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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

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Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#701

Post by aidenn0 »

energy123 wrote: post #577
aidenn0 wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course this is subject to a similar rebuttal to Pascal's Wager (Consider a universe in which the deity punishes all believers): What if a capricious super-intelligence takes over that punishes everyone who didn't buy into the hype?

Roko's Basilisk is literally impossible. If the AI is super-intelligent then it won't buy into the sunk cost fallacy. That is to say, it will know that it has no reason to punish you (or digital copies of you) because it knows that retrocausality is impossible - punishing you won't alter your past behavior. And if the AI does buy into the sunk cost fallacy, then it isn't super-intelligent.

1. This was mostly a joke; Pascal's wager is about gods and many people talk about future super-AI as if it were a god. FWIW I had to google Roko's Basilisk

2. Plenty of humans are smarter than me and many of them, at least occasionally, use fallacious reasoning.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#702

Post by theboonies »

stego-tech wrote: post #28

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…

The problem that I see with this analysis is that the author is trying to describe a curve in data that is kind of a punctuated equilibrium on steroids. Given that the takeoff event is when systems are capable of recursive self-improvement and that event will be a huge inflection point in the curve, it feels like they are trying to predict the second half of a biphasic graph based on data from the first half, when the second half is distinctly different than the first.

Thinking about how this might work, the slope of the first half does not predict the inflection point. Once the threshold for recursive self-improvement gets crossed, the curve changes drastically. From what I have heard MAYBE we are just starting to see the glimmers of possible recursive self-improvement in GPT-5.3 / Opus 4.6. If so, this discussion, while interesting, is trying to predict the new curve based on a single relevant data point.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#703

Post by benterix »

ElevenLathe wrote: post #168
bee_rider wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This world where everybody’s very concerned with that “refined form” is annoying and exhausting. It causes discussions to become about speculative guesses about everybody else’s beliefs, not actual facts. In the end it breeds cynicism as “well yes, the belief is wrong, but everybody is stupid and believes it anyway,” becomes a stop-gap argument. I don’t know how to get away from it because ultimately coordination dep…

IMO this is a symptom of the falling rate of profit, especially in the developed world. If truly productivity enhancing investment is effectively dead (or, equivalently, there is so much paper wealth chasing a withering set of profitable opportunities for investment), then capital's only game is to chase high valuations backed by future profits, which means playing the Keynesian beauty contest for keeps. This in turn…

> If outsiders could plausibly invest in China

But they can and they do.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#704

Post by rtikulit »

striking wrote: post #205
menaerus wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s honestly why I gave up trying to get folks to look at these things rationally as knowable objects (“here’s how LLMs actually work”) Here's your own fallacy you fell into - this is important to understand. Neither do you nor me understand "how LLMs actually work" because, well, nobody really does. Not even the scientists who built the (math around) models. So, you can't really use that argument because it would…

Even if interpretability of specific models or features within them is an open area of research, the mechanics of how LLMs work to produce results are observable and well-understood, and methods to understand their fundamental limitations are pretty solid these days as well. Is there anything to be gained from following a line of reasoning that basically says LLMs are incomprehensible, full stop?

The concept “understand” is rooted in utility. It means “I have built a much simpler model which produces usefully accurate predictions, of the thing or behaviour I seek to ‘understand’”. This utility is “explanatory power”. The model may be in your head, may be math, may be an algorithm or narrative, it may be a methodology with a history of utility. “Greater understanding” is associated with models that are simpler, more essential, more accurate, more useful, cheaper, more decomposed, more composable, more easily communicated or replicated, or more widely applicable.

“Pattern matching”, “next token prediction”, “tensor math” and “gradient descent” or the understanding and application of these by specialists, are not useful models of what LLMs do, any more than “have sex, feed and talk to the resulting artifact for 18 years” is a useful model of human physiology or psychology.

My understanding, and I'm not a specialist, is there are huge and consequential utility gaps in our models of LLMs. So much so, it is reasonable to say we don't yet understand how they work.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#705

Post by ambicapter »

nphardon wrote: post #183

Iirc in the Matrix Morpheus says something like "... no one knows when exactly the singularity occurred, we think some time in the 2020s". I always loved that little line. I think that when the singularity occurs all of the problems in physics will solve, like in a vacuum, and physics will advance centuries if not millennia in a few pico-seconds, and of course time will stop. Also: > As t→ts−t→ts− , the denominator g…

> Not a bug. The feature.

I actually think this was nice writing, and it didn't strike me as LLM thought at all, specifically because of the terse delivery.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#706

Post by ambicapter »

nutjob2 wrote: post #241
kpil wrote: post #116

"... HBR found that companies are cutting [jobs] based on AI's potential, not its performance. I don't know who needs to hear this - a lot apparently - but the following three statements are not possible to validate but have unreasonably different effects on the stock market. * We're cutting because of expected low revenue. (Negative) * We're cutting to strengthen our strategic focus and control our operational costs…

> The hype is real. Will we see drastically reduced operational costs the coming years or will it follow the same curve as we've seen in productivity since 1750? There's a third possibility: slop driven productivity declines as people realize they took a wrong turn. Which makes me wonder: what is the best 'huge AI bust' trade?

Sharpening your non-AI, boring (but real) skills, and stepping in to clean up the mess when the other shoe drops.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#707

Post by ambicapter »

jredwards wrote: post #544

I have always asserted, and will continue to assert, that Tuesday is the funniest day of the week. If you construct a joke for which the punchline must be a day of the week, Tuesday is nearly always the correct ending.

counterpoint: It is Wednesday, my dudes.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#708

Post by tinfoilhatter »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #686
tinfoilhatter wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm familiar with Ray Kurzweil. He's a Luciferian and transhumanist. You're obviously also a Luciferian, since you are so gung-ho about transhumanism, but I suppose you're probably in good company on HN. There are lots of deranged people on this website.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#710

Post by danielmarkbruce »

willis936 wrote: post #661
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing his point. They very likely don't start building TPUs if there were no GPUs.

I'm not missing the point. If you recall your computer architecture class there are many vector processing architectures out there. Long before there was nvidia the world's largest and most expensive computers were vector processors. It's inaccurate to say "gaming built SIMD".

You are missing the point - it's an economic point. Very little R&D was put into said processors. The scale wasn't there. The software stack wasn't there (because the scale wasn't there).

No one is suggesting gaming chips were the first time someone thought of such an architecture or built a chip with such an architecture. They are suggesting the gaming industry produced the required scale to actually do all the work which lead to that hardware and software being really good, and useful for other purposes. In chip world, scale matters a lot.

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