Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

campedersen.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 800 posts

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#471

Post by nandomrumber »

skissane wrote: post #455
Nevermark wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People vote for people they don't agree with. When there are only two choices, and infinite issues, voters only have two choices: Vote for someone you don't agree with less, or vote for someone you quite hilariously imagine agrees with you. EDIT: Not being cynical about voters. But about the centralization of parties, in number and operationally, as a steep barrier for voter choice.

That’s much more true for Nixon in 1968 than Morrison in 2019 Because the US has a “hard” two party system - third party candidates have very little hope, especially at the national level; voting for a third party is indistinguishable from staying home, as far as the outcome goes, with some rather occasional exceptions But Australia is different - Australia has a “soft” two party system - two-and-a-half major parties…

And minor parties receive funding from the Australian Electoral Commission if they receive over certain percentage of votes.

It was 5% last time I cared to be informed by may be different now, and they would receive $x for each vote, or what ever it is now.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#472

Post by bee_rider »

legulere wrote: post #325
bee_rider wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On the other hand talking about those believes can also lead to real changes. Slavery used to be seen widely a necessary evil, just like for instance war.

I don’t actually know a ton about the rhetoric around abolitionism. Are you saying they tried to convince people that everybody else thought slavery was evil? I guess I assumed they tried to convince people slavery was in-and-of-itself evil.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#473

Post by k4rnaj1k »

tim333 wrote: post #457
atomic128 wrote: post #51

Once 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…

>You won't read/write/think/understand etc... I can't see it. We have LLMs now and none of that applies to me. I find them quite handy as a sort of enhanced Google search though.

[dead]

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#474

Post by nandomrumber »

skissane wrote: post #455
Nevermark wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People vote for people they don't agree with. When there are only two choices, and infinite issues, voters only have two choices: Vote for someone you don't agree with less, or vote for someone you quite hilariously imagine agrees with you. EDIT: Not being cynical about voters. But about the centralization of parties, in number and operationally, as a steep barrier for voter choice.

That’s much more true for Nixon in 1968 than Morrison in 2019 Because the US has a “hard” two party system - third party candidates have very little hope, especially at the national level; voting for a third party is indistinguishable from staying home, as far as the outcome goes, with some rather occasional exceptions But Australia is different - Australia has a “soft” two party system - two-and-a-half major parties…

Also, there is nothing centre-right about Susan Ley.

She is the leftest left leaning leader of the Liberal party I’ve ever had the misfortune of having to live through.

She was absolutely on board with this recent Hitlerian “anti-hate” legislation that was rammed through with no public consultation.

Okay, that’s a bit uncharitable. We had 48 hours.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#475

Post by striking »

famouswaffles wrote: post #395
striking wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pattern matching, likely from typography texts and descriptions of umbrellas. My understanding is that the model can attempt some permutations in its thinking and eventually a permutation's tokens catch enough attention to attempt to solve, and that once it is attending to "everyday object", "arc", and "hook", it will reply with "umbrella". Why am I confident that it's not actually doing spatial reasoning? At le…

>It's pattern matching, likely from typography texts and descriptions of umbrellas. "Pattern matching" is not an explanation of anything, nor does it answer the question I posed. You basically hand waved the problem away in conveniently vague and non-descriptive phrase. Do you think you could publish that in a paper for ext ? >Why am I confident that it's not actually doing spatial reasoning? At least in the case of…

I don't have much more to add to the sibling comment other than the fact that the transcript reads

> When you rotate ")" counterclockwise 90°, it becomes a wide, upward-opening arc — like ⌣.

but I'm pretty sure that's what you get if you rotate it clockwise.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#476

Post by willis936 »

senbrow wrote: post #460
sealeck wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a bit hard to say that this is definitively true: people have always been interested in running linear algebra on computers. In the absence of NVIDIA some other company would likely have found a different industry and sold linear algebra processing hardware to them!

Almost certainly not at the scale of the consumer gaming industry, however!

Google is making millions of TPUs per year. Nvidia ships more gaming GPUs, but it's not like multiple orders of magnitude off.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#477

Post by handoflixue »

ActorNightly wrote: post #359
dagss wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't talking about "here’s how LLMs actually work" in this context a bit like saying "a human can't be a relevant to X because a brain is only a set of molecules, neurons, synapses"? Or even "this book won't have any effect on the world because it's only a collection of letters, see here, black ink on paper, that is what is IS, it can't DO anything"... Saying LLM is a statistical prediction engine of the next token…

Its pretty clear that the problem of solving AI is software, I don't think anyone would disagree. But that problem is MUCH MUCH MUCH harder than people make it out to be. For example, you can reliably train an LLM to produce accurate output of assembly code that can fit into a context window. However, lets say you give it a Terabyte of assembly code - it won't be able to produce correct output as it will run out of c…

> For example, you can reliably train an LLM to produce accurate output of assembly code that can fit into a context window. However, lets say you give it a Terabyte of assembly code - it won't be able to produce correct output as it will run out of context.

Fascinating reasoning. Should we conclude that humans are also incapable of intelligence? I don't know any human who can fit a terabyte of assembly into their context window.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#478

Post by throwerxyz »

atomic128 wrote: post #51

Once 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…

Bold of you to assume people will be writing in any form in the future. Writing will be gone, like the radio and replaced with speaking. Star Trek did have it right there.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#479

Post by Forgeties79 »

tehjoker wrote: post #273
Forgeties79 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just point to Covid lockdowns and how many people took up hobbies, how many just turned into recluses, how many broke the rules no matter the consequences real or imagined, etc. Humans need something to do. I don’t think it should be work all the time. But we need something to do or we just lose it. It’s somewhat simplistic, but I find it get the conversation rolling. Then I go “it’s great that we want to replace w…

It's true people need something to do, but I don't think the COVID shutdown (lockdowns didn't happen in the U.S. for the most part though they did in other countries) is a good comparison because the entire society was perfused with existential dread and fear of contact with another human being while the death count was rising and rising by thousands a day. It's not a situation that makes for comfortable comparisons…

That’s a fair point. I don’t mean to trivialize the actual fears and concerns surrounding the pandemic.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#480

Post by handoflixue »

wavemode wrote: post #384
dagss wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't talking about "here’s how LLMs actually work" in this context a bit like saying "a human can't be a relevant to X because a brain is only a set of molecules, neurons, synapses"? Or even "this book won't have any effect on the world because it's only a collection of letters, see here, black ink on paper, that is what is IS, it can't DO anything"... Saying LLM is a statistical prediction engine of the next token…

You're putting a bunch of words in the parent commenter's mouth, and arguing against a strawman. In this context, "here’s how LLMs actually work" is what allows someone to have an informed opinion on whether a singularity is coming or not. If you don't understand how they work, then any company trying to sell their AI, or any random person on the Internet, can easily convince you that a singularity is coming without…

The problem is, there's two groups:

One says "well, it was built as a bunch of pieces, so it can only do the thing the pieces can do", which is reasonably dismissed by noting that basically the only people predicting current LLM capabilities are the ones who are remarkably worried about a singularity occurring.

The other says "we can evaluate capabilities and notice that LLMs keep gaining new features at an exponential, now bordering into hyperbolic rate", like the OP link. And those people are also fairly worried about the singularity occurring.

So mainly you get people using "here's how LLMs actually work" to argue against the Singularity if-and-only-if they are also the ones arguing that LLMs can't do the things that they can provably do, today, or are otherwise making arguments that also declare humans aren't capable of intelligence / reasoning / etc..

Post reply on HN