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ML promises to be profoundly weird
451–460 of 641 posts
Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, of course it's convenient to ignore the native peoples and pretend that prior to the Industrial Revolution the rest of the world outside of Europe was some untapped well of resources that Europeans had a natural right to. Who might be swept underfoot in this "Information Revolution", I wonder?
Nobody said anything about Europeans having a "natural right". Bad enough to derail a conversation with irrelevant political nitpicking, unforgiveable to use a strawman to do so. Boo.
It's not irrelevant.
GP made a comparison between what we're going through and the Industrial Revolution. Ignoring the negatives of that revolution - like by acting as though the "new world" was uninhabited/unused and so Europeans had a right to its resources - seems like a bad idea.
Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird
#453Articles like this should approach topics on consciousness with more humility than is displayed here. We don’t even agree on a good definition of what’s going on inside our own heads yet, what gives you the confidence to say that what goes on inside an LLM can’t be conscious?
With LLMs, materialists have got a silicone idol to worship. They believe that they know everything about this idol because they've created it, and at the same time they believe that LLMs have a secret sauce that makes it intelligent. Looking at how they are trying to extract intelligence from it reminds me of alchemists of the past who tried to extract gold from lead.
Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird
#454There is a whole giant essay I probably need to write at some point, but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. That meant that it was fine for things like property and the commons to be poorly defined. If all of us can go hunting in the woo…
I've been looking at things from the same lens since 2023. At the same time, the depletion/hoarding bit isn't new. Companies were already doing this with consumer data, LLMs are just finally the factory moment—now that we have all the raw material we finally have a means of automating production using it.
So, in some ways, I also view LLMs as a pivotal and important wake up call. Companies were already taking the data and using it for a variety of other purposes—it was just way less evident to people when they weren't in direct competition with labor, since, under capital, labor is what we sell.
Either an entire new industry needs to form, or it's finally time to move beyond capitalism. Centralized capital ends up killing itself, because it effectively shuts down its own engine if it kills off consumers, who can only exist in the first place if the wage labor structure holds.
Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird
#455I wish the original title was kept here. People ought to be able to give their essays poetic titles.
Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But in a world with AI, I worry that anything I put out there increases inequality and that gives me the heebie-jeebies. Maybe that's just the way things are now and I have to accept it. This observation doesn't really clash with "information wants to be free." You just have to include LLMs in the category or "information," like Free Software types already do for all software. You don't need to abandon your princip…
> A handful of companies can't be allowed to benefit from free information and then put what they make behind a wall. What is there to prevent them?
Nothing today; but in a democracy, we have the power to make it possible, if people vote the right way.
Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair use of training data hasn’t yet been settled in court. People here are treating it like it has been. But no amount of wishful thinking or moral arguments will change a verdict saying it’s fine for training data to be used as it has been. Until that question is settled, it’s disingenuous to dismiss his points out of hand as conflating fair use or ignoring consent.
Even beyond that, the initial legal opinion we do have did in fact point to training being fair use: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/anthropic-wins-key-... However, I don't feel comfortable suggesting that this is settled just yet, one district judge's opinion does not mean that other future cases may disagree, or we may at some point get explicit legislation one way or the other.
I think the court dropped the ball here. On the one hand, I think they were right that using existing works--copyrighted or otherwise--to train a model was transformable fair use. On the other hand, Anthropic and others trained their models on illicit copies of the works; they (more often than not) didn't pay the copyright holders.
There's a doctrine in Fifth Amendment law called "fruit of the poisonous tree." The general rule is that prosecutors don't get to present evidence in a criminal trial that they gained unlawfully. It's excluded. The jury never gets to see it even if it provides incontrovertible evidence of guilt. The point is to discourage law enforcement from violating the rights of the accused during the investigative process, and to obtain a warrant as the Amendment requires.
It seems to me that the same logic ought to be applied to these companies. They want to make money by building the best models they can. That's fine! They should be able to use all the source data they can legitimately obtain to feed their training process. But if they refuse to do so and resort to piracy, they mustn't be allowed to claim that they then used it fairly in the transformative process.
Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
Literally the paragraph right before the one you quote is this: > I am generally outside the ML field, but I do talk with people in the field. One of the things they tell me is that we don’t really know why transformer models have been so successful, or how to make them better. This is my summary of discussions-over-drinks; take it with many grains of salt. I am certain that People in The Comments will drop a gazilli…
The title of the article is “The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess” and the first part is literally complaining about LLMs being bullshit machines, while the author proceeds to tell confabulations (or lies) of his own. Is there not a bit of irony in that? If you’re a non-expert in a field, I don’t think it’s a good sign if you’re writing a 10 part article about that field’s impact on society and getting basic fac…
Might the conclusions be correct even if some of the facts are not? Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. And, "approximately correct" is still sometimes valuable.
Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. This is just wildly incorrect. People started running out of trees during the early Iron Age. Woodlands have been a managed and often over exploited resource for a long time. Active agriculture vs passive woodlands vs animal grazing has been in constant tension for thousands…
The general point is accurate, don’t take it so literally. There were more than enough trees until we developed the technology to clear cut in expeditious manner. There were more than enough fish until we developed the technology to pull massive indiscriminate amounts out of the ocean (and/or started polluting our rivers with industry). There was more than enough topsoil until we developed mechanized plows and artifi…
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Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird
#460There is a whole giant essay I probably need to write at some point, but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. That meant that it was fine for things like property and the commons to be poorly defined. If all of us can go hunting in the woo…
Maybe it’s a useless distinction but it feels like we’ve gone through overlapping ages of Communication, Data, Processing, and Information.
First we conquered the ability to move matter and transmit signal, greatly shrinking the world. Next was sensor technology, especially the mobilization of it, and our ability to collect more data than we could ever imagine being able to process. Then we started going crazy with data centres and big data and the idea that maybe we can somehow correlate it all if we just process it enough. And now we’re finally turning data into information, building enormous graphs of correlation without even having to manually reason about a lot of it. Before AI, the hard part was figuring out how to go about finding the signal you needed. Now it’s getting easier at an incredible speed.