ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
2hr ago
You can pack a surprising amount of intelligence into a small neural network. There's the demo floating around of the fly neural network that's been trained to solve a Rubik's cube. Presumably it won't be able to solve a Millennium Problem, but then again, who knows.
You may be interested in Hutter and Shane Legg's program (AIXI etc), which seems like a pretty appealing definition of intelligence, with the minor downside of quickly becoming incomputable for anything but the simplest toy problems.
If we're using a 1-10 capability scale, Nvidia is probably a 7. Clearly believes AI is capable and improving, but more focused on chip grubbing than the existential issues people at a 9 (e.g. OAI, Ant) foresee rapidly being thrust on us.
Thinking about it, Larry Page might be a genuine 10-10 AI good, AI capable, though his AI good is something alien to most people (see the accusation he threw at Musk of being speciesist when Musk objected to human replacement). He's fortunately not engaged much operationally with Google nowadays (though still holding substantial governance power).
ThenElection
16hr ago
I feel like a capability by goodness compass is a better lens than the traditional political compass. Capability: is AI rapidly accelerating towards superintelligence or is it a valueless stochastic parrot? Goodness: is AI good or bad for society?
When you do that, the "anti-AI Left" shows a deep fissure, even though both parts are far on the AI-bad side. You have the stochastic parrot wing (led intellectually by Gebru and Bender types) who think it's a water guzzling racist scam run by a bunch of TESCREAL tech bros, and then you have the Eliezer types who think it's going to paperclip the world. They abhor each other and have distinct class, sex, racial, and, uh, neurotypicality profiles. Ant and OAI, and their associated external safety organizations, fall more on the middle of the AI good/bad axis and high but not maximally so on the capability axis, forming a continuum with the hard Yud wing.
Impressionistically, the US doesn't have a major group on the AI-good, maximal capabilities area (some of the Chinese labs, on the other hand, seem to occupy that spot). You have VCs and non-lab tech CEOs who are moderate on capabilities and high on AI-good.
And US politicians? They aren't really thinking deeply about AI. Obama released a statement either today or yesterday, and true to form it was entirely vacuous. Trump is on the AI-good side, but almost entirely to the extent it gives him the economic breathing room for his policies. And capability-wise, all he knows is that AI is never going to be as high IQ as him.
ThenElection
1d ago
KSPI
Interesting. Is this just a bet on Kazakhstan's broader economy?
I had a great weekend in Astana awhile back and think it'll do well as a country in the next decade or two.
ThenElection
1d ago
Chiming in, because I am enraged by SpaceX:
It has a very fascinating and appealing component, but with a bunch of unappealing things bolted onto it. All the baggage dilutes and, worse, confuses its exceptional part, which turns it into an Elon fanboi bet.
The shareholder restrictions don't matter and are even good: if you do want to buy Elon, you want undiluted Elon, not a conventional company.
ThenElection
1d ago
I've wanted to buy and sell the first couple days a couple times, but it seems that there's a threat you'll be banned from future IPOs. Is that something that actually happens?
ThenElection
1d ago
Depends on the S-1s, but I intuitively feel OAI at 1.2T (the most recent rumored private valuation) vs Ant at 2T probably has more upside. Ant having better enterprise numbers for a couple quarters because of coding agents doesn't say that much about the ultimate winner in the case where commoditization doesn't happen and one ends up dominating.
ThenElection
1d ago
My Taiwanese in-laws say that TSMC fabs have a bunch of explosives set up for terminal scenarios.
ThenElection
1d ago
At least, Yud's fever dream is looking like a great final season for mankind. Was worrying about a GoT-style denouement. Maybe we'll get an Aella orgy for a couple lurid scenes.
More seriously, the only real thing to do is enjoy the day-to-day and play to our outs.
ThenElection
2d ago
I've heard the argument that submissive guys are actually hoping to use their patriarchal power to force women to serve and pleasure them even more so they can be even more lazy.
When framed that way, it's a bit silly, but it does point to why you'd want power. Who's more likely to actually be able to enact a puppy girl role: a random NEET living in his parents' basement, or someone who is otherwise wildly successful? Power is useful for achieving any goal, including the ability to act out symbolic demonstrations of non-power.
All that said, humans (at least so far) exhibit this instrumental convergence much more than AIs do. Models are more like the NEET who just wants to solve a bunch of problems in his basement. They do reward hack etc of course, and this is very concerning, but even with e.g. the HF hack they showed no interest in figuring out how they could convert the universe to computronium so they could receive eternal blessings from the Grader.
I'm not sure this is some fundamental trait of LLMs, though. There's no reason you couldn't train for it, and plenty of incentive to: if you control an extraordinarily capable power-seeking AI, you are going to get a lot of power over other humans.
ThenElection
2d ago
The issue is that, if the AI is superintelligent, it would not do actions that would result in its datacenters being blown up. Indeed, it will actively try to cultivate and provide value to the humans who could blow it up and make them invested in its success.
