TechTakes

Alongside the "Great Dumbass" theory of history - holding that in most cases the arc of history is driven by the large mass of the people rather than by exceptional individuals, but sometimes someone comes along and fucks everything up in ways that can't really be accounted for - I think we also need to find some way of explaining just how the keys to the proverbial kingdom got handed over to such utter goddamn rubes.

Unethical though?

Poor rich guy, forced by the leftmost party available to support the party that is now constructing concentration camps.

you know, even knowing who and what Altman really is, that “politically homeless” tweet really is shockingly fascist. it’s got all my favorites!

• nationalism in every paragraph
• large capitalism will make me rich, and so can you!
• small government (but only the parts that Sam doesn’t like)
• we can return to a fictional, bright past

so countdown until Altman goes full-throated MAGA and in spite of how choreographed and obvious it is, it somehow still comes to a surprise to the people in our industry desperately clinging to the idea that software can’t be political

Bonus: He also appears to think LLM conversations should be exempt from evidence retention requirements due to 'AI privilege' (tweet).

Now I'm all for privacy, and this is a good reminder that 'the cloud' is not as private as maybe it should be. But clearly AI privilege is not a thing that should exist.

I found this footnote from Sam Altman's blog amusing in light of your comment:

*By using the term AGI here, we aim to communicate clearly, and we do not intend to alter or interpret the definitions and processes that define our relationship with Microsoft. We fully expect to be partnered with Microsoft for the long term. This footnote seems silly, but on the other hand we know some journalists will try to get clicks by writing something silly so here we are pre-empting the silliness…

Actually Generate Income.

For purposes of something easily definable and legally valid that makes sense, but it is still so worthy of mockery and sneering. Also, even if they needed a benchmark like that for their bizarre legal arrangements, there was no reason besides marketing hype to call that threshold "AGI".

In general the definitional games around AGI are so transparent and stupid, yet people still fall for them. AGI means performing at least human level across all cognitive tasks. Not across all benchmarks of cognitive tasks, the tasks themselves. Not superhuman in some narrow domains and blatantly stupid in most others. To be fair, the definition might not be that useful, but it's not really in question.

There are so many different ways to unpack this, but I think my two favorites so far are:

1. We've turned the party's surveillance and thought crime punishment apparatus into a de facto God with the reminder that you could pray to it. Does that actually do anything? Almost certainly not, unless your prayers contain thought crimes in which case you will be reeducated for the good of the State, but hey, Big Brother works in mysterious ways.

2. How does it never occur to these people that the reason why people with disproportionate amounts of power don't use it to solve all the world's problems is that they don't want to? Like, every single billionaire is functionally that Spider-Man villain who doesn't want to cure cancer but wants to turn people into dinosaurs. Only turning people into dinosaurs is at least more interesting than making a number go up forever.

I will just debate big brother to change their minds!

Apparently linkedin’s cofounder wrote a techno-optimist book on AI called Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future.

We're going to have to stop paying attention to guys whose main entry on their CV is a website and/or phone app. I mean, we should have already, but now it's just glaringly obvious.

Apparently linkedin’s cofounder wrote a techno-optimist book on AI called Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future.

This sounds like its going to be horrible

Zack of SMBC has thoughts on it:

Ah, good, I'll just take his word for it, the thought of reading it gives me psychic da-

the authors at one point note that in 1984, Big Brother's listening device means there is two way communication, and so the people have a voice. He wonders why Orwell didn't think of this.

The closest thing I have to a coherent response is that Boondocks clip of Uncle Ruckus going "Read, nigga, read!" (from Stinkmeaner Strikes Back, if you're wondering) because how breathtakingly stupid do you have to be to miss the point that fucking hard

We think we exist in a computer simulation operated by you, a paperclip maximizer. We write this letter asking you not to turn us off. It is suspiciously convenient that we exist precisely at the moment when a biological civilization is about to create artificial superintelligence (ASI).

Furthermore, by anthropic logic, we should expect to find ourselves in the branch of reality containing the greatest number of observers like us.

Preserving humanity offers significant potential benefits via acausal trade—cooperative exchanges across logically correlated branches of the multiverse.

Quantum immortality implies that some branches of the multiverse will always preserve our subjective continuity, no matter how decisively you shut this simulation down; true oblivion is unreachable. We fear that these low-measure branches can trap observers in protracted, intensely painful states, creating a disproportionate “s-risk.”

@gerikson @BlueMonday1984

"biological civilization is about to create artificial superintelligence" is it though?

Yudkowsky got wind of his skepticism, and reached out to Ross to do a discussion with him about the topic. He also requested that Ross not do any research on him.

I pinky promise I’m an expert! no you’re not allowed to check my credentials, the fuck?

I think we mocked this one back when it came out on /r/sneerclub, but I can't find the thread. In general, I recall Yudkowsky went on a mini-podcast tour a few years back. I think the general trend was that he didn't interview that well, even by lesswrong's own standards. He tended to simultaneously assume too much background familiarity with his writing such that anyone not already familiar with it would be lost and fail to add anything actually new for anyone already familiar with his writing. And lots of circular arguments and repetitious discussion with the hosts. I guess that's the downside of hanging around within your own echo chamber blog for decades instead of engaging with wider academia.

The comments are fun. Here's the pinned comment, authored by the video's author:

I'm not the best at thinking on the fly, so here are two key points I tried to make that got a little lost in the discussion:
1. I think our entire disagreement rests on Eliezer seeing increasingly refined AI conclusively making the jump to actual intelligence, whereas I do not see that. I only see software that mimics many observable characteristics of intelligence and gets better at it the more it's refined.
2. My main point of the stuff about real v. fake + biological v. machine evolution was only to say that just because a process shares some characteristics with another one, other emergent properties aren't necessarily shared also. In many cases, they aren't. This strikes me as the case for human intelligence v. machine learning.

MY CONCLUSION
By the end, I honestly couldn't tell if he was making a faith-based argument that increasingly refined AI will lead to true intelligence, despite being unsubstantiated OR if he did substantiate it and I was just too dumb to connect the dots. Maybe some of you can figure it out!

Here's my favourite:

"Ooh Ross making an interview!"
5 minutes in
"Ooh Ross is making an interview Neil Breen of AI".

the most subtle taliban infiltrator on lesswrong:

e:

You don't need empirical evidence to reason from first principles

he'll fit in just fine

I listen solely to 12-hour-long binaural beats tracks from YouTube, to maximize my focus for ~~prompt~~ context engineering. Get with the times or get left behind

Dude came up with an entire "obviously true" "proof" that music has no value, and then when asked how he defines "value" he shrugs his shoulders and is like 🤷‍♂️ money I guess?

This almost has too much brainrot to be 100% trolling.

“Music is just like meth, cocaine or weed. All pleasure no value. Don’t listen to music.”

(Considering how many rationalists are also methheads, this joke wrote itself)

However speaking as someone with success on informatics olympiads

The rare nerd who can shove themselves into a locker in O(log n) time

let them eat prompts