211–220 of 247 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Moreover the singularity makes this crass assumption that a single player takes all. It seems to ignore a future of many, many AI players, or many, many human + AI players instead. Furthermore, regardless of how smart one thing is, it cannot win towards infinite games of poker against 7 billion humans, who as a race are cognitively extremely diverse and adaptive.
The singularity does no such thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Moreover the singularity makes this crass assumption that a single player takes all. It seems to ignore a future of many, many AI players, or many, many human + AI players instead. Furthermore, regardless of how smart one thing is, it cannot win towards infinite games of poker against 7 billion humans, who as a race are cognitively extremely diverse and adaptive.
that's kind of optimistic. for example a misaligned super AI might engineer a virus that wipes out most of the 7 billion humans. that would put a damper on the adaptability of the human race...
The interesting question to me at the moment is whether we are still at the bottom of an exponential takeoff or nearing the top of a sigmoid curve. You can find evidence for both. LLMs probably can't get another 10 times better. But then, almost literally at any minute, someone could come up with a new architecture that can be 10 times better with the same or fewer resources. LLMs strike me as still leaving a lot on…
Why is everyone so damn obsessed with the singularity? You don't need superintelligence to disrupt humanity. We easily have enough advancement to change the economy dramatically as is. The adoption isn't there yet.
Because they are captives (to a system of incentives that is already "superintelligent" in comparison to any individual) who are hoping for salvation (something to make them free against their will; since it is their will which is captured).
Singularity, then, is the point at which the system itself "finally becomes able to imagine what it is like to be a person", and decides to stop torturing people. IMO, this is unlikely to work out like that.
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You are very strong on the "slop" bias. Why? In managing a large to enterprise sized code base, I experience the opposite. I can guarantee a much more homogenous quality of the code base. It is the opposite of slop I am seeing. And that at a lower cost. Today,I literally made a large and complex migration of all of our endpoints. Took ai 30 minutes, including all frontends using these endpoints. Works flawlessly, deb…
>> Works flawlessly, debt principal down. I don't doubt it completed the initial coding work in a short time, but the fact that you've equated that with flawless execution is on the concerning-scary spectrum. I can only assume you're talking "compiles-runs-ship it" The danger is not generating obvious slop, it's accepting decent and convincing outputs as complete and absolving ourselves of responsibility.
Code idioms, or patterns if you will, is largely our solution.
We have small pattern/[pattern].md files througout the code base where we explain how certain things should be done.
In this case, the migration was a normalization to the specific pattern specified in the pattern file for the endpoints.
Semantics was not changed and the transform was straight forward. Just not task I would be able to justify spending time on from a business perspective.
Now, the more patterns you have, and the more your code base adheres to these patterns, the easier you can verify the code (as you recognize the patterns) and the easier you cal call out faulty code.
It is easier to hear an abnormality in music than in atmospheric noise. It is the same with code.
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Seeing plenty of this. The quality of agentic code is a function of the quantity and quality of adversarial quality gates. I have seen no proof that an agentic system is incapable of delivering code that is as functional, performant and maintainable as code from a great team of developers, and enough anecdotes in the other direction to suggest that AI "slop" is going to be a problem that teams with great harnesses wi…
I take your point but then it makes me think is there no more value in diversity? [Philosophy disclaimer] So in a code-base diversity is probably a bad idea, ok that makes sense. But in an agentic world, if everything is run through the Perfect Harness then humans are intentionally just triggers? Not even that, like what are humans even needed for? Everything can be orchestrated. I'm not against this world, this is a…
I really wish we'd stop arguing about AI with an "some automation failed, so all automation is bad" approach. Yes, AF447 crashed due to lack of training for a specific situation. And yet, air travel is safer than ever. Yes, that Tesla drove into a wall, and yet robotaxis exist, work well, and are significantly safer than human drivers. Yes, there are a lot of "witchcraft" approaches to working with AI, but there are…
I think you may have missed a subtle point: there is an especial risk from automation which almost always works correctly. The aviation industry calls the phenomenon "automation fatigue". It's very difficult for humans to stay alert and monitor systems like these, and the use of the systems tends to lead to de-skilling over time in the very skills required to monitor them and fix the (rare but fatal - at least in avi…
I didn't miss that point. I'm saying it's blown out of proportion, and that diminishes the value of the actually important content.
The interesting question to me at the moment is whether we are still at the bottom of an exponential takeoff or nearing the top of a sigmoid curve. You can find evidence for both. LLMs probably can't get another 10 times better. But then, almost literally at any minute, someone could come up with a new architecture that can be 10 times better with the same or fewer resources. LLMs strike me as still leaving a lot on…
Great article, near the end it talks about where the money go and if there will be universal basic income. I think those paragraph had an assumption that if models get very smart all the money will go to big tech. But, thanks to all the companies working on open-weight models, I'm starting to think this might no longer happen. Currently open-weights models are said to be just months behind the top players (and I thin…
Now what? How does this benefit the average person who just wants to have a 9-5 job and go home and hang with family / enjoy some hobbies? Not everyone's idea of utopia is "all the code I could ever think of writing at my fingertips 24x7".. I mean, I sometimes code for fun, etc. But I also do other things. I don't WANT to be able to do 25x my current amount of work just because. Imagine if you're sick for 2 weeks - now you're so far behind you'll never catch up?
The older I get, the less I want all the latest tech everywhere. I just want dependable things that work. And ESPECIALLY stuff that isn't spying on me.
If AI can replace anyone who today uses a keyboard/mouse/screen or does something adjacent (for example, teaching) - what's left? If the AI bros are in it for the $$ (many are, I think) - what if a few hundred people in the world had, effectively, all the $$$?
Will I still be able to retire in a few years, or will my $$ be worthless? Will I only be allowed to live/buy food/have medical care if I swear allegiance to one of a few tech overlords?
Some of those super-dev-brand-marketing-everything guys will be able to spin up a business in a weekend - to what end? What products would they sell? They're a prompt away (not man-years) from someone else copying their product - so why would I give you $10 for it? So you effectively have ZERO $$ from software sales. What's the purpose of self-driving cars if no one has $$ to go anywhere?
Do I think we'll get there? I (mostly) don't - but I also don't understand the thinking behind those who DO want to get there at all costs.
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I see AI has great utility and we'll figure out ways to better it. If I had any power, i would run Nuclear Power plants to run AI dafacenters and find other near infinite sources of energy to create deeper and deeper AIs. This level of ai tech is at its infancy, it's evidently clear. People are assuming it will stall soon, and won't go beyond a certain point. I don't believe this at all, I am believing it will go muc…
An LLM is never, ever going to find "other near infinite sources of energy". All it can do is predict the next word in an effort to make the user stop prompting it. That's all it does. It does not have the ability to find solutions to the worlds problems.
The interesting question to me at the moment is whether we are still at the bottom of an exponential takeoff or nearing the top of a sigmoid curve. You can find evidence for both. LLMs probably can't get another 10 times better. But then, almost literally at any minute, someone could come up with a new architecture that can be 10 times better with the same or fewer resources. LLMs strike me as still leaving a lot on…
Why is everyone so damn obsessed with the singularity? You don't need superintelligence to disrupt humanity. We easily have enough advancement to change the economy dramatically as is. The adoption isn't there yet.
And at the same time, we don't take advantage of the intelligence we already have.