"America has two workforces now" - The rest of the world can use AI too ya know.
AI 2040: Plan A
61–70 of 567 posts
Re: AI 2040: Plan A
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you’ve done any software development at all, certainly.
Is that true or does it only feel true because they nerf the old models just before every major release?
You can compare benches of the old models against the new models. So yeah, you can see the difference.
Even then, you can just compare the progress in open models. Leaps and bounds from where they were 6 months ago.
Re: AI 2040: Plan A
#63Sounds like another Chinese Op to me; Ensuring Chinese compliance would be incredible hard to enforce or to check. Look, I am scared of where we are heading, but I cannot see how we can change the dilemma towards mutual cooperation unless, as humans tend to do, only react massively after something really bad happens.
I recommend actually reading their recommendation, because they get into the weeds about precisely how the US and China could address this in a trustless/auditable way. The TL;DR is that basically all of the relevant compute can be tracked.
Edit: Also, definitely not a Chinese op. The authors are prominent Americans, and are the folks responsible for the AI 2027 forecast that has pretty accurately predicted the current state of affairs today: https://ai-2027.com/
Re: AI 2040: Plan A
#64I found the AI 2027 paper to be overly optimistic, but not wholly fantastical. This paper feels wildly speculative, and relies on premises I am not confident even pass surface reasoning. Even under optimistic conditions, we are not going to see robots "capable of 95% of all cognitive and physical tasks" by 2035. Nor do I think a 74% unemployment rate is even remotely possible. Economic collapse would implode AI devel…
The "and physical" is the part I'm particularly skeptical of. Sure, drones are scary, but nobody's really solved getting a robot to deliver a package to your front porch in a civilian setting, and it seems unlikely to be solved quickly.
Re: AI 2040: Plan A
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s a possibility, but not the only one. The two most realistic ones are: we race ahead and maintain our status, or we slow down and open ourselves up to colonization.
Worth noting that it is the Europeans and Americans that have been colonial. Asian peoples have, with the prominent exception of the Mongols and Japanese Empire, pretty much not done that. In particular, China shut down its exploration program. This is a settler-colonial mindset that reflects all the bad things we did onto everyone else. Notably, it's a current US ally that is most guilty of this.
The Quing era boundaries are quite a bit larger than the Han boundaries. That did not happen by peaceful means.
Re: AI 2040: Plan A
#66If carbon taxes are already a lethal policy for an political campaign, it's absurd to think that fears of ASI will create any real movement around pausing AI. If there is any movement to pause AI development, it will come from the general public's dislike of these companies. Not from the AI safety angle.
If that is true and one cares about a moratorium on progress in the US then it seems like the number one way is to meet people where they are: so water use misinformation, degrowth, power supply constraints. That does place all the people who push for these things in a different light. They may well be attempting to do what the AI safety labs are ostensibly trying to do. As an AI safetyist, one’s closest ally (in a d…
You should consider why the best ally to your position is misinformation.
Re: AI 2040: Plan A
#67NYT reported today that Russia and China are funding anti-datacenter and anti-ai hysteria on western social media.
Always easier to boost something already existing on social media than manufacture it themselves, then wildly blow it out of proportion to make it seem urgent and important.
Re: AI 2040: Plan A
#68Sounds like another Chinese Op to me; Ensuring Chinese compliance would be incredible hard to enforce or to check. Look, I am scared of where we are heading, but I cannot see how we can change the dilemma towards mutual cooperation unless, as humans tend to do, only react massively after something really bad happens.
I recommend actually reading their recommendation, because they get into the weeds about precisely how the US and China could address this in a trustless/auditable way. The TL;DR is that basically all of the relevant compute can be tracked. Edit: Also, definitely not a Chinese op. The authors are prominent Americans, and are the folks responsible for the AI 2027 forecast that has pretty accurately predicted the curre…
I wonder. There has been some headway in getting decentralized training runs to work.
Re: AI 2040: Plan A
#69NYT reported today that Russia and China are funding anti-datacenter and anti-ai hysteria on western social media. Always easier to boost something already existing on social media than manufacture it themselves, then wildly blow it out of proportion to make it seem urgent and important.
There are 22 golf courses within a 30 minute drive from me, and people here a losing their minds over datacenter water usage...
Re: AI 2040: Plan A
#70The thing that continues to irk me about these sorts of "papers" is how they refuse to remotely acknowledge the possibility that LLMs and Diffusion models won't lead to AGI, ASI, or whatever acronym they're foisting upon the populace.
If you won't even so much as acknowledge the possibility of error, your argument is hollow and empty. All the "choices" presume these labs are being completely honest and acting in some degree of good faith (relative to the systemic incentives of society in its present form), while in reality we're still just building and refining probability models with increasing accuracy of output and flexibility of processing (namely agents) but still lack actual "intelligence" of any real sort.
Show me a paper that doesn't merely presume inevitability of LLM-based AGI/ASI, and instead actually lays out the core paths that history suggests we're likely to encounter with any "world changing technology":
* In the best case, that the technology really will revolutionize the world and do everything promised by its biggest boosters (papers like this one)
* In the middle case, that it becomes just another tool in our collective toolkit, and the consequences of a revolution built on external investment fizzling out
* In the worst case, that the tool itself is so niche in its utility that investment collapses rather than fizzles out; what do we do with all this compute, now? Who owns the debt? Who foots the bill? How can we mitigate those existential risks?
I'm just rather nauseated by the continued trot of inevitablism masquerading as academia rather than an actual, neutral, bias-controlled-and-disclosed study that paints potentialities instead.
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Having finished skimming through it, another comment springs to mind: Jesus Christ these things continue to be jingoist as absolute fuck. It's a fancier set of makeup for the same shitty western chauvinism worldview of American excellence and Manifest Supremacy.
Nah, I'm done with this trite garbage. Go proselytize to idiots, I'm not one of them.