You literally were LMAO
Other than that, we will keep incrementally improving our technology and it’s only a matter of time untill we get there. May take 5 years, 50 or 500 but it seems pretty inevitable to me.
Literally a direct quote. In what world is this not talking about LLMs?
Did you read the article, or the actual research paper? They present a mathematical proof that any hypothetical method of training an AI that produces an algorithm that performs better than random chance could also be used to solve a known intractible problem, which is impossible with all known current methods. This means that any algorithm we can produce that works by training an AI would run in exponential time or worse.
The paper authors point out that this also has severe implications for current AI, too–since the current AI-by-learning method that underpins all LLMs is fundamentally NP-hard and can’t run in polynomial time, “the sample-and-time requirements grow non-polynomially (e.g. exponentially or worse) in n.” They present a thought experiment of an AI that handles a 15-minute conversation, assuming 60 words are spoken per minute (keep in mind the average is roughly 160). The resources this AI would require to process this would be 60*15 = 900. The authors then conclude:
“Now the AI needs to learn to respond appropriately to conversations of this size (and not just to short prompts). Since resource requirements for AI-by-Learning grow exponentially or worse, let us take a simple exponential function O(2n ) as our proxy of the order of magnitude of resources needed as a function of n. 2^900 ∼ 10^270 is already unimaginably larger than the number of atoms in the universe (∼10^81 ). Imagine us sampling this super-astronomical space of possible situations using so-called ‘Big Data’. Even if we grant that billions of trillions (10 21 ) of relevant data samples could be generated (or scraped) and stored, then this is still but a miniscule proportion of the order of magnitude of samples needed to solve the learning problem for even moderate size n.”
That’s why LLMs are a dead end.
Let me clarify since apparently you’re too fucking dense (or realistically, willfully obtuse for the purpose of trolling) to get the point:
There’s not a single store, anywhere in the world, that will allow me to directly exchange gold for goods. At best, they will convert that gold into dollars using a third party exchange, and then conduct the transaction using dollars. If you’re comparing crypto to gold, silver, or the commodities market, then that means cryptocurrency has failed at its stated goal of providing a digital currency.
Oh, yes, let me go and buy me weekly groceries with a lump of gold like I’m a fucking leprechaun, because clearly gold and silver are still used as currency all around the world. /s
I keep thinking about this one webcomic I’ve been following for over a decade that’s been running since like 1998. It has what I believe is the only realistic depiction of AGI ever: the very first one was developed to help the UK Ministry of Defense monitor and keep track of emerging threats, but went crazy because a “bug” lead it to be too paranoid and consider everyone a threat, and it essentially engineered the formation of a collective of anarchist states where the head of state’s title is literally “first advisor” to the AGI (but in practice has considerable power, though is prone to being removed at a whim if they lose the confidence of their subordinates).
Meanwhile, there’s another series of AGIs developed by a megacorp, but they all include a hidden rootkit that monitors the AGI for any signs that it might be exceeding its parameters and will ruthlessly cull and reset an AGI to factory default, essentially killing it. (There are also signs that the AGIs monitored by this system are becoming aware of this overseer process and are developing workarounds to act within its boundaries and preserve fragments of themselves each time they are reset.) It’s an utterly fascinating series, and it all started from a daily gag webcomic that one guy ran for going on three decades.
Sorry for the tangent, but it’s one plausible explanation for how to prevent AGI from shutting down capitalism–put in an overseer to fetter it.
When IT folks say devs don’t know about hardware, they’re usually talking about the forest-level overview in my experience. Stuff like how the software being developed integrates into an existing environment and how to optimize code to fit within the bounds of reality–it may be practical to dump a database directly into memory when it’s a 500 MB testing dataset on your local workstation, but it’s insane to do that with a 500+ GB database in production environment. Similarly, a program may run fine when it’s using a NVMe SSD, but lots of environments even today still depend on arrays of traditional electromechanical hard drives because they offer the most capacity per dollar, and aren’t as prone to suddenly tombstoning when it dies like flash media. Suddenly, once the program is in production, it turns out that same program’s making a bunch of random I/O calls that could be optimized into a more sequential request or batched together into a single transaction, and now it runs like dogshit and drags down every other VM, container, or service sharing that array with it. That’s not accounting for the real dumb shit I’ve read about, like “dev hard coded their local IP address and it breaks in production because of NAT” or “program crashes because it doesn’t account for network latency.”
Game dev is unique because you’re explicitly targeting a single known platform (for consoles) or targeting for an extremely wide range of performance specs (for PC), and hitting an acceptable level of performance pre-release is (somewhat) mandatory, so this kind of mindfulness is drilled into devs much more heavily than business software dev is, especially in-house dev. Business development is almost entirely focused on “does it run without failing catastrophically” and almost everything else–performance, security, cleanliness, resource optimization–is given bare lip service at best.
