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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

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Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#591

Post by esailija »

dagss wrote: post #286
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…

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…

There is more than molecules, neurons and synapses. They are made from lower level stuff that we have no idea about (well, we do in this instance but you get the point). They are just higher level things that are useful to explain and understand some things but don't describe or capture the whole thing. For that you would need to go to lower and lower level and so far it seems they go on infinitely. Currently we are stuck at the quantum level, that doesn't mean it's the final level.

OTOH, an LLM is just a token prediction engine. It fully and completely covers it. There is no lower level secrets hidden in the design nobody understands, because it could not have been created if there was. The fact that the output can be surprising is not evidence of anything, we have always had surprising outputs like funny bugs or unexpected features. Using the word "emergence" for this is just deceitful.

This algorithm has fundamental limitations and they have not been getting better, if you look closely. For instance you could vibe code a C compiler now, but it's 80% there, cute trick but not usable in real world. Just like anything, it cannot be economically vibe coded to 100%. They are not going back and vibe coding the previous simpler projects to 100% with "improved" models. Instead they are just vibe coding something bigger to 80%. This is not an improvement in limitations, it is actually communicating between the lines that the limitations cannot be overcome.

Also, enshittification has not even started yet.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#592

Post by giorgioz »

When technology is rapidly progressing up in iperbole or exponential it looks like it reach infinity. In practice though at some point will reach a physical limit and it will go flat. This alternation of going up and flattening make the shape of steps.

We've come so far and yet we are so small.

They seem two opposite concepts but they live together, we will make a lot of progress and yet there will always be more progress to be made.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#593

Post by threethirtytwo »

measurablefunc wrote: post #583
threethirtytwo wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well don't ask me to help you then. I read your profile and it has this snippet in there: "Address the substance of my arguments or just save yourself the keystrokes." The substance of your argument was complete ignorance about the topic, so I addressed it as you requested. Please remove that sentence from your profile if that is not what you want. Thank you.

I don't see how you interpreted it that way so I recommend you make fewer assumptions about online content instead of asserting your interpretation as the one & only truth. It's generally better to assume as little as possible & ask for clarifications when uncertain.

There is no other interpretation for that other than what I said. If you disagree then that’s a misinterpretation of the English language.

I am addressing the substance of your argument and that substance is lack of knowledge there is zero other angle to interpret it.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#594

Post by tyrust »

energy123 wrote: post #577
aidenn0 wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course this is subject to a similar rebuttal to Pascal's Wager (Consider a universe in which the deity punishes all believers): What if a capricious super-intelligence takes over that punishes everyone who didn't buy into the hype?

Roko's Basilisk is literally impossible. If the AI is super-intelligent then it won't buy into the sunk cost fallacy. That is to say, it will know that it has no reason to punish you (or digital copies of you) because it knows that retrocausality is impossible - punishing you won't alter your past behavior. And if the AI does buy into the sunk cost fallacy, then it isn't super-intelligent.

Vengeance needn't be productive. The super-intelligence may punish simply because they want to.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#595

Post by accounting2026 »

tavavex wrote: post #510
accounting2026 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If such a simplistic explanation was true, LLM's would only be able to answer things that had been asked before, and where at least a 'fuzzy' textual question/answer match was available. This is clearly not the case. In practice you can prompt the LLM with such a large number of constraints, so large that the combinatorial explosion ensures no one asked that before. And you will still get a relevant answer combining…

I think you're confusing OP for the people who claim that there is zero functional difference between an LLM and a search engine that just parrots stuff already in it. But they never made such a claim. Here, let me try: the simplest explanation for how next token estimation leads to a model that often produces true answers is that for most inputs, the most likely next token is true. Given their size and the way they'…

No one ever made the claim it was magic, not even remotely. Regarding the rest of your commentary: a) The original claim was that LLM's were not understood and are a black box. b) Then someone claims that this is not true, and they know well how LLM's work, it is simply due to questions & answers being in close textual proximity in training data. c) I then claim this is a shallow explanation because you then need to invoke additionally a huge abstraction network - that is a black box, d) you seem to agree with this while at the same time saying I misrepresented "b" - which I don't think I did. They really claimed they understood it and only offered this textual proximity thing.

In general, every attempt at explanation of LLM's that appeal to "[just] predicting next token" is thought terminating and automatically invalid as explanation. Why? Because it is confusing the objective function with the result. It adds exactly zero over saying "I know how a chess engine works, it just predicts the next move and has been trained to predict the next move" or "A talking human just predicts the next word, as it was trained to do". It says zero about how this is done internally in the model. You could have a physical black box predicting the next token, and inside you could have simple frequentist tables or you could have a human brain or you could have an LLM. In all cases you could say the box is predicting the next token and if any training was involved you could say it was trained to predict the next token.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#596

Post by energy123 »

tyrust wrote: post #594
energy123 wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roko's Basilisk is literally impossible. If the AI is super-intelligent then it won't buy into the sunk cost fallacy. That is to say, it will know that it has no reason to punish you (or digital copies of you) because it knows that retrocausality is impossible - punishing you won't alter your past behavior. And if the AI does buy into the sunk cost fallacy, then it isn't super-intelligent.

Vengeance needn't be productive. The super-intelligence may punish simply because they want to.

Agreed, but not because it agrees with the logic of Roko's Basilisk. If it actually did agree with it, it would be too stupid to be a super-intelligence.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#597

Post by measurablefunc »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #593
measurablefunc wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how you interpreted it that way so I recommend you make fewer assumptions about online content instead of asserting your interpretation as the one & only truth. It's generally better to assume as little as possible & ask for clarifications when uncertain.

There is no other interpretation for that other than what I said. If you disagree then that’s a misinterpretation of the English language. I am addressing the substance of your argument and that substance is lack of knowledge there is zero other angle to interpret it.

As I said previously, I don't think this is a productive use of time or effort for anyone involved so I'm dropping out of this thread.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#598

Post by [deleted] »

giorgioz wrote: post #592

When technology is rapidly progressing up in iperbole or exponential it looks like it reach infinity. In practice though at some point will reach a physical limit and it will go flat. This alternation of going up and flattening make the shape of steps. We've come so far and yet we are so small. They seem two opposite concepts but they live together, we will make a lot of progress and yet there will always be more pro…

[deleted]

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#599

Post by fouc »

nandomrumber wrote: post #469
albumen wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two options, not two choices. (Unless you have a proportional representation voting system like ireland, in which case you can vote for as many candidates as you like in descending order of preference) Anyway, there’s a third option: spoil your vote. In the recent Irish presidential election, 13% of those polled afterwards said they spoiled their votes, due to a poor selection of candidates from which to choose. http…

Please don’t encourage people to waste their vote. Encourage people to vote for the candidate they dislike the least, then try to work out ways to hold government accountable. If you’re in Australia, at least listen to what people like Tony Abbott, the IPA, and Pauline Hanson are actually saying these days.

A spoiled vote is at least better than not voting at all.

Because now that means there's an indication of what percentage of the populace are saying "These candidates don't qualify for my vote"

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#600

Post by psychoslave »

https://medium.com/@kin.artcollective/the-fundamental-flaws-...

So when things are told to be accelerating, we have some choices to do.

First, what is accelerating compared to what other regime in which referential?

Who is telling that things accelerate, and why they are motivated to make us believe that it's happening.

Also, is accelerating going to be forever and only with positive feedback loops? Or are the pro-acceleration sending the car quicker in a well visible wall, but they sell the speech that stopping the vehicle right now would mean losing the ongoing race. Of course questioning the idea of the race itself and its cargo cult is taboo. It's all about competition don't you know (unless it threat an established oligarch)?

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