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AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

tomwphillips.co.uk

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Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#671

Post by greener_grass »

asdfman123 wrote: post #346
lordleft wrote: post #59

The language around AGI is proof, in my mind, that religious impulses don't die with the withering of religion. A desire for a totalizing solution to all woes still endures.

I'm an atheist too. I grew up in the church, rejected it in my teens. The problem with organized religion was the "organized" part -- the centralized, inflexible human authority. I'm increasingly convinced that spirituality is a vital part of the human experience and we should embrace it, not reject it. If you try to banish basic human impulses, they just resurface in worse, unexpected forms somewhere else. We all ne…

The EA / Rationalist / AI Safety crowd tend to think they can overcome these impulses

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#673

Post by advisedwang »

kadushka wrote: post #582
advisedwang wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even worse than number of input/outputs, number of neurons, efficiency or directional feedback. The brain also has plasticity! The connections between neurons change dynamically - an extra level of meta.

Connections between LLM neurons also change during training.

a) "during training" is a huuuuge asterisk

b) Do you have a citation for that? my understanding is that while some weights can go to zero and effectively be removed, no (actually used in prod) network architecture or training method allows arbitrary connections.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#674

Post by nawgz »

Nevermark wrote: post #668
nawgz wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re talking about whether or not humanity has enough compute to simulate a bee brain, how can us having orders of magnitude less transistors than there are atoms in the system we wish to simulate possibly be hand waved away? A single transistor doesn’t do much, regardless of how much you wish to baldly assert atoms are supposedly trivial.

Perhaps you are meaning to compare transistors with neurons? If we do that, then yes, a transistor is a lot simpler than a neuron. But transistors are also insanely fast compared to neurons, so transistors do far FAR more, per unit of time. A bee brain might have a million neurons, operating at maximum speed of about 250 Hz. 10^6 neurons x 250 Hz = 2.5 x 10^8 Hz for a bee brain. We can easily model that many neurons…

Oh yeah, you're right, we have 4 * 10^14 more compute than an insectoid brain in real time. Come the fuck off it.

This is the same guy who said rational characterizations had left right before waving away the complexity of a trillion atoms. Painful to imagine how smarmy you are.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#675

Post by simianwords »

tomwphillips wrote: post #222
simonw wrote: post #12

Tip for AI skeptics: skip the data center water usage argument. At this point I think it harms your credibility - numbers like "millions of liters of water annually" (from the linked article) sound scary when presented without context, but if you compare data centers to farmland or even golf courses they're minuscule. Other energy usage figures, air pollution, gas turbines, CO2 emissions etc are fine - but if you com…

Hey Simon, author here (and reader of your blog!). I used to share your view, but what changed my mind was reading Hao's book. I don't have it to hand, but if my memory serves, she writes about a community in Chile opposing Google building a data centre in their city. The city already suffers from drought, and the data centre, acccording to Google's own assessment, would abstract ~169 litres of water a second from lo…

An update: there seems to be a critical error in the reporting of metrics in this book for the water issue. https://andymasley.substack.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-mis....

I do think the whole water issue as pointed out in the book is completely discredited with this call out.

The author Karen Hao acknowledges this:

https://x.com/_KarenHao/status/1990412118584144113

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#676

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

pavas wrote: post #666
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And there's something there that the looking is of or like, if that makes sense I think I know what you mean, but if you consider something really simple like the patch of a single color, even without any color associations (although presumably they are always there subconsciously) then isn't the experience just of "a surface attribute, of given spatial extent". There is something there, that is the same in that sp…

Yeah that pretty much seems to be it. > then isn't the experience just of "a surface attribute, of given spatial extent". I don't know why this seems to be so hard for me to think about and even put into words, but isn't "the experience of the surface attribute of a given spatial extent" something other than the experience of the surface attribute of a given spatial extent itself? I mean that the words we use to desc…

Yes - the experience / quale has nothing to do with words.

The point (opinion) I'm trying to make is that something like the quale of vision, that is so hard to describe, basically has to be the way it is, because that is it's fundamental nature.

Consider starting with your eyes closed, and maybe just a white surface in front of you, then you open your eyes. Seeing is not the same as not-seeing, so it has to feel different. If it was a different color then the input to your brain would be different, so that has to feel different too. Vision is a spatial sense - we have a 2-D array of rods and cones in our retina feeding into our brain, so (combined with persistence of vision) we experience the scene in front of us all at once in a spatial manner, completely unlike hearing which is a temporal sense with one thing happening after another... etc, etc.

It seems to me that when you start analyzing it, everything about the quale of vision (or hearing, or touch, or smell) has to be the way it is - it is no mystery - and an artificial brain with similar senses would experience it exactly the same way.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#677

Post by Nevermark »

nawgz wrote: post #674
Nevermark wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you are meaning to compare transistors with neurons? If we do that, then yes, a transistor is a lot simpler than a neuron. But transistors are also insanely fast compared to neurons, so transistors do far FAR more, per unit of time. A bee brain might have a million neurons, operating at maximum speed of about 250 Hz. 10^6 neurons x 250 Hz = 2.5 x 10^8 Hz for a bee brain. We can easily model that many neurons…

Oh yeah, you're right, we have 4 * 10^14 more compute than an insectoid brain in real time. Come the fuck off it. This is the same guy who said rational characterizations had left right before waving away the complexity of a trillion atoms. Painful to imagine how smarmy you are.