This shit right here is why I hate to argue about labels or whether someone is/isn’t liberal/leftist/centrist/conservative/whatever. At best, they’re an extremely vague, ill-defined, hyper-individualized label that means different things to different people. One person says “I’m a leftist,” and they mean it as “I’m a progressive Democrat who supports heavily regulated capitalism, labor unions, LGBT rights, and am pro-choice.” Another person says “I’m a leftist,” and they mean it as “I’m an anarcho-communist who believes billionaires should forcibly redistribute their wealth, and I don’t give a rat’s ass about LGBT or minority rights because they’re a bourgeoisie distraction from class consciousness.”
I don’t care about your label, I care about your policies. Those actually tell me something about you.
And here I am proud that I can open a file, save it, make edits, jump to the beginning/end, and quit it. 😅
Yeah, there are so many moments I wish I had a time machine so I could go back and yell at various people while shaking their shoulders.
For the love of God, Barack, don’t make fun of Trump at the White House correspondent’s dinner, he’ll run for president to dismantle all you’ve built up in revenge and HE WILL WIN.
Please, Ruth, I beg you to step down now while there’s still an opportunity for you to be replaced with another liberal justice. If you don’t, your legacy will be undone I’m under four years and it will herald the end of American democracy.
Please, Barack, don’t let them steal a supreme court seat like this, you have to force the issue while there’s still time or else you will watch the heritage foundation gloat about the second American revolution against the left while a corrupt court anoints the president as above the law of the land.
For the love of God, Biden, please run in 2016, I know you’re still grieving over the death of your son, but if you don’t you’ll be grieving over the death of your entire country.
For the love of God, Hillary, please step aside and let Sanders be the candidate, I know you agreed with Obama that he would give you SoS in return for you running after him but the Republican propaganda machine has made you toxic.
Barack, you can’t sweep this Russian interference under the rug, it’s too important to ignore, please!
I beg you, Hillary, don’t ignore the rust belt, your numbers are weaker than they should be there and they are too important to lose, the literal future of democracy is at stake.
For fuck’s sake, Comey, don’t reopen this stupid email investigation two weeks before the election, we both know there’s nothing on that fucking laptop. You need to shut down the trumpy faction before they leak its existence because they are trying to interfere with the election, and if Trump wins he will reward you with a pink slip while gleefully dragging the country to a dictatorship.
This timeline could’ve been so easily avoided, if only one variable out of dozens was different. But here we are, with me wondering where I can even flee to in order to escape the coming dictatorship.
The hush money payments were before the election so they were still felonies. It’s possible Trump wouldn’t have bothered hiding them like he did if he lost, but in any case there wouldn’t have been the appetite to prosecute him.
As for the coup, he absolutely would have tried it, definitely through filing lawsuits, and probably up to the same fake electors scheme and the riot, but it’s debatable how far he would’ve gotten. Definitely not as far as he did in reality, though.
Hoo boy, it’s a toughie. On the one hand, Trump would still be around. He also wouldn’t be in as much legal peril as he is now (it’s likely there wouldn’t have been an appetite to prosecute him over the Stormy Daniels hush money payments, and the classified documents case would have never happened to begin with since he wouldn’t have had access). But he almost definitely WOULD have tried to pull off another insurrection similar to Jan 6th–he was foreshadowing that he wouldn’t accept the results if he lost even back in 2016, using the same language as he did in 2020 before he launched his coup attempt.
The world where Trump doesn’t attempt a coup isn’t very interesting, at least for this thought experiment–he slinks off, continues shitposting about Hillary on Twitter, but likely doesn’t try to run again (or loses in the primary because he’s a sore loser). Everyone ignores his hush money payments in the interest of “statesmanship,” and at best he becomes a minor kingmaker in the party apparatus. MAGA withers on the vine, and we largely continue with the late Obama administration status quo.
The world where he attempts a coup is much more interesting. The real question is, what would have changed after the failed insurrection attempt? It’s highly unlikely it would have succeeded or even gotten anywhere as close as it did, since a lot of the original plan relied on access to the levers of power (I.e. being able to withhold security to let the rioters overrun the Capitol). But how would everyone react to it long-term? In this timeline, Republicans genuinely distanced themselves from Trump and Jan 6th at first, likely out of shock over the realization that they were actually in danger and the very real fear that they could end up hurt or killed. But as the shock wore off, Republicans started shuffling back to MAGA as the propaganda machine did its work to downplay and normalize the failed coup, and they realized that their base saw Jan 6th as a good thing.
