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Vernor Vinge has died

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Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#101

Post by jart »

mechagodzilla wrote: post #79
dsr_ wrote: 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…

Bro, Jensen Huang just unveiled a chip yesterday that goes 20 petaflops. Intel's latest raptorlake cpu goes 800 gigaflops. Can you really explain 25000x progress by the 2x larger die size? I'm sure reactionary America wanted Moore's law to run out of steam but the Taiwanese betrayal made up for all the lost Moore's law progress and then some.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#102

Post by vvillena »

Voultapher wrote: post #88
smogcutter wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, discovering Nau’s chamber of horrors is meant to strip any illusions about his motivations.

Book spoilers. IIRC wasn't it the chamber/ship of someone he worked with, that he tolerated? Read it like six or seven years ago, so the details are fuzzy. The impression I kept was that he did a lot of evil stuff not because he relished the suffering he created in others, but because he didn't mind it.

Yes, it was not his chamber, but Nau never wanted one because he kept a pet in the open.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#103

Post by _yb2s »

dsr_ wrote: post #72
mnsc wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine the first llm to suggest an improvement to itself that no human has considered. Then imagine what happens next.

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.

LLMs are so much more than you are assuming… text, images, code are merely abstractions to represent reality. Accurate prediction requires no less than usefully generalizable models and deep understanding of the actual processes in the world that produced those representations.

I know they can provide creative new solutions to totally novel problems from firsthand experience… instead of assuming what they should be able to do, I experimented to see what they can actually do.

Focusing on the simple mechanics of training and prediction is to miss the forest for the trees. It’s as absurd as saying how can living things have any intelligence? They’re just bags of chemicals oxidizing carbon. True but irrelevant- it misses the deeper fact that solving almost any problem deeply requires understanding and modeling all of the connected problems, and so on, until you’ve pretty much encompassed everything.

Ultimately it doesn’t even matter what problem you’re training for- all predictive systems will converge on general intelligence as you keep improving predictive accuracy.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#105

Post by protomolecule »

n4r9 wrote: post #52
nabla9 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concept predates von Neuman. First known person to present the idea was mathematician and philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet in the late 1700s. Not surprising, because he also laid out most ideals and values of modern liberal democracy as they are now. Amazing philosopher. He basically invented the idea of ensemble learning (known as boosting in machine learning). Nicolas de Condorcet and the First Intelligence Exp…

That kind of niche knowledge is what I come to HN for!

Also "Darwin among the Machines"[0] written by Samuel Butler in 1863, that's 4 years after Darwin's "On the Origin of Species".

Butlerian jihad[1] is the war against machines in the Dune universe.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_among_the_Machines

[1] https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#106

Post by ben_w »

jart wrote: post #97
ben_w wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> GPT4 does inference at 560 teraflops. Human brain goes 10,000 teraflops

AFAICT, both are guesses. The low-end estimate I've seen for human brains are ~ 162 GFLOPS[0] to 10^28 FLOPS[1]; even just the model size for GPT-4 isn't confirmed, merely a combination of human inference of public information with a rumour widely described as a "leak", likewise the compute requirements.

[0] https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2022/02/17/brai...

[1] https://aiimpacts.org/brain-performance-in-flops/

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#107

Post by remram »

@dang Can't this thread be titled "Vernor Vinge has died"? I feel like this is the usual title for those. With this title it's not obvious that the news is he died yesterday.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#108

Post by tialaramex »

Vetch wrote: post #78
tialaramex wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that all of Vinge's longer works are about Singularitarian disasters. In Tatja we eventually figure out that Tatja herself is arguably the disaster. In Fire it was asleep in the library, and I think in Rainbows there's both Rabbit obviously and the weapon the story focuses on. You can think of the apparent survival of Rabbit as a hint of doom right at the end, like the fact R's diary is in the slush pil…

I disagree with your characterization of Vinge's works as primarily about disasters but I agree they were all about an accelerating technological pace and its relation with intelligence. I'm fairly certain the mysterious event in Marooned in Realtime was Ascension. For Fire Upon Deep, it was sealed and there was a powerful countermeasure. The rabbit of Rainbows End felt like a trickster to me. Child-like playfulness,…

I think I've said "catastrophes" before rather than "disasters" and I think that's a better word, but I stand by it.

It doesn't matter that Rabbit doesn't intend harm. Neither does Tatja, at least to those who aren't trying to harm her. But well, look at what she does, at first she almost gets a few dozen people killed, reckless teenager but hardly extraordinary, next time we see her she's about to tear apart a kingdom to fraudulently seize power, and as collateral she's (without telling them) ensured everybody she knew previously will die if she fails. By the end Tatja has started a war in order to seize control of a means to signal off world. Only two other people on her world even realises what "signalling off world" would even mean, but she's potentially going to kill huge numbers of people to achieve it anyway. She's a catastrophe even though that wasn't her intent. She does apologise, for whatever it's worth, right at the very end, to people who were close to her and from whom she belatedly realises she is now so distant.

Rabbit is indeed just playing. When the library nearly falls over and kills a lot of university staff and students, that's just a small taste of what happens when playful Rabbit forgets for a moment that this isn't really just a game. Consider just how powerful Rabbit is remembering that's a distraction. The whole fight, which causes massive disruption to the city and easily could have led to enormous loss of life, isn't what Rabbit was really doing, it was just to distract Bob's team so that they don't focus on the labs for a few hours. And remember that Rabbit's goal here is clearly to secure the weapon for itself, not to deny it to the antagonist.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#110

Post by jordanpg »

nl wrote: post #70

One of the true greats. True Names is a better cyberpunk story than anything Gibson or Neal Stephenson wrote. Everyone mentions A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky which are some of the best sci fi ever written, but I think The Peace War is way underrate too (although it was nominated for a Hugo award which it lost to Neuromancer ). RIP

A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky are the books that opened my eyes to the utter incomprehensibility and weirdness of what intelligent alien life would really be like if it's out there.

I also credit the Transcend as being the first plausible, secular explanation for "gods" that I ever came across back in my militant atheist days.

These stories will be with me until I am gone, too. Thank you, Vernor. RIP.

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