291–300 of 334 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except for the weird dogs. "A deepness in the sky" is the epitome for me.
I couldn't buy the audio relaying wolf packs either, but enjoyed the other aspects of his fiction.
Best aliens ever.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 conver…
Of course it doesn't help that people are a bit hand wavy about what that mark exactly is to begin with. We're very good at moving the goal posts. So that 100% mark has the problem that it's poorly defined and in any case just a brief moment in time given exponential improvements in capabilities. In the eyes of most we're not quite there yet for whatever there is. I would agree with that.
At some point we'll be debating whether we are actually there, and then things move on from there. A lot of that debate is going to be a bit emotional and irrational of course. People are very sensitive about these things and they get a bit defensive when you portray them as clearly inferior to something else. Arguably, most people I deal with don't actually know a lot, their reasoning is primitive/irrational, and if you'd benchmark them against an LLM it wouldn't be that great. Or that fair.
The singularity is kind of the point where most of the improvements to AI are going to come from ideas and suggestions generated by AI rather than by humans. Whether that's this decade or the next is a bit hard to predict obviously.
Human brains are quite complicated but there's only a finite number of neurons in there; a bit under 100 billion. We can waffle a bit about the complexity of their connections. But at some point it becomes a simple matter of throwing more hardware at the problem. With LLMs pushing tens-hundreds of parameters already, you could legitimately ask what a few more doublings in numbers here enable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you - I love HN for things like this! A Fire Upon the Deep is one of my favorite books/series. RIP
Except for the weird dogs. "A deepness in the sky" is the epitome for me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I couldn't buy the audio relaying wolf packs either, but enjoyed the other aspects of his fiction.
What?! Blasphemy! A computer nerd created a fictional distributed intelligence, and you were not entertained? Best aliens ever.
The third book -- while not nearly as good as either Fire Upon The Deep or Deepness in the Sky -- had even more fascinating insights into the practical mechanics of a group mind with physical bodies. Like the fact that romance happens on two separate levels!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't use the A word, because it's one of those words that popular culture has poisoned with fear, anger, and magical thinking. I can at least respect Kurzweil though and he says the human brain has 10 petaflops. Blackwell has 20 petaflops. That would seem to make it capable of superhuman intelligence to me. Especially if we consider that it can focus purely on thinking and doesn't have to regulate a body. Imagine…
I think there's a big focus on petaflops and that it may have been a good measure to think about initially, but now we're missing the mark. If a human brain does its magic with 10 petaflops, and you have 1 petaflop, you should be able to make an equivalent to the human brain that runs at 1/10th of the speed but never sleeps. In other words, once you've reached the same order of magnitude it doesn't matter. On the oth…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except for the weird dogs. "A deepness in the sky" is the epitome for me.
I couldn't buy the audio relaying wolf packs either, but enjoyed the other aspects of his fiction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
not quite the same, but Iain M. Banks is in my top 5, along with Vernor Vinge.
I've so far only read Consider Phlebas, and while it's an interesting dystopia where humans have no purpose, and machines could do everything (if allowed), it's not an actual interesting story . It's like he had the idea for the dystopia, with the main character fighting against the machines. And then tried to write a story around it. The central idea is interesting I guess, but the story built around it is not. It d…
Unfortunately every single one of his books has this problem. It's like all of his novels are written from the perspective of the protagonist's housecat.
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.
There's an interview with Vinge from 2009 [0] which contains a screenshot [1] of him using Emacs with his home-brewed proto-Org-mode annotation system (which appears in parent's link). [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170215121054/http://www.norwes... [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170104130412/http://www.norwes...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except for the weird dogs. "A deepness in the sky" is the epitome for me.
Personally I found the chapters about the spiders absurdly boring. They're just big sentient spiders; nothing novel like a group mind. Fortunately the other half of the Deepness plot more than made up for it though.
They're giant sentient spiders living in a 50's sitcom. What's not to like?
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.
Singularity doesn't necessarily rely on LLMs by any means. It's just that communication is improving and the number of people doing research is increasing. Weak AI is icing on top, let alone LLMs, which are being shoe-horned into everything now. VV clearly adds these two other paths: o Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent. o Biological scien…
I don't believe LLMs will really get us much of anywhere, Singularity-wise. They're just ridiculously inefficient in terms of compute (and thus power) needs to even do the basic pattern-prediction they do today. They're neat tools for human augmentation in some cases, but that's about all they contribute.
I think, even prior to the recent explosion of LLM stuff, that the aggregate of Humans and the depth of their interconnections on the Internet is already starting to form at least the beginnings of a sort of Singularity, without any AI-related topics needing to be introduced. The way memes (real memes, not silly jokes) spread around the Internet and shape thoughts across all the users, the way the users bounce ideas off each other and refine them, the way viral advocacy and information sharing works, etc. Basically the Singularity is just going to be the emergent group consciousness and capabilities of the collective Internet-connected set of Humans.