691–700 of 746 posts
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Cheap Chinese single-board computers made specifically for inference is the missing puzzle piece. (No, GPU's and especially Nvidia is not that.) Also the current crop of AI agents are just utter crap. But that's a skill issue of the people coding them, expect actual advances here soon.
Aren't DGX Spark or Framework Desktop cheap enough?
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All 501(c)(3) are funded in part by the public by way of uncollected tax revenues for economically valuable activity.
>uncollected tax revenues for economically valuable activity. Taxes are on profits not revenue. The for-profit OpenAI LLC subsidiary created in 2019 would have been the entity that owes taxes but it has been losing money and never made any profits to tax. Yesterday's news about switching from for-profit LLC to for-profit PBC still leaves a business entity that's liable for future taxes on profits.
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Well, possibly it isn't. Possibly LLMs are limited in ways that humans aren't, and that's why the staggering advances from GPT-2 to GPT-3 and from GPT-3 to GPT-4 have not continued. Certainly GPT-4 doesn't seem to be more powerful than the largest nuclear weapons. But OpenAI isn't limited to creating LLMs. OpenAI's objective is not to create LLMs but to create artificial general intelligence that is better than human…
the problem is, none of that needs to happen. If the AI can start coming up with novel math or physics, it's game over. Whether the AI is "sentient" or not, being able to break that barrier would send us into an advancement spiral.
You are surely correct that there are weaker imaginable AIs than the strongly superhuman AI that OpenAI and I are talking about which would still be more powerful than nuclear weapons, but they are more debatable. For example, whether discovering new physics would permit the construction of new, more powerful weapons is debatable; it didn't help Archimedes or Tipu Sultan. So discussing such weak claims is likely to end up off in the weeds of logistics and speculation about exactly what kind of undiscovered physics and math would come to light. Instead, I focused on the most obviously correct ways that strongly superhuman AI would be more powerful than nuclear weapons.
These may not be the most practically important ways. Maybe any strongly superhuman AI would immediately discover a way to explode the sun, or to control people's minds, or to build diamondoid molecular nanotechnology, or to genetically engineer super-plagues, or to collapse the false vacuum. Any of those would make nuclear weapons seem insignificant. But claims like those are much more uncertain than the very simple question before us: whether what OpenAI is trying to develop would be more powerful than nuclear weapons. Obviously it would be, by my reasoning in the grandparent comment, even if this isn't a false vacuum, if the sticky fingers problem makes diamondoid nanotechnology impossible, if people's minds are inherently uncontrollable, etc. So we don't need to resolve those other, more difficult questions in order to do the much easier task of ranking OpenAI's objective relative to nuclear weapons.
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> LLM AI was being reported on all over the place. No, it wasn't. As a proxy, here's HN results prior to November, 2022 - 13 results. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1667260800&dateRange=custom&... Here's Google Trends, showing a clear uptick May 2023, and basically no search volume before (the small increase Feb. 2023 probably Meta's Llama). https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge... https://tre…
If you're in this space and follow it closely, it can be difficult to notice the scale. It just feels like the hype was always big. 15 years ago it was all big data and sentiment analysis and NLP, machine translation buzz. In 2016 Google Translate switched to neural nets (LSTM) which was relatively big news. The king+woman-man=queen stuff with word2vec. Transformer in 2017. BERT and ELMo. GPT2 was a meme in techie cu…
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> There's so much to do, explore and learn. Hobbies, hanging out with friends, reading, etc. That's basically it. Probably no international travel. It will be like a simple retirement on a low income, because in a socialist system the resources must be rationed. This will drive a lot of young ambitious people to insanity. Nothing meaningful for them to achieve. No purpose. Drug use, debauchery, depression, violence,…
Wait, wait, wait. Our society's gonna fall apart due to a lack of Darwinian selection pressure ? What do you think we're selecting for right now? Seems to me like our culture treats both survival and reproduction as an inalienable right. Most people would go so far as to say everyone deserves love, "there's a lid for every pot".
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Yes! Sounds like a dream. My value isn't determined by some economic system, but rather by myself. There is so much to do when you don't have to work. Of course, this assumes we actually get to UBI first, and it doesn't create widespread poverty. But even if humanity will have to go through widespread poverty, we'd porbably come out with UBI on the other side (minus a few hundred millions starved). There's so much to…
> There's so much to do, explore and learn. Hobbies, hanging out with friends, reading, etc. That's basically it. Probably no international travel. It will be like a simple retirement on a low income, because in a socialist system the resources must be rationed. This will drive a lot of young ambitious people to insanity. Nothing meaningful for them to achieve. No purpose. Drug use, debauchery, depression, violence,…
Maybe, if the only flavor of ambition you're aware of is that of SV types. Plenty of people have found achievement and meaning before and alongside the digital revolution world.
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I don't agree with Tyler on this point (although o3 really is a thing to behold) But reasonable people could argue that we've achieved AGI (not artificial super intelligence) https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/04/o3... Fwiw, Sam Altman will have already seen the next models they're planning to release
An AGI would be able to learn things while you are talking to it, for example.
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That’s not how logic works. The GP is applying the precautionary principle: when there’s even a small chance of a catastrophic risk, it makes sense to take precautions-like restricting who can build superintelligent AI, similar to how we restrict access to nuclear technology. Changing the premise to "superintelligence is the only thing that can save us" doesn’t invalidate the logic of being cautious. It just shifts t…
Not really. If there is a small chance that this miraculous new technology will solve all of our problems with no real downside, we must invest everything we have and pull out all the stops, for the very future of the human race depends on AGI. Also, @tsimionescu's reasoning is spot on, and exactly how logic works.
I'm guessing that you think that society is getting worse every year or will eventually collapse, and you hope that continued AI research might prevent that outcome.
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Which of these statements do you disagree with? - Superintelligence poses an existential threat to humanity - Predicting the future is famously difficult - Given that uncertainty, we can't rule out the chance of our current AI approach leading to superintelligence - Even a 1-in-1000 existential threat would be extremely serious. If an asteroid had a 1-in-1000 chance of hitting Earth and obliterating humanity we shoul…
You bring up the example of an extinction-level asteroid hurling toward earth. Gee, I wonder if this superintelligence you’re deathly afraid of could help with that? This extreme risk aversion and focus on negative outcomes is just the result of certain personality types, no amount of rationalizing will change your mind as you fundamentally fear the unknown. How do you get out of bed everyday knowing there’s a chance…
The new life form will be to humans, as humans are to chimps, or rats, or ants.
At this point we have lost control of the situation (the planet). We are no longer at the top of the food chain. Fingers crossed it all goes well.
It's an existential gamble. Is the gamble worth taking? No one knows.
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> There's so much to do, explore and learn. Hobbies, hanging out with friends, reading, etc. That's basically it. Probably no international travel. It will be like a simple retirement on a low income, because in a socialist system the resources must be rationed. This will drive a lot of young ambitious people to insanity. Nothing meaningful for them to achieve. No purpose. Drug use, debauchery, depression, violence,…
> This will drive a lot of young ambitious people to insanity. Nothing meaningful for them to achieve. Maybe, if the only flavor of ambition you're aware of is that of SV types. Plenty of people have found achievement and meaning before and alongside the digital revolution world.
Jobs, careers, real work, all replaced by machines which can do it all better, faster, cheaper than humans.
Young people with modest ambitions to learn and master a skill and contribute to society, and have a meaningful life. That can be blue collar stuff too.
How will children respond to the question - "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
They can join the Amish communities where humans still do the work.