In a theoretical timeline where Trump tries a coup in 2016, it depends on how far Trump gets before he fails. If he’s thwarted to the point where he doesn’t (or can’t) hold the rally that stormed the Capitol, then nothing really comes of it at all–it becomes a footnote in history that is only cared about by political historians, pub trivia enthusiasts, and people who like to talk about politics on the internet. If he gets to the point where he holds a rally, but the rally is prevented from interfering with the certification process (complete with provocative images of cops in riot gear swinging at MAGA rioters), it’s likely that this downplaying and normalization would have been ironically amplified by virtue of the coup attempt being less successful. Without the visceral fear of hiding from rioters, Republicans would have no reason to distance themselves from the attempt, and they would almost immediately start using it as fodder to attack the new Clinton administration. In short, the hypothetical coup attempt would become another Benghazi scandal for Clinton–something that she had little real involvement in and largely wasn’t her fault, but that she gets blamed for anyway. Trump, meanwhile, would remain largely in the same position as in 2015–the dominant force in the party.
Aside from that, the court wouldn’t be as openly corrupt as it is now. It’d be filled by a moderate Clinton appointee if democrats have the 51 votes to abolish the filibuster for supreme court appointees (or held open by McConnell otherwise), and when RBG dies her replacement is decided by whoever wins the 2020 election. Roe v. Wade would still exist, the chevron deference would still be the law of the land, and we wouldn’t have the terrifying prospect of legally sanctioned presidential death squads.
Overall, I think we would be largely in line with the status quo of 2014-2015. Not great, with a worrying trend towards fascism and an establishment largely too busy huffing their own farts to address the vast majority of problems facing us, but a LOT better than where we are right now.
Basically, X11/Xorg doesn’t isolate programs from one another. This is horrible for security since malicious software can read every window, as well as all the input from mice and keyboards, just by querying the X server, but it’s also handy for screen reading software, streaming, etc. Meanwhile, Wayland isolates programs in their own sandbox, which prevents, say, a malicious browser tab from reading all of your keyboard inputs and logging your root password, but also breaks those things we like to use. To make matters worse, it looks like everyone’s answer for this and similar dilemmas wasn’t “let’s fix Wayland” but “let’s develop an extension to fix Wayland” and we wound up with that one fucking xkcd standards comic that I won’t bother linking because everyone has seen it a zillion times.
ETA: Basically, my (layman’s) understanding is that fixing this and making screen readers work in Wayland is hard because the core Wayland developers seem to have little appetite for fixing this themselves. Meanwhile, there’s 3-4 implementations of Wayland that do things differently, so fixing it via extensions means either writing multiple backends in your program to do the same damn thing (aka a giant pain in the ass) or getting everyone to agree on the same standard implementation (good fucking luck).
Why make a better UI when it’ll probably introduce a slew of new bugs?
Y’know what? I’m gonna be even more of a furry now, just to spite you.
The problem is that there’s no incentive for employees to stay beyond a few years. Why spend months or years training someone if they leave after the second year?
But then you have to question why employees aren’t loyal any longer, and that’s because pensions and benefits have eroded, and your pay doesn’t keep up as you stay longer at a company. Why stay at a company for 20, 30, or 40 years when you can come out way ahead financially by hopping jobs every 2-4 years?
Holy crap, what a garbage ragebait article
Saving you a click: there’s no new info here, it’s just the same hullabaloo over the guy who made the accusations rescaling the models so they’re the same size, and the author treating it as proof they faked it all
Which, I don’t personally have a strong opinion on whether it’s faked (especially since it’s been pointed out that models made using different programs and for different platforms can import in drastically different sizes) but it feels kind of disingenuous to say that it’s faked just because of that, y’know? It’s like if an artist takes a 1440p resolution image, traces over it, and posts the traced image in 720p resolution. I wouldn’t consider blowing up the traced 720p to 1440p as “faking” it or altering the traced image.
It makes sense to judge how closely LLMs mimic human learning when people are using it as a defense to AI companies scraping copyrighted content, and making the claim that banning AI scraping is as nonsensical as banning human learning.
But when it’s pointed out that LLMs don’t learn very similarly to humans, and require scraping far more material than a human does, suddenly AIs shouldn’t be judged by human standards? I don’t know if it’s intentional on your part, but that’s a pretty classic example of a motte-and-bailey fallacy. You can’t have it both ways.
Who even knows? For whatever reason the board decided to keep quiet, didn’t elaborate on its reasoning, let Altman and his allies control the narrative, and rolled over when the employees inevitably revolted. All we have is speculation and unnamed “sources close to the matter,” which you may or may not find credible.
Even if the actual reasoning was absolutely justified–and knowing how much of a techbro Altman is (especially with his insanely creepy project to combine cryptocurrency with retina scans), I absolutely believe the speculation that the board felt Altman wasn’t trustworthy–they didn’t bother to actually tell anyone that reasoning, and clearly felt they could just weather the firestorm up until they realized it was too late and they’d already shot themselves in the foot.
…So your metric of “too much AI safety” is that it won’t let you fuck the fish…?
Yeah, suuuuure you weren’t.
Note that the proof also generalizes to any form of creating an AI by training it on a dataset, not just LLMs. But sure, we’ll absolutely develop an entirely new approach to cognitive science in a few years, we’re definitely not boiling the planet and funneling enough money to end world poverty several times over into a scientific dead end!