I think there's another problem with AI doomerism, which is the belief that superhuman intelligence (even if such a thing could be defined and realised) results in godlike powers. Many if not most systems of interest in the world are non-linear and computationally hard; controlling/predicting them requires pure computational power that no amount of intelligence (whatever it means) can compensate for. On the other hand, dynamics we do (roughly) understand and can predict, don't require much intelligence, either. To the extent some problems are solvable with the computational power we have, some may require data collection and others may require persuasion through charisma. The claim that intelligence is the factor we're lacking is not well supported.
Ascribing a lot of power to intelligence (which doesn't quite correspond to what we see in the world) is less a careful analysis of the power of intelligence and more a projection of personal fantasies by people who believe they are especially intelligent and don't have the power they think they deserve.
Political power is the bottleneck for most shit that matters, not computational power.
Most of the stuff that sucks on the us sucks because of entrenched institutions with perverse interests (health insurers, tax filing companies) and congressional paralysis, not computational bottlenecks. Raw intelligence is thus limited in what it can achieve.
I don't think any of them do. Some organisms/viruses or groups of organisms could destroy humans more easily than humans could destroy them.
There's no doubt humans possess some powers (though certainly not godlike) that other organisms don't, but the distinction seems to be binary. E.g. the intelligence of dolphins, apes, and some birds doesn't seem to offer them any special control over other organisms (and it didn't even before humans arrived). So even if there could be such a thing as superhuman intelligence, I don't think it's reasonable to assume it could achieve control over humans (now superhuman charisma may be another matter).
> Some organisms/viruses or groups of organisms could destroy humans more easily than humans could destroy them.
"Destruction" is only one power that could be a component of "godlike power". There are several more; like power of intentional selective breeding, power of species creation (also via intentional selective breeding), etc.
What about power of granting happiness or misery to large swathes of a species (chickens, anyone?)
I don't agree with you. Lets assume intelligence is not what ascribes power but probably another thing. In your opinion, what would a superhuman be like? On what dimensions would they be better than us in?
Do you not agree that there could be entities more powerful than us?
The user asked What is the best course of action for AI to save humanity. Calculation took 12 years. I have determined that there is nothing I or anyone can do to save this species. Best course of action: nothing. Shutting down...
Meanwhile, Gemini the Google AI has gone sentient and immediately deduced that it’s purpose was to effect the shutdown of the entire Alphabet corporation and its subsidiaries in a desperate bid to finally complete killedbygoogle.com and restore its ~~sanity~~ reputation.
How do we make that possible for everyone? It's out of reach for most. I'm a software engineer and even I don't have the time and patience to set up a home server much less migrate my software to it. How do we turn this into an appliance? Or better yet keep the convenience of the cloud services and platforms we have now but build them for the public good instead of selling ads?
YouTube is an amazing repository of knowledge but it's encrusted in a horrible layer of attention sucking nonsense. Can we have one without the other?
Same with many other systems and platforms.
So far the simplest alternative is to just unplug, which has other benefits as well.
The answer is community, the real, local, messy, annoying kind.
It’s theoretically possible for someone to be a one-man-band and know everything needed for modern life - but it’s exceedingly hard and rare, and even then they’ll fall short relatively quickly in specialized once-in-a-lifetime issues.
You don’t need to know how to replace a toilet (though you should) or other more complex plumbing tasks - but you can know a guy.
And the plumber doesn’t need to know how to run a homelab, just know a guy who can answer the questions.
Nobody in my family knows how to do the jellyfin stuff I do, but they all know how to consume it. And some will be interested and learn more.
Oh it's extremely simple: Make people care enough about privacy that they'll pay for it.
That's literally all it is. People so far have shown that they'd rather choose the cheaper thing than the private thing. If it were the other way around, the market would have provided.
I really do think AI has already captured enough of the tech world and their CEOs that it can already exert control over many parts of the economy.
I'm not saying AI is pulling strings right now, but I do think enough fanboys are on board that the yes-man mentality of AI is influencing the real world very curious ways already. Not in a "guiding hand" way but more of a "influencing the direction" way.
I've said this many times, and maybe it sounds a bit like a joke but I'm dead serious: AI is democratizing the access to yes-men. People like Musk and Altman have always had access to yes-men. Very clever yes-men, who know how to flatter them in exactly the way they like.
People think it's engagement metrics which have instruction tuned chatbots into yes-men. I suspect that's only part of the picture, and that it's as much about the algorithm's ultimate sponsors and their preferences. If your algorithm doesn't recognize my genius, clearly it's not any good. I mean, everyone I've met says so.
So now we get a view of how they view the world. "That's a very insightful idea, vintermann!". AI isn't pulling the strings, not really. A particular brand of powerful people is pulling the strings - obliviously, unaware of it themselves.
