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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

campedersen.com

221–230 of 800 posts

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do not know or understand even a tiny fraction of the algorithms and processes a Large Language Model employs to answer any given question. We simply don't. Ironically, only the people who understand things the least think we do. Your comment about 'binary arithmetic' and 'billions of logic gates' is just nonsense.

Not even wrong: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/b649c8ca-7907-4597-a4ee-0...

"Look man all reality is just uncountable numbers of subparticles phasing in and out of existence, what's not to understand?"

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#222
post #18

"It had been a slow Tuesday night. A few hundred new products had run their course on the markets. There had been a score of dramatic hits, three-minute and five-minute capsule dramas, and several of the six-minute long-play affairs. Night Street Nine—a solidly sordid offering—seemed to be in as the drama of the night unless there should be a late hit." – 'SLOW TUESDAY NIGHT', a 2600 word sci-fi short story about lif…

This is incredible. > A thoughtful-man named Maxwell Mouser had just produced a work of actinic philosophy. It took him seven minutes to write it. To write works of philosophy one used the flexible outlines and the idea indexes; one set the activator for such a wordage in each subsection; an adept would use the paradox, feed-in, and the striking-analogy blender; one calibrated the particular-slant and the personality…

Wow yeah very prescient.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#223
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s honestly why I gave up trying to get folks to look at these things rationally as knowable objects (“here’s how LLMs actually work”) Here's your own fallacy you fell into - this is important to understand. Neither do you nor me understand "how LLMs actually work" because, well, nobody really does. Not even the scientists who built the (math around) models. So, you can't really use that argument because it would…

Agree. I think it is just people have their own simplified mental model how it works. However, there is no reason to believe these simplified mental models are accurate (otherwise we will be here 20-year earlier with HMM models). The simplest way to stop people from thinking is to have a semi-plausible / "made-me-smart" incorrect mental model of how things work.

Did you mean to use the word "mental"?

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#225
post #157
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly* Here comes my favorite notion of "epistemic takeover". A crude form: make everybody believe that you have already won. A refined form: make everybody believe that everybody else believes that you have already won. That is, even if one has doubts about your having won, they believe that everyone else submit to you as a winner, and must act accordingly.

Refined 1.01 authoritarian form: Everybody knows you didn't win, and everybody knows the sentiment is universal... But everyone maintains the same outward facade that you won, because it's become a habit and because dissenters seem to have "accidents" falling out of high windows.

Is that not the "Emperor's New Clothes" form? That would be like version 0.0.1

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s honestly why I gave up trying to get folks to look at these things rationally as knowable objects (“here’s how LLMs actually work”) Here's your own fallacy you fell into - this is important to understand. Neither do you nor me understand "how LLMs actually work" because, well, nobody really does. Not even the scientists who built the (math around) models. So, you can't really use that argument because it would…

Even if interpretability of specific models or features within them is an open area of research, the mechanics of how LLMs work to produce results are observable and well-understood, and methods to understand their fundamental limitations are pretty solid these days as well. Is there anything to be gained from following a line of reasoning that basically says LLMs are incomprehensible, full stop?

You can't keep pushing the AI hype train if you consider it just a new type of software / fancy statistical database.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#227
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly* Here comes my favorite notion of "epistemic takeover". A crude form: make everybody believe that you have already won. A refined form: make everybody believe that everybody else believes that you have already won. That is, even if one has doubts about your having won, they believe that everyone else submit to you as a winner, and must act accordingly.

This world where everybody’s very concerned with that “refined form” is annoying and exhausting. It causes discussions to become about speculative guesses about everybody else’s beliefs, not actual facts. In the end it breeds cynicism as “well yes, the belief is wrong, but everybody is stupid and believes it anyway,” becomes a stop-gap argument. I don’t know how to get away from it because ultimately coordination dep…

Isn't that how Bitcoin "works"?

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#229
post #23

>That's a very different singularity than the one people argue about. --- I wouldn't say it's that much different. This has always been a key point of the singularity >Unpredictable Changes: Because this intelligence will far exceed human capacity, the resulting societal, technological, and perhaps biological changes are impossible for current humans to predict. It was a key point that society would break, but the ex…

r̶e̶a̶d̶e̶r̶ survivor.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Maybe you don't.

My best friend who has literally written a doctorate on artificial intelligence doesn't. If you do, please write a paper on it, and email it to me. My friend would be thrilled to read it.

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