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AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

tomwphillips.co.uk

651–660 of 683 posts

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#651
post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it kind of sucks honestly because im never going to get any sort of recognition, but that's partly by choice and partly because I don't have the right personal connections. I 100% understand why all of you think I'm a significant fool. Thats ok. Like i said, im burying the idea. But its obvious enough that someone else will discover it soon enough.

You literally see no irony here? You are doubling, tripling down on some idea you won't even vaguely describe to people, but you are so utterly convinced that it's right you don't appear to even admit the possibility that your idle thoughts could be wrong, or just silly. Frankly it sounds delusional and you should question yourself more often. If you're so afraid of being right that you won't even write the idea down…

Tell you what, here's a story from my last job.

I was hired on to help run these experiments with a machine they were trying to perfect. They wanted to do all this stuff with running two machines in parallel, dumping the refuse from one into another machine, all kinds of silly stuff.

I looked at it and in a few minutes I sketched in my notebook a solution to their problem that would achieve the maximum theoretical yield without all these wacky experiments.

But then what would be my job? I was hired to run these experiments not solve their whole problem in 5 minutes. So I didn't tell them. I was getting paid so i didn't care if they were wasting time. I'm a smiley little trans woman anyway, they wouldn't have listened. I did work out the math though on my own.

A few months later, a team of phds at a university we were working with hit on a rudimentary form of the same idea, so at that point I revealed to the boss, oh, look I've worked out the math for that already. And I wrote up the code, and we hit the maximum theoretical yield and it ran 100x faster computationally, and i got a pat on the back. But the reason they listened was because a man with a degree said it.

Why would I bother giving them ideas if they won't listen anyway? If i had given them the answer months earlier, I would not have gotten any kind of bonus even in the unlikely event that I had been taken seriously.

So now of course youre all telling me im insane, and thats fine because honestly I have no incentive to give you answers ahead of time. Go suck eggs. Figure shit out on your own.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#652
post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If you're so confident that your discovery will be found by someone else soon why not just share it right here and get the credit you seem to want? Otherwise why even bring it up in the first place?

No reason to risk making the humanity killing doomsday machine appear even a minute sooner, and besides, you wouldn't listen.

I said something because im a fool who cant keep her mouth shut. It was reasons of emotional catharsis having no rational basis.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#653

After reading Empire of AI by Karen Hao, actually changed my perspective towards these AI companies, not that they are building world-changing products but the human nature around all this hype. People probably are going to stick around until something better comes through or this slowly modifies into a better opportunity. Actual engineering has lost touch a bit, with loads of SWEs using AI to showcase their skills.…

Can you elaborate on that last sentence a bit? How has engineering lost touch?

What I mean is the process of brainstorming with other engineers or understanding a complex solution from a more senior engineer is fading away. There are lots of tools with AI that do it for you. The human experience of connecting is going away.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know how it looks. I shouldn't have said anything- it was pointless. At any rate someone else will figure out what i know soon or already has.

Nostradamus 2.0

Nah im just the kind of autistic that is good at solving specific kinds of problems that can be worked out through visualizing data structures

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have some idea of what the way forward is going to look like but I don't want to accelerate the development of such a dangerous technology so I haven't told anyone about it. The people working on AI are very smart and they will solve the associated challenges soon enough. The problem of how to slow down the development of these technologies- a political problem- is much more pressing right now.

cringe

Reject subtlety

Embrace cringe

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#656
post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only millions of people suffering from lack of water knew this.

If you redistributed this water to a million people suffering from lack of water, they'ed get about 2 shot glasses worth per day.

Yea but it's not like those people have never seen water. And yet it's not so simple, that you can use water but the water eventually comes back to you. There is a hell lot more nuance to this.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to this logic the ideal situation is when there are no farms anymore because then each (out of zero) farm gets maximum water.

Eventually people stop building more data centers as food becomes scarce and expensive, and farms become the hot new thing for the stock market, cereal entrepreneurs become the new celebrities and so on. Elon Husk, cereal magnate.

I was just pointing out the ridiculousness of the argument.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears logical, but it falls under the same threshold. We say it has function, which is logical, but its used for something we could or may not have planned for. That's evolution. The logic is a pretext.

If it quacks like a Markov chain...

That's unrelated to evolution.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of those failings (i.e. COT faithfulness) are straight up human failure modes. LLMs failing the same way as humans do on the same tasks as humans is a weak sign of "this tech is AGI capable", in my eyes. Because it hints that LLMs are angling to do the same things human mind does, and in similar enough ways to share the failure modes. And human mind is the one architecture we know to support general intelligenc…

This is all nonsense and you are just falling for marketing that you want to be true. The whole space is largely marketing at this point, intentionally conflating all these philosophical terms because we don't want to face the ugly reality that LLMs are a dead end to "AGI". Not to mention, it is not on those who don't believe in Santa Clause to prove that Santa Clause doesn't exist. It is on those who believe in Sant…

You are falling for the AI effect.

Which is: flesh apes want to feel unique and special! And "intelligence" must be what makes them so unique and special! So they deny "intelligence" in anything that's not a fellow flesh ape!

If an AI can't talk like a human, then it must be the talking that makes the human intelligence special! But if the AI can talk, then talking was never important for intelligence in the first place! Repeat for everything.

I use LLMs a lot, and the improvements in the last few years are vast. OpenAI's entire personality tuning team should be loaded into a rocket and fired off into the sun, but that's a separate issue from raw AI capabilities, which keep improving steadily and with no end in sight.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of those failings (i.e. COT faithfulness) are straight up human failure modes. LLMs failing the same way as humans do on the same tasks as humans is a weak sign of "this tech is AGI capable", in my eyes. Because it hints that LLMs are angling to do the same things human mind does, and in similar enough ways to share the failure modes. And human mind is the one architecture we know to support general intelligenc…

Breaking down in -30C temperatures is also human failure mode, but doesen't make cars human. They both exhibit the exact same behavior (not moving), but are fundamentally different

The similarities go quite a bit deeper than that.

Both rely on a certain metabolic process to be able to move. Both function in a narrow temperature range, and fail outside it. Both have a homeostatic process that attempts to keep them in that temperature range. Both rely on chemical energy, oxidizing stored hydrocarbons to extract power from them, and both take in O2-rich air, and emit air enriched in CO2 and water vapor.

So, yes, the cars aren't humans. But they sure implement quite a few of the same things as humans do - despite being made out of very different parts.

LLMs of today? They implement abstract thinking the same way cars implement aerobic metabolism. A nonhuman implementation, but one that does a great many of the same things.

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