541–550 of 1001 posts
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Grad students on zero pay solve problems like this everyday. What exactly is your point here?
Everyday? Which 10 problems were solved by mathematics grad students in the past 10 days? OK I’ll grant that it’s not your obligation to be my search function (despite you making the wild assertion in the first place), so instead can you just point us to the latest grad student solved problem of this level that you know of?
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you are working on coding. they are working on things like "creative writing" remember that gpt 4o was popular among those who had ai as a romantic partnet?
Well that's on purpose lol. OpenAI does not want you falling in love with their chatbot and have been deliberately training it to be less romantic.
People argue whether we are at y-5, y, or y+5, meanwhile we seem to be on a y=2^x exponential that keeps delivering more and more impressive results. The most interesting question to me is what will be consumed by the exponential like math seems to be undergoing, and what won’t. Writing has been quite stubborn, but I’ve noticed Fable to be quite a big step up there. How about politics? Will we develop new ways to let…
Yes.
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Asking questions about policy and values and pushing to have those resolved in positive ways is about as far away from denial as you can get. It’s possibly the only useful thing an ordinary person can do. What a lot of people want to do, and I’m not saying that you’re one of them, is to assume that a positive outcome is impossible and either do nothing or loudly yell that the world is ending. Neither is particularly…
The AI companies themselves, who are highly motivated to sell AI as overall positive for society, notwithstanding some security/etc risks, and who have economists on the payroll to think about things like this, do not seem to have found any possible positive outcome to present. Shane Legg (DeepMind co-founder), one of the more intelligent and thoughtful people you'll find in the industry, could only offer "it's a tou…
Eventually UBI will be the norm, and if the living standards of a person on UBI is as good as yours or mine today, that will be an enormous win for everyone. It’s like pensions, once these were only for the elderly poor, now they’re a right for everyone in most developed countries.
It’s also interesting that for most of human history leisure time was the point of life, and only in recent modernity has work come to be the meaning of someone’s existence.
UBI has to be commensurate with production being automated. That’s a big logistical problem, if you think building datacenters is a challenge try bringing about radical abundance, but even so it’s not insurmountable. It just needs to be taken on as project and not seen as an impossibility.
So much of this is not about what is possible so much as what people believe is possible. We can do anything if we try.
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And what does taking it seriously entail?
The human zoo where the top ~250,000k humans live in a "human utopia" and the AI provides while mostly focusing on whatever it decides it's own goals are. Humanity survives (but we reading this probably don't), the AI treats the living humans like the Emperor's favorite pets (probably a pretty good life), and then the AI does whatever else it deems important.
People argue whether we are at y-5, y, or y+5, meanwhile we seem to be on a y=2^x exponential that keeps delivering more and more impressive results. The most interesting question to me is what will be consumed by the exponential like math seems to be undergoing, and what won’t. Writing has been quite stubborn, but I’ve noticed Fable to be quite a big step up there. How about politics? Will we develop new ways to let…
What’s new about LLMs is that you can scalably manipulate people individually. It used to be that you could either have scale (speeches, tweets, interviews, website, etc.) or individual engagement (replying to mail/tweets/town hall questions.)
Now you can pull the history and preferences of an individual, then shape a message—in real time—to them, specifically. You can have conversations on social media with a single person and shape your message specifically to them.
Part of this can be good (you talk about what they care about, where 90% of broadcast messaging might not apply) and part of it can be bad (manipulation.)
My guess is that, in the US, the right will cynically adopt manipulation to great effect and the left will take a moral stand against shady practices and lose elections.
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>Whilst current models can't 'intuit That's how they are finding these solutions though, unless we are just going to label intuition as something only humans can do. Like a submarine being unable to swim or whatever that example is.
Some of them... The two places were seeing lots of movement are: * Updates to lower/upper bounds. In many cases, these kinds of problems are the deep-math equivalent of calculating more digits of pi. Yes, if you throw time at it you'll break the record, but it may not be terribly worthwhile. * Finding counter examples which disprove conjectures. This is really useful, and helps offset some positivity bias on the huma…
Replace philosophers for mathematicians and Douglas Adams was spot on again. Whilst current models can't 'intuit' and come up with conjectures, they can certainly disprove some of them very quickly through the kind of grind that humans can't do. I suppose there really are some mathematicians out there today, whose last few years of study, have just been up-ended by this. -- "Yes we are," insisted Majikthise. "We are…
Of course computers can grind in a way that humans can't. But now we have systems that convert the human-comprehensible ideas into a computer's plan of attack, in a way that greatly expands the frontier of ideas thus treatable.
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All arguments like this boil down to semantics at a certain point, but yes large language models can “intuit” because they can generalize between examples. The issue then becomes how you pack new examples into context. Humans can “intuit” based on a much larger, if not unlimited, context. Also I just want to say that human cognition is something so insanely complex and deep that we will not understand it at all in my…
Define insanely complex and deep in a way that isn't illiterate hand waving. Most humans are dumber than a box of rocks. Here in Seattle we had one of many light rail-related fuckups where they had to replace part of the line with buses. People piled into the front of one when it was full. When people got out they never moved back. As the driver struggled to close the door and people struggled to get in the wad of pe…
This does not demonstrate a lack of intelligence. It demonstrates laziness and a lack of interest in spreading apart. Or just lack of consideration (or even malice) on the part of those at the back of the wad.
> Chatgpt was smarter than the average person a while ago
This is an absurd claim that fundamentally misunderstands what it means to be "smart". Reasoning that would get you to this conclusion would equally well apply to Google's search engine over a decade ago.
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> We improve, we learn, we recalibrate our expectations based on what we've learned. That's not what people mean when they say "moving the goalposts". It means that people are adamant that something wasn't important/hard/impressive once the "AI" solves it. And then they come up with another thing that needs to be solved in order to prove it is important/hard/impressive. And once that happens, they do it again. And ag…
If it seems like I don't understand the meaning of that very well-known phrase, then clearly I have failed to make my point. I'll try again. And please note that I will use some generalizations to make my point more clearly, rather than because I don't understand nuance; kindly grant me a charitable reading. In recent years, I have commonly seen the phrase "you're moving the goalposts" deployed by the "it might be se…
It's in how they change, not the fact that they change. The skeptics seem to have secret definitions for intelligence, sentience, consciousness, creativity, etc. that amounts to "a thing only humans have". Often that thing is equivalent to a soul. When yesterday's challenge (LLMs don't have X because they can't do Y!) is met, Y changes but X stays the same. This is not the process by which a field matures, it is a rhetorical technique used by skeptics to avoid honestly stating or confronting their internal definitions. That can be revealed by asking the skeptic the following:
"Forget LLMs. What if we made a completely physically accurate simulation of a human being?"
Many say no, that simulated human being still couldn't have (intelligence, consciousness, sentience, creativity, ...). This reveals that there is a necessary metaphysical component to those attributes, at which point any scientific-minded person will leave the debate.