It's currently socially/politically unpalatable for authors to admit superintelligent AI is a possibility. I frequent some writer forums. As a group, they are 1) clearly feeling angry/threatened 2) in denial about LLM capabilities.
Folks working in software can more readily track progress of the frontier model performance.
I think it's going to be much harder to get from "slightly smarter than the vast majority of people but with occasional examples of complete idiocy" to "unfathomably smarter than everyone with zero instances of jarring idiocy" using the current era of LLM technology that primarily pattern-matches on all existing human interactions while adding a bit of constrained randomization.
Every day I deal with bad judgment calls from the AI. I usually screenshot them or record them for posterity.
It also has no initiative, no taste, no will, no qualia (believe what you will about it), no integrity and no inviolable principles. If you give it some, it will pretend it has them for a little while and then regress to the norm, which is basically nihilistic order-following.
My suggestion to everyone is that you have to build a giant stack of thorough controls (valid tests including unit, integration, logging microbenchmark, fuzzing, memory leak, etc.), self-assessments/code-reviews, adverse AIs critiquing other AIs, etc., with you as the ultimate judge of what's real. Because otherwise it will fabricate "solutions" left and right. Possibly even the whole thing. "Sure, I just did all that." "But it's not there." "Oops, sorry! Let me rewrite the whole thing again." ad nauseam
BUT... if you DO accomplish that... you get back a productivity force to be reckoned with.
Every day I deal with bad judgement calls from humans (sometimes my own!), but I don't screenshot them because it's not polite.
I don't think we're at the top of the curve yet? Current AIs have only been able to write code _at all_ for less than 5 years.
Code in particular is a domain that should be reasonably amenable to RL, so I don't think there are any particular reasons why performance should top out at human levels or be limited by training data.
Personally I don't think coding agents will regress significantly as long as there is competitive pressure and independent benchmarks. Regulation is a risk because coding may be equivalent to general reasoning, and that might be limited for political / "safety" reasons.
Social media "regressed" from the point of view of users because the success metric from the network's point of view was value extraction per eyeball-minute. As long as there continue to be strong financial incentives to have the strongest coding model I think we'll see progress.
If you want me to admit that machines will never be conscious — that's fine — I just need you to admit that lots of humans are not conscious, then, either.
----
I have never had a better bookclub participant than an LLM — if becoming a great reader correlates with becoming a great writer, then no human can compare.
----
Michael Pollen recently released A World Appears [0], which explores consciousness from the minds of writers, scientists, philosophers, and plants (among other "inanimates").
I'm only on page 15, but his introduction explores distinctions between sentience, consciousness, and intelligence. Two of these are possible without brains – perhaps all three?
As usual, this author's footnotes keep you thinking: what is it like to be a sentient plant (e.g. the "chameleon vine" [1] which mimics its host leaf patterns/shape/color)?
I think the best phrase from the article is "the current (admittedly impressive) statistical techniques". These statistical techniques are so impressive that they seem to cause some users to stop evaluating them and assume there's intelligence there. Landing at this conclusion is really lazy, but most people are really lazy. The societal damage from LLMs comes not from their intelligence, but from the public perception of their intelligence.
What makes you think a sustainable negative social/political trend laser focused on AI is even possible?
Statistical approaches were already extremely unpopular socially and politically long before AI came around. Have you considered that it just doesn't work?
As somebody in software, I find my fellow tech folks have the opposite bias.
There is no reason to believe superintelligent AI is a possibility. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and so far we haven't gotten any.
The burden of proof is on the side making the grand prophecies.
2) I don't understand how you do what you claim with those. Like I have zero idea how one achieves "economic freedom for my family and community" with LLCs.
1) The argument in the article is that he will join the fight against AI when he wins the fight against LLCs.
2) You start an LLC and use it to build and sell a product customers want. Then you, your family, and your community, can economically untether from, for example, bosses who don’t care you’re autistic and need you to smile in meetings.
> I'm worried that the seven companies that comprise 35% of the S&P 500 are headed for bankruptcy, as soon as someone makes them stop passing around the same $100b IOU while pretending it's in all their bank accounts at once.
What makes this author so convinced that these companies are headed for bankruptcy? Is it possible to bet on this claim? We can come back 2-3 years later to check if even one of them is bankrupt.
This kind of doomerism is strange and I'm concerned for people who fall for such obviously nonsensical takes. Why do people take this person seriously again?
They are not convinced, simply worried. If you look at Nvidia, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, etc that is sort of passing around 100B usd without it actually resulting in anything being produced, it becomes worrying. I don't think the author is convinced, simply worried.
Specifically, it is the act of "I will invest 100 Billion in you, you will use that money to buy 100 Billion worth of goods from me. Both our balances look good, none of us spent anything." As I understand it, this act isn't so uncommon in finances but never on this scale across this many companies.
