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Meta's Vision for Superintelligence

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Re: Meta's Vision for Superintelligence

#61

Post by aeon_ai »

I read Careless People recently.

I don't think the author of that book is unbiased, and after some healthy debate with friends, imagine there are a number of different perspectives on the facts. But it seems clear that, well before it was public knowledge outside of the company, there was clearly visibility of and ignorance over harms being caused by the platform inside of it.

Facebook (now Meta) turned human attention into a product. They optimized for engagement over wellbeing and knew that their platforms were amplifying division and did it anyway because the metrics looked good.

It's funny, because I aspire to many of the same things cited in this vision -- helping realize the best in each individual, giving them more freedom, and critically, helping them be wise in a world that very clearly would prefer them not to be.

But the vision is being pitched by the company that already knows too much about us and has consistently used that knowledge for extraction rather than empowerment.

Re: Meta's Vision for Superintelligence

#62

Post by HDThoreaun »

meindnoch wrote: post #30
twoodfin wrote: post #9

If trends continue, then you'd expect people to spend less time in productivity software, and more time creating and connecting. Does the average American worker today spend a ton of time in productivity software? I know and Zuckerberg surely knows the impact on labor will be much more pervasive than that, so it seems like an odd way to frame the future.

>and more time creating and connecting. Creating what? AI slop?

I mean yea, Marks vision here is that genAI creates special personalized space in his metaverse for literally everyone in the world. Slop for the masses.

Re: Meta's Vision for Superintelligence

#63

Post by 9rx »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #59
9rx wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, that's why experts started pushing college/university as the way to find escape, with an understanding that people could use its research facilities to create capital instead of falling into the labor class. But it was ultimately lost in translation. The layman heard: Go to college/university to become a more appealing laborer to employers. And thus nothing improved for the people; the promises of things l…

>people could use its research facilities to create capital This is just survivorship bias. Of course most people choose the employment route since very few people are gonna become good researchers with valuable ideas, and even fewer of those have the ability to become successful business owners, being a good researcher is not enough. And money doesn't just rain from the sky, you still need money to make money.

> This is just survivorship bias.

It was forward looking, so survivorship bias doesn't fit. But it may be fair to say that it was unrealistic to think that it was tenable. Reality can certainly give theory a good beating.

> And money doesn't just rain from the sky

If you are going to college to do anything but create capital, the money must be raining from the sky. It would be pretty hard to justify otherwise given that there has been no economic benefit from it. As before, the promise of higher incomes never materialized (obviously, they were promised on the idea of people using college to create capital) — incomes have held stagnant.

Re: Meta's Vision for Superintelligence

#64

Post by laweijfmvo »

qprofyeh wrote: post #50

Reads as RIP Metaverse to me. Any time a CEO publishes such empty, wordy essays, it's probably earnings reporting time. I can't shake the feeling it's a public subreply at one of or a cluster of doubting investors, who started to doubt the CEOs vision for the company, or find the lack of one on a certain topic concerning.

FWIW, today is Meta’s earnings report

Re: Meta's Vision for Superintelligence

#65

Post by FirmwareBurner »

hnthrow90348765 wrote: post #34

This stuff is naive. There's a bunch of people who want a large income (wealth) disparity, and they will fight to preserve it unless you give them an equivalent station in the 'new world'. But you will still need to sustain ex-workers if they can't get normal jobs, and those same people at the top will not tolerate the taxes required to sustain a basic level of living for much wider population. They already can't tol…

>There's a bunch of people who want a large income (wealth) disparity

Apart form you of course, so I'm sure you'd be ok if the government would tax your higher than average tech wage till your take home pay would match that of a train conductor's or bus driver's, like in Western Europe, and therefore fix the wage gap you hate so much. Would you like that solution?

Caption this: It's only a problem when the people who earn more than me are greedy, but my greed is fine, it's OK for me to out-earn others because "I've earned it", not like Zuckerberg, he didn't earn it.