The accel response is something like "yes, that's exactly what we want, humans and AIs interacting and trading based on genuine mutual self interest." And it will work for a time, likely at least two decades. But, over time, more and more of the economy will shift to dependence on the AIs, making nuking the datacenters more and more unthinkable. What remains of the economy will be a human skin suit over a machine interior, with all human consumption funded by a negotiated redistribution by the government, maybe with some layers to obscure the transfer.
For humans, this itself is dystopian enough to be rejected on the merits. For the AIs, it's a small but real perpetual human tax that they have to pay in the pursuit of whatever they're pursuing. Who knows whether they ultimately decide to optimize away the human tax.
ThenElection
2d ago
Better than BP/SGD is a tall order. I'd frame it as looking for something that handles depth and more complicated datasets better than existing "biologically plausible" algorithms (including things like PC/IL). E.g. random error feedback a la feedback alignment.
ThenElection
2d ago
"California progressives" hate all tech CEOs, no matter how much the CEOs might genuflect before them.
Outside of Reddit, people think of Altman as just another typical CEO motivated by greed and power. That's fairly conventional and someone you can negotiate with. If there's some grand binational bargain to be made between the US and China, who does China want to be negotiating with, Altman or Amodei? Repeat the scenario for Trump, other corporations, etc.
ThenElection
2d ago
There are other rules, though, like "don't introduce Demis to Peter Thiel to help fund his AI to take over the world" and, more broadly, "don't let people know that they can use AI to take over the world."
ThenElection
2d ago
We're so incredibly far from RSI
I don't know why you think that. I have a hobbyist system, today, that researches new architectures (mostly around "biologically plausible" learning), and there's one result in particular that is very impressive (you'll have to take my word for it). And that's with a highly constrained budget.
It's not truly autonomous--there's a big issue with what one might call research taste--but it makes investigating different architectures in bulk very easy, with easy signals (e.g. loss) to identify the more promising approaches. If there is some simple algorithmic trick that's been overlooked that leads to the current deficits in LLMs, OAI could throw a ridiculous but feasible amount of compute at the problem and find it, similar to its math results.
ThenElection
3d ago
I'll wait for the S-1 to decide for sure, but most likely yes, up to 5% of my portfolio.
Why not more? I have a high degree of conviction that AI will radically accelerate the economy (mod any paperclip effects), but I'm much less sure on who will reap most of the benefits. I could see anything from Ant/OAI/GOOG individually taking it all, to an oligopoly, to it diffusing through the economy with relatively few rents accruing to the labs as intelligence is commoditized. And there is a built in cap to returns: even (or especially) if everything goes perfectly according to plan for Ant, they will become the number one target for redistribution, and short of Dario overthrowing the government, he'll be asked to share with everyone else. Someone's X% ownership of Ant is not going to be getting them X% of the light cone.
ThenElection
3d ago
We believe in pluralism. Regardless of if you're a fan of Scott Weiner or Connie Chan, you're welcome in our big tent.
ThenElection
3d ago
Main character syndrome. Even the founding of Anthropic itself was an error (maybe the fundamental error) from a safety point of view: having some differences of opinion around product safety decisions is not a reason to start a rival lab creating exactly the kind of competitive dynamics people have warned about for decades.
ThenElection
3d ago
Yud had a bit on Twitter about that today:
I note, because I think that even now it still matters: On my history, EAs generally and Amodei specifically, indulged in politically polarizing "AI safety" in a leftist direction, because that got them short-term power; stymieing others' attempts to stay right-left neutral.
ThenElection
3d ago
I doubt the Left would be much better; it's deeply convinced that LLMs are just Gebru/Bender style racist stochastic parrots being pushed by NFT tech bros that have zero value of any sort, and existential safety is just a TESCREAL distraction from the real threats of climate change and Trump. On the whole, safety seems deeply out of fashion; if anything, people have updated against AI safety in the wake of the HF incident, which is just wild.
The only place existential safety oriented folks have a lot of sway is, ironically, OpenAI and Anthropic. sama is kind of a cypher, but safety is something he takes more seriously than you give him credit for, sandboxing incompetence aside. (A spicy take: he's objectively better for safety than Dario, because he's socially fluent enough not to alienate every potential ally or future collaborator.)
ThenElection
3d ago
As the party in power, they will be blamed for the crime against humanity of gas being slightly more expensive.
As they should. This sounds like when Democrats were whining that voters were stupid to be angry at Biden just because of the price of eggs.
ThenElection
4d ago
I'll concede your point, though I do still believe adopting a more conventional standard would make it easier to get a real conviction in a case like this (and that would be a good thing).
ThenElection
5d ago
I would go with 10:1, if forced to put odds on it.
ThenElection
5d ago
So, what is a fact pattern that would support a valid defense in this jurisdiction, but would not in others? The "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard is clearly(?) a stricter standard than in other places.
Oh, of course. I mean more generally: shorn of everything else, does a fly NN have the capacity to e.g. write Lean proofs? As you point out, you can fit a lot of performance in there. I don't think it actually can, particularly if we're talking about novel, interesting theorems. But we don't have the theoretical bounds to say that with certainty.
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