Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

There is no hard takeoff

geohot.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 190 posts

Re: There is no hard takeoff

#11

Post by gorbachev »

neatze wrote: post #6

> Oh wait…every hedge fund bro is already doing this. And most of them aren’t billionaires. The problem is your model needs to include all the computers playing the market, and it also needs to include the other hedge fund bros themselves. This strategy only dominates if you have more compute than the whole market itself, which you don’t. Best part of this article, honestly, I did not expected this, of-course one can…

Yes, every hedge fund bro already does that, but they usually target specific scenarios, they don't model the entire market.

The way to make money this way is to find out a unique scenario, and then create a prediction algorithm for that. I'm not close enough to hedge fund bros to know how feasible that is.

Re: There is no hard takeoff

#13

Post by petercooper »

neatze wrote: post #6

> Oh wait…every hedge fund bro is already doing this. And most of them aren’t billionaires. The problem is your model needs to include all the computers playing the market, and it also needs to include the other hedge fund bros themselves. This strategy only dominates if you have more compute than the whole market itself, which you don’t. Best part of this article, honestly, I did not expected this, of-course one can…

It reminds me of the rocket fuel equation where you have 500kg to take to space, so you need X kg of fuel. Except now you have 500+X kg to take to space and so you need even more fuel. Repeat. This sort of pattern seems to exist in all sorts of diverse situations.

Re: There is no hard takeoff

#14

Post by chasd00 »

smcl wrote: post #7

> Back in 2014, Elon Musk referred to AI as summoning the demon. And it wasn’t hard to see that view. Soon, Go agents would beat top humans learning from self play. By the end of 2017, the same algorithm mastered Chess and Shogi. By 2020, it didn’t even need tons of calls to the simulator, and could play Atari too. > AI looked scary. It looked like it was one FOOM away from self playing and becoming superhuman at the…

> really burst into the mainstream recently.

I think what made the LLMs so popular in the mainstream was anyone could go experience it themselves in a familiar, low barrier to entry way with a simple chat prompt.

Re: There is no hard takeoff

#15

Post by FeepingCreature »

bilsbie wrote: post #9

This makes good points. And it articulates an idea I’ve been having trouble getting down. What if increasing intelligence is an exponential problem and the reason humans all have somewhat similar intelligence isn’t that we peaked at some level but that even vast additional intelligence just doesn’t get much more traction against the universe of problems. Eg doubling your compute doesn’t get you many more cities in th…

IQ is robustly correlated with income though.

Re: There is no hard takeoff

#16

Post by FeepingCreature »

anileated wrote: post #8
ilaksh wrote: post #5

I am all for AI research and integrating more AI use into society. Currently working on tools based on GPT. I think it has incredible potential to help humans. But at the same time, I am sure that AI does not need to have a hard takeoff to be extremely dangerous. It just needs to get a bit smarter and somewhat faster every few months. Within less than a decade we will have systems that output "thoughts" and actions a…

To see how “AI” can be dangerous just look how social media bubble/recommendation algorithms would radicalize people, even with much cruder ML. People tend to miss that it’s not about some model starting to “think” and act all sci-fi evil, just us humans applying powerful tech in irresponsible ways that we either don’t bother to assess due to lack of awareness or assess positively due to a conflict of interest (money…

If a human can apply AI irresponsibly, the AI can probably also learn to apply AI irresponsibly.

Re: There is no hard takeoff

#17

Post by em500 »

neatze wrote: post #6

> Oh wait…every hedge fund bro is already doing this. And most of them aren’t billionaires. The problem is your model needs to include all the computers playing the market, and it also needs to include the other hedge fund bros themselves. This strategy only dominates if you have more compute than the whole market itself, which you don’t. Best part of this article, honestly, I did not expected this, of-course one can…

That argument is a variation of the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), that at any moment market prices already reflect all information available to the public. Or as the old joke goes, two economists are walking down the street and pass by a hundred dollar bill without picking it up. A little while later one turns to the other and asks "was that a hundred dollar bill on the ground?" To which the other replies "it must be fake, if it was real someone would have picked it up already."

Every graduate level economics and finance student is aware of this joke, and also know EMH with more nuance than "you can't make money with trading". There's tons of research and debate about the various forms of the EMH. But you don't have to believe anything anyone else wrote. There's plenty of data and computing software available, so anyone can try everything for themselves.

Re: There is no hard takeoff

#18

Post by anileated »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #16
anileated wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To see how “AI” can be dangerous just look how social media bubble/recommendation algorithms would radicalize people, even with much cruder ML. People tend to miss that it’s not about some model starting to “think” and act all sci-fi evil, just us humans applying powerful tech in irresponsible ways that we either don’t bother to assess due to lack of awareness or assess positively due to a conflict of interest (money…

If a human can apply AI irresponsibly, the AI can probably also learn to apply AI irresponsibly.

Not really, humans are the ones who think and have agency.

Re: There is no hard takeoff

#20

Post by mysterydip »

Do we have enough historical weather data to train a decent AI on? Maybe this is already being done and is just a quieter area of research (in the headline sense)? I know for example every time a hurricane comes toward land all the weather places trot out a half dozen different model predictions saying different things. It would be great if there was more confidence in this area for planning.
Post reply on HN