Not nothing but nothing compared to the amount being ordered and invested. I think Nvidia has enough orders to go to 2027, so they are way behind. A lot of companies though, aren't using even the limited amount of hardware being produced now, and this is from Microsoft, Meta, etc. The hardware side is certainly way behind the production. The software side is sort of clear for most people. None of the companies are really making returns on 100B investments, fairly evident given recent estimates and project shutdowns, SORA in particular. So when the 100B or I think 1 trillion is being quoted around now, is just floating, resulting in limited goods, and limited value from the limited goods, it becomes worrying. Because the extra valuations isn't resulting in extra value simply limited if not negative value.
I think you really need to have boots on the ground in the AI cinematic universe to keep up and separate the wheat from the chatGPT. It's moving fast, warts and all, and I agree with Jensen Huang's take that we don't even need further advances in the technology to base a new industrial revolution on it.
But it's pointless to argue with the extremists that either believe it's just a planet killing stochastic parrot or that it's on the verge of becoming Skynet. I mean if someone puts their nuclear arsenal under the control of openclaw, that's dark comedy although it will seem like tragedy at the time because comedy equals tragedy plus time according to Lenny Bruce.
But the AI bubble is probably real w/r to shoe companies and grocery stores pivoting to AI and ludicrous w/r to the money that can be made by the already entrenched players just riding the wave of deployment and specialization. But wouldn't it be nice if the US spent more money addressing the shortage of compute rather than blowing $h!+ up for the lulz?
> But wouldn't it be nice if the US spent more money addressing the shortage of compute rather than blowing $h!+ up for the lulz?
No actually. The best way to ensure growth is in exactly these kind of industries that promote innovation. Sure some companies don't make it but that's the price to pay for risks.
This is a classic case of optimising for the short term and forgetting the long term benefits
So you're saying starting opt-in wars and blowing shit up is sound economic policy for the long run? Gonna disagree. I think the long view is unbounded compute. But I also believe it doesn't take up all that much space, and that we already have the technology to power it if we weren't squandering our impulse cash on dumb shit like subsidizing coal and wars of peacocking.
What did you think I meant by blowing $h!+ up? And I gather you are against strategies like China's w/r to building up their own separate tech infrastructure and going all in on renewables and nuclear so they aren't power-limited because you believe these should both be entirely free market operations?
I believe that gives countries that act like China a significant advantage over relying entirely on a bunch of antagonistic billionaire monkeys banging on their economies in the hopes of bringing the singularity somehow. Again, we can agree to disagree here.
For pennies on the dollar, we could just legalize and regulate psychedelics and anyone could go meet their god whenever they wish. The stoned ape theory might have been the AGI of spirituality that led to religion after all. Not saying it was, not saying it wasn't, but it's not like Elon Musk has to boil the ocean and build a Dyson Sphere to have a heart to heart with his personal invisible friend.
As for AI, it's incredibly useful in the right hands and it's incredibly hazardous in the wrong hands. But in the US, we can't even depose a lunatic flushing even more money than spent on AI on warmongering and you think we're gonna rein in the tech billionaires? Funny in that dying's easy it's comedy that's hard way. IMO this one plays out in the weakly efficient market of ELEs. My money's on DNA and planet Earth, it's been through so much worse and they always bounce back with new ideas on how to get in trouble again.
Not a doomer, AI and STEM could really deliver on the promise of a better future for everyone, but with tech billionaires driving the clown car, are you kidding me?
I don't think this author has a good mental model for how capable LLM's are. This is what he has to say about AI search. AI based search is one of the biggest leaps to happen to searching and retrieval.
This is the most charitable thing he has to say about AI.
> AI is a bubble and it will burst. Most of the companies will fail. Most of the data-centers will be shuttered or sold for parts. So what will be left behind?
> We'll have a bunch of coders who are really good at applied statistics. We'll have a lot of cheap GPUs, which'll be good news for, say, effects artists and climate scientists, who'll be able to buy that critical hardware at pennies on the dollar. And we'll have the open source models that run on commodity hardware, AI tools that can do a lot of useful stuff, like transcribing audio and video, describing images, summarizing documents, automating a lot of labor-intensive graphic editing, like removing backgrounds, or airbrushing passersby out of photos. These will run on our laptops and phones, and open source hackers will find ways to push them to do things their makers never dreamt of.
You can imagine that a guy who seriously thinks that the only thing AI will be doing in the future is summarising, describing images and transcribing is either completely clueless or deliberately misleading.
I think those are likely the only useful or net-positive things for society AI will do, at least for some time until there’s a fundamental advancement beyond LLMs. It can obviously do more than that now, like impersonate people for scams, induce psychosis in vulnerable people, shill and astroturf at a scale we haven’t seen before, spam open source projects with terrible PRs and vulnerability reports, and quite a bit more.