Re: Meta's Vision for Superintelligence

#66

Post by DanHulton »

> The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable. Developing superintelligence is now in sight.

Oh, is it now? So you know for a fact that intelligence comes from token prediction, do you, Mark?

Look, multi-bit screwdrivers have been improving steadily as well. I've got one that stores all it's bits in the handle, and one with over three dozen bits in a handy carrying case! But they're never going to suddenly, magically become an ur-tool, capable of handling any task. They're just going to get better and better as screwdrivers.

(Well, they make a handy hammer in a pinch, but that's using them off-spec. The analogy probably fits here, too, though.)

My POINT, to be crystal clear, is that Mark is saying that A is getting better, so eventually it will turn into B. It's ludicrous on its face, and he deserves the ridicule he's getting in the comments here.

But I also want to go one step further and maybe turn the mirror around a bit. There's also an odd tendency here to do a very similar thing: to observe critical limitations that LLM tools have, that they have always have, and that are very likely baked into the technology and science powering these tools, and then to do the same thing as Mark, to just wave our hands, and say "But I'm sure they'll figure it out/fix it/perfect it soon."

I dunno, I don't see it. I think we're all holding incredible screwdrivers here, which are very impressive. Some people are using them to drive nails, which, okay, sure. But acting like a screwdriver will suddenly turn into precision calipers (and a saw, and a level, and...) if we just keep adding on more bits, I think that's just silly.

Re: Meta's Vision for Superintelligence

#68

Post by DanHulton »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #65
hnthrow90348765 wrote: post #34

This stuff is naive. There's a bunch of people who want a large income (wealth) disparity, and they will fight to preserve it unless you give them an equivalent station in the 'new world'. But you will still need to sustain ex-workers if they can't get normal jobs, and those same people at the top will not tolerate the taxes required to sustain a basic level of living for much wider population. They already can't tol…

>There's a bunch of people who want a large income (wealth) disparity Apart form you of course, so I'm sure you'd be ok if the government would tax your higher than average tech wage till your take home pay would match that of a train conductor's or bus driver's, like in Western Europe, and therefore fix the wage gap you hate so much. Would you like that solution? Caption this: It's only a problem when the people who…

Unless you are yourself a robber baron the likes of Zuck, you should look up this little concept called "class solidarity."

Re: Meta's Vision for Superintelligence

#69

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

aschobel wrote: post #44
Barrin92 wrote: post #6

Anthropic, to their credit, just published that pretty funny paper about how they couldn't get their chatbot to run a single vending machine profitably[1]. Admirable that Mark is so visionary he's skipped straight past Bodega-intelligence to super-intelligence [1] https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1?ref=blog.m...

I wonder if that is the right takeaway; that was Sonnet 3.7 Model since then have been able to run it profitably. Incredible how fast things are progressing. https://andonlabs.com/evals/vending-bench

This isn't measuring the same thing, and recent results are so extreme that they call into question whether the results would map to the real-world implementation Anthropic tried. Is it really the case that Grok 4 can manage a vending machine many times more profitably than a human, or is it exploiting some property of the simulated environment?

Re: Meta's Vision for Superintelligence

#70

Post by sorcerer-mar »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #41
sorcerer-mar wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How can I be free to do my gardening whenever I want when the landlord is asking for $11K rent in my SF flat? This is the fatal flaw. It's been recognized explicitly for at least 140 years that the price of land rent rises in lockstep with productivity increases, guaranteeing there is no "escape velocity" for the labor class regardless of how good technology gets.

>regardless of how good technology gets Technology increases aren't there so you work less hours for the same pay, they're there so your business owner gets more money form you working the same hours. If a machine gets invented that can do your job it's not like you can now go home and relax for the rest of your life and still keep receiving your pay cheques. This utopia doesn't exist.

Yes but even this ignores the more important dynamic at play: rent rises to eat nearly all the productivity gains.

If you add technology to your workplace your wages should go up (not to eat all the gains of the technology, but a decent portion via wage competition), but then once your wages go up, the local rent goes up anyway.

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