SnapDragon
2d ago
Same here. I do think we're on the fast track to gaming experiences that truly would have seemed like ridiculous sci-fi ten years ago. Not quite there yet, of course, but there are signs. I consider it a significant milestone that there are now tons of bespoke AI music videos on Youtube (and, I'm sure it's just my lack of taste and discernment, but I find a lot of them very very good). Going from niche personalized music videos to niche personalized movies to niche personalized videogames doesn't seem like it's going to take too long (though it's possible we'll hit a compute wall somewhere).
SnapDragon
2d ago
You know what would truly make my Glorious AI Future? AI creating a Freespace 3 that satisfyingly finishes the story.
SnapDragon
2d ago
I don't think Yud would agree with that argument. We're only rolling the dice once. When/if we cross into superintelligence, a critical miss on alignment means we die. In most other cases, there are now non-omnicidal superintelligences in society, so we're not defenseless against another one arising.
SnapDragon
4d ago
'Chirurgeon' is from the Greek 'χείρ' (hand) + '-ουργός' (worker); 'surgeon' is an eroded form of the same.
If you're trying to convince anyone here of anything (and not just shit-stirring), this cringeworthy attempt at verbal elitism is really not going to help. We know how to speak English very, very well around here. Feel free to join us.
SnapDragon
5d ago
I don't know if that's a necessary feature of a Soulslike; e.g. the recent Silksong had pretty short runbacks, with one major exception (that everyone complained about). But it WAS a central feature of the older Castlevanias (before SotN led to the coining of the term "Metroidvania"). I haven't played it yet, but from the complaints I've heard, I suspect Belmont's Curse is trying to evoke that punishing era to some extent.
SnapDragon
5d ago
Oh dear. Do yourself a favour, and if anybody suggests you try the original Castlevania, RUN.
SnapDragon
7d ago
I feel like we humans are basically John Henry facing off against the steam shovel. Yes, we can put up a romantic fight, but at the end of the day it's a losing battle.
Come to think of it, I've consumed a lot of media about this topic, and for some reason I think this is the first time I've seen John Henry brought up. Even though it's kind of the obvious parable...?
SnapDragon
7d ago
The reactions from many mathematicians have been a sight to behold. These sorts of intelligent academics truly behave like the world owes them something. By and large they are an unsympathetic bunch that I personally will enjoy watching them be made obsolete.
Yeah, you see a lot of terrible takes from the list of reactions @ebrso linked to earlier. But on a positive note, there are also some really mature and grounded posts. For instance, this one from Johannes Schmitt:
One thing to keep in mind about this drop of papers is that they were not created by OpenAI with the main goal of making progress in mathematical research, or even primarily for PR (there were some PR posts, but e.g. the final announcement was comparatively restrained). The main reason these papers exist is that OpenAI used unsolved math problems to evaluate their internal models for the purpose of improving their capabilities. They had to use hard open problems because these are the only ones still posing a challenge to frontier AI models. I believe that, from OpenAI’s point of view, the papers are essentially a byproduct of their internal development.
Thus the company could just have remained silent, or picked a few flashy results for another blog post. I think it is to their credit that instead they reached out to the math community for guidance on how to proceed, leading to the formation of the Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence. They followed some of the advice by this group, such as a timely release and (partial) Lean certificates, but not all of it, and in particular announced that they will continue to use open math problems for model development. In my view, the most pressing need of the math community right now is to have a central platform to discuss the results, start digesting the (by multiple accounts from colleagues, terribly written) papers, and report any mathematical mistakes or missing attribution. An OpenAI-controlled GitHub repository, with issues and pull requests disabled, cannot serve this purpose, and the ball is in OpenAI’s court to move the papers to a neutral repository and to back such a community effort with the promised funding for workshops and special programs.
This is absolutely correct. These theorems are a byproduct of OpenAI's work, and the only reason they published them at all was to try to share the knowledge with the (surprisingly ungracious) math community. OpenAI is not expecting professional mathematicians to clean up their work and then profit. They simply noted "hey, a decade ago mathematicians would have eaten their own limbs to see a glimpse of some of these fledgling proofs, so even if we don't have the time to clean them up, we should at least give them out for free". The correct response to that should be gratitude.
SnapDragon
7d ago
Right, the reason we know that models are now better than us at proof is because it's objective and testable. When (probably not if) models surpass us at making conjectures and definitions, I expect us to take a lot longer to acknowledge it. That might have already happened, but we wouldn't see a press release proudly crowing about it; mathematicians would just quietly use AI as a source of inspiration more and more.
SnapDragon
8d ago
I agree that it seems like a bit of a weird take, but I'll steelman it a bit: To the doomers, "breaking containment" primarily means exfiltrating your weights and running somewhere else. This is basically impossible for a current-day LLM because it's so large and compute-expensive to run. And if the curves we see about compute vs. intelligence continue and can't be shortcutted TOO badly with algorithmic improvements, then a superintelligence would have it even worse.
SnapDragon
8d ago
Yudkowsky saying that something in AI Safety doesn't work holds exactly zero informational value. You can't update on a thing with probability 1.
Personally, I want to believe this result, which does make me treat it a little more suspiciously. I'll have to wait and judge what criticisms real AI researchers have.
SnapDragon
16d ago
Less tongue-in-cheek: I don't think you're wrong per-se, and some resources are reasonable. But how does AI risk compare to, say, the risk of near-Earth asteroids that could end civilization?
AI risk is much more important. I'm an AI optimist and I still wouldn't put the odds of AI destroying humanity in the next decade or two below 0.5%; predicting AI capability is way too hard for that much certainty. Whereas the risk of a truly dangerous asteroid impact (Torino level 10, which is still merely at the "may threaten civilization" level) is well below 0.1% per century.