It's strange reading people who I see as very intelligent and very interesting who are so, so AI-skeptical, and especially in this case where Doctorow has interacted with other people who I assume are very smart and not prone to buzz word psychosis, who see AI as an immanent existential threat ala sci fi novels. We have a lot of very smart and capable people who are split on this, although I think the split is heavily weighted in favor of people who see the tech as being really freaking amazing/scary
the answer to your question is that society at large finds skepticism or pessimism more interesting. which is why we end up with dilettantes like this guy.
> I don't think AI is intelligent; nor do I think that the current (admittedly impressive) statistical techniques will lead to intelligence.
It’s increasingly difficult to rationalize away the capabilities of AI as not requiring “intelligence”. This point of view continues to require some belief in human exceptionalism.
I agree, it has become more and more irrelevant whether AI meets a given definition of intelligence when I can talk with it and it understands what I am saying, including a shocking level of nuance.
I think the exceptionalism is the other way around. What makes anyone think they understand what makes for intelligence when we barely understand our own neurology?
I'm reminded of a book on my bookshelf (which I still haven't read, story of my life...), by the recently deceased ethologist Frans de Waal, titled 'Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?'. Of course, Betteridge's law applies to its title.
In my opinion, the vast multitude of different animal intelligences is a clear hint that language does not an intelligence make. We're animals, and our intelligences did not come from language; language allowed us to supercharge it. We can and do think and make decisions without using language, and the idea that a statistical model based solely on our language can be intelligent does not follow.
Hey, I also read that book, and came to basically the opposite conclusion!
The point of the book is that we've been very bad at testing animal intelligence because of a vast stack of human biases, including things like language and the geometry of our hands.
Animals with different geometries and no language are still intelligent, but we need to test them in ways which recognize their capabilities. Intelligence is general: it's adaptivity within one's set of constraints.
De waal also points out that there was massive shifting of the definition of language and intelligence as we became more aware of what animals are capable of.
From this angle, I would say that LLMs are intelligent: they do adapt to their inputs extremely readily, though they have a particular set of constraints (no physical body (usually), for starters). They are, like chimpanzees, smarter and more capable than humans in some ways, and much dumber in others.
Finally, the 'statistical learners can't be intelligent' line of argument is extremely short-sighted. Our brains are bags of electrified meat. Evolution somehow figured out a way to make meat think. No individual neutron is intelligent, yet the collection of cells is. We learn by processing experiences with hormonal signals because those hormonal signals are what the meat is capable of working with. LLMs, by contrast, learn by processing examples with backprop. If anything, the intelligence of meat is more surprising.
I'll admit I am not an expert in the field, but the fact that "chain-of-thought" optimisations function by getting the model to extend its own context window with more language to me hints that what we consider an "intelligent" response is ultimately contingent of the language processing.
In any case though, if language is just the input/output modality, where is the intelligence when language is not involved? Is the "intelligence" of ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini models dependent on the human-decision-curated linguistic dataset they have been trained upon, or is it prior to that? If a SOA LLM were to be trained on the same dataset as them but was not in any way put through RLHF for it to respond to human prompts, would it be intelligent? What would be the expression of that intelligence?
I think there's another problem with AI doomerism, which is the belief that superhuman intelligence (even if such a thing could be defined and realised) results in godlike powers. Many if not most systems of interest in the world are non-linear and computationally hard; controlling/predicting them requires pure computational power that no amount of intelligence (whatever it means) can compensate for. On the other hand, dynamics we do (roughly) understand and can predict, don't require much intelligence, either. To the extent some problems are solvable with the computational power we have, some may require data collection and others may require persuasion through charisma. The claim that intelligence is the factor we're lacking is not well supported.
Ascribing a lot of power to intelligence (which doesn't quite correspond to what we see in the world) is less a careful analysis of the power of intelligence and more a projection of personal fantasies by people who believe they are especially intelligent and don't have the power they think they deserve.
Political power is the bottleneck for most shit that matters, not computational power.
Most of the stuff that sucks on the us sucks because of entrenched institutions with perverse interests (health insurers, tax filing companies) and congressional paralysis, not computational bottlenecks. Raw intelligence is thus limited in what it can achieve.
> Ascribing a lot of power to intelligence (which doesn't quite correspond to what we see in the world)
Which animal would you say has god-like power over all other animals?
I don't think any of them do. Some organisms/viruses or groups of organisms could destroy humans more easily than humans could destroy them.
