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The Cognitive Dark Forest

ryelang.org

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Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#101

Post by stephen_cagle »

I think the most interesting idea here is the idea of people purposely keeping secrets in order to maintain advantages.

Beliefs: At this time, I do not actually believe that LLM's can innovate in any real way. I'm not even clear if they can abstract. I think the most creative thing they can do is act as digital "nudgers" on combinatorial deterministic problems; illustrated by their performance on very specific geometry and chemistry problems.

Anyway, my point is that I think they may still need human beings to actually provide novel solutions to problems. To handle the unexpected. To simplify. LLM's can execute once they have been trained, but they cannot train themselves.

In the past, the saying in silicon valley was often "ideas are cheap". And there was some truth to that. Execution was far more difficult then the idea itself. Execution was so much more difficult than "pure thought" that you could often publicize the algorithmic/process/whatever that you had and still offer a product/service/consultancy that made use of it. The execution was the valuable thing.

But LLM's execute at a cost that is fractional of human cost and multiples of human development speed. The idea hasn't increased in value, but the execution cost has decreased markedly. In this world, protecting the idea is far more valuable than it is in the previous world. You can't keep your competitors away by out executing them, but you can keep them away if you have some advantage that they do not understand.

And, I agree, that is quite worrisome. If people don't share knowledge then knowledge disseminate much more slowly as everyone has to independently learn things on their own. That is a frightening future.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#102

Post by oh_my_goodness »

RajT88 wrote: post #96
oh_my_goodness wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and the big guys can't steal your customers. What a crazy idea.

The point is - they're going to do that anyways if they want to. Owning the LLM platforms makes it marginally cheaper to do so. It's not the risk it's being made out to be.

Absolutely. The fact that they know your app better than you do, and that they can revoke your ability to develop it at any moment, those are just details. Those things won't change the game at all.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#103

Post by mwkaufma »

Like Cixin Liu's "Dark Forest" which inspired the author, this is science fiction.

LLMs do not have and cannot obtain the capabilities the author is hand-wringing about, and the current much-hyped apparent-productivity will pop with the bubble & corps have to start paying full-price for chatbot access.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#104

Post by xantronix »

arkensaw wrote: post #74
xantronix wrote: post #51

I have been mulling this over and I think I have some solutions in mind, at least for myself. • No more sharing my project work as open source. No more open discussion. I don't care how badly I want to show the world; if I'd like somebody to see, I will have it printed in a physical book, or I will give them access to my private repository not reachable via the public Internet. • Bring back LAN parties. Not for gamin…

I don't know, I think it's an overreaction. > No more sharing my project work as open source. No more open discussion. I don't care how badly I want to show the world; if I'd like somebody to see, I will have it printed in a physical book, or I will give them access to my private repository not reachable via the public Internet. If you have a project you would have open-sourced, and you don't do that for fear that th…

> If you have a project you would have open-sourced, and you don't do that for fear that the LLM god will steal it, what's the point of building it at all?

To prove to myself that I can, and to solve problems in a way I enjoy.

I'm not saying I want to go into utter solitude; I just want to be a lot more careful where and how I share my works.

Addendum: I think the idea of private art and code collectives, entirely separate from concerns of LLM consumption, are an interesting idea worth pursuit. Has something like that been pursued before? It's reason enough for me to engage in that.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#105

Post by hx8 »

arkensaw wrote: post #74
xantronix wrote: post #51

I have been mulling this over and I think I have some solutions in mind, at least for myself. • No more sharing my project work as open source. No more open discussion. I don't care how badly I want to show the world; if I'd like somebody to see, I will have it printed in a physical book, or I will give them access to my private repository not reachable via the public Internet. • Bring back LAN parties. Not for gamin…

I don't know, I think it's an overreaction. > No more sharing my project work as open source. No more open discussion. I don't care how badly I want to show the world; if I'd like somebody to see, I will have it printed in a physical book, or I will give them access to my private repository not reachable via the public Internet. If you have a project you would have open-sourced, and you don't do that for fear that th…

[dead]

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#106

Post by mikewarot »

In a recurring metatheme when it comes to AI and coding, I call bullshit. It's been 80+ years since we had a really great idea introduced, in "As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush[1,2]. We still don't have a Memex. Hell, we don't even have a standard way to add annotation[3] on top of hypertext. No matter how useful the idea is, and how much some of us want it, it just isn't going to happen because of copyright.

