakthroughs from LLMs, maybe they are rationally deciding to use those ideas without mentioning the LLM came up with it first.

Anyway, I still think Gwern’s suggestion of a generic idea-lab trying to churn out insights is neat. Given the resources needed to fund such an effort, I could imagine that a trading shop would be a possible place to develop such a system. Instead of looking for insights generally, you’d be looking for profitable trades. Also, I think you’d do a lot better if you have relevant experts to evaluate the promising ideas, which means that more focused efforts would be more manageable. Not comparing everything to everything, but comparing everything to stuff in the expert’s domain.

If a system like that already exists at Jane Street or something, I doubt they are going to tell us about it.

kajumix · 8 months ago
Most interesting novel ideas originate at the intersection of multiple disciplines. Profitable trades could be found in the biomedicine sector when the knowledge of biomedicine and finance are combined. That's where I see LLMs shining because they span disciplines way more than any human can. Once we figure out a way to have them combine ideas (similar to how Gwern is suggesting), there will be, I suspect, a flood of novel and interesting ideas, inconceivable with humans.
kajumix commented on Just How Many More Successful UBI Trials Do We Need?   medium.com/the-no%C3%B6sp... · Posted by u/rbanffy
codersfocus · 9 months ago
UBI is the wrong approach.

Once CBDCs become a thing, citizens should have the ability to have direct credit relationships with the central bank.

We can then transition from a cash based monetary system to an accrual based one (similar to how businesses do their accounting.)

Public benefits, then, rather than being given out like it is currently (e.g. you get $200 for food stamps) will instead be based on allowing you to draw credit.

So, the eGovCreditCard would for example always allow any citizen to draw $200 per month for food expenses.

Potentially, if we want to do more generous policies a la "UBI," we could add e.g. $1000 always being allowed per month for rent.

Health care similarly, instead of if the archaic and very inefficient system we have now where those on the dole often go to emergency rooms, money is funneled through "insurance", etc... would allow you to draw money for regular doctor care. Maybe at a set maxiumim limit per citizen, e.g. $1M.

kajumix · 9 months ago
Your suggestion basically amounts to: digitize and centralize welfare. There are already electronic cards for food. If the money is drawn directly from the central bank as credit instead of from the state welfare fund, it won't make it any more efficient. In fact any experimentation among states will disappear. Also, if CBDCs become a thing, you could see a slow slide into behavior control. What people eat, and where they live becomes a concern for the central bank, because they get to decide who the approved vendors are for those things. "Central" anything is a design smell in most cases.

Getting rid of cash also requires proper paper work and identification so you can sign up for the CBDC wallet. In that case you're excluding the very people from the system who need it the most.

kajumix commented on Just How Many More Successful UBI Trials Do We Need?   medium.com/the-no%C3%B6sp... · Posted by u/rbanffy
squeegee_scream · 9 months ago
I don’t think _everyone_ gets an extra $1,000, just those at the bottom. I’m pretty sure there are different ways of implementing UBI, and some of them only provide a certain amount to the lower income folks. So if you are making plenty of money, whatever plenty means in your location and context, you would not receive any additional income.
kajumix · 9 months ago
If it's not for _everyone_ it's not _universal_ basic income. It's just welfare for poor in that case, and that's already very common
kajumix commented on Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans   spectrum.ieee.org/amazon-... · Posted by u/Luc
pixl97 · 10 months ago
And what labor are you going to be doing to afford those upleveled products?
kajumix · 10 months ago
it's a good question. what would true abundance look like? I can't wait to find out
kajumix commented on Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans   spectrum.ieee.org/amazon-... · Posted by u/Luc
iamtheworstdev · 10 months ago
but ads exist to convince people to buy things. if people can't afford to buy things, why would you need ads?
kajumix · 10 months ago
you may not need to buy a box of cereal or a vacuum cleaner, but maybe a flight to moon, or a humanoid companion? products move up a level
kajumix commented on Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans   spectrum.ieee.org/amazon-... · Posted by u/Luc
thisisnotauser · 10 months ago
Henry Ford famously wanted his workers to be able to afford his cars. When Bezos replaces everyone with robots, who will be left to buy his junk?
kajumix · 10 months ago
Once he replaces everyone with robots, and all the factories do the same, people will get stuff at home for watching ads.
kajumix commented on Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?   newsletter.goodtechthings... · Posted by u/forrestbrazeal
camgunz · a year ago
A couple things are true here:

- The kid's behavior isn't their fault. They might have a medical condition or a home situation causing them to act this way. It's tempting to write kids like this off, but we shouldn't punish kids for their parents' failings.