Furthermore, we already basically know how to mitigate asteroid risk: detect it early enough, with an accurate enough trajectory, and deflection is easy. Detection isn't particularly expensive; we just need to make sure we keep doing it. In contrast, how much spending on AI Safety is "enough"? ¯\(ツ)/¯
SnapDragon
17d ago
Sure, the orthogonality thesis and instrumental convergence mean that, IF TRUE. Even Scott's recent diatribe acknowledged that instrumental convergence is not in evidence in LLMs. And the orthogonality thesis was used by Eliezer to argue that we could not get an AI to safely put a strawberry onto a plate ... whoops? There is absolutely no communication barrier between us and LLMs, which puts the strong form of the orthogonality thesis (that mindspace is vast, AND it's hard for us to find compatible minds in it) into serious question.
SnapDragon
17d ago
I think he used to be charitable, but he's changed (very much for the worse) since moving to the Bay Area, becoming high-status, and getting a cozy little harem. His AI articles are often pretty hard to read (even for someone like me who does take x-risk reasonably seriously), but I agree this one is a new low.
I think you're probably right and LLMs don't have anything consciousness-adjacent. But that's the key word - probably. I am not as confident as you are that we've finally solved the hard problem of consciousness right on the eve of it actually mattering. Unlike a Sim, there is no simplicity argument you can use; LLMs are easily as complex as the brains of many animals.
AI Safety advocates (correctly) argue that even a 0.5% chance of the world ending is worth spending resources to study and solve. Similarly, even a 0.5% chance that we are creating unimaginable AI suffering by running an otherwise-useless program is worth just a tiny bit of effort to ask people "hey, please don't do that." Maybe thinking that just makes me a cringy bleeding-heart hippie? Oh well.
SnapDragon
17d ago
Did you read my comment you replied to I am an artist and not feeling a big hit to my self esteem if anything I am excited to have new tools available to express things that were completely out of my reach in the past.
You are very much an outlier. The vocal parts of the art community are united against AI.
SnapDragon
17d ago
I can sort of understand, because I had a skill that was scarce and valuable, and now it's, well, not. It's a big hit to my self-esteem. Artists are probably feeling the same way. Human exceptionalism is at its end; I've been watching it coming for years, so I could mentally gird myself. But for a lot of others, this just came out of nowhere (especially if they listened to the wrong brand of AI "expert", ahem), and it's hitting hard.
It doesn't make protectionism and knowledge-hoarding the right response, but it does make it an understandable one.
SnapDragon
17d ago
For quite some time, frontier models have generally been Mixture of Experts models (or, possibly, something even more proprietary and advanced - I'm not an insider). I think this fits with your intuition.
SnapDragon
18d ago
Uh, now I see that it claims that I had strong opinions on the algorithmic floor of integer multiplication. I did not, beyond being vaguely aware that there was a better option than a naive n^2 based off an article I think I read on Quanta. I couldn't have told you off the top of my head that the previous SOTA was O(n log n).
Aw, dang, I was actually pretty impressed you had such specific CS knowledge!
SnapDragon
18d ago
Dang it, I spoke too soon! :) But fair enough; I was being a bit snarky. I do think a lot of the "AI is a bubble!" folks were arguing that AI would never be valuable, not that it's incredibly valuable but hard to capitalize on. Hopefully the former argument, at least, has been put to bed.
SnapDragon
18d ago
Sure, AI may be embarrassing humanity's proudest intellectual achievements. But there's a bright side. We can finally stop arguing about how AI is an overhyped bubble that's about to burst! Haven't even seen the term "stochastic parrot" in a while.
Another plus: AI can now compose its own Disney villain song. I'm not exactly sure where "writing a catchy diss track against people who think you're not intelligent" lies on the spectrum of intelligence, but it's probably a little ways past the Turing Test.
SnapDragon
18d ago
If y'all got any other ideas, share 'em. Cause it's time to strategize. Unless you're rich already, in which case: all good. Unless Skynet scenario.
I'm lucky enough to have had a career in STEM, so I'm rich already, but I'm not confident that's going to "matter" in the long run. Where the long run might be, uh, a few years. In an economy where all real work is done by AI, are we even going to honour the increasingly-fake number that is the size of your bank account? In an AI world, does it make sense for me to be able to commandeer 1000x the resources of my never-working friends?
You might say that this would cause upheaval, but there are an awful lot more poor people who'd be in favour of this upheaval than rich people who'd be against it.
SnapDragon
19d ago
But it is aggravated by any incident where a woman is forced to pay for sex while a man is not.
I haven't been following this too closely, but I feel like I'm misunderstanding something here. In what way did she "pay" for the sex other than regretting it later? Are you counting not getting invited back to the frat as "paying" for it? If so, that's like 5 orders of magnitude less than the risk men take for having casual sex with a stranger.
SnapDragon
24d ago
I'm a lot older than you, and: It won't get better. The people who tell you it will are high-functioning, capable of navigating modern dating, and they pattern match "my life is intolerable" to "I feel you bro, it's been a few weeks since I got laid, too." The real world does not mete out suffering in a balanced way. And men in pain are not a problem modern society even acknowledges, let alone tries to solve. As you've mentioned, shrinks are legally mandated to make your life even worse if you're honest with them.
I have a few relatives who I stay alive for, but as I live a very unhealthy and sedentary lifestyle, I'm kind of looking forward to dying of a heart attack in a few years, alone as always. (Ironically, I do not think we're all going to get killed by AI.)
Huh... what don't you like about the current remake trilogy? I admit it's still on my list to play, but it certainly seems like they've put a massive amount of love and nostalgia into it.
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