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Vernor Vinge has died

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Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#91
post #69
post #8

Oh man, this makes me sad. I remember reading A Fire Upon the Deep based on a Usenet recommendation, and then immediately wanting to read everything else he wrote. A Deepness in the Sky is a worthy sequel. He wasn’t prolific, but what he wrote was gold. He had a Tolkienesque ability to build world depth not by lengthy exposition, but by expert omission . A true name in sci-fi.

Bizarrely, there's a second sequel to A Fire Upon The Deep, but it's never been digitised.

Children Of The Sky is certainly available digitally.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#92
post #53

He coined the concept 'singularity' in the sense of machines becoming smarter than humans what a time for him to die with all the advancements we're seeing in artificial intelligence. I wonder what he thought about it all. >The concept and the term "singularity" were popularized by Vernor Vinge first in 1983 in an article that claimed that once humans create intelligences greater than their own, there will be a techn…

with respect, we don’t know if he was spot on. Companies shoehorning language models into their products is a far cry from the transformative societal change he describes will happen. nothing like a singularity has yet happened at the scale he describes, and might not happen without more fundamental shifts/breakthroughs in AI research.

> Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.

Blackwell.

> o Develop human/computer symbiosis in art: Combine the graphic generation capability of modern machines and the esthetic sensibility of humans. Of course, there has been an enormous amount of research in designing computer aids for artists, as labor saving tools. I'm suggesting that we explicitly aim for a greater merging of competence, that we explicitly recognize the cooperative approach that is possible. Karl Sims [22] has done wonderful work in this direction.

Stable Diffusion.

> o Develop interfaces that allow computer and network access without requiring the human to be tied to one spot, sitting in front of a computer. (This is an aspect of IA that fits so well with known economic advantages that lots of effort is already being spent on it.)

iPhone and Android.

> o Develop more symmetrical decision support systems. A popular research/product area in recent years has been decision support systems. This is a form of IA, but may be too focussed on systems that are oracular. As much as the program giving the user information, there must be the idea of the user giving the program guidance.

Cicero.

> Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace.

Trump.

> o Use local area nets to make human teams that really work (ie, are more effective than their component members). This is generally the area of "groupware", already a very popular commercial pursuit. The change in viewpoint here would be to regard the group activity as a combination organism. In one sense, this suggestion might be regarded as the goal of inventing a "Rules of Order" for such combination operations. For instance, group focus might be more easily maintained than in classical meetings. Expertise of individual human members could be isolated from ego issues such that the contribution of different members is focussed on the team project. And of course shared data bases could be used much more conveniently than in conventional committee operations. (Note that this suggestion is aimed at team operations rather than political meetings. In a political setting, the automation described above would simply enforce the power of the persons making the rules!)

Ingress.

> o Exploit the worldwide Internet as a combination human/machine tool. Of all the items on the list, progress in this is proceeding the fastest and may run us into the Singularity before anything else. The power and influence of even the present-day Internet is vastly underestimated. For instance, I think our contemporary computer systems would break under the weight of their own complexity if it weren't for the edge that the USENET "group mind" gives the system administration and support people!) The very anarchy of the worldwide net development is evidence of its potential. As connectivity and bandwidth and archive size and computer speed all increase, we are seeing something like Lynn Margulis' [14] vision of the biosphere as data processor recapitulated, but at a million times greater speed and with millions of humanly intelligent agents (ourselves).

Twitter.

> o Limb prosthetics is a topic of direct commercial applicability. Nerve to silicon transducers can be made [13]. This is an exciting, near-term step toward direct communcation.

Atom Limbs.

> o Similar direct links into brains may be feasible, if the bit rate is low: given human learning flexibility, the actual brain neuron targets might not have to be precisely selected. Even 100 bits per second would be of great use to stroke victims who would otherwise be confined to menu-driven interfaces.

Neuralink.

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https://justine.lol/dox/singularity.txt

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#93
post #53

He coined the concept 'singularity' in the sense of machines becoming smarter than humans what a time for him to die with all the advancements we're seeing in artificial intelligence. I wonder what he thought about it all. >The concept and the term "singularity" were popularized by Vernor Vinge first in 1983 in an article that claimed that once humans create intelligences greater than their own, there will be a techn…

with respect, we don’t know if he was spot on. Companies shoehorning language models into their products is a far cry from the transformative societal change he describes will happen. nothing like a singularity has yet happened at the scale he describes, and might not happen without more fundamental shifts/breakthroughs in AI research.

What we're seeing right now with LLMs is like music in the late 30s after the invention of the electric guitar. At that point people still have no idea how to use it so, so they were treating it like an amplified acoustic guitar. It took almost 40 years for people to come up with the idea of harnessing feedback and distortion to use the guitar to create otherworldly soundscapes, and another 30 beyond that before people even approached the limit of guitar's range with pedals and such.

