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Vernor Vinge has died

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Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#141

Post by jhbadger »

protomolecule wrote: post #105
n4r9 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Butler also expanded this idea in his 1872 novel Erewhon, where he described a seemingly primitive island civilization that turned out to once had greater technology than the West, including mechanical AI, but they abandoned it when they began to fear its consequences. A lot of 20th century SF tropes in the Victorian period.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#142

Post by db48x »

geden wrote: post #60
turing_complete wrote: post #43

If you never read Vernor Vinge (except for his essay on the Technological Singularity), what would be the best book to start?

A Fire Upon The Deep, shortly followed by A Deepness In The Sky (which is even more page turny but kinda requires AFUTD. Across Real Time is also great and shorter.

I disagree with the notion that A Deepness in the Sky requires having read A Fire Upon the Deep. In fact, I would go so far as to say that each ends with an open question that is answered by the other, so that no matter which one you read first you will discover the answer in the second.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#143

Post by adastra22 »

unnamed76ri wrote: post #49
pontifier wrote: post #26

Oh man, I sincerely hope he was signed up for cryonics. If there was someone who deserved to see what the future holds, it was him.

From what I’ve read, cryonics seems like a massive scam pulled on rich people. The tissue damage in these frozen corpses is extensive and irreparable.

Then you obviously haven't read much about cryonics, which involves vitrification rather than freezing to avoid such tissue damage.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#144

Post by blauditore »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #93
gcr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peop…

> Furthermore I don't think people have a conception of how good these models are going to get within 5-10 years.

Pretty sure it's quite the opposite of what you're implying: People see those LLMs who closely resemble actual intelligence on the surface, but have some shortcomings. Now they extrapolate this and think it's just a small step to perfection and/or AGI, which is completely wrong.

One problem is that converging to an ideal is obviously non-linear, so getting the first 90% right is relatively easy, and closer to 100% it gets exponentially harder. Another problem is that LLMs are not really designed in a way to contain actual intelligence in the way humans would expect them to, so any apparent reasoning is very superficial as it's just language-based and statistical.

In a similar spirit, science fiction stories playing in the near future often tend to have spectacular technology, like flying personal cars, in-eye displays, beam travel, or mind reading devices. In the 1960s it was predicted for the 80s, in the 80s it was predicted for the 2000s etc.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#145

Post by justsomehnguy »

rsynnott wrote: post #136
jerf wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All currently-unknown real languages that an LLM might decode are languages that are unknown because of a lack of data, due the civilization being dead. An LLM won't necessarily be able to overcome that. In the book the characters had access to effectively unbounded input since it was a live civilization generating the data, plus they had reference to at least some video, and... something else that would be very usef…

Oh, yeah; I'm just not convinced there's any particular reason to think that LLMs would be useful for decoding languages. (That said it would be an interesting _experiment_, if a little hard to set up; you'd need a live language which hadn't made it into the LLM's training set at all, so you'd probably need to purpose-train an LLM...)

LLMs are.. not bad at finding some semantic relationships between some arbitrary data. Sure, if you dump an unknown language into LLM then you can only receive a semantically correct sentences of unknown meaning, but as you start to decode the language itself it would be way easier to find the relationships there, if not just outright replacing the terms with a translated ones.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#146

Post by ethagnawl »

gumby wrote: post #115
Simon321 wrote: post #20

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…

Just to clarify, the “singularity” conjectures a slightly different and more interesting phenomenon, one driven by technological advances, true, but its definition was not those advances. It was more the second derivative of future shock: technologies and culture that enabled and encouraged faster and faster change until the curve bent essentially vertical…asymptotimg to a mathematical singularity. An example my he s…

Here's a link to the full text of _Slow Tuesday Night_: https://web.archive.org/web/20060719184509/www.scifi.com/sci...

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#147

Post by jart »

ben_w wrote: post #106
jart wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/jekyl…

They're not guesses. We know they use A100s and we know how fast an A100 goes. You can cut a brain open and see how many neurons it has and how often they fire. Kurzweil's 10 petaflops for the brain (100e9 neurons * 1000 connections * 200 calculations) is a bit high for me honestly. I don't think connections count as flops. If a neuron only fires 5-50 times a second then that'd put the human brain at .5 to 5 teraflops it seems to me. That would explain why GPT is so much smarter and faster than people. The other estimates like 1e28 are measuring different things.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#148

Post by dmd »

thrtythreeforty wrote: post #129
dmd wrote: post #117

Please mirror, because more people should have a copy of this: https://3e.org/vvannot This is Vinge's annotated copy of A Fire Upon the Deep. It has all his comments and discussion with editors and early readers. It provides an absolutely fascinating insight into his writing process and shows the depth of effort he put into making sure everything made sense.

Thanks for mirroring this! This was only published on an old CD for the '93 Hugo winners, and I had a devil of a time trying to find a copy (inter-library-loan, etc) before realizing someone had archived it on archive.org. It is indeed well worth the time spent if you're a fan of Fire .

Is this annotated version on the archive.org CD? I couldn't find it in https://archive.org/download/hugo_nebula_1993

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#149

Post by db48x »

throw1234651234 wrote: post #120
SECProto wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Children Of The Sky is certainly available digitally.

It's a bad book, nowhere close to the first two in any regard.

Well, the characters are stuck on a primitive planet in the Slow Zone so if you go in expecting Space Opera then you’ll be disappointed. If you go in with a more open mind then you may find that there’s actually an interesting philosophical point to be examined and a decent story built around it.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#150

Post by PaulHoule »

gumby wrote: post #115
Simon321 wrote: post #20

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…

Just to clarify, the “singularity” conjectures a slightly different and more interesting phenomenon, one driven by technological advances, true, but its definition was not those advances. It was more the second derivative of future shock: technologies and culture that enabled and encouraged faster and faster change until the curve bent essentially vertical…asymptotimg to a mathematical singularity. An example my he s…

Note that the "Singularity" turns up in the novel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marooned_in_Realtime

where people can use a "Bobble" to freeze themselves in a stasis field and travel in time... forward. The singularity is some mysterious event that causes all of unbobbled humanity to disappear leaving the survivors wondering, even 10s of millions of years later, what happened. As such it is one of the best pretenses ever in sci-fi. (I am left wondering though if the best cultural comparison is "The Rapture" some Christians believe in making this more of a religiously motivated concept as opposed to sound futurism.)

I've long been fascinated by this differential equation

  dx
  -- = x^2
  dt
which has solutions that look like

  x = 1/(t₀-t)
which notably blows up at time t₀. It's a model of an "intelligence explosion" where improving technology speeds up the rate of technological process but the very low growth when t ≪ t₀ could also be a model for why it is hard to bootstrap a two-sided market, why some settlements fail, etc. About 20 years ago I was very interested in ecological accounting and wondering if we could outrace resource depletion and related problems and did a literature search for people developing models like this further and was pretty disappointed not to find much also it did appear as a footnote in the ecology literature here and there. Even papers like

https://agi-conf.org/2010/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/agi10si...

seem to miss it. (Surprised the lesswrong folks haven't picked it up but they don't seem too mathematically inclined)

---

Note I don't believe in the intelligence explosion because what we've seen in "Moore's law" recently is that each generation of chips is getting much more difficult and expensive to develop whereas the benefits of shrinks are shrinking and in fact we might be rudely surprised that the state of the art chips of the new future (and possibly 2024) burn up pretty quickly. It's not so clear that chipmakers would have continued to invest in a new generation if governments weren't piling huge money into a "great powers" competition... That is, already we might be past the point of economic returns.

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