ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
1hr ago
Much of the empirical part of ML, though, is also something the LLM can do autonomously. The agent can write up some pytorch or jax to train a model on an existing dataset, observe whatever quantities you want, repeat. It does have a longer feedback loop and more compute requirements than pure math, but quite automatable.
The pure math part of ML is unfortunately quite weak right now and hasn't played a huge role in the current boom; pure math research could provide a much stronger basis for understanding learning and creating new approaches, and I think it will, but that's speculative.
We'll find out soon.
ThenElection
2hr ago
I'm quite sure they have. These math results are likely almost an afterthought; I wouldn't be surprised if they've already put 10x of the compute they used for these math results into researching ML.
ThenElection
2hr ago
In other news, this morning someone used ChatGPT to improve the new bound on multiplication by a factor of 2^104.
ThenElection
3hr ago
Park Slope is a nice neighborhood in Brooklyn. A brownstone in Park Slope is roughly a Victorian in Noe Valley.
In the utopia, how does someone not in Park Slope get their brownstone in Park Slope?
ThenElection
3hr ago
Yeah. This made me suspicious, and it seems like not reindexing is a mistake a human would make, not a model. This seems like a last minute redaction to me. I can't find any clues in the repo about what they were, though, aside from the general fields you mention.
Well, AI skeptics questioned the NS result at the time of release, with variations of "AI stole it"; "it was just providing a solution that blows up instead of doing real math, so it doesn't count"; "OAI spent millions of dollars doing it, I could probably have done the same if you gave me an eight figure check." I think that this new release should put those concerns to rest.
Though, who knows: Wired (the onetime home of Kevin Kelly!) has decided to cover the most momentous day in mathematical history with "OpenAI is pissing off mathematicians".
The cost is what should drive any updates. These took three hours each; that's cheap enough for pretty much anyone to be able to produce these kinds of results, when they get access to models of this class. And that cost is rapidly falling. This has substantial relevance for both how quickly we should expect AI to diffuse as well as how practical RSI is.
ThenElection
4hr ago
I'm less sanguine than you. The utopia AI will offer us does have advantages, the biggest being significantly healthier throughout a (neverending?) lifespan. And I, personally, am very excited for the knowledge and discoveries it will have about the universe.
But beyond that, the utopia won't fundamentally change that much. Even today, no one (at least in the USA) is starving for lack of food. The deprivations most people feel are positional and status-related: most people can get a house somewhere, but when people complain about not having access to housing, what they mean is they can't afford a brownstone in Park Slope.
Before AI, society could, at least in part, use merit and economic contribution as a way to allocate those inherently exclusionary goods; that's going away in the utopia. I'm lucky enough to have a almost two-decade-long career during a time where I could convert my intellectual capabilities into something that lets me acquire those resources, but that path won't exist for people like me. I don't have faith that whatever way society decides to allocate status resources will allocate them in a way I like (though I expect I personally am positioned in a place to have the level of exclusionary goods I want; it's more what I'm imagining for future generations).
That's following the optimistic utopia branch. The extinction branch is also quite likely (though I'd guess on the order of decades, not months or years) and much worse.
ThenElection
4hr ago
I am pretty torn about it; originally I had a fairly sophisticated research ontology. But I've gradually simplified it to just files that can be discovered in a hierarchy of progressive disclosure, and trusting the agent is smart enough to find what it needs when it needs it.
ThenElection
5hr ago
Here, yes, just that. Used higher diction than my comment, but you could put it in a loop.
For my more usual interests, it's more involved; oftentimes the model will go off on a tangent or latch onto something I don't care about, and I need to tell it to stop going in a certain direction. There's also specifically generating artifacts that're useful for later sessions to build on (OAI has a library tool that does something similar now, but I don't love the implementation.) But for this math paper extension, it was just the dumbest elicitation repeatedly.
ThenElection
6hr ago
That's a bit optimistic about the organizational stuff in a large org. E.g. make a Gantt chart for reporting to higher ups; convert your team's tickets into a new particular spreadsheet structure; write a design proposal for a system that's already done so it can be used for promo. They aren't entirely valueless because they give organizational legibility into otherwise opaque processes for decision makers, but they're not the pleasant part of software engineering.