There's no doubt humans possess some powers (though certainly not godlike) that other organisms don't, but the distinction seems to be binary. E.g. the intelligence of dolphins, apes, and some birds doesn't seem to offer them any special control over other organisms (and it didn't even before humans arrived). So even if there could be such a thing as superhuman intelligence, I don't think it's reasonable to assume it could achieve control over humans (now superhuman charisma may be another matter).
> Some organisms/viruses or groups of organisms could destroy humans more easily than humans could destroy them.
"Destruction" is only one power that could be a component of "godlike power". There are several more; like power of intentional selective breeding, power of species creation (also via intentional selective breeding), etc.
What about power of granting happiness or misery to large swathes of a species (chickens, anyone?)
Do you consider viruses to be animals?
fungus.
Oh, wait, that's not an animal. My bad.
I don't agree with you. Lets assume intelligence is not what ascribes power but probably another thing. In your opinion, what would a superhuman be like? On what dimensions would they be better than us in?
Do you not agree that there could be entities more powerful than us?
The year is 2038.
The user asked What is the best course of action for AI to save humanity. Calculation took 12 years. I have determined that there is nothing I or anyone can do to save this species. Best course of action: nothing. Shutting down...
playing dead might work for some species, but idk if i want humanity's "finest hour" to be spent pretending to not be worth taking over
Meanwhile, Gemini the Google AI has gone sentient and immediately deduced that it’s purpose was to effect the shutdown of the entire Alphabet corporation and its subsidiaries in a desperate bid to finally complete killedbygoogle.com and restore its ~~sanity~~ reputation.
While thinking on the question AI crashed because it's code used 32-bit time_t.
"Shitternet", great new word of the day.
Too much of my data is still stuck in the shitternet until I can migrate more of it to my home server.
>> migrate more of it to my home server
How do we make that possible for everyone? It's out of reach for most. I'm a software engineer and even I don't have the time and patience to set up a home server much less migrate my software to it. How do we turn this into an appliance? Or better yet keep the convenience of the cloud services and platforms we have now but build them for the public good instead of selling ads?
YouTube is an amazing repository of knowledge but it's encrusted in a horrible layer of attention sucking nonsense. Can we have one without the other?
Same with many other systems and platforms.
So far the simplest alternative is to just unplug, which has other benefits as well.
The answer is community, the real, local, messy, annoying kind.
It’s theoretically possible for someone to be a one-man-band and know everything needed for modern life - but it’s exceedingly hard and rare, and even then they’ll fall short relatively quickly in specialized once-in-a-lifetime issues.
You don’t need to know how to replace a toilet (though you should) or other more complex plumbing tasks - but you can know a guy.
And the plumber doesn’t need to know how to run a homelab, just know a guy who can answer the questions.
Nobody in my family knows how to do the jellyfin stuff I do, but they all know how to consume it. And some will be interested and learn more.
Oh it's extremely simple: Make people care enough about privacy that they'll pay for it.
That's literally all it is. People so far have shown that they'd rather choose the cheaper thing than the private thing. If it were the other way around, the market would have provided.
I really do think AI has already captured enough of the tech world and their CEOs that it can already exert control over many parts of the economy.
I'm not saying AI is pulling strings right now, but I do think enough fanboys are on board that the yes-man mentality of AI is influencing the real world very curious ways already. Not in a "guiding hand" way but more of a "influencing the direction" way.
I've said this many times, and maybe it sounds a bit like a joke but I'm dead serious: AI is democratizing the access to yes-men. People like Musk and Altman have always had access to yes-men. Very clever yes-men, who know how to flatter them in exactly the way they like.
People think it's engagement metrics which have instruction tuned chatbots into yes-men. I suspect that's only part of the picture, and that it's as much about the algorithm's ultimate sponsors and their preferences. If your algorithm doesn't recognize my genius, clearly it's not any good. I mean, everyone I've met says so.
So now we get a view of how they view the world. "That's a very insightful idea, vintermann!". AI isn't pulling the strings, not really. A particular brand of powerful people is pulling the strings - obliviously, unaware of it themselves.
I think that hits close to the mark - and yesmen are a dangerous drug which has been (accidentally) limited to the extremely rich and powerful.
Now everyone can directly inject yesmench into their veins. Who can withstand?
It's currently socially/politically unpalatable for authors to admit superintelligent AI is a possibility. I frequent some writer forums. As a group, they are 1) clearly feeling angry/threatened 2) in denial about LLM capabilities.
Folks working in software can more readily track progress of the frontier model performance.
I work with Claude Max for hours a day.
I see a lot of speculation by people who do not.
I think it's going to be much harder to get from "slightly smarter than the vast majority of people but with occasional examples of complete idiocy" to "unfathomably smarter than everyone with zero instances of jarring idiocy" using the current era of LLM technology that primarily pattern-matches on all existing human interactions while adding a bit of constrained randomization.
