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Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

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Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#381

Post by danaris »

card_zero wrote: post #327
danaris wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

....I think it's a fairly widespread view to value joy for its own sake. In fact, I would say that's pretty much how normal people would say they view joy.

So normal people don't make sense, what else is new. The problem here is that joy-in-itself isn't anything. Say you're a huge hedonist, and you try to maximize your pleasure. Maybe you start with some notion involving a speedboat and cocaine. Then you might ask, how can you maximize your pleasure even more? That means you have to ask why you like things. You like things for reasons, and reasons have meaning, and mean…

Your examples make it clear that you do not understand normal people in the slightest. And when I say "normal" here, I'm not talking about the Blazing Saddles-style "salt of the earth; you know, morons." I mean roughly the middle 50-60% (by width) of the bell curve. The vast majority of humanity.

Normal people don't self-reflect, realize they like joy, and then try to maximize this with speedboats and cocaine. If they realize they like joy and want to maximize it, they do things like spend more time with their families.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#382

Post by sjsdaiuasgdia »

ahartmetz wrote: post #316
sjsdaiuasgdia wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having shame would require the LLMs to actually be able to recognize mistakes they make. People love to put a lot of meaning on what an LLM responds with when asked why it made a mistake, but it's critical to remember that the answer to that prompt is just another series of probabilistic tokens, and has no actual relation to how the error happened.

They "recognize" mistakes just fine because you explicitly tell them. They recognize them well enough to correct (...sometimes). The way in which mistakes don't register is "Oh shit, that bad result was a result of my inappropriate actions. I must pay attention to not doing that again or the user will think I'm an idiot. I should even think about it some more to avoid the whole class of mistakes". Think of emotions a…

And many times, after an error is pointed out and an LLM offers an "explanation" for what happened, the LLM then gives the exact same erroneous result.

The LLM does not understand itself in any way.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#383

Post by ACCount37 »

JTbane wrote: post #280
dchftcs wrote: post #33

Unsurprising he'd be cheered for saying what they wanted to hear. But perhaps whether or not his stance is correct, the students needed to hear this. They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore.

No AI company is addressing the elephant in the room that you need someone experienced constantly monitoring any agentic workflows. This means that the cost savings of agents are a myth. My company actually did an internal study of agent usage for coding and found it only improved productivity by 10-20%, basically on the same level as good code templates or an autocomplete.

Less and less true with every new generation of AI systems.

AI gets better and better at operating self-supervised, and the amount of skill needed to supervise an AI in a useful fashion only ever goes up.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#384

Post by joquarky »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #115
throwatdem12311 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent more than half my day yesterday telling Claude to correct itself because it did things I explicitly told it not to do in my prompt. “You’re right - I overstepped” Is the new “You’re absolutely right”. I don’t know if we can qualify something that actively goes against the explicit instructions you give it as “something great”. It just sounds like Dario is building snake oil and selling it too.

Imagine worker that did loop of "you're absolutely right -> same fuckup again" multiple days every week, wasting time of whoever told them to do the task They'd be out of company after a week

That depends on the company. I worked at an S&P 500 company that muddled along like this. They still make critical software for local and state governments.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#385

Post by rvz »

lokar wrote: post #303
alsetmusic wrote: post #90

The man is hailed as a brilliant nerd in our circles. I didn't realize he's a great public speaker. He really read the room. The "McKenzie"-style lady and Schmidt from Google (who really seemed to resent the pushback and chided graduates), can go to hell. I'm happy that someone is telling the young people who are likely to suffer because of this tech that they matter. I can't imagine how much angst much exist after t…

A bit off topic, but about commencement speeches... Marvin Minsky spoke at my graduation. It was around the time when it seemed like genetic therapies might solve all kinds of problems, and there was a big debate, moral objections, etc. Most of the talk was a rambling rant against religion holding us back from scientific improvements to life. It did not go over in the mostly christian crowd. I loved it.

> Marvin Minsky spoke at my graduation.