ThenElection
12hr ago
Organizational frictions are real. A year ago, I'd guess I spent 60% of my time writing code, the rest spent doing organizational bullshit. Now it's something like 95% organizational bullshit, and 5% prompting and reviewing LLM-generated code.
This seems temporary to me, though. Once everyone finishes shifting to LLM coding, organizations (mega corps or startups) that minimize the organizational aspects will outcompete those that don't.
ThenElection
13hr ago
STEM is over, IMO; even more broadly, abstract thought will soon be economically valueless, including the humanities (which can have meaningful rigor to them!)
I would say that, to the extent labor income exists in the future, it's the physical aspect that matters. Prostitute, yes; OnlyFans star, no, you'll be competing with millions of AI bots who will outcompete you on every dimension.
Hoping I'll have enough to retire by the time that transition is complete.
A Big Day in the Culture War
Apologies for any incoherency or grammatical errors; today's events led me to down more than my usual share of booze.
Earlier today, big things happened in math. No, not Claude providing a sub quadratic 3SUM. OpenAI released hundreds of notable math results, in a GitHub repo.
Fun results:
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The rational Hodge conjecture holds for every CM abelian variety
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Integer multiplication can be done in sub-log-linear time. Oh, there's also a sub-log linear DFT.
Thoughts and observations:
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Mathematicians are big mad. View the relevant subreddit on our progenitor site. Most there are probably, at best, adjuncts at community colleges desperately coping with the downward trajectory of already marginal careers, but it's fair to say that the writing is on the wall for mathematicians. There's probably a double digit number of grad students staring into a glass of whiskey tonight and thinking of hanging themselves.
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My immediate question was about whether this closer to the current peak of performance, or just a lazy demonstration of OpenAI's power. So, I took one of the particularly interesting preprints to me (memory and precision in Gaussian models) and tested whether it's at the edge of capabilities or not. 30 minutes of back and forth with Astra (itself behind OAI's internal model) resulted in a significantly stronger result, on multiple dimensions. While I finished my first bottle, I spent a fair amount of time convincing myself of the result; I was convinced the strengthened results were plausible. Write this off as AI psychosis if you want, but try it yourself; I'm genuinely curious for what you get. (The back and forth, here, was entirely me saying "you can do it!", "keep at it, I believe in you", and "you've got this, finish it!")
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Probably the most important line in OAI's announcement post is "The average result used the equivalent compute of roughly three hours of ChatGPT Pro thinking." This isn't a case of OAI spending millions for a marketing bump. My bet is a kind of Pareto distribution: most took minutes, not hours, with a long tail around Riemann-level results pulling up the average significantly.
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Notably, ML related results are nearly entirely absent from this batch of proofs; maybe a half dozen touch on it, distantly. Some problem indices are skipped in overview.md. Conspiratorially, my inclination was to think they filtered them out for competitive advantage. I can't find any evidence of that in the GitHub repo or any of the preprints (equally plausible: deduping), so maybe they judiciously decided not to point their mathematical ballista at ML. ML also doesn't have a meaningful bank of rigorous conjectures, so given the conjecture sources, maybe they're not yet digging into ML math. But color me skeptical.
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Does math matter? Is it something to advance civilization and technology, or an artistic pasttime for humans to create logical beauty? Likely both, today, but this is an almost nuclear detonation against the latter.
ThenElection
1d ago
In a hyper individuated world, women can't control their sexuality. Neither can men. That's why, in every society in history sexuality has been heavily regulated by custom and law.
They are all just babes in the woods who cannot be expected to assess risk or bear the consequences when their gambits fail.
Maybe libertarian sexuality works really well for some subset of hyper-rational economically privileged people living in a co-op in Berkeley. Maybe. But for the large majority of people, men and women, that leads to ruin. Predictably, and we as a society have to bear the costs. Descriptively, they can't assess risk or bear consequences when their gambit fails, which calls for external regulation.
ThenElection
1d ago
The line here is "don't be an idiot; the vast majority of women will regret having a train run on them, even if they say they're cool with it in the moment." If someone starts bringing in legalese about consent, you repeat. Ideally you've earned the respect of your frat brothers, and they'll listen: it's most likely they're just naive, not malicious.