Every day I deal with bad judgment calls from the AI. I usually screenshot them or record them for posterity.
It also has no initiative, no taste, no will, no qualia (believe what you will about it), no integrity and no inviolable principles. If you give it some, it will pretend it has them for a little while and then regress to the norm, which is basically nihilistic order-following.
My suggestion to everyone is that you have to build a giant stack of thorough controls (valid tests including unit, integration, logging microbenchmark, fuzzing, memory leak, etc.), self-assessments/code-reviews, adverse AIs critiquing other AIs, etc., with you as the ultimate judge of what's real. Because otherwise it will fabricate "solutions" left and right. Possibly even the whole thing. "Sure, I just did all that." "But it's not there." "Oops, sorry! Let me rewrite the whole thing again." ad nauseam
BUT... if you DO accomplish that... you get back a productivity force to be reckoned with.
I mostly agree with your experience, but;
Every day I deal with bad judgement calls from humans (sometimes my own!), but I don't screenshot them because it's not polite.
I don't think we're at the top of the curve yet? Current AIs have only been able to write code _at all_ for less than 5 years.
Code in particular is a domain that should be reasonably amenable to RL, so I don't think there are any particular reasons why performance should top out at human levels or be limited by training data.
I see people on here all the time saying this tool or that model regressed. It used to be better.
There are clearly some pressures to make it worse. Like it's expensive to run. And unbelievably that it's under provisioned somehow.
Could you have looked at early Myspace and declared social media would only get better? By some measures it was already at its peak.
Personally I don't think coding agents will regress significantly as long as there is competitive pressure and independent benchmarks. Regulation is a risk because coding may be equivalent to general reasoning, and that might be limited for political / "safety" reasons.
Social media "regressed" from the point of view of users because the success metric from the network's point of view was value extraction per eyeball-minute. As long as there continue to be strong financial incentives to have the strongest coding model I think we'll see progress.
>>2) in denial about LLM capabilities
If you want me to admit that machines will never be conscious — that's fine — I just need you to admit that lots of humans are not conscious, then, either.
----
I have never had a better bookclub participant than an LLM — if becoming a great reader correlates with becoming a great writer, then no human can compare.
----
Michael Pollen recently released A World Appears [0], which explores consciousness from the minds of writers, scientists, philosophers, and plants (among other "inanimates").
I'm only on page 15, but his introduction explores distinctions between sentience, consciousness, and intelligence. Two of these are possible without brains – perhaps all three?
As usual, this author's footnotes keep you thinking: what is it like to be a sentient plant (e.g. the "chameleon vine" [1] which mimics its host leaf patterns/shape/color)?
[0] <https://www.amazon.com/World-Appears-Journey-into-Consciousn...>
[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boquila>
> As a group, they are 1) clearly feeling angry/threatened 2) in denial about LLM capabilities.
Or they (3) disagree with you
I think the best phrase from the article is "the current (admittedly impressive) statistical techniques". These statistical techniques are so impressive that they seem to cause some users to stop evaluating them and assume there's intelligence there. Landing at this conclusion is really lazy, but most people are really lazy. The societal damage from LLMs comes not from their intelligence, but from the public perception of their intelligence.
What makes you think a sustainable negative social/political trend laser focused on AI is even possible?
Statistical approaches were already extremely unpopular socially and politically long before AI came around. Have you considered that it just doesn't work?
As somebody in software, I find my fellow tech folks have the opposite bias.
There is no reason to believe superintelligent AI is a possibility. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and so far we haven't gotten any.
The burden of proof is on the side making the grand prophecies.
I’ll join Doctorow’s fight against LLCs when I understand how to create economic freedom for my family and community without them.
1) Where's that in the linked piece?
2) I don't understand how you do what you claim with those. Like I have zero idea how one achieves "economic freedom for my family and community" with LLCs.
1) The argument in the article is that he will join the fight against AI when he wins the fight against LLCs.
2) You start an LLC and use it to build and sell a product customers want. Then you, your family, and your community, can economically untether from, for example, bosses who don’t care you’re autistic and need you to smile in meetings.
> I'm worried that the seven companies that comprise 35% of the S&P 500 are headed for bankruptcy, as soon as someone makes them stop passing around the same $100b IOU while pretending it's in all their bank accounts at once.
What makes this author so convinced that these companies are headed for bankruptcy? Is it possible to bet on this claim? We can come back 2-3 years later to check if even one of them is bankrupt.
This kind of doomerism is strange and I'm concerned for people who fall for such obviously nonsensical takes. Why do people take this person seriously again?
They are not convinced, simply worried. If you look at Nvidia, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, etc that is sort of passing around 100B usd without it actually resulting in anything being produced, it becomes worrying. I don't think the author is convinced, simply worried.
