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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
261–270 of 800 posts
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you replace "taxes" with more general "investment", it's everywhere. A good example is Amazon that has reworked itself from an online bookstore into a global supplier of everything by ruthlessly reinvesting the profits. Taxes don't usually work as efficiently because the state is usually a much more sloppy investor. But it's far from hopeless, see DARPA. If you're looking for periods of high taxes and growing pros…
> It's not a great example though, because the US was the principal winner of WWII, the only large industrial country relatively unscathed by it. The US is also shaping up to be the principal winner in Artificial Intelligence. If, like everyone is postulating, this has the same transformative impact to Robotics as it does to software, we're probably looking at prosperity that will make the 1950s look like table stake…
> The US is also shaping up to be the principal winner in Artificial Intelligence.
There is no early mover advantage in AI in the same way that there was in all the other industries. That's the one thing that AI proponents in general seem not to have clued in to.
What will happen is that it eventually drags everything down because it takes the value out of the bulk of the service and knowledge economies. So you'll get places that are 'ahead' in the disruption. But the bottom will fall out of the revenue streams, which is one of the reasons these companies are all completely panicked and are wrecking the products that they had to stuff AI in there in every way possible hoping that one of them will take.
Model training is only an edge in a world where free models do not exist, once those are 'good enough' good luck with your AI and your rapidly outdated hardware.
The typical investors horizon is short, but not that short.
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you replace "taxes" with more general "investment", it's everywhere. A good example is Amazon that has reworked itself from an online bookstore into a global supplier of everything by ruthlessly reinvesting the profits. Taxes don't usually work as efficiently because the state is usually a much more sloppy investor. But it's far from hopeless, see DARPA. If you're looking for periods of high taxes and growing pros…
> the state is usually a much more sloppy investor I don’t find this to be true The state invests in important things that have 2nd and 3rd order positive benefit but aren’t immediately profitable. Money in a food bank is a “lost” investment. Alternatively the state plays power games and gets a little too attached to its military toys.
State agencies are often good at choosing right long-term targets. State agencies are often bad at the actual procurement, because of the pork-barrelling and red tape. E.g. both private companies and NASA agree that spaceflight is a worthy target, but NASA ends up with the Space Shuttle (a nice design ruined by various committees) and SLS, while private companies come up with Falcon-9.
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#264Earlier 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…
The "Silent Majority" - Richard Nixon 1969
"Quiet Australians" - Scott Morrison 2019
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#265Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. ... Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind. -- Frank Herbert, Dune You won't read, except the output of your LLM. You won't write, except prompts for your LLM. Why write code or prose when the machine can write it for you? You won't think or…
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Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#266This 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…
The goal is to eliminate humans as the primary actors on the planet entirely At least that’s my personal goal If we get to the point where I can go through my life and never interact with another human again, and work with a bunch of machines and robots to do science and experiments and build things to explore our world and make my life easier and safer and healthier and more sustainable, I would be absolutely thrill…
Nobody can stop you from having this view, I suppose. But what gives you the right to impose this (lack of) future on billions of humans with friends and families and ambitions and interests who, to say the least, would not be in favor of “human obviation”?
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#267This 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…
I don’t think you’re rational. Part of being able to be unbiased is to see it in yourself. First of all. Nobody knows how LLMs work. Whether the singularity comes or not cannot be rationalized from what we know about LLMs because we simply don’t understand LLMs. This is unequivocal. I am not saying I don’t understand LLMs. I’m saying humanity doesn’t understand LLMs in much the same way we don’t understand the human…
> Nobody knows how LLMs work.
I'm sorry, come again?
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#268[deleted]
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#269Earlier 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?
>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.
If you train a transformer on (only) lots and lots of addition pairs, i.e '38393 + 79628 = 118021' and nothing else, the transformer will, during training discover an algorithm for addition and employ it in service of predicting the next token, which in this instance would be the sum of two numbers.
We know this because of tedious interpretability research, the very limited problem space and the fact we knew exactly what to look for.
Alright, let's leave addition aside (SOTA LLMs are after all trained on much more) and think about another question. Any other question at all. How about something like:
"Take a capital letter J and a right parenthesis, ). Take the parenthesis, rotate it counterclockwise 90 degrees, and put it on top of the J. What everyday object does that resemble?"
What algorithm does GPT or Gemini or whatever employ to answer this and similar questions correctly ? It's certainly not the one it learnt for addition. Do you Know ? No. Do the creators at Open AI or Google know ? Not at all. Can you or they find out right now ? Also No.
Let's revisit your statement.
"the mechanics of how LLMs work to produce results are observable and well-understood".
Observable, I'll give you that, but how on earth can you look at the above and sincerely call that 'well-understood' ?
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO this is a symptom of the falling rate of profit, especially in the developed world. If truly productivity enhancing investment is effectively dead (or, equivalently, there is so much paper wealth chasing a withering set of profitable opportunities for investment), then capital's only game is to chase high valuations backed by future profits, which means playing the Keynesian beauty contest for keeps. This in turn…
What percentage of work would you say deals w/ actual problems these days?
In a post-industrial economy there are no more economic problems, only liabilities. Surplus is felt as threat, especially when it's surplus human labor.
In today's economy disease and prison camps are increasingly profitable.
How do you think the investor portfolios that hold stocks in deathcare and privatized prison labor camps can further Accelerate their returns?