Well you have left your written record of (1) persistently confusing atoms with neurons, (2) an inability to explain where your confusion comes from outside of just repeating it, along side (3) snide responses to someone who in good faith took the time to explain the difference to you.

One more time:

Not understanding something is not the same as needing high compute. And the amount of compute we have today is colossal.

Simulating a high level system (neurons or transistors) is not the same as simulating their low level implementations (all the atoms and electrons in either of them).

Some large LLMs (interactive summaries of a large percentage of the entire human race's verbalized knowledge at moderate depth), can be run on a single MacStudio M3 Ultra with 512GB of RAM.

Modeling a bee brain will require a tiny fraction of that computationally.

> Most of what atoms do in any cell, including neurological cells, is operate a vast number of complex but common survival systems. And the very small fraction supporting specifically neurological behavior, do not meaningfully contribute at the level where specifics of individual atoms matter, but at a level many orders of magnitude higher in scale.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#678

Post by pavas »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #676
pavas wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that pretty much seems to be it. > then isn't the experience just of "a surface attribute, of given spatial extent". I don't know why this seems to be so hard for me to think about and even put into words, but isn't "the experience of the surface attribute of a given spatial extent" something other than the experience of the surface attribute of a given spatial extent itself? I mean that the words we use to desc…

Yes - the experience / quale has nothing to do with words. The point (opinion) I'm trying to make is that something like the quale of vision, that is so hard to describe, basically has to be the way it is, because that is it's fundamental nature. Consider starting with your eyes closed, and maybe just a white surface in front of you, then you open your eyes. Seeing is not the same as not-seeing, so it has to feel dif…

Yep that's a cogent, serious stance, and it sounds a lot like illusionism (famously argued by Daniel Dennett) or functionalism if you ever wanted to check out more about it.

It’s a serious stance, but the really interesting thing to me here is that its not a settled fact. What’s quite surprising and unique about this field is that unlike physics or chemistry where we generally agree on the basics, in consciousness studies you have some quite brilliant minds totally deadlocked on the fundamentals. There is absolutely no consensus on whether the problem is 'solved' or 'impossible,' and its definitely not a matter of people not taking this seriously enough or making some rash judgments or simple errors.

I find this fascinating because this type of situation is pretty rare or unique in modern science. Maybe the fun part is that I can take one stance and you another and here there's no "right answer" that some expert knows and one of us is "clearly" wrong. Nice chatting with you :)

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#679

Post by nawgz »

Nevermark wrote: post #677
nawgz wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah, you're right, we have 4 * 10^14 more compute than an insectoid brain in real time. Come the fuck off it. This is the same guy who said rational characterizations had left right before waving away the complexity of a trillion atoms. Painful to imagine how smarmy you are.

Well you have left your written record of (1) persistently confusing atoms with neurons, (2) an inability to explain where your confusion comes from outside of just repeating it, along side (3) snide responses to someone who in good faith took the time to explain the difference to you. One more time: Not understanding something is not the same as needing high compute. And the amount of compute we have today is coloss…

I don’t see where I reference neurons, care to quote me rather than adding misleading citation looking (1) strings to your text?

Indeed, looking towards full compute simulation of a physical system, I reference one of its smallest physical components - atoms - and draw an analogy to the transistor in compute. You make no argument for why an atom needn’t be simulated in a system but nonetheless hand wave it away, lifting yourself to neurons as if their behavior is well understood, finally acting as if clock speed of a transistor is somehow related to the unsourced “clock speed” of a neuron.

So, to me it seems pretty transparently obvious you’ve failed to grasp the two topics in play here - whether there is enough brute force compute available, and what models of simulating a system like a brain exist - and in your confusion, went ahead and self aggrandized your own typing to cast out the conversation that played out before you joined.

I encourage you to not respond, and instead to use that energy to read someone else’s argument from a steel man perspective rather than this diminishing arrogance you display.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#680

Post by lynndotpy »

AgentME wrote: post #461
lynndotpy wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almonds are pretty cherry picked here as notorious for their high water use. Notably, we're not betting an entire economy and pouring increasing resources into almond production, either. Your example would be even more extreme if you chose crops like the corn used to feed cattle. Feeding cows alone requires 21.2 trillion gallons per year in the US. The people advocating for sustainable usage of natural resources have…

>Almonds are pretty cherry picked here as notorious for their high water use. If water use was such a dire issue that we needed to start cutting down on high uses of it, then we should absolutely cherry pick the high usages of it and start there. (Or we should just apply a pigouvian tax across all water use, which will naturally affect the biggest consumers of it.)

Yes, that's roughly what I said in my post. If we're doing a controlled economy and triaging for the health of the ecosystem, we'd start with feed for cattle, and almonds wouldn't be much further down on the list.

The contention with AI water use is that something like this is currently happening as local water supplies are being diverted for data-centers.

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