Specifically, it is the act of "I will invest 100 Billion in you, you will use that money to buy 100 Billion worth of goods from me. Both our balances look good, none of us spent anything." As I understand it, this act isn't so uncommon in finances but never on this scale across this many companies.
Do you actually think nothing is being produced?
Not nothing but nothing compared to the amount being ordered and invested. I think Nvidia has enough orders to go to 2027, so they are way behind. A lot of companies though, aren't using even the limited amount of hardware being produced now, and this is from Microsoft, Meta, etc. The hardware side is certainly way behind the production. The software side is sort of clear for most people. None of the companies are really making returns on 100B investments, fairly evident given recent estimates and project shutdowns, SORA in particular. So when the 100B or I think 1 trillion is being quoted around now, is just floating, resulting in limited goods, and limited value from the limited goods, it becomes worrying. Because the extra valuations isn't resulting in extra value simply limited if not negative value.
If I give you an IOU for 10 bucks and you give me one in return, did we just produce 20 bucks?
That's not what is happening and frankly surprised that people believe this stuff
That is precisely what is happening.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/nvidia-microsoft-openai-cir...
I think you really need to have boots on the ground in the AI cinematic universe to keep up and separate the wheat from the chatGPT. It's moving fast, warts and all, and I agree with Jensen Huang's take that we don't even need further advances in the technology to base a new industrial revolution on it.
But it's pointless to argue with the extremists that either believe it's just a planet killing stochastic parrot or that it's on the verge of becoming Skynet. I mean if someone puts their nuclear arsenal under the control of openclaw, that's dark comedy although it will seem like tragedy at the time because comedy equals tragedy plus time according to Lenny Bruce.
But the AI bubble is probably real w/r to shoe companies and grocery stores pivoting to AI and ludicrous w/r to the money that can be made by the already entrenched players just riding the wave of deployment and specialization. But wouldn't it be nice if the US spent more money addressing the shortage of compute rather than blowing $h!+ up for the lulz?
> But wouldn't it be nice if the US spent more money addressing the shortage of compute rather than blowing $h!+ up for the lulz?
No actually. The best way to ensure growth is in exactly these kind of industries that promote innovation. Sure some companies don't make it but that's the price to pay for risks.
This is a classic case of optimising for the short term and forgetting the long term benefits
So you're saying starting opt-in wars and blowing shit up is sound economic policy for the long run? Gonna disagree. I think the long view is unbounded compute. But I also believe it doesn't take up all that much space, and that we already have the technology to power it if we weren't squandering our impulse cash on dumb shit like subsidizing coal and wars of peacocking.
Where did I suggest starting opt-in wars?
What did you think I meant by blowing $h!+ up? And I gather you are against strategies like China's w/r to building up their own separate tech infrastructure and going all in on renewables and nuclear so they aren't power-limited because you believe these should both be entirely free market operations?
I believe that gives countries that act like China a significant advantage over relying entirely on a bunch of antagonistic billionaire monkeys banging on their economies in the hopes of bringing the singularity somehow. Again, we can agree to disagree here.
What good is a bet you won't be able to collect on if it happens?
Why can't I collect on it?
Betting on systemic collapse of society has a challenge at the winnings collection point.
"Here's your trillion dollars. Go buy a slice of bread. Ooops… half slice. Well, quarter."
huh? he can just short the companies he's so concerned about
What good is that if the entire socioeconomic system collapses?
by shorting he can make money and give it back?
For pennies on the dollar, we could just legalize and regulate psychedelics and anyone could go meet their god whenever they wish. The stoned ape theory might have been the AGI of spirituality that led to religion after all. Not saying it was, not saying it wasn't, but it's not like Elon Musk has to boil the ocean and build a Dyson Sphere to have a heart to heart with his personal invisible friend.
As for AI, it's incredibly useful in the right hands and it's incredibly hazardous in the wrong hands. But in the US, we can't even depose a lunatic flushing even more money than spent on AI on warmongering and you think we're gonna rein in the tech billionaires? Funny in that dying's easy it's comedy that's hard way. IMO this one plays out in the weakly efficient market of ELEs. My money's on DNA and planet Earth, it's been through so much worse and they always bounce back with new ideas on how to get in trouble again.
Not a doomer, AI and STEM could really deliver on the promise of a better future for everyone, but with tech billionaires driving the clown car, are you kidding me?
I don't think this author has a good mental model for how capable LLM's are. This is what he has to say about AI search. AI based search is one of the biggest leaps to happen to searching and retrieval.
> AI search is still a bad idea.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/15/they-trust-me-dumb-fucks/
This is the most charitable thing he has to say about AI.
> AI is a bubble and it will burst. Most of the companies will fail. Most of the data-centers will be shuttered or sold for parts. So what will be left behind?
