Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

251–260 of 264 posts

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

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: What _would_ convince you that we are not heading towards a singularity? Like, is this belief falsifiable? (Secondary question: what do you mean with singularity?) As an offering of me engaging in good faith, a controversial opinion of mine: I legit think arpanet going online and starting the networking all of humanity into a massive coupled complex system fits the definition of singularity of "the m…

For falsification, I would take a year in which we don’t see an absolute sea change in capability. The last twelve months were not that, in my opinion, nor were the twelve before it. Hell, I’d even throw in “a year in which capabilities obviously improve but at a cost consumers can’t afford”. “What LLMs can’t do, only humans can” feels like a God of the Gaps situation: people have to keep moving the goal posts becaus…

That's the best answer I've seen to that question so far, my honest respect. I am much more skeptical than you, for me I have seen a sea change in _tool capabilities_ (mainly pre opus 4.5 to post 4.5) and harness engineering but no strong change in the type of errors made and the pattern of harness engineering (the pattern of "set things up for the LLM to see when it fucks up and let it flail till the verifier tells it to stop").

I would actually expect the sea changes as you describe it in your first criteria to continue with 1) vision, audio and video natively integrated 2) continued scaling of e2e rlvf for workflows with large scale labeling efforts 3) ASICs and widescale deployment of diffusion models leading to speed ups

But as of right now, I still expect these models to need humans to prune the output to the gold and set up the harness right for both the novel bits, and for the boilerplate to be cohesive with the global intent.

Which is of course an amazing potential boost in productivity, but still a sigmoid flattening.

As for your second criteria that includes cost, I think we might every well see this coming soon, but it's difficult to estimate with the efficiency gains still possible.

Thanks for engaging:-)

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

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can nod along when I hear and read people talking about the dangers of these technologies and the endgame of their creators; and then suddenly very weird when everyone except me is nodding along that the answer must be similar (but different) technology! It's as if technologists are stuck in a room of mirrors, unable to imagine a world in which "solutions" don't ultimately just continue to feed technology's increas…

To a man with a hammer...

take this hammer, take it to the captain

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

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please take this as a sincere comment, rather than an attack: what you're describing is much more likely to be a problem you need to work on, than an issue with humanity as a whole.

I didn't mean to imply there's an issue with humanity, just that talking to people is less effective, though maybe more fun.

Effective?

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

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proje…

How is AI "more powerful than nuclear weapons" etc when they're two completely different things? Please explain to me how AI can glass the planet via mutually assured destruction.

Someone who would not otherwise be able to asks AI for simple instructions for how to make a deadly virus, which then spreads rapidly and kills most of those it infects

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

#255
post #91
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.

Math is verifiable. LLMs will continue to make strides in such search spaces where all they need to do is try->verify->repeat. You can't train an LLM on how to end the war in Iran or Ukraine, nor how to solve hunger, nor climate change, etc. Real issues. And LLMs still suck at art and writing.

Claude had some pretty good ideas about how to end the war in Iran when I asked it a while ago (The US should sue for peace, I believe was the conclusion).

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

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't mean to imply there's an issue with humanity, just that talking to people is less effective, though maybe more fun.

Effective?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49179916

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

#258
I am finding the goal of the project at odds with the anti-local approach in the article.

I understand the point about people not wanting to be sysadmins - but surely hosting your Guardian Angel in a AWS data center has its own risks. Imagine how broken you would feel when us-east-1 goes down again.

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

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " How much would you pay to have access to a smarter version of yourself? " How much would I pay to rent my fucking self from a landlord? No, bodylord? Mindlord? Poe's Law. But looking at the post, they argue that big AI labs have an incentive problem which stops them from personalising, but Guardian Angel will make agents which are "Genuinely yours". In what sense is it genuinely mine if someone else owns it and r…

Selling something desirable has been an incentive since year dot But this reminds me of the black mirror episode of a female that needs a subscription to live and the company keeps increasing and restricting the subscription

s7e1 Common People - the parasitic corporation is called Rivermind, and the sales rep is someone who's life was saved by the corporation.

I thought the same thing when reading this.

If big tech has taught us anything over the past couple of decades, it is that: for corporations (the first unaligned AGIs): if a perverse incentive exists, it will eventually be exploited for profit.

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

#260
post #210
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that's truer in other industries, but the history of Silicon Valley is at great odds with such a claim.

Silicon Valley was originally funded by the military industrial complex. Today it’s dominated by the military industrial complex and advertisers like Google and Meta. The hippies were never in charge, only for a brief period were they well compensated and allowed to make noise(1990s).

But tech people HAVE BUILT IT ALL!

None of this could exist without the cooperation of technical people. We (as a group) are guilty of building this, and I don't see any genuine reflection or self-awareness or accountability at all from tech people for this.

Post reply on HN