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…
do... do the "poison" people actually think that will make a difference? that's hilarious.
It works for Russian propaganda, I can't see why it should not work for shitty code
> Hyperbolic growth is what happens when the thing that's growing accelerates its own growth.
Quibble: when a growth rate of a metric is directly proportional to the metric's current value you will see exponential growth, not hyperbolic growth.
Hyperbolic growth is usually the result of a (more complex) second order feedback loop, as in, growth in A incites growth in B, which in turn incites growth in A.
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…
Ugh, GBNews, outrage fodder for idiots and the elderly with no ability to navigate the modern information landscape. You can tell it's watched almost exclusively by old people because all the ads on the channel are for those funeral pre-pay services or retirement homes. Safe to ignore anything they have to say.
> Safe to ignore anything they have to say. And that of anyone who quotes them too
The everyone living on benefits as a prototype for the singularity was a bit tongue in cheek.
> the state is usually a much more sloppy investor I don’t find this to be true The state invests in important things that have 2nd and 3rd order positive benefit but aren’t immediately profitable. Money in a food bank is a “lost” investment. Alternatively the state plays power games and gets a little too attached to its military toys.
Yeah, our use of our military force provides some of the most obvious cases of "bad investment". Vietnam, Iraq, etc And there are many others that might've been a positive investment from a strictly financial perspective, but not from a moral one: see Banana Republics and all those times the CIA backed military juntas.
I would argue that those bad investments (such an understatement!) were clearly lobbied for by the military-industrial complex. So yes, the state dropped the ball, big, on those. But that was because the private sector pushed for it, probably also in a big way. I would say that, even though the politicians were ultimately responsible for those calamities, the CEOs who greatly enritched themselves from them are absolutely to be blamed, too.
The most interesting finding isn't that hyperbolic growth appears in "emergent capabilities" papers - it's that actual capability metrics (MMLU, tokens/$) remain stubbornly linear. The singularity isn't in the machines. It's in human attention. This is Kuhnian paradigm shift at digital speed. The papers aren't documenting new capabilities - they're documenting a community's gestalt switch. Once enough people believe…
Though this is still compatible with exponential or at least superlinear capability growth if you model benchmarks as measuring a segment of the line, or a polynomial factor.
> It's not a great example though, because the US was the principal winner of WWII, the only large industrial country relatively unscathed by it. The US is also shaping up to be the principal winner in Artificial Intelligence. If, like everyone is postulating, this has the same transformative impact to Robotics as it does to software, we're probably looking at prosperity that will make the 1950s look like table stake…
Are you sure that in today's reality the fruits of the AI race will be harvested by "the people"?
Russell's chicken (or turkey) would like a word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_illusion
I love that you brought this up. Chickens are killed ALL the time. It’s a recurring mass event. If you were a smart chicken you could see that pattern and put it into a formula. In contrast, the end of Humanity would be a singular event. It’s even in the name… And that is fiction / speculation in comparison. It’s not backed by any data. Human survival over 300,000 years by contrast is. I mean it’s fine to dream thing…
Big if true, we might as well ditch further development and just use op's LLM since it can track singularity, it might already reached singularity itself
Russell's chicken (or turkey) would like a word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_illusion
I love that you brought this up. Chickens are killed ALL the time. It’s a recurring mass event. If you were a smart chicken you could see that pattern and put it into a formula. In contrast, the end of Humanity would be a singular event. It’s even in the name… And that is fiction / speculation in comparison. It’s not backed by any data. Human survival over 300,000 years by contrast is. I mean it’s fine to dream thing…
The frame is not from our view. It is from that of this singular chicken who has only ever known its keeper's care. As that chicken, we simply do not know if Christmas will ever come.
The collapse of civilizations has happened many times. Today, all of humanity is bound tighter than ever before. In the latter half of the last century, we were on the brink of nuclear war.
New things are happening under the sun every day. If we were that exceptionally smart chicken you describe, then we have reason to expect Christmas.