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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

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Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#611

Post by handoflixue »

wavemode wrote: post #506
handoflixue wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exponenti…

False dichotomy. One can believe that LLMs are capable of more than their constituent parts without necessarily believing that their real-world utility is growing at a hyperbolic rate.

Fair - I meant there's two major clusters in the mainstream debate, but like all debates there's obviously a few people off in all sorts of other positions.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#612

Post by 00117 »

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…

Are you not just making it more expensive to acquire clean data, thus giving an edge to the megacorps with big funding?

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#614

Post by catoc »

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…

> ”when they don’t even understand that the computer is the box attached to the monitor, not the monitor itself”

Laughed out loud at that - and cried a little.

I have had trouble explaining people: “No! don’t use your email password! This is not your email you are logging in to, your email address is a username for this other service. Don’t give them your email password!”

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#615

Post by dTal »

famouswaffles wrote: post #202
dTal wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In a massive dataset of human writing, the answer to a question is by far the most common thing to follow a question. No it isn't. Type a question into a base model, one that hasn't been finetuned into being a chatbot, and the predicted continuation will be all sorts of crap, but very often another question, or a framing that positions the original question as rhetorical in order to make a point. Untuned raw languag…

>No it isn't. Type a question into a base model, one that hasn't been finetuned into being a chatbot, and the predicted continuation will be all sorts of crap, but very often another question, or a framing that positions the original question as rhetorical in order to make a point..... To be fair, only if you pose this question singularly with no proceeding context. If you want the raw LLM to answer your question(s)…

Right, but that was my point - statistically, answers do not follow questions without some establishing context, and as such, while LLMs are "simply" next word predictors, the chatbots aren't - they are Hofstaderian strange loops that we will into being. The simpler you think language models are, the more that should seem "magic".

They're not simple though. You can understand, in a reductionist sense, the basic principles of how transformers perform function approximation; but that does not grant an intuitive sense of the nature of the specific function they have been trained to approximate, or how they have achieved this approximation. We have little insight into what abstract concepts each of the many billions of parameters map on to. Progress on introspecting these networks has been a lot slower than trial-and-error improvements. So there is a very real sense in which we have no idea how LLMs work, and they are literally "magic black boxes".

No matter how you slice it - if "magic" is a word which can ever be applied to software, LLM chatbots are sure as shit magic.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#616

Post by Nevermark »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #607
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.

Third parties exist. Folks act like Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan don't exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_United_States_presidentia... 18.9% as recently as 1992. I predict we will have a similar viable third party showing sometime in the next few elections due to the radical shift in the party system that AI is causing as we speak. I really hope Yang Gang can rebuild itself and try again, maybe without #MATH. A…

In the US, there are tremendous structural barriers for third parties. They exist, it is just extremely difficult for them.

The centralization of power of each of the two dominant parties nationally at the expense of a more decentralized parties with strong state variability as in the past, makes it even more difficult for third parties to gain traction against all that coordination.

Perot had the best chance, but managed to blow it by bowing out and then back in.

I do think you are right, that times of great dissatisfaction are rare openings for third party candidates, if someone special enough appears. 2020 would have been a great election for that - but an inspiring third party candidate can't be manufactured on demand.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#617

Post by vintermann »

bee_rider wrote: post #134
nine_k wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly* Here comes my favorite notion of "epistemic takeover". A crude form: make everybody believe that you have already won. A refined form: make everybody believe that everybody else believes that you have already won. That is, even if one has doubts about your having won, they believe that everyone else submit to you as a winner, and must act accordingly.

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…

It's not just exhausting, it's a huge problem. Even if everyone is a complete saint all the time and has the best of intentions, going by beliefs about beliefs can trap us in situations where we're all unhappy.

The classic situation is the two lovers who both want to do what they think makes their partner happy, to the extent that they don't tell what they actually want, and end up doing something neither wants.

I think the goal of all sorts of cooperative planning should be to avoid such situations like the plague.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#618

Post by imtringued »

majormajor wrote: post #552
ElevenLathe wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO this is a symptom of the falling rate of profit, especially in the developed world. If truly productivity enhancing investment is effectively dead (or, equivalently, there is so much paper wealth chasing a withering set of profitable opportunities for investment), then capital's only game is to chase high valuations backed by future profits, which means playing the Keynesian beauty contest for keeps. This in turn…

>If truly productivity enhancing investment is effectively dead (or, equivalently, there is so much paper wealth chasing a withering set of profitable opportunities for investment), then capital's only game is to chase high valuations backed by future profits, which means playing the Keynesian beauty contest for keeps. What if profit is dead because wealth is all concentrating in people who don't need it from a margi…

If you accept that the economy can be in disequilibrium, then it is very easy to see how this happens.

Rich people learn a habit that makes them consume less than their investment returns. The difference is reinvested, resulting in a net increase of their equity. Even if you say they spend 90% of their returns on consumption, the last 10% still grow in absolute terms. Since returns are paid proportionally based on the quantity of equity, you can clearly see that money is allocated from where it has high marginal utility to places where it has low marginal utility.

Of course this leads to a contradiction. If money is held by people who have a low marginal utility for consumption, why would investments pay high returns? Your equity is the latent demand that your investments need to pay you the returns in the first place. You'd increasingly be paying yourself. That is equivalent to investing into something that yields a 0% return which in turn is equivalent to doing nothing.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#619

Post by hparadiz »

senbrow wrote: post #485
willis936 wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm willing to bet TPUs wouldn't be nearly as successful or sophisticated without the decades of GPU design and manufacturing that came before them. Current manufacturing numbers are a small part of the story of the overall lineage.

It's pretty interesting that consumer GPUs started to really be a thing in the early 90s and the first Bitcoin GPU miner was around 2011. That's only 20 years. That caused a GPU and asic gold rush. The major breakthroughs around LLMs started to snowball in the academic scene right around that time. It's been a crazy and relatively quick ride in the grand scheme of things. Even this silicone shortage will pass and we'll look back on this time as quaint.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#620

Post by heeen2 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #488
handoflixue wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 co…

Any human who would try to do this is probably a special case. A reasonable person would break it down into sub-problems and create interfaces to glue them back together...a reasonable AI might do that as well.

I can tell you from first hand experience that claude+ghidra mcp is very good at understanding firmware, labeling functions, finding buffer overflows, patching in custom functionality
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