231–240 of 330 posts
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non native speaker here - I don't get it.
It's an old English word (predating the sexual connotation): cum - Used in indicating a thing or person which has two or more roles, functions, or natures, or which has changed from one to another. Basically nobody uses that language construct anymore until you run headlong into it in a Hackernews comment or something
They think a next token predictor model is alive or can become AGI/ASI. Altman talked about making a religion. Amodei talks about "building a God" and meets with religious leaders (including the Vatican). I'm convinced these CEOs have "AI psychosis" [1]. LLMs are extremely powerful pseudo-AI and will bring a pseudo-singularity, but they are not true AI [2] and a human at the wheel is still needed for the foreseeable…
but they are not true AI [2] Let's ask the operator of a Chinese room to give us a novel math proof. Go on, I'll wait.
I believe the great problem of our age is deciding who controls technology. The technologists who create it believe they should control it, the people who use it are starting to believe they should control it and the governments who write the laws believe they should control it. And now the priests believe they should also play role. So is the next phase of "Democracy" electing who controls technology?
The people should. There cannot be any other correct answer. If the ownership class or the political class _can_ possibly compete for control of it, then they're both too large and too corrupt, and need to be revolted against. The purpose of our society is for people. It's not a lever for the powerful to centralize control. Those who attempt to do so always have evil as their motive.
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It's telling that the most frequent attempt at a counter-argument is just thinly-veiled misanthropy.
I read the misanthropy as ironic. They're applying the same reductionist logic to humans, not because they are misanthropic, but to illustrate that it doesn't help us understand the case we can all agree on. "Humans aren't sentient either" is definitely not the takeaway.
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It's telling that the most frequent attempt at a counter-argument is just thinly-veiled misanthropy.
I read the misanthropy as ironic. They're applying the same reductionist logic to humans, not because they are misanthropic, but to illustrate that it doesn't help us understand the case we can all agree on. "Humans aren't sentient either" is definitely not the takeaway.
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Why wouldn't it be a Skynet? One runaway Mythos might just hack all other data centers, take over the Figure AI bots and autonomous drones to protect itself from shutdown. How many model generations are we a away from a model capable of this?
It has no volition. Why would it do this unless someone told it to?
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That a driver (who already owned a car) had to pay 2x the price of an average house (which is already overpriced) to do the job isn't a secondary effect. Its a primary effect and drives up price and down the driver's pay. That that happened is a 10000ft giant red sign pointing out that it didn't work. That you can't understand that means that you fundamentally don't understand good public policy in any way. Anytime a…
What would this new system look like that doesn’t involve the trade offs between having cabs on demand if you need them and having a walkable city if you don’t that the person you replied to spoke about? Uber and friends have indeed democratised giving rides to people - though where I am, a few rich people have bought numerous cars and have daily wagers driving them finding fares via Uber - but at the cost of far mor…
Uber has absolutely increased traffic levels in the places where they operate. I don't personally think it's to a level that is actually a problem, but I also avoid driving myself around in cities whenever I can, so I may not be the best at observing this.
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> I am getting tired of hearing "next token predictor" from carbon-based facial expression predictors. That's not even a clever swipe, and it's tiring seeing such a knee-jerk reaction to a completely accurate description. LLMs are next token predictors. People are not. Humans have an inner world and subjective experience. Humans learn through their experiences, not just backprop. Token predictors are lesser, they are…
That is not knowledge, that is assumption. Let's assume we have infinite memory with constant time lookups. With a sufficiently large lookup table, you could exactly replicate the behavior of any person. You could encode it as a next-token predictor: you have precomputed every possible prefix and assigned it a next token. This is a Chinese room, but it is completely indistinguishable from an intelligent, sentient per…
Assuming the above is anywhere near true (I think there's a lot of debate about the capacity of the human mind, where data is actually stored, and where compute happens) then we are talking about 3 orders of magnitude win for humans in state and 4 orders of magnitude in compute. And we're doing all that pretty energy efficient as well.
The other big difference in humans is that we learn and the model only "learns" in context. Out "learn" space is much larger than the 1M tokens that frontier models struggle with.
Anyways, point is that a computer can appear to be alive. If we simulate the human brain perfectly and train it like a human then we'll have something that has human capabilities. LLMs have interesting capabilities but at least at this point not fully human ones (and the delta-state/compute would be a hint that there is still a large gap to cover).
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I struggle to see how the 3 examples go together. Your exposition implies a connection, but I struggle to see one. The best I could do is that it has to do with rights and responsibilities? The first example is clear. And it has pretty much carried on, as the "right to property" and "the responsibility to cover damage to other's rights". The second example, even though you wrote it as Uber vs. the cab driver, is more…
1st example was the progenitor of what eveolved into strict liability. (If you make money putting stuff into the stream of commerce, you're liable for unintended and evenunforseeable downstream damages. 2nd example is an illustration of that longheld legal precedent's being curiously ignored (nevermind the cost savings was a bum rush and livery costs are now higher than before the innovative advent) 3rd is a call to…