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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

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Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#751

Post by codethief »

I know this is not to be taken too seriously but I don't even buy the premise: Why would those metrics predict the singularity?

Tokens will not suddenly become free (as in beer) – AI will still consume energy –, there will still be a finite amount of arXiv papers mentioning emergence (for not just one reason), release frequency of frontier models is not necessarily related to breakthroughs (model capabilities might also approach an asymptote), Copilot code share increasing will likely happen over time anyway even if all AI research stopped today. Etc.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#753

Post by stickfigure »

dTal wrote: post #699
stickfigure wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you're looking for something more than the simple reality that the math is what's going on. It's a complex system that can't simply be debugged through[1], but that doesn't mean it isn't "understood". This reminds me of Searle's insipid Chinese Room; the rebuttal (which he never had an answer for) is that "the room understands Chinese". It's just not satisfying to someone steeped in cultural traditions…

Your ultra-reductionism does not not constitute understanding. "Math happens and that somehow leads to a conversational AI" is true , but it is not useful . You cannot use it to answer questions like "how should I prompt the model to achieve ". There are many layers of abstraction within the network - important, predictive abstractions - which you have no concept of. It is as useful as asking a particle physicist why…

It sounds like you're looking for the field of psychology. And like the field of psychology, any predictive abstraction around systems this complicated will be tenuous, statistical, and full of bad science.

You may never get a scientific answer to "how should I prompt the model to achieve ", just like you may never get a capital-S scientific answer to "how should I convince people to do X". What would it even mean to "understand people" like this?

You demand too much.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#754

Post by dclowd9901 »

tavavex wrote: post #530
dclowd9901 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hate that the first example has become a de facto tell for LLMs, because it's a perfectly fine rhetorical device.

It is a perfectly fine rhetorical device, and I don't consider a text that just has that to be automatically LLM-made. However, it is also a powerful rhetorical device, and I find that the average human writer right now is better at using these than whatever LLM most people use to generate essays. It's supposed to signify a contrast, a mood shift, something impactful, but LLMs tend to spam these all over the place, a…

That's interesting -- I'll have to keep an eye out for it.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#755

Post by awesome_dude »

backscratches wrote: post #640
awesome_dude wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin is actually kind of useful for some niche use cases - namely illegal transactions, like buying drugs online (Silk Road, for example), For the record - the illegal transactions were thought to be advantaged by crypto like BTC because it was assumed to be impossible to trace the people engaged in the transaction, however the opposite is true, public blockchains register every transaction a given wallet has ma…

Anonymity/untraceability was not the primary reason for using BTC towards black/grey markets. Bitcoin can be used pseudo anonymously , and the fact is you simply cannot send money to your grey market counterparty via any method but cash without it being flagged/canceled, and if you can't send cash (which has its own problems), bitcoin is the only option.

Online drug markets existed before BTC, and today there is a problem with "mules" being used (people who have legitimate bank accounts that are used to transfer money for groups that engage in illegal activities)

Sending money to a "grey market counterparty" has had workarounds for some time, and continues to have workarounds.

People were fooled into thinking crypto offered anonymity, and were surprised when they realised every single one of their transactions was sitting in the public chain available for anyone to read.

Digital wallets provide LEA's with clear evidence of transactions with a given party when that party's anonymity is unmasked, and it's there in perpetuity.

Had Epstein being using BTC to do business, every single one of his clients would be known.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#756

Post by true_religion »

bee_rider wrote: post #472
legulere wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand talking about those believes can also lead to real changes. Slavery used to be seen widely a necessary evil, just like for instance war.

I don’t actually know a ton about the rhetoric around abolitionism. Are you saying they tried to convince people that everybody else thought slavery was evil? I guess I assumed they tried to convince people slavery was in-and-of-itself evil.

IMO, abolitionist made absolutist arguments like appeals to the common sense of inalienable rights, or Christian virtue. Their opponents would have to fight through the cognitive dissonance of arguing an unnatural or unchristian position.

That sounds a lot like saying slavey is obviously bad, and simultaneously also saying everyone else naturally already believes this.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#757

Post by renewiltord »

toraway wrote: post #720
arjie wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large number of people read a work of fiction and conclude that what happened in the work of fiction is an inevitability. My family has a genetically-selected baby (to avoid congenital illness) and the Hacker News link to the story had these comments all over it. > I only know seven sci-fi films and shows that have warned about how this will go badly. and > Pretty sure this was the prologue to Gattaca. and > I post…

Using fiction as an interpretive vehicle to explore, challenge and contrast our assumptions and perceptions about our own world isn't even in the same universe as "outsourcing their reasoning to a work of fiction". "Haha you're basically a human LLM!" is such a weak, boringly robotic rebuttal in nearly any context given how it can be generically applied to literally anything.

Pretty sure this is the prologue to The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster where everyone outsources their decisions to the Machine and communicates second-hand ideas.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#758

Post by throwerxyz »

baxtr wrote: post #634
throwerxyz wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, you weren't alive when the last mass extinction event occurred? Why didn't you communicate or at least write the last handful down or something? Aren't you smarter than a chicken? It's funny that you think we know what happened to humans anymore than a chicken knows what happened to chickens.

Look that’s the thing: we know about mass extinction events. So we can use these to extrapolate. A 10+ kilometer wide asteroid will most likely cause global mass extinction, by blocking sunlight and collapsing ecosystems. That’s how the dinosaurs were wiped out 66 million years ago. Such events are estimated to occur roughly once every 100-200 million years. That’s not fiction that’s science. If we get hit by one of…

We think we know. But we don't.

Chickens think they know. But they don't.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#759

Post by kakapo5672 »

measurablefunc wrote: post #371
NateEag wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they meant "Nobody knows why LLMs work."

Because they encode statistical properties of the training corpus. You might not know why they work but plenty of people know why they work & understand the mechanics of approximating probability distributions w/ parametrized functions to sell it as a panacea for stupidity & the path to an automated & luxurious communist utopia.

My goodness. Please introduce me to this "plenty of people". I'm in the field, and none of them work with me.

But I can tell you that statistics and parametrized functions have absolutely nothing to do with it. You're way out of your depth my friend.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#760

Post by MSKJ »

holoduke wrote: post #139
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…

For ages most people believed in a religion. People are just not smart and sheepy followers.

That is a very uncharitable take. Faith is often a source of meaning or purpose independent of intelligence. I would recommend "A Confession by Tolstoy" for a different perspective
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