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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

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Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#421

Post by gfarah »

hnfong wrote: post #206
menaerus wrote: post #181

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…

Pro tip: call it a "law of nature" and people will somehow stop pestering you about the why. I think in a couple decades people will call this the Law of Emergent Intelligence or whatever -- shove sufficient data into a plausible neural network with sufficient compute and things will work out somehow. On a more serious note, I think the GP fell into an even greater fallacy of believing reductionism is sufficient to d…

In science these days, the term "Law" is almost never used anymore, the term "Theory" replaced it. E.g Theory of special relativity instead of Law of special relativity.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#423

Post by tim333 »

bheadmaster wrote: post #85
stego-tech wrote: post #28

This 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…

> 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.

I thought the Hinton talking to Jon Stewart interview gives a rough idea how they work. Hinton got Turing and Nobel prizes for inventing some of the stuff https://youtu.be/jrK3PsD3APk?t=255

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#424

Post by marifjeren »

azeirah wrote: post #390
marifjeren wrote: post #370

> I [...] fit a hyperbolic model to each one independently ^ That's your problem right there. Assuming a hyperbolic model would definitely result in some exuberant predictions but that's no reason to think it's correct. The blog post contains no justification for that model (besides well it's a "function that hits infinity"). I can model the growth of my bank account the same way but that doesn't make it so. Unfortun…

If I understand the author correctly, he chose the hyperbolic model specifically because the story of "the singularity" _requires_ a function that hits infinity. He's looking for a model that works for the story in the media and runs with it. Your criticism seems to be criticizing the story, not the author's attempt to take it "seriously"

Correct.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#425

Post by Invictus0 »

baxtr wrote: post #409
austinjp wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russell's chicken (or turkey) would like a word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_illusion

I love that you brought this up. Chickens are killed ALL the time. It’s a recurring mass event. If you were a smart chicken you could see that pattern and put it into a formula. In contrast, the end of Humanity would be a singular event. It’s even in the name… And that is fiction / speculation in comparison. It’s not backed by any data. Human survival over 300,000 years by contrast is. I mean it’s fine to dream thing…

298,000 of those years didn't have toilet paper. It was utterly impossible for a single person to "end humanity" even 200 years ago; now, the president can do it in minutes by launching a salvo of nukes. Comparing the present moment to the hunter/gatherer days is preposterous.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#426

Post by lovich »

tinfoilhatter wrote: post #331
NateEag wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you should make your goal to teach AndrewKemendo to appreciate his existence as the inscrutable gift it is, and to spend his brief time in this universe helping others appreciate the great gift they've been given and using it to the fullest. See how it works?

AndrewKemendo (based on his personal website) looks to be older than me. If he hasn't figured out the miracle of getting to exist yet, unfortunately I don't think he's going to.

Only looked at his website because it was mentioned and wow. This is not quite at timecube levels but it’s closer to timecube than it is to coherence.

The man seems unwell if he has kids based on his other comments and is still talking about “civilization suicide” and “obviating humans”

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#427

Post by tinfoilhatter »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #378
tinfoilhatter wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AndrewKemendo (based on his personal website) looks to be older than me. If he hasn't figured out the miracle of getting to exist yet, unfortunately I don't think he's going to.

So why are you wasting your time being a miracle on anything other than building the successor to us?

Because I don't believe humans need succeeding by machines? You're obviously a Curtis Yarvin / Nick Land megafan. I'm of the opinion that these people are psycopaths and I think most people would agree with my sentiment.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#429

Post by famouswaffles »

measurablefunc wrote: post #400
stickfigure wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the fallacy at hand is more along the lines of "no true scotsman". You can define understanding to require such detail that nobody can claim it; you can define understanding to be so trivial that everyone can claim it. "Why does the sun rise?" Is it enough to understand that the Earth revolves around the sun, or do you need to understand quantum gravity?

Good point. OP was saying "no one knows" when in fact plenty of people do know but people also often conflate knowing & understanding w/o realizing that's what they're doing. People who have studied programming, electrical engineering, ultraviolet lithography, quantum mechanics, & so on know what is going on inside the computer but that's different from saying they understand billions of transistors b/c no one really…

Honestly, you are just confused.

With LLMs, The "knowing" you're describing is trivial and doesn't really constitute knowing at all. It's just the physics of the substrate. When people say LLMs are a black box, they aren't talking about the hardware or the fact that it's "math all the way down." They are talking about interpretability.

If I hand you a 175-billion parameter tensor, your 'knowledge' of logic gates doesn't help you explain why a specific circuit within that model represents "the concept of justice" or how it decided to pivot a sentence in a specific direction.

On the other hand, the very professions you cited rely on interpretability. A civil engineer doesn't look at a bridge and dismiss it as "a collection of atoms" unable to go further. They can point to a specific truss and explain exactly how it manages tension and compression, tell you why it could collapse in certain conditions. A software engineer can step through a debugger and tell you why a specific if statement triggered.

We don't even have that much for LLMs so why would you say we have an idea of what's going on ?

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#430

Post by knollimar »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #297
AlexCoventry wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I learned more last year from ChatGPT Pro than I'd learned in the previous 5, FWIW.

Just say 'LLMs'. Whenever someone name drops a specific model I can't help but think it's just an Ad bot.

The "Pro" part is particularly suspect
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