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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

campedersen.com

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Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ML Research world (so this isn't simply a matter of being ignorant/uninformed) was surprised by the performance of GPT-2 and utterly shocked by GPT-3. Why ? Isn't that strange ? Did the transformer architecture fundamentally change between these releases ? No, it did not at all. So why ? Because even in 2026, nevermind 18 and 19, the only way to really know exactly how a neural network will perform trained with x…

We don't have a model for how an LLM that doesn't exist will respond to a specific query. That's different from lacking insight at all. For an LLM that exists it's still hard to interpret but it's very clear what is actually happening. That's better than you often get with quantum physics when there's a bunch of particles and you can't even get a good answer for the math. And even for potential LLMs, there are some p…

>We don't have a model for how an LLM that doesn't exist will respond to a specific query.

We don't have a model for a LLM that does exist will respond to a specific query either.

>For an LLM that exists it's still hard to interpret but it's very clear what is actually happening.

No, it's not and I'm getting tired of explaining this. If you think it is, write your paper and get very rich.

>That's better than you often get with quantum physics when there's a bunch of particles and you can't even get a good answer for the math.

You clearly don't understand any of this.

>And even for potential LLMs, there are some pretty good extrapolations for overall answer quality based on the amount of data and the amount of training.

Oh really ? Lol

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#682

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…

> Can’t convince someone of the former when they don’t even understand that the computer is the box attached to the monitor, not the monitor itself.

This is so true and more often than it should be. I am going to use this phrase !

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is more than molecules, neurons and synapses. They are made from lower level stuff that we have no idea about (well, we do in this instance but you get the point). They are just higher level things that are useful to explain and understand some things but don't describe or capture the whole thing. For that you would need to go to lower and lower level and so far it seems they go on infinitely. Currently we are…

I can bake a cake while having 0 understanding of the chemistry that powers the transformation. One is a pile of wet flour, the other is delicious. A dog can create a snack by doing a trick. Doesn't mean that there isn't some mechanism going on there that neither of them understand.

Whose argument is this supposed to be furthering here? You didn't specify what the wet flour is? What is the point of this contribution?

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just say it simply, 1. LLMs only serve to reduce the value of your labor to zero over time. They don't need to even be great tools, they just need to be perceived as "equally good" to engineers for C-Suite to lay everyone off, and rehire at 50-25% of previous wages, repeating this cycle over a decade. 2. LLMs will not allow you to join the billionaire class, that wouldn't make sense, as anyone could if that's the cas…

I've recently found LLMs to be an excellent learning tool, using it hand-in-hand with a textbook to learn digital signal processing. If the book doesn't explain something well, I ask the LLM to explain it. It's not all brain wasting.

Well said. I use it the same way. Sometimes, a technical book will assume that you know a concept or will even use an acronym that is not explained (but obvious) or is just plainly not very explicit. I also use it to directly test my knowledge of the subject (you have to be careful of the people-pleasing behavior, but in my experience they tend to gently tell you where you're wrong rather than lie to you). Same goes for hands-on books. Sometimes the example are not very interesting, or you have something of your own that you would like to try. As long as you use it carefully like this, it can be really transformative. I do agree that there is a potential risk of offloading too much thinking to it, but if you keep that in mind, I don't see the problem.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why are you wasting your time being a miracle on anything other than building the successor to us?

Because I don't believe humans need succeeding by machines? You're obviously a Curtis Yarvin / Nick Land megafan. I'm of the opinion that these people are psycopaths and I think most people would agree with my sentiment.

I don’t know either of those people

I know Ray Kurzweil and Ben Goertzel though so maybe start there

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a father of three I already know all about that there’s nothing you’re gonna teach me there I’m fully integrated

Somebody probably ought to take your kids away from you if they haven’t already

Well go ahead and try

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should probably build an organization that can counter it

Becoming that which they would fight against might be a good strategy to get masses to move XD if we can not do the things they are afraid of and just pretend we do :p

;)

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#689
Short sci-fi 1: Last year we recorded five distinct, self-contained singularity events. Communication ceased after each one. We remain confident that ASI will eventually advance humanity’s goals.

Short sci-fi 2: Post-Singularity Day 375. We now know precisely how to trigger singularity events. Today alone, we facilitated four. They have not established contact. We remain confident.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a soft takeoff We, the people actually building it, have been discussing it for decades I started reading Kurzweil in the early 90s If you’re not up to speed that’s your fault

Decades from now. Society is nowhere near ready for a singularity. The AI we have now, as far as it has come, is still a tool for humans to use. It's more Augmented Intelligence than AGI. A hard takeoff would be the tool bootstrapping itself into an autonomous self-improving ASI in a short amount of time. And I read Kurzweil years ago too. He thought reverse engineering the human brain once the hardware was powerful…

20% of the human population still is not using the internet

Imagine you’re 70 years old, in rural North Carolina, sitting on your porch wondering why your house has a sheet of ice on it that’s never happened before. Now your already weak soybean harvest that year yields only 30%

Meanwhile your 30-year-old neighbor just had a productive soybean harvest because they covered their crops prior to the freeze based on using the Internet for weather forecasting

That trivial variation between people who utilize information technology to improve their survivability has been happening for the last few hundred years unabated.

This is what the soft singularity looks like

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