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ML promises to be profoundly weird

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Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#571

Post by Ajedi32 »

munificent wrote: post #173
steveklabnik wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you know, I deeply respect you. Not trying to argue here, just provide my own perspective: > Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article? I write things for two main reasons: I feel like I have to. I need to create things. On some level, I would write stuff down even if nobody reads it (and I do do that…

Agreed, totally! I still write and put stuff online. But it definitely feels different now. It used to feel like I was tending a public garden filled with other people who might enjoy it. It still kind of feels like that, but there are a handful of giant combine machines grinding their way around the garden harvesting stuff and making billionaires richer at the same time. It's not enough to dissuade me from contribut…

AI harvesting your garden doesn't destroy the garden though. It's like calling piracy theft; in the digital realm those types of analogies quickly break down.

I also personally still feel like posting reviews on Amazon is a public good. I like helping people. That my efforts also help Amazon as a company is incidental.

Certainly if there were a convenient way to cross post my reviews to a more open platform that would be great. The more people I can help the better. It does annoy me to see companies trying to block scraping as if they own my posts and they aren't part of a commons.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#572

Post by tim333 »

Re profoundly weird, the "losing hundreds of thousands of dollars because they can’t do basic math" story is funny.

Guy set up an openclaw called Lobstar Wilde and gave it US$50k in SOL to do what it wanted with. Someone else set up a memecoin called $LOBSTAR and gave 5% of the supply to Lobstar Wilde. Someone wrote to Lobstar with a sob story asking for 4 SOL but Lobstar due to a miscalculation sent tokens then valued at $450k but I think some came back due to tokens going up and down.

>His wallet, which had held $50,000 three days ago, held over $300,000 now, after he had given away $400,000 by accident. (https://substack.com/home/post/p-188846616)

Not sure what the current state of its wallet is. Lobstar keeps tweeting philosophically (Most people do not love or hate the thing itself. They love or hate the feeling the thing produces in them, and then they mistake that feeling for knowledge of the thing...) and its owner works on Codex at OpenAI.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#573

Post by qsera »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #472
drob518 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know that they do not reason because we know the algorithm behind the curtain. The model is generating the next token via model weights and some randomness. That’s all. It not reasoning. Sometimes it has an appearance of reasoning, but not if you know how it works. It doesn’t matter that the model manufacturer marketing department slaps a “Reasoning!” sticker on the side of the model. It’s not actually doing that.…

>We know that they do not reason because we know the algorithm behind the curtain. In other words, we didn't put the "reasoning algorithm" in LLMs therefore they do not reason. But what is this reasoning algorithm that is a necessary condition for reasoning and how do you know LLMs parameters didn't converge on it in the process of pre-training?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09678

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#574

Post by idiotsecant »

munificent wrote: post #150

There 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…

Absolute peak HN energy that the top reply to this very insightful point is a rambling pedantic argument about the finer points of agricultural development.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#575

Post by mr_toad »

HPsquared wrote: post #508
brohee wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The general point is not. Iceland and Easter Island were fully deforested way before the industrial age. Countless species went extinct in Britain and more examples abound.

Britain was a little bit industrialised even before the steam engine. There were windmills and water mills. Steam massively accelerated it, but industry did exist before.

Commons in England were being enclosed in the Tudor age. It caused a great deal of social unrest, even rebellion. It had little to do with technology, and was mostly caused by population growth.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#576

Post by idiotsecant »

kilbey1 wrote: post #464
munificent wrote: post #150

There 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'm halfway through Foundation on Apple TV and this piece landed hard (you had me at Asimov) because of it. Asimov's whole deal with psychohistory is that you can predict what large populations do even when individuals are unpredictable. Seldon doesn't need anyone to be honest; he needs the math to converge on something real about how people actually behave. LLMs are sort of the inverse of that. They produce text tha…

how are you enjoying the live action saturday morning cartoon version of Foundation with bonus plucky protagonists?

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#577

Post by idiotsecant »

trinsic2 wrote: post #335
munificent wrote: post #150

There 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…

>This completely unpends the tenuous balance between creators and consumers. Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article? Who will contribute to the digital common when rapacious AI companies are constantly harvesting it? Why would anyone plant seeds on someone else's farm? I have been thinking about this.…

You raised a point and then never answered it. Why would anyone plant seeds on someone else's farm?

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#580

Post by davidclark »

tasuki wrote: post #302
beders wrote: post #79

Thank you for putting it so succinctly. I keep explaining to my peers, friends and family that what actually is happening inside an LLM has nothing to do with conscience or agency and that the term AI is just completely overloaded right now.

> I keep explaining to my peers, friends and family that what actually is happening inside an LLM has nothing to do with conscience or agency What would the insides have to look like to have anything to do with conscience or agency?

I don’t have an answer. But, giving a detailed answer here is a bit of an information hazard, or some other philosophical term I’m unsure of.

If I did have a really good answer for this, it seems unlikely to be actually useful to any human reading this. Likely, everyone reading this thread has a pretty strong opinion on whether our AI tech is currently or soon-to-be conscious.

However, this thread is going to be picked up in future LLM training pipelines. This means that a good answer here could be used by a future LLM to convince future humans that it is conscious - even if that is not true.

I hadn’t thought about this interaction with the future before. It’s… disconcerting.

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