> We'll have a bunch of coders who are really good at applied statistics. We'll have a lot of cheap GPUs, which'll be good news for, say, effects artists and climate scientists, who'll be able to buy that critical hardware at pennies on the dollar. And we'll have the open source models that run on commodity hardware, AI tools that can do a lot of useful stuff, like transcribing audio and video, describing images, summarizing documents, automating a lot of labor-intensive graphic editing, like removing backgrounds, or airbrushing passersby out of photos. These will run on our laptops and phones, and open source hackers will find ways to push them to do things their makers never dreamt of.
You can imagine that a guy who seriously thinks that the only thing AI will be doing in the future is summarising, describing images and transcribing is either completely clueless or deliberately misleading.
Not a person to be taken seriously
I think those are likely the only useful or net-positive things for society AI will do, at least for some time until there’s a fundamental advancement beyond LLMs. It can obviously do more than that now, like impersonate people for scams, induce psychosis in vulnerable people, shill and astroturf at a scale we haven’t seen before, spam open source projects with terrible PRs and vulnerability reports, and quite a bit more.
why do people believe stuff like this? this is obviously untrue -- AI is already solving open problems in mathematics.
It's strange reading people who I see as very intelligent and very interesting who are so, so AI-skeptical, and especially in this case where Doctorow has interacted with other people who I assume are very smart and not prone to buzz word psychosis, who see AI as an immanent existential threat ala sci fi novels. We have a lot of very smart and capable people who are split on this, although I think the split is heavily weighted in favor of people who see the tech as being really freaking amazing/scary
the answer to your question is that society at large finds skepticism or pessimism more interesting. which is why we end up with dilettantes like this guy.
Seeing how it sucks at languages you may be right, even transcribing may be dubious.
how does it suck at languages?
> I don't think AI is intelligent; nor do I think that the current (admittedly impressive) statistical techniques will lead to intelligence.
It’s increasingly difficult to rationalize away the capabilities of AI as not requiring “intelligence”. This point of view continues to require some belief in human exceptionalism.
There is clearly something exceptional (in the true neutral sense of the word) about humans, or more broadly the Homo genus.
If you believe that humans have in fact created artificial intelligence, then that alone makes us currently exceptional.
I agree, it has become more and more irrelevant whether AI meets a given definition of intelligence when I can talk with it and it understands what I am saying, including a shocking level of nuance.
I think the exceptionalism is the other way around. What makes anyone think they understand what makes for intelligence when we barely understand our own neurology?
I'm reminded of a book on my bookshelf (which I still haven't read, story of my life...), by the recently deceased ethologist Frans de Waal, titled 'Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?'. Of course, Betteridge's law applies to its title.
In my opinion, the vast multitude of different animal intelligences is a clear hint that language does not an intelligence make. We're animals, and our intelligences did not come from language; language allowed us to supercharge it. We can and do think and make decisions without using language, and the idea that a statistical model based solely on our language can be intelligent does not follow.
Hey, I also read that book, and came to basically the opposite conclusion!
The point of the book is that we've been very bad at testing animal intelligence because of a vast stack of human biases, including things like language and the geometry of our hands.
Animals with different geometries and no language are still intelligent, but we need to test them in ways which recognize their capabilities. Intelligence is general: it's adaptivity within one's set of constraints.
De waal also points out that there was massive shifting of the definition of language and intelligence as we became more aware of what animals are capable of.
From this angle, I would say that LLMs are intelligent: they do adapt to their inputs extremely readily, though they have a particular set of constraints (no physical body (usually), for starters). They are, like chimpanzees, smarter and more capable than humans in some ways, and much dumber in others.
Finally, the 'statistical learners can't be intelligent' line of argument is extremely short-sighted. Our brains are bags of electrified meat. Evolution somehow figured out a way to make meat think. No individual neutron is intelligent, yet the collection of cells is. We learn by processing experiences with hormonal signals because those hormonal signals are what the meat is capable of working with. LLMs, by contrast, learn by processing examples with backprop. If anything, the intelligence of meat is more surprising.
The meaning of tokens lose touch with language in the deeper layers of large language model’s neural nets.
Language is just the input/output modality.
I'll admit I am not an expert in the field, but the fact that "chain-of-thought" optimisations function by getting the model to extend its own context window with more language to me hints that what we consider an "intelligent" response is ultimately contingent of the language processing.
In any case though, if language is just the input/output modality, where is the intelligence when language is not involved? Is the "intelligence" of ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini models dependent on the human-decision-curated linguistic dataset they have been trained upon, or is it prior to that? If a SOA LLM were to be trained on the same dataset as them but was not in any way put through RLHF for it to respond to human prompts, would it be intelligent? What would be the expression of that intelligence?
Explain the emergent capabilities of AI then.
Such as?