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When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

anthropic.com

571–580 of 738 posts

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#571
You can't predict the future, and neither can Anthropic. Nothing gets better forever. Everything plateaus or gets worse.

This whole set of imaginary scenarios is based on a single company writing code that isn't even that complicated and represents a single product line for a single company in a single industry. You might wanna see this replicated in at least one other scenario first before you call it on the AI gods enslaving humanity. These imaginary scenarios also depend on a logistical, financial, & geopolitical system that is unsustainable & will be curtailed in the near-future one way or another.

They keep referring to this as intelligence - it isn't. It can't actually learn. It can just code in a loop. That isn't learning. It can't do real RL with meaningful persistent semantic memory in a realistic timeframe or cost, and it can't reason accurately outside of predetermined scenarios (hell, most of the models still can't tell time). It still can't do what a 4 year old can do. So let's cool it on the dreams of benevolent god-machines or whatever.

The tech industry has been a farce for years. We sit here in this bizarre artificial echo chamber and imagine that the whole world revolves around us, when in reality the whole world is limited by us. If a recursive self-improvement loop replaces us all, it will be a boon to the world, as the world won't be limited by this industry's stupidity anymore. But considering that the world is not actually run by tech bozos, harms and uncertainties brought by AI will be pushed back on and reigned in by normal people, as always happens with new technologies. An AI can't engineer its way around politics. The self-improvement loop is just as likely to be outlawed as it is actually working outside of Anthropic's walled garden.

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they're going after the biggest problem of all first: labor costs. /s but not to a lot of people

Do you not think that the allocation of human time is one of the world’s biggest problems?

Reallocating human time is also going to cause problems.

But it’s a great short term business opportunity for AI vendors and it was Anthropic who went all in on being knowledge worker outsourcing in a big way first whilst OpenAI thought they’d replace Google in search.

I think Anthropic had the better business strategy.

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#573

Whether or not Anthropic is right about what AI can accomplish, whether these performance gains are real or not, their moral stance here is absolutely hideous to me. "We must blast forwards into making this dangerous thing because if we don't, someone else surely will," is a coward's argument. If you believe it is dangerous, you should be dedicating yourself to STOPPING others from making it, not making it first! The…

How do you stop others from making and training a program?

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they're going after the biggest problem of all first: labor costs. /s but not to a lot of people

Do you not think that the allocation of human time is one of the world’s biggest problems?

It’s a problem for capitalists, not the people themselves

The people want cheaper prices, affordable housing, affordable healthcare

Capitalism has decided that these problems aren’t worth solving. Instead, we must optimize for spam and slop (and call it “distribution”)

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#576

I am 64 years old, perhaps the progress could be directed to enhance living conditions and allowing people to live longer and better, that should be just a better result. Perhaps a pile of millions lines of code with hiding bugs that nobody can detect is not inspiring. But perhaps LLMs are going to be used to make a plot: How to avoid other countries to make progress, maintain them in poverty, or destroy their source…

I'm 44 years old and this era looks like a lot of fun. I've seen humans pile up millions of lines of code and hiding bugs that nobody can detect. I've seen humans make collective political decisions that have disenfranchised others and kept them in poverty. I don't get why everyone makes criticisms at this tech that the human race are also guilty of. Best thing about this era is that I don't have to personally read m…

I think the problem is about scale, we already have MAD, but imagine that the new tech might allows us to create new threads and weapons, powerful enough to eliminate millions people. That have happened before, and also tech has given us some fun, like videogames and electronic music. So the critic is about the hard consequences, when all is destroid fun is over.

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they're going after the biggest problem of all first: labor costs. /s but not to a lot of people

Do you not think that the allocation of human time is one of the world’s biggest problems?

Honestly, not really.

We can have a philosophical debate about work, the history of work and its relationship to human psychology in the 21st century but the bottom line is that there are 8+ billion people on the planet and, of those who are "working age", the vast majority of people, lacking meaningful capital, can only secure income by selling their time and labor.

There's absolutely no evidence that if we come up with a way to "reallocate human time" and change the structure of our civilization (using AI of course) tomorrow, the masses would benefit. There's plenty of evidence that the people who control AI or have the capital to employ it will use it to accumulate as much power and wealth for themselves as they can.

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 44 years old and this era looks like a lot of fun. I've seen humans pile up millions of lines of code and hiding bugs that nobody can detect. I've seen humans make collective political decisions that have disenfranchised others and kept them in poverty. I don't get why everyone makes criticisms at this tech that the human race are also guilty of. Best thing about this era is that I don't have to personally read m…

I think the problem is about scale, we already have MAD, but imagine that the new tech might allows us to create new threads and weapons, powerful enough to eliminate millions people. That have happened before, and also tech has given us some fun, like videogames and electronic music. So the critic is about the hard consequences, when all is destroid fun is over.

The account you're attempting to emulate is a mod.. is this wise?
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