ThenElection
1d ago
Fault is a tool we use to create better outcomes, by justifying legal and social punishments. Assigning fault to them allows us to channel energy into creating new norms and expectations that would otherwise be dissipated in questions of "how much ketamine can a girl snort off a guy's cock before the guy can't have sex with her."
She's at fault, too, but gotta choose your battles.
It's a central issue in the consent framework. Is sex behind closed doors between consenting adults ever wrong? The actual answer is yes, because consent is insufficient. But because the only way people can criticize the morality of a sexual act is by shoving it into a consent framework, you end up with convoluted, unsatisfying (to everyone!) arguments about whether the exact scenario constituted legal consent.
The men are the parties that did the greater wrong, here, and it has nothing to do with the details of her consent or non-consent. The very limited defense I have of them is that they are confused in believing that consent is the moral line, and that's what media and various bureaucracies have told them since birth; but that doesn't change that the act is well-over the actual line.
ThenElection
2d ago
I'm not sure we can fairly attribute the SBF shenanigans to Yud.
The rest seems on point, though I don't really care about the cults and the shrimp supremacists. Any group that explicitly is about a radical reconsideration of norms and thought will run into that error mode if it builds a somewhat broad community. E.g. Protestantism has some pretty wild subgroups. If Motte-thought somehow spread widely throughout society, you'd have tons of weird offshoots, if it doesn't already.
Yud's most damning trait isn't any of that, but that he's the single most accelerationist figure in history. At least a thousand times more so than Beff Jezos or Andreessen, plausibly a million. Since working to avoid AI doom is not just his core principle but the foundation of his personality and claim to fame, he deserves to be hit hard on that, and I don't think he has ever really grappled with it or how he went wrong.
Misallocation of weirdness points is probably a distant second after that.
ThenElection
6d ago
But it doesn't. That money is recycled throughout the economy
This is just the broken windows fallacy, gussied up. Higher oil prices mean that people use less oil than they would otherwise; this is a global economic distortion. The half a trillion dollars number isn't coming from naively multiplying the delta in oil prices (that gets you the trillion dollar number) but from (necessarily counterfactual) GDP deltas. I guess a hardcore climate change person could eliminate a lot of those costs by saying oil usage is a net negative.
And, although I don't expect many people to be sympathetic here to Iran's economy, massive destruction of capital is massive destruction of capital.
ThenElection
7d ago
I am glad that we've achieved the pre-war status quo, at an economic cost of a half trillion dollars or so.
Though, you also have claimed oil flows had been restored and complete US victory several times before. Maybe this time it'll stick. It'd be rational for Iran to accept peace on pretty much any terms, but that's been true for awhile.
ThenElection
8d ago
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-26-62.pdf from today seems relevant; may be applied retroactively.
ThenElection
8d ago
There is an enforcement mechanism:
§ 367. Suits to enforce the requirements of § 365(a) of this title.
Though, surprisingly, there's apparently no case law (according to my lawyer on retainer, Claude McClaude Esq.) around a PBC not fulfilling its public benefit. There is for shareholders' financial benefit: Drakes Landing Associates, L.P. v. Tilden Park Capital Management, L.P. It was dismissed, though, as the plaintiffs didn't account for the other purposes.
It does seem like it disempowers shareholders, without adding meaningful checks to enforce the public benefit. If you're not looking out for shareholder financial interests, it's because you're looking out for the public benefit; if you're not looking out for the public benefit, it's because you're looking out for financial interests.
Nice for insiders, and maybe has the benefit of making nuisance suits harder to prove.
It's also worth pointing out that the "avoid the weirdos" heuristic is probably an actively counterproductive strategy for a VC. You avoid Holmes types, but you also avoid Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Altman, Amodei, Musk types. Since the latter group is where VCs take the large majority of their profits, they'd be reduced to a bunch of small, conventional bets that don't sustain the model.
ThenElection
11d ago
If we are going to insist on creating beings far more intelligent and capable than we are, and capable of causing us great amounts of pain, knowing how to cause them great amounts of pain seems extremely valuable. We'll still lose, but at least we might get some licks in.
Depends on if the construction is galactic or not. We might have NP=P formally, but never be able to use it on any remotely practical problem. The world would mostly continue running as is.
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