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The Cognitive Dark Forest

ryelang.org

171–180 of 301 posts

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's rumors based on vibes. There are attempts to track and quantify this with repeated model evaluations multiple times per day, this but no sawtooth pattern has emerged as far as I know.

I don't want to go too far down the conspiracy rabbit hole, but the vendors know everyone's prompts so it would be trivial for them to track the trackers and spoof the results. We already know that they substitute different models as a cost-saving measure, so substituting models to fool the repeated evaluations would be trivial. We also already know that they actively seek out viral examples of poor performance on ce…

If a claim is unfalsifiable, it contains no information

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#173
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This was the same before, if you had a novel idea and make a product out of it others follow. You've almost captured the full picture of it. If you have a great idea, it's not going to be self-evidently enough of a great idea until you've proved it can make money. That's the hard part which comes at great personal, professional and financial risk. Algorithms are cheap. Sure, they could use your LLM history to figur…

I don't think the risk is that they copy your app. The risk is that they make the category a built-in feature in something people already use. At that point, copying the product and taking the customers start to look like the same problem.

Yup, pre-cog Sherlocking. The mass keeps accreting towards the already too large players.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#174
post #71

This article makes no real sense to me. >You think of something new and express it - through a prompt, through code, through a product - it enters the system. Your novel idea becomes training data. The sheer act of thinking outside the box makes the box bigger. This was the same before, if you had a novel idea and make a product out of it others follow. Especially for LLMs, they are not (till now) learning on the fly…

I'm sure being exposed to one million video games instead of 100 works just the same, scarcity was a feature not a bug.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#175
But then why don’t the big corpos take each other down by vibe coding each others offerings until only one is left?

You build your product audience off the back of your community and sense of taste just as much as the code itself. I love what Brad does with liliputing.com. I love what dang et al do with this place. I love what Stephen Lavelle does at increpare.com. 3Blue1Brown, Steve Ramsey’s Woodworking for Mere Mortals, Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared… I guess I’m straying into content not just code but the underlying theme is good taste and good ideas and a good workflow through craftsmanship and custom tools*.

You won’t make billions but you’ll make something worth engaging with. If anything, I’m looking forward to a future of more creators not fewer.

* Oh! Vibecoding is 3D printing and AI slop is land-filament? Doesn’t mean you can’t do amazing things with an LLM / X1 Bamboo, just that if you don’t put much effort in then… it shows!

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#177
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. Knowledge is being commodified.

> Knowledge is being commodified. Already was well before AI, the difference now is that a few big AI providers risk becoming the ultimate rent-seekers that will increasingly capture all of the value of that commodified knowledge whether the original knowledge generators want that or not. There is no opt out, everything will be vacuumed up into the machine mind. This will almost certainly lead to vastly increased amo…

Industrial-scale plagiarism. A form of copyright-laundering only available to big actors.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This was the same before, if you had a novel idea and make a product out of it others follow. The article says: "Ideas are cheap - execution is hard" "Announcing, signaling your ideas offered much greater benefit than risk, because your value multiplied by connections, and execution was the moat you could stand behind." That's the key difference. It used to be much harder for a competitor to catch up to the state o…

And it's not just that the execution is faster now. The competition saw the "outer shell" of your idea. But LLM platforms (the forest) - they see the internals, if you used them to explore and develop it. They also see all similar ideas across the globe. And they own - not rent the compute and models - as you do from them. If we want to extend this, they could "pre-cog" your idea and build it even before you do. I'm…

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Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#179
post #71

This article makes no real sense to me. >You think of something new and express it - through a prompt, through code, through a product - it enters the system. Your novel idea becomes training data. The sheer act of thinking outside the box makes the box bigger. This was the same before, if you had a novel idea and make a product out of it others follow. Especially for LLMs, they are not (till now) learning on the fly…

The author read too much sci-fi. But too little at the same time.

The problem is never we don't have enough ideas. It's how to find the good ones among the sea of ideas. Most of ideas that eventually prove right sounded very stupid at first. Selling books online? Pff.

By the way, Liu (the author of The Three-Body Problem, who popularized the concept of "Dark Forest") has a short story about exactly that, Cloud of Poems. Unfortunately it's never translated into English.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#180
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This was the same before, if you had a novel idea and make a product out of it others follow. You've almost captured the full picture of it. If you have a great idea, it's not going to be self-evidently enough of a great idea until you've proved it can make money. That's the hard part which comes at great personal, professional and financial risk. Algorithms are cheap. Sure, they could use your LLM history to figur…

I don't think the risk is that they copy your app. The risk is that they make the category a built-in feature in something people already use. At that point, copying the product and taking the customers start to look like the same problem.

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