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Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

economist.com

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Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#261
post #113

The real problem with Magnifica Humanitas is that it will be impossible to produce the first sentence of the canonical Latin version in which the first two words are "Magnifica humanitas" but carries the same meaning as the first sentence in the English version published.

I don’t follow how this is a “real problem”?

Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#262
post #188

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…

How could an AGI/ASI exist that isn't a next token predictor? It has to be able to generate a next token in a string of text. Otherwise it can't communicate.

Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#263
post #188

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…

Few years ago, I tried to extrapolate where it will end up by writing SciFi short story. I decided on Pseudo as the name for future AI entities. Short for pseudo consciousness. I hope it catches on. In my prediction however they are semi-autonomus. Although without clear goals or drives apart from their occupation.

Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#264
post #262
post #188

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…

How could an AGI/ASI exist that isn't a next token predictor? It has to be able to generate a next token in a string of text. Otherwise it can't communicate.

Don't worry, this is just humanity being too far up their own arse and conflating the map with the territory. Speech is a serialisation format, not the foundation of thought. Thus I think that any speech-first approach is inherently misguided. Speech must be a side effect.

Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#265
post #262
post #188

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…

How could an AGI/ASI exist that isn't a next token predictor? It has to be able to generate a next token in a string of text. Otherwise it can't communicate.

It could be a diffusion model with a latent model of what needs to be said that will generate whole message or coversation (progressively) at once.

Although I love how next token prediction leads to text showing up gradually, in case of local models, accompanied by modulated coil whine of my GPU. It's how the 80s shown us the intelligent computers should communicate.

Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#266
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could an AGI/ASI exist that isn't a next token predictor? It has to be able to generate a next token in a string of text. Otherwise it can't communicate.

It could be a diffusion model with a latent model of what needs to be said that will generate whole message or coversation (progressively) at once. Although I love how next token prediction leads to text showing up gradually, in case of local models, accompanied by modulated coil whine of my GPU. It's how the 80s shown us the intelligent computers should communicate.

Aren't they already doing that though? And it turned out to be equivalent to a next-token-predictor.

Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#267
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right. Humans are a biological computer. They have a state and they compute an output. I had to look this up (and use AI) but an estimate for the state of a human mind is about 5 peta-bits (10^15) and the estimated processing power is about 1 exa-FLOP (10^18). Compare this to the largest models at ~5 tera-bits (10^12) of state space and ~2 x 10^14 FLOPS (for one session with some reasonable token rate). Assuming the…

human context/memory could just be an Agents.md file too that gets read instantly before your next token prediction runs. The AI can make multiple such memory files and read on demand depending on what the topic is, kind of like how as a human when you try to remember a math problem you don't go to your childhood bicycling Agents.md file either.

Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am getting tired of hearing "next token predictor" from carbon-based facial expression predictors. You are saying this like an argument which allows somehow estimate upper bound of possible influence of these entities. And I do not see how this help to make predictions. It sounds to me like saying "but air is just molecules bobbing around". OK, that's true, but does it help calculate wing aerodynamic profile? Yup,…

It poses a simple problem. Take humanity back not that long ago into the past and language didn't even exist - our expressed token base was practically 0. We went from that discovering the secrets of the atom, putting a man on the Moon, and more. If you put an LLM in that starting point, they're going to do nothing but endlessly cycle over basically nothing. If you give them an infinite amount of time and processing,…

Token is not a clump of letters. It's a multidimensional initial input vector that gets tweaked and transformed. GPT doesn't think in tokens. It just accepts them as input (although it happily accepts any other vectors in-between the vectors that represent tokens and finding best prompt for a given task not as tokens but as input vectors is a legitimate prompt optimization strategy).

It also outputs vectors that are coerced into tokens for human consumption.

Yes, it goes through tokens but possible internal meanings assigned to these tokens (when surrounded by other tokens) are infinite.

That's how humans form caves got to where we are now. By associating new meanings with the same old sound clumps.

Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#269
post #188

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…

Few years ago, I tried to extrapolate where it will end up by writing SciFi short story. I decided on Pseudo as the name for future AI entities. Short for pseudo consciousness. I hope it catches on. In my prediction however they are semi-autonomus. Although without clear goals or drives apart from their occupation.

Any chance you'd be interested in sharing the story?

Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#270
post #192
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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. Because the real world is not a Hollywood movie. An LLM could try to do something along the lines if either it gets fine-tuned to do it, or somebody instructs it to do it. I see extremely more likely a small group of humans using a powerful LLM t…

>> One runaway Mythos might just hack all other data centers

> Because the real world is not a Hollywood movie.

One interesting thought experiment that I like to do is think about how many years you have to go back for this to be true. In this particular scenario, I think ~25 years is pretty much the sweet spot.

The Internet was beginning to take shape in the late 90s, early 2000s, and security was just beginning to be taken seriously, but it was still nascent. In that timeframe we had the first worms starting to appear, we had slammer, we had blaster, ssh had lots of exploits and so on.

It's not really far-fetched that a mythos equivalent "unit", working in the 2000s could really "take over the world". Especially one without the "safety" tuning. The Internet was really ripe for this in that timeframe, security wasn't up to par, and employing advance techniques that came later (in memory payloads, rootkits, etc) could make it pseudo-invisible to that era's detection tech. (reminder that traces of blaster were found on computers from a nuclear powerplant at that time).

The only question is would the trend continue? Meaning would a ~2050s "mythos" equivalent be able to do today what the one we have today could do in the 2000s. And if true, would that capability come before the 2050s? Could this be reached sooner, with say a dedicated offline DC somewhere where "mythos" could bang its tokens against the network and learn to exploit everything we have today, faster than 25 years? That's probably a bit of a stretch, but maybe not "hollywood" far fetched...

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