- No matter what, this represents a problem we have to solve. Either family can solve it at home, educators can solve it at school, or some LEO can solve it in the carceral system, but you burn more money and suffer worse outcomes the further down the pipeline you solve it (not unlike bugs in software engineering).

---

I have a hot take that school is so frustrating because it's one of the very few things in the US money and status don't readily fix. Your household income might be $250k a year, but your kid's playing kickball with... people who make less, and there's really nothing anyone can do about it. The US isn't good at these kinds of "let's make society as a whole healthier so we avoid the worst outcomes" type problems, preferring to use those bad outcomes to motivate people to not be poor/lazy/unlucky.

Unfortunately the resources required to create some kind of middle tier education are truly bonkers (it's also de facto racist: 30% of Black kids and 20% of Hispanic kids are impoverished, so if you're saying "poor kids with all their problems not welcome here" you're kind of also saying Black/Hispanic kids with all their problems not welcome here--which also doesn't super work because of de facto segregation, so you're also saying "no middle tier schools here"). There are around 70m kids in the US. Let's take the top 2/3 (they're in households making > 199% of the poverty line) and assume ideal class size of 12. That's $229,000,000,000 a year just in salary (current median teacher salary is $58,950), which is more than 2/3 the current DoE budget, plus you'd have to dramatically increase salary and benefits if you wanted to hire that many new teachers anyway.

But, yeah overall my point is it's really hard to appreciate the scale of the problem both like, logically (can it really cost this much money?), emotionally (my kid got hit with a chair today), and culturally (I honestly thought making a quarter of a million dollars a year ensured my kid would never be hit by a chair in school; who do I see about this). But, it really is just the case we are going have to spend money like crazy and hire a shitload of professional educators. It might seem expensive, but you'll pay 10x if kids slide to the end of the pipeline--to say nothing of the moral cost.

kajumix · a year ago
In neighborhoods with better school districts, home prices and rents are higher in proportion to the demand people have for better schools, creating de facto segregation based on income, and by your logic, by race too.
kajumix commented on Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?   newsletter.goodtechthings... · Posted by u/forrestbrazeal
swiftcoder · a year ago
The problem with homeschooling is it's pretty much a crapshoot whether you end up in a weird religious environment or an abusive environment, with a long-shot chance of ending up in a fun constructive environment with lots of personalised attention and the opportunity to travel the world.

Of course, this is pretty much the same set of dice you roll when you spawn into a traditional school system, except you roll with disadvantage when it comes to the long-shot.

I don't know, I was fortunate enough to roll the long shot, and it worked out pretty well for me. Though I will echo the article's note that forming emotional attachments continues to be a bitch if you didn't have a large peer group at a young age...

kajumix · a year ago
Why do you imply that the fun, constructive environment for homeschooling a long shot, but the weird religious or abusive environment is more of the norm?
kajumix commented on Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers   businessinsider.com/mark-... · Posted by u/cryptoz
tombert · a year ago
Mostly because of the huge bet on "Web 3.0" and the "metaverse" stuff. I could be wrong, maybe in ten years we'll be looking at how great Facebook was at predicting stuff, but it seems like it mostly has not panned out, at least from my (admittedly very limited) perspective.

I guess the reason I'm skeptical is because there's really no reason for him to not say this kind of stuff. If he says "Meta's AI model is so good that it's on par with a mid-level engineer", there's a chance the stock price shoots up because it suggests that maybe Meta has some amazing new model and AI is the current hotness, and there's basically no penalty for being wrong.

It's not hard to find cases where CEOs just completely lie to everyone's faces in order to try and boost stock prices, so it's not a skepticism of Zuckerberg explicitly, so much as all CEOs.

kajumix · a year ago
Most CEOs, yes. But founder CEOs normally don't care about stock price that much. Zuck turned down yahoo, remember. Bezos kept taking losses in Amazon in the beginning for the sake of future growth despite the stock being punished so hard. Steve Jobs was like that too. Your cynicism is misguided. VR is a very long call.
kajumix commented on Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers   businessinsider.com/mark-... · Posted by u/cryptoz
janice1999 · a year ago
Could someone with "0 coding skill" really compose the prompts in the first place? You need to understand the problem space, the right terminology and visualise a general architecture/structure for the solution. These things might be obvious to you and me but take someone from a different field and it would be the same as handing me the controls to a medical robot and telling me to start pushing buttons.
kajumix · a year ago
Do you realize most enterprise coders are writing just simple CRUD applications?

u/kajumix

KarmaCake day216June 24, 2014View Original