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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

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Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#101

Post by PaulHoule »

The simple model of an "intelligence explosion" is the obscure equation

  dx    2
  -- = x
  dt
which has the solution

        1      
  x = -----
       C-t
and is interesting in relation to the classic exponential growth equation

  dx
  -- = x
  dt
because the rate of growth is proportional to x and represents the idea of an "intelligence explosion" AND a model of why small western towns became ghost towns, it is hard to start a new social network, etc. (growth is fast as x->C, but for xLike the exponential growth equation it is unphysical as well as unecological because it doesn't describe the limits of the Petri dish, and if you start adding realistic terms to slow the growth it qualitatively isn't that different from the logistic growth equation

  dx
  --  = (1-x) x
  dt
thus it remains obscure. Hyperbolic growth hits the limits (electricity? intractable problems?) the same way exponential growth does.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#102

Post by MarkusQ »

bheadmaster wrote: post #85
stego-tech wrote: post #28

This is delightfully unhinged, spending an amazing amount of time describing their model and citing their methodologies before getting to the meat of the meal many of us have been braying about for years: whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly. And, yep! A lot of people absolutely believe it will and are acting accordin…

> here’s how LLMs actually work But how is that useful in any way? For all we know, LLMs are black boxes. We really have no idea how did ability to have a conversation emerge from predicting the next token.

> We really have no idea how did ability to have a conversation emerge from predicting the next token.

Uh yes, we do. It works in precisely the same way that you can walk from "here" to "there" by taking a step towards "there", and then repeating. The cognitive dissonance comes when we conflate this way of "having a conversation" (two people converse) and assume that the fact that they produce similar outputs means that they must be "doing the same thing" and it's hard to see how LLMs could be doing this.

Sometimes things seems unbelievable simply because they aren't true.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#104

Post by OkayPhysicist »

bheadmaster wrote: post #85
stego-tech wrote: post #28

This is delightfully unhinged, spending an amazing amount of time describing their model and citing their methodologies before getting to the meat of the meal many of us have been braying about for years: whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly. And, yep! A lot of people absolutely believe it will and are acting accordin…

> here’s how LLMs actually work But how is that useful in any way? For all we know, LLMs are black boxes. We really have no idea how did ability to have a conversation emerge from predicting the next token.

> We really have no idea how did ability to have a conversation emerge from predicting the next token.

Maybe you don't. To be clear, this is benefiting massively from hindsight, just as how if I didn't know that combustion engines worked, I probably wouldn't have dreamed up how to make one, but the emergent conversational capabilities from LLMs are pretty obvious. In a massive dataset of human writing, the answer to a question is by far the most common thing to follow a question. A normal conversational reply is the most common thing to follow a conversation opener. While impressive, these things aren't magic.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#105

Post by 0x20cowboy »

stego-tech wrote: post #28

This is delightfully unhinged, spending an amazing amount of time describing their model and citing their methodologies before getting to the meat of the meal many of us have been braying about for years: whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly. And, yep! A lot of people absolutely believe it will and are acting accordin…

"'If I wished,' O'Brien had said, 'I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.' Winston worked it out. 'If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens'".

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#106

Post by shantara »

vcanales wrote: post #9

> The pole at ts8 isn't when machines become superintelligent. It's when humans lose the ability to make coherent collective decisions about machines. The actual capabilities are almost beside the point. The social fabric frays at the seams of attention and institutional response time, not at the frontier of model performance. Damn, good read.

It doesn’t help when quite a few Big Tech companies are deliberately operating on the principle that they don’t have to follow the rules, just change at the rate that is faster than the bureaucratic system can respond.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#107

Post by sempron64 »

H8crilA wrote: post #67
sempron64 wrote: post #62

A hyperbolic curve doesn't have an underlying meaning modeling a process beyond being a curve which goes vertical at a chosen point. It's a bad curve to fit to a process. Exponentials make sense to model a compounding or self-improving process.

But this is a phase change process. Also, the temptation to shitpost in this thread ...

I read TFA. They found a best fit to a hyperbola. Great. One more data point will break the fit. Because it's not modeling a process, it's assigning an arbitrary zero point. Bad model.
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