Live data from Hacker News

Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?

fikisipi.substack.com

41–50 of 70 posts

Re: Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?

#41
post #26

We must thank the author for the content-free article, so each of us can freely ramble on tangents, as if we are looking at an abstract art piece. My beef is with the Dwarkesh Patel podcast. While he has some very good interviews (Carl Shulman, or even Zuckerberg) he seems to have a lot of rambling-on conversstion by very young employees of AI startups (openAI). I don't get value from those because they don't really…

I've been enjoying the Machine Learning Street Talk podcast, they talk to real practioners on real topics.

Re: Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?

#42
post #12

It’s pretty bizarre how SV decision makers have shifted from talking about ML to LLMs to straight up Artificial Intelligence. I think one of the reasons is that LLMs are very good at what the execs do every day for a living and because of that, use as a way of assessing each other’s mental capacity: producing coherent-sounding speech (1). Now that the LLM can do what any VP has dedicated their entire life to masterin…

Reads like execs just have a new delusion about outsourcing the work of high paid workers to someone cheaper. Curious how this bubble will bust, or if they can fake it long enough to reach the singular point where the delusion becomes real.

Re: Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?

#44
post #36
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we will agree on a definition of AGI, nor should we. To me this is settled by freedom of religion being a universal human right. This is why the AGI in X years is such an interesting perspective. (And why I'm deeply concerned about my downvoters.)

Treating AGI as gods is another example, yes, though I'd forgotten that one. Same direction as ASI but moreso.

People have been putting up signs on lamp posts saying "Jesus is coming" all my life.

I'll just leave it at that.

Re: Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?

#45
post #26

We must thank the author for the content-free article, so each of us can freely ramble on tangents, as if we are looking at an abstract art piece. My beef is with the Dwarkesh Patel podcast. While he has some very good interviews (Carl Shulman, or even Zuckerberg) he seems to have a lot of rambling-on conversstion by very young employees of AI startups (openAI). I don't get value from those because they don't really…

I agree, but it is the nature of the content cycle. They can’t all be winners. I very heavily curate my listening, and bounce off when it’s obvious the guest is not contributing meaningfully to my understanding of the topic.

Re: Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?

#46
post #12

It’s pretty bizarre how SV decision makers have shifted from talking about ML to LLMs to straight up Artificial Intelligence. I think one of the reasons is that LLMs are very good at what the execs do every day for a living and because of that, use as a way of assessing each other’s mental capacity: producing coherent-sounding speech (1). Now that the LLM can do what any VP has dedicated their entire life to masterin…

After being initially dazzled, I've drifted firmly into the camp of "this hype cycle is nonsense". I get why VCs/Startups/investors/legislators want (or even need) a hype cycle in a post-ZIRP economy, in an election year, with geo instability. But there's nothing, neither data/evidence that LLM === AGI or even a path that points towards LLM → AGI.

AFAICT, LLMs are stochastic predictors of words within a large context. If you transfer (pun intended) that behavior over to humans, you would call a person like that a bullshitter, or at best a salesguy :-) A bullshitter as a person or team member is useful, but not scalable in the singularity sense: you can scale its output in terms of quantity, but not quality: the stochastic parrot may move prospects through the funnel (necessarily to a higher-IQ actual salesperson) but it will not create a patent from scratch (and probably will not close a deal).

So, we're not getting AGI. Given that the stochastic approach has hit scalability limits (there's no more data to feed), we need a new approach. Are there approaches that can bring AGI outside of LLMs? (AlphaZero?) Or is our industry just a bunch of stochastic parrots that complete every sentence with "eventually we'll have AGI and everything will be either great or destroyed" (which is exactly what an LLM would say at this point)?

Re: Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?

#47
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't he say right at the start that basically nobody is pricing this stuff in right? Becoming an investor makes a ton of sense if you earnestly believe that.

My point is that it is meaningless to make a lot of money for his scenario

Do you think all previous wealth will simply be 'reset' in some way, come the AI rapture?

Re: Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?

#48
post #26

We must thank the author for the content-free article, so each of us can freely ramble on tangents, as if we are looking at an abstract art piece. My beef is with the Dwarkesh Patel podcast. While he has some very good interviews (Carl Shulman, or even Zuckerberg) he seems to have a lot of rambling-on conversstion by very young employees of AI startups (openAI). I don't get value from those because they don't really…

100% agreed. His earlier conversations before the recent AI boom were pretty great, going deep into a wide range of topics. Since then, it's taken a sharp nose-dive into AGI navel gazing. He's clearly drank too much of the kool-aid.

Aschenbrenner et al are clearly smart, but they have no real world experience to base their (entirely biased) predictions on. It's all very on-brand for the EA and EA-adjacent folks, who spend way too much time on the internet and not enough time out in the real world.

Re: Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?

#49

How is this article worthy of the front page of HN? It must be simply the click-bait nature of the title as there is nothing of substance beyond that.

It is a question. I tried to put what my opinion is on a few statements but I absolutely cannot summarize 160 pages (Business Insider did using GPT, which I find insulting and funny) nor have a 100% opinion on something that involves national security, secrets and other stuff that I don't have access to.

Re: Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?

#50

How is this article worthy of the front page of HN? It must be simply the click-bait nature of the title as there is nothing of substance beyond that.

I thought it was extremely thought provoking. Are you overconfident in your weights perhaps?

Thank you.
Post reply on HN