181–190 of 309 posts
Well, for starters, it would make The Economist 's recent article on "What if AI made the world's economic growth explode?" [1] look like the product of overly credulous suckers for AI hype. [1] https://www.economist.com/briefing/2025/07/24/what-if-ai-mad...
If you back every horse in a race, you win every time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So are LLMs. Under the covers they are just deterministic matmul.
Everything is either deterministic, random, or some combination. We only have two states of causality, so calling something "just" deterministic doesn't mean much, especially when "just random" would be even worse. For the record, LLMs in the normal state use both.
https://books.google.com/books?id=-fG_NOxltlEC&pg=PA25&dq=Co... Computer's Aren't Pulling Their Weight (1991) There were _so many_ articles in the late 80s and early 90s about how computers were a big waste of money. And again in the late 90s, about how the internet was a waste of money. We aren't going to know the true consequences of AI until kids that are in high school now enter the work force. The vast majority…
You mean the same kids that are currently cheating their way through their education at record rates due to the same technology? Can't say I'm optimistic.
> - Socrates (399 BC)
> The world is passing through troublous times. The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behavior and dress
> - Peter the Hermit (1274)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Floating point numbers aren't ambiguous in the least. They behave by perfectly deterministic and reliable rules and follow a careful specification.
I understand what you're saying, but at the same time floating point numbers can only represent a fixed amount of precision. You can't, for example, represent Pi with a floating point. Or 1/3. And certain operations with floating point numbers with lots of decimals will always result in some precision being lost. They are deterministic, and they follow clear rules, but they can't represent every number with full prec…
They're a fixed precision format. That doesn't mean they're ambiguous. They can be used ambiguously, but it isn't inevitable. Tools like interval arithmetic can mitigate this to a considerable extent.
Representing a number like pi to arbitrary precision isn't the purpose of a fixed precision format like IEEE754. It can be used to represent, say, 16 digits of pi, which is used to great effect in something like a discrete Fourier transform or many other scientific computations.
Okay, so AI isn’t exceptional, but I’m also not exceptional. I run on the same tech base as any old chimpanzee, but at one point our differences in degree turned into one of us remaining “normal” and the other burning the entire planet. Whether the particular current AI tech is it or not, I have yet to be convinced that the singularity is practically impossible, and as long as things develop in the opposite direction…
I also wonder if we can even power an AI singularity. I guess it depends on what the technology is. But it is taking us more energy than really reasonable (in my opinion) just to produce and run frontier LLMs. LLMs are this really weird blend of stunningly powerful, yet with a very clear inadequacy in terms of sentient behaviour.
I think the easiest way to demonstrate that, is that it did not take us consuming the entirety of human textual knowledge, to form a much stronger world model.
The paper:
https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/d6e33a074ac9269e4511e5d...
"Differences about the future of AI are often partly rooted in differing interpretations of evidence about the present. For example, we strongly disagree with the characterization of generative AI adoption as rapid (which reinforces our assumption about the similarity of AI diffusion to past technologies)."
Digital spreadsheets (excel, etc) have done much more to change the world than so-called "artificial intelligence," and on the current trajectory it's difficult to see that changing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that the mere theoretical possibility isn’t sufficient for the argument, but you’re missing the much less refutable component: that the inevitability is actively driven by universal incentives of competition. But as I alluded to earlier, we’re working towards plenty of other collapse scenarios, so who knows which we’ll realize first…
None of them. Humans have always believed that we are headed for imminent total disaster. In my youth it was WW3 and the impending nuclear armageddon that was inevitable. Or not, as it turned out. I hear the same language being used now about a whole bunch of other things. Including, of course, the evangelist Rapture that is going to happen any day now, but never does. You can see the same thing at work in discussion…
The observation is, humans tend to think that annihilation is inevitable, it hasn't happened yet so therefore it will never be inevitable.
In fact, _anything_ could happen. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
If you need cognitive behavioral therapy, fine.
But to casually cite nuclear holocaust as something people irrationally believed in as a possibility is dishonest. That was (and still is) a real possible outcome.
Whats somewhat funny here is is if youre wrong, it doesnt matter. But that isnt the same as being right.
> Something in our makeup revels in the thought that we'll be the last generation of humans, that the future is gone and everything will come to a crashing stop
And yet there _will_ (eventually) be one generation that is right.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[citation needed] People constantly assert that LLMs don't think in some magic way that humans do think, when we don't even have any idea how that works.
I recently saw an article about LLMs and Towers of Hanoi. An LLM can write code to solve it. It can also output steps to solve it when the disk count is low like 3. It can’t give the steps when the disk count is higher. This indicates LLMs inability to reason and understand. Also see Gotham Chess and the Chatbot Championship. The Chatbots start off making good moves, but then quickly transition to making illegal move…
No it doesn't, this is an overgeneralization.
Okay, so AI isn’t exceptional, but I’m also not exceptional. I run on the same tech base as any old chimpanzee, but at one point our differences in degree turned into one of us remaining “normal” and the other burning the entire planet. Whether the particular current AI tech is it or not, I have yet to be convinced that the singularity is practically impossible, and as long as things develop in the opposite direction…
I don't think LLMs are building towards an AI singularity at least. I also wonder if we can even power an AI singularity. I guess it depends on what the technology is. But it is taking us more energy than really reasonable (in my opinion) just to produce and run frontier LLMs. LLMs are this really weird blend of stunningly powerful, yet with a very clear inadequacy in terms of sentient behaviour. I think the easiest…