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I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

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Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#81

A few snippets from his full post here: https://gwern.net/guardian-angel . > "The chatbot personas are deeply misaligned with you, and aligned with their owners; and the economic incentives are to farm you with ads and subscriptions, while racing not to amplify you but to replace you." > "On my visits to the Bay Area, I would ask AI researchers or interns why they are doing their current research or projects, when in…

> > "On my visits to the Bay Area, I would ask AI researchers or interns why they are doing their current research or projects, when in a year or three agentic LLMs could probably do them; they rarely had a good answer, or any idea what they would be doing in 3 years"

I heard this already when ChatGpt came up. Still waiting to be fully obsolete.

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#82
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leaving AI completely aside, it still amazes me that people finds "novel" the idea of removing highly-paid white collar intellectual workers (software developers or otherwise) completely out of the loop. No-code platforms date back to the 80's. Getting rid of engineers in general is even older [*]. Even relational databases and SQL were initially promoted as "ways to get rid of those expensive programmers to access y…

It's novel because previous rounds of automation were about automating specific tasks or well-scoped functions. There was always an implicit understanding that the white-collar worker would be freed to spend their time on more valuable, higher-level problems. But this time is different because of the generality of the technology. Agents promise to automate the process of thinking itself. And in many domains they can…

> It's novel because previous rounds of automation were about automating specific tasks or well-scoped functions. There was always an implicit understanding that the white-collar worker would be freed to spend their time on more valuable, higher-level problems. But this time is different because of the generality of the technology. Agents promise to automate the process of thinking itself. And in many domains they can learn new tasks as fast as white-collar workers can find them.

Nah, sometimes the expectation and advertisement was that you could let go of the white collar worker because you're paying the overseas person 1/10th the amount. And "overseas person" is pretty general.

"Everybody knew" it was a bad idea to get a CS degree for a bit after the dot-com bust because of that.

(Some white-collar industries did get hit much harder by that; VFX is one I've heard in that context quite a bit.)

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#83
post #38

It's hard to read Gwern's accompanying article without seeing this for what it is, which is a kind of mania. I'm sure he means well and is genuine in his aspirations, but what's outlined for GA is framing LLM's as quasi-gods, which they absolutely are not. I wish him the best, and look forward to being proven wrong.

Meh. It does all sound rather grandiose, but in this startup economy I'm sure he can at least manage to get acquired.

At least he's pursuing something more novel than yet another "sandboxes for agents".

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#84
post #36

> The big AI labs are building a single mind for everyone Reminds me of Pluribus (I just started watching it on Apple TV so maybe this is a late realization for me)

I understood Pluribus as a metaphor for what AI is to us today / what it is becoming. Really great show

Or the "unicontext" that Derek Thompson recently wrote about.

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#85
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An LLM just solved 10 top tier math problems this week. It seems very likely that in 6 months they will solve 100 top tier math problems, maybe 1 millenium math problem, maybe 10 top tier physics problems, etc. It's only going to get crazier.

Suppose LLM solved all math problems. So what? It’s not like diplomacy and war will end. Are humanity’s problems really constrained on our intellectual ability? If anything most evidence points to cultural failing and all AI will do is enable unprecedented oppression due to said skills at intellectual tasks. As you read this some poor person is starving. Humanity already possesses the ability to identify said person…

It's an interesting time when the bar has moved to "It’s not like diplomacy and war will end". But that is on the table. Nuclear weapons caused the end of wars as we know them. Great powers no longer directly attack each other. And AI is much more powerful than nuclear weapons, with an equal capacity for damage and a much greater capacity for good.

By the way, I donate monthly to GiveWell and the shrimp welfare project. Do you donate monthly to starving people? Most people don't, and the reason is simple: at the end of the day, most people just don't care that much about helping a starving person far away. They also don't care much about things like that, animals in factory farms, or earthquakes that kill hundreds of thousands. But ideally, we could find a way to empower people such that the minority who do care can make a big difference.

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#86
Of all the news I've heard of recent, this one has flipped my world upside down the most. Gwern dropping his pseudonymity isn't something I thought would happen.

I suppose we can't expect any more entries to his blackmail page: https://gwern.net/blackmail

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#87
post #46
post #38

It's hard to read Gwern's accompanying article without seeing this for what it is, which is a kind of mania. I'm sure he means well and is genuine in his aspirations, but what's outlined for GA is framing LLM's as quasi-gods, which they absolutely are not. I wish him the best, and look forward to being proven wrong.

An LLM just solved 10 top tier math problems this week. It seems very likely that in 6 months they will solve 100 top tier math problems, maybe 1 millenium math problem, maybe 10 top tier physics problems, etc. It's only going to get crazier.

>An LLM just solved 10 top tier math problems this week

and 30 years ago a computer beat Gary Kasparov, if you'd listened to Hans Moravec you wouldn't be surprised that the first thing that gets automated is intellectual domain expertise.

Things are going to get crazy when it can figure out how to walk into a random house a and brew a cup of coffee, not do math

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#88
post #46
post #38

It's hard to read Gwern's accompanying article without seeing this for what it is, which is a kind of mania. I'm sure he means well and is genuine in his aspirations, but what's outlined for GA is framing LLM's as quasi-gods, which they absolutely are not. I wish him the best, and look forward to being proven wrong.

An LLM just solved 10 top tier math problems this week. It seems very likely that in 6 months they will solve 100 top tier math problems, maybe 1 millenium math problem, maybe 10 top tier physics problems, etc. It's only going to get crazier.

https://dsimanek.vialattea.net/twain.htm

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#90
Sounds good in theory. But your own personal AI agent that guards you can't do so just defensively, it must also have offensive capability. If personal AI agents have offensive capability then we are going to eventually end up with AI agents battling each other over the net and later on into the real world and it's going to make everything worse.
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