I don't know about mentioning that one.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#386

Post by eudamoniac »

card_zero wrote: post #339
9dev wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed my point. The distinction I made in terminology was on purpose: I used "joy" to describe the inherent motivation for trying to accomplish something, and "bliss" for the state some may try to reach by using drugs. And I also made a distinction between knowledge and meaning, which you sort of seem to imply is a universally shared value, while I seriously doubt that is the case. There are many ways to…

Obviously you'd want to name "joy" as a separate thing, to propose it as the thing we're motivated to do, but the problem is that you didn't describe it. So now I'm at: the thing we're motivated to do is the thing we're motivated to do, and it's not whatever I say it is, but apart from that you haven't told me anything about it. Of course I'm open to some pluralism, like it can be a string bag of mixed motivations, b…

https://overthunk.netlify.app/posts/worthwhile/

(Which is itself a poor rendition of Nichomachean Ethics...this conversation you two are having is ancient)

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#387

Post by 9dev »

card_zero wrote: post #339
9dev wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed my point. The distinction I made in terminology was on purpose: I used "joy" to describe the inherent motivation for trying to accomplish something, and "bliss" for the state some may try to reach by using drugs. And I also made a distinction between knowledge and meaning, which you sort of seem to imply is a universally shared value, while I seriously doubt that is the case. There are many ways to…

Obviously you'd want to name "joy" as a separate thing, to propose it as the thing we're motivated to do, but the problem is that you didn't describe it. So now I'm at: the thing we're motivated to do is the thing we're motivated to do, and it's not whatever I say it is, but apart from that you haven't told me anything about it. Of course I'm open to some pluralism, like it can be a string bag of mixed motivations, b…

> the thing we're motivated to do is the thing we're motivated to do, and it's not whatever I say it is, but apart from that you haven't told me anything about it.

That’s just what I mean: I oppose your notion of a universally shared motivation of deriving meaning from creating knowledge. I don’t have an alternative to offer, because I believe no such objective motivation exists. Instead, it occurs to me you project your own belief system onto humanity (or at least your society) as a whole.

Yes, our world might be shaped most dramatically by those with a desire to create knowledge, but that still doesn’t support the generalisation that humans universally consider the creation of knowledge as a way to give their life meaning.

> Why are you trying to avoid morality?

I try to avoid bringing it into the question of what is and what isn’t a valid motivation for a continued existence, because that is one of the most fundamentally subjective aspects of being a sentient creature. Who am I to make a judgement?

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#388

Post by scandox »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #380
scandox wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about the expression "Reading the Room" for the last ten years. I've come to the conclusion finally that it is extremely pernicious.

Pray elaborate.

Because, in practice, it turns telling people what they want to hear into a first-class virtue.

>> "We told him about how our land had been stolen and our people were dying. When we finished he shook our hands and said, 'Endeavor to persevere!' ... We thought about it for a long time, 'Endeavor to persevere.' And when we had thought about it long enough, we declared war on the Union."

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#389

Post by compiler-guy »

joe_mamba wrote: post #160
alsetmusic wrote: post #90

The man is hailed as a brilliant nerd in our circles. I didn't realize he's a great public speaker. He really read the room. The "McKenzie"-style lady and Schmidt from Google (who really seemed to resent the pushback and chided graduates), can go to hell. I'm happy that someone is telling the young people who are likely to suffer because of this tech that they matter. I can't imagine how much angst much exist after t…

* * *

Even if Schmidt was telling the truth, and Woz was lying, there is a time and a place for everything, and Graduation speeches are a time for celebrating the graduates, not telling them their lives will suck.

Even if it is true.

The job of a speaker at an event is to meet the goals of the event, in the spirit of the event. Schmidt didn't do that.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#390

Post by soulchild37 »

mold_aid wrote: post #366
abirch wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed." AI has made my life so much easier. If I need to change non-standard lightbulbs (e.g., G9, MR11, A19), I'm taking a picture and asking my AI what kind are they. If I need to create the first pass of test scripts, I ask my AI. It's reduced technical debt and let me focus on the things I care about.

>If I need to change non-standard lightbulbs (e.g., G9, MR11, A19), I'm taking a picture and asking my AI what kind are they. Did you just tell a "how many X does it take to change a lightbulb" joke about yourself ?

it takes 10 prompts, 5 fuse jumps, and hiring one electrician to change a lightbulb
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