Instead, we've got the slop[4,5] that TBL came up with, and it stuck.

The best ideas aren't the most profitable, and thus remain outside the goals of the "Dark Forest". The best thing to do is to just have fun, and not worry about profit, like this man, his cats, and his use of the 3d printer to make a train for them.[6]

  [1] https://worrydream.com/refs/Bush%20-%20As%20We%20May%20Think%20(Life%20Magazine%209-10-1945).pdf
  [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/
  [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_annotation
  [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web
  [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML
  [6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3CnDXh7hH0 - "Building a Cat-Sized Lego Train"

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#107

Post by satvikpendem »

oh_my_goodness wrote: post #102
RajT88 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is - they're going to do that anyways if they want to. Owning the LLM platforms makes it marginally cheaper to do so. It's not the risk it's being made out to be.

Absolutely. The fact that they know your app better than you do, and that they can revoke your ability to develop it at any moment, those are just details. Those things won't change the game at all.

Unless you're using their API (in which case there's always platform risk, same as before), this is not an issue. There are lots of half assed implementations of ideas by the big companies that smaller companies run circles around, Innovator's Dilemma was literally written about this.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#108

Post by spartanatreyu »

This post puts forward two paths:

1) Everyone and everything is subsumed into the forest. Innovation becomes unprofitable for the innovator as the one who controls the forest uses their capital to clone every new innovation.

2) Everyone withdraws from the forest. Innovation goes private. The forest stops growing, but doesn't die.

---

But there's two things the post doesn't consider:

1) Viral licensing.

What happens to a model if it is trained on data that comes with a license? What happens if the laws that be decide that the model producers, the models and the products of the models themselves must follow the conditions of the licences. How will that affect the model producers? What if customers don't want to be beholden to those licenses? What happens if the conventional wisdom is to avoid models to avoid lawsuits? What happens when models, model producers and customers power lawsuits against (other) model producers? Where would the new equilibrium between model producers and innovators move to?

2) Non-profits models

What happens to model producers if customer shift to become non-profits themselves, specifically those that pay employees instead of model producers. Would the model producers become starved out? Or would they need to switch to non-profit status as well? How would model producers, the models and the forest as a whole change if profit no longer became the priority?

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#109

Post by viccis »

king_phil wrote: post #3

Dark forest makes no sense to me. Why would a civilization eradicate another, spending huge amounts of resources (time, energy, material) when the universe has such an enormous scale that you cannot even get to each other in a timescale that makes much sense...

It's a silly concept IMO because it assumes that civilizations with the ability to do interstellar travel or communication make the decision to not do so because they have knowledge of an interstellar force that destroys any civilization that does so. It would seem like any civilization that becomes aware of such a force would be destroyed, so how would all of these surviving ones know of the danger? Actual dark forests are quiet because a mix of the animals' instinct and visible signs of danger.

While it's possible that some civilizations would hypothetically be able to observe what happened to others and keep quiet, they would all have to do so to solve the contradictions of Fermi's paradox.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#110

Post by mannanj »

spartanatreyu wrote: post #108

This post puts forward two paths: 1) Everyone and everything is subsumed into the forest. Innovation becomes unprofitable for the innovator as the one who controls the forest uses their capital to clone every new innovation. 2) Everyone withdraws from the forest. Innovation goes private. The forest stops growing, but doesn't die. --- But there's two things the post doesn't consider: 1) Viral licensing. What happens t…

what about we properly implement copyright and protection for software to prevent cloning style theft?

I mean we haven't had an innovation in patents and trademark for software for how long? Why is it that only hardware can be copyrighted and trademarked - can we really find no way to do this that can't be abused by patent trolls?

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