LLMs are a game changer that are going to enable a new programming paradigm as models get faster and better at producing structured output. There are entire classes of app that couldn't exist before because there there was a non-trivial "fuzzy" language problem in the loop. Furthermore I don't think people have a conception of how good these models are going to get within 5-10 years.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#94
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK. I'm imagining a correlation engine that looks through code as a series of prompts that are used to generate more code from the corpus that is statistically likely to follow. And now I'm transforming that through the concept of taking a photograph and applying the clone tool via a light airbrush. Repeat enough times, and you get uncompilable mud. LLMs are not going to generate improvements.

They might generate improvements, but I’m not sure why people think those improvements would be unbounded. Think of it like improvements to jet engines or internal combustion engines - rapid improvements followed by decades of very tiny improvements. We’ve gone from 32-bit LLM weights down to 16, then 8, then 4 bit weights, and then a lot of messy diminishing returns below that. Moore’s is running on fumes for proces…

Saying that AI hardware is near a dead end because Moore's law is running out of steam is silly. Even GPUs are very general purpose, we can make a lot of progress in the hardware space via extreme specialization, approximate computing and analog computing.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#95

This guy was one of the greats. A deepness in the sky (the sequel) is one of my favourite sci fi books of all time, and even better than Fire upon the deep imo.

A Deepness in the Sky was perhaps the first "hard sci-fi" novel I ever read (this was before I knew of Greg Egan). The concept of spiders and the onOff planet was just awe-inspiring. While Egan's idea-density is off the charts, I found Deepness in the Sky to be the most complete and entertaining hard-scifi novel. It has a lot of novel science but ensures that the reader is never overwhelmed (Egan will have you overwh…

> Vinge had literal human LMs in the novel to decode the Spider language.

Could you elaborate on this? It's been a while since I read the novel. I remember the use of Focus to create obsessive problem-solvers, but not sure how it relates to generative models or LLMs.

Thinking about it, I'm not sure how useful LLMs can be for translating entirely new languages. As I understand it they rely on statistical correlations harvested from training data which would not include any existing translations by definition.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#97
post #76
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK. I'm imagining a correlation engine that looks through code as a series of prompts that are used to generate more code from the corpus that is statistically likely to follow. And now I'm transforming that through the concept of taking a photograph and applying the clone tool via a light airbrush. Repeat enough times, and you get uncompilable mud. LLMs are not going to generate improvements.

Saying they definitely won't or they definitely will are equally over-broad and premature. I currently expect we'll need another architectural breakthrough; but also, back in 2009 I expected no-steering-wheel-included self driving cars no later than 2018, and that the LLM output we actually saw in 2023 would be the final problem to be solved in the path to AGI. Prediction is hard, especially about the future.

GPT4 does inference at 560 teraflops. Human brain goes 10,000 teraflops. NVIDIA just unveiled their latest Blackwell chip yesterday which goes 20,000 teraflops. If you buy an NVL72 rack of the things, it goes 1,400,000 teraflops. That's what Jensen Huang's GPT runs on I bet.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#98
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Deepness in the Sky was perhaps the first "hard sci-fi" novel I ever read (this was before I knew of Greg Egan). The concept of spiders and the onOff planet was just awe-inspiring. While Egan's idea-density is off the charts, I found Deepness in the Sky to be the most complete and entertaining hard-scifi novel. It has a lot of novel science but ensures that the reader is never overwhelmed (Egan will have you overwh…

> Vinge had literal human LMs in the novel to decode the Spider language. Could you elaborate on this? It's been a while since I read the novel. I remember the use of Focus to create obsessive problem-solvers, but not sure how it relates to generative models or LLMs. Thinking about it, I'm not sure how useful LLMs can be for translating entirely new languages. As I understand it they rely on statistical correlations…

I do not recall the exact details but I remember that some of the focused individuals were kept in a grid or matrix of some sort. The aim of these grids were to translate the spider-talk and achieve some form of conversation with the spiders on the planet. It is also mentioned that the focused individuals have their own invented language with which they communicate to other focused individuals, which is faster and more efficient than human languages.

I may be misremembering certain details, but the similarity to neural networks and their use in machine translation was quite apparent.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#99
I had the privilege to interview Vernor back in 2011, and continued to have interactions with him on and off in the intervening years. He was, as others have said, just immeasurably kind and thoughtful. I'm sad that I'll not have the opportunity to speak with him again.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#100
A true visionary, he will be missed. His fiction was entertaining, but also filled with important lessons that will help us prepare for the future in a better and more humane way. Thank you Vernor Vinge.
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