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Yeah. Ironically, if he used an LLM to proofread his work, it would have told him that GAN's are generative not "generalized". That LLMs are primarily built on Transformers rather than GANs. And that they're more famous for image generation rather than image recognition.
Transformers are an architecture and GANs are a training method for the architecture. There are GAN Transformers.
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I’m more optimistic about humanity but I doubt the west will work out in its current trajectory. If you haven’t read The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter it’s worth a read. It’s not a conspiratorial or even outright pessimistic theory.
Ill check the book out as I am extremely interested in these kind of topics. Although I am extremely pessimistic. You wrote "the west", what system will (in theory) work out? And how much does it value the individual? I know capitalism for example, can in theory, never succeed as its base premise is built on endless growth (which simply wont work out with finite resources). It's a short term system that we need to im…
I mentioned the west because I’m a westerner with little experience of other systems, but I don’t think Tainter’s conception of a collapse would be limited to the west.
Interestingly since you edited your comment to talk about capitalism, I think under the lense of Tainter’s theory it’s the most resilient to collapse since it’s simpler, at least in theory. In practice it’s heavily regulated - in fact I’d say no country really is capitalist, at most you could say it’s “state capitalism” which is very different from free market capitalism. But you’re also not wrong in that it has issues of its own.
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I think it is true that people who obviously dislike AI for ideological reasons often lead with ecological concerns or doubt about the capabilities, leading to an unproductive discussion.
Have you considered engaging on those ecological concerns? There is quite a lot to dig into and can be pretty interesting. For example, try to project how much electricity will be needed to power all the datacenters in construction, then compare that to the existing grid and infra, then figure out the cooling capacity. If done well you will see that we have a pretty massive resource problem here
That is going from 1.5% of global electricity use to 3%.
It is less than I expected.
Maybe if AI does work out better than expected for knowledge work or becomes applicable to robotics and fields like construction, we are going to see a larger buildout.
> They're word-association mechanisms with no embodiment and no way to associate the text vectors they manipulate with real-world phenomena. Doesn't most of this also apply to a guy living in The Matrix?
And also these models have been associating with real-world phenomena from the first moment their training data did, and also those text vectors are (to varying degrees) associated with corresponding image vectors in multimodal models.
Of course, the Plato's cave critique would still be valid.
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No it doesn't. I happened to have read "design and typography in easy steps" as a (bored) child of the 90s, but that's the extent of my "printer's art" knowledge. I don't understand the celebration of ignorance myself. There are lots of things I don't know how to do or how to use, but I'd never dream of complaining because somebody else does.
How do you feel about a fleuron dinkus?
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No it doesn't. I happened to have read "design and typography in easy steps" as a (bored) child of the 90s, but that's the extent of my "printer's art" knowledge. I don't understand the celebration of ignorance myself. There are lots of things I don't know how to do or how to use, but I'd never dream of complaining because somebody else does.
Read their original message again--you are debating with a self-proclaimed "fucker." ;)
> They're word-association mechanisms with no embodiment and no way to associate the text vectors they manipulate with real-world phenomena. Doesn't most of this also apply to a guy living in The Matrix?
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Transformers are an architecture and GANs are a training method for the architecture. There are GAN Transformers.
Examples for us less educated folk?
Or "it's not 4-wheel-drive, it's diesel!", if familiar with cars.
> They're word-association mechanisms with no embodiment and no way to associate the text vectors they manipulate with real-world phenomena. Doesn't most of this also apply to a guy living in The Matrix?
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Here's another technical point: > They're word-association mechanisms with no embodiment and no way to associate the text vectors they manipulate with real-world phenomena. This is wrong too. RLVR grounds foundational models in reality.
Aren't RLVR signals typically based off formal systems not natural phenomena? The formal sciences are certainly useful for producing tools used in natural science, but it's not entirely clear they alone are sufficient to associate text to natural (real-world) phenomena. Honestly, the pretraining and RLHF are probably more tied to the world than RLVR, for all that RLVR might be useful (maybe even more useful) for maki…
> no way to associate the text vectors they manipulate with real-world phenomena.
Historically, that LLMs were text-only used to be a major argument for why they "lack access to meaning", see the Stochastic Parrot paper and the Octopus paper that it references. But even the authors of those papers have (grudgingly) conceded that the argument no longer holds due to multimodality.