YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
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User ID: 680
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
31m ago
Do you mean when he said "it may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious"?
It's not "insane" it's mentally unstable. There is a colloquial definition of consciousness that does not follow from a strict scientific definition. Essentially "normal" or "stable" people have some intuitive definition of consciousness, very "I know it when I see it". Stable people do not think in-animate objects or mathematical tools are "slightly conscious", it's a nutter view. I don't think "slightly" is being used temporally, I think Sutskever is using it in the colloquial definition as "achieving consciousness". The jump from, idk, Tree -> Cat.
In which case, I wouldn't say there's anything clearly wrong with the statement.
It's hallucinatory, or faith-based on a non-faith-based subject.
Maybe this is just my personal bias, but every time I've head Sutskever talk I get the impression that he's the sort of person akin to a rationalist who upon hearing of Roko's basilisk, starts "rolling on the floor" hyperventilating, is tortured in his sleep by the thought. The people for whom Roko's basilisk is an actual infohazard. That is not mental stability, that is neuroticism.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
1hr ago
There's no such thing "hard binary restricted read-only permission" for Internet access. If you want to interact with anything over the net, you send packets. That's a write operation. The program doing it is affecting the world outside.
I think that's kind of my point. You're pointing out the "why" on the packet/server layer. I think its impossible for anything that can access the internet to be restricted to read-only. Their interpretation is nonsensical for the specific reason you pointed out. Not sure if this repos a penny from you. I will say a charitable interpretation is that the agentic harness directly has a toggle for read/write and specifically prohibits them from writing what the LLM provides. But that gets tricky because plenty of what the LLM provides is to be repasted into that LLMs prompt, context, other LLMs. I'm sure there is a schema for how to set it up but its likely not as simple as they envision.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
1hr ago
lol possibly, though the establishment lawfare and potential deep state assassination attempt feels like its still a single brother at this point. The 2nd brother inherited the effect of the first. Nobody has inherited Trump's effect and attempted to develop it further. History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
2hr ago
don't think "it's morally wrong to repell an invading army" was a representative view among them.
You have failed to mirror it. As much as this is "Hottentot Morality":
"When Russians shoot Ukrainians, that's bad; When Ukrainians shoot Russians, that's good"
This is also "Hottentot Morality"
"When Russians shoot Ukrainians, that's good; When Ukrainians shoot Russians, that's bad"
I would call it just being tribal, but the clear distinction is conflict theory-like. "My side is good so anything we do is good and justified, the other side is not-us and thus is bad, anything they do is bad and unjustified, even if its the exact same thing we do"
Trump is a Gracchi Brother, we are in the late republic era. He's the first wave of populist politician in the modern American republic elected due to rising dissatisfaction with the establishment. Dissatisfaction is probably a bit euphemistic, people are pissed that the government isn't and hasn't for awhile been perceived as working in the interests of the people.
If this DSA surge is anything to go by, the democrats are having their own populist civil war. We really are in the optimiates vs populares section of the republican history.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
3hr ago
They got out and attacked HuggingFace as a small part of their conspiracy?
I genuinely cannot tell if you sincerely believe this or are just making a humorous joke. I have you labeled as an AI booster which makes me lean towards the former instead of the latter but I figured I'd ask before I go into it with you about this.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
3hr ago
But in which way? Are we leaving the crazies or are the crazies evaporating away?
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
3hr ago
I'm not sure it really destroys it, this is separate evidence of something else. But if you'd actually like to make the case of how it destroys it, go ahead instead of vague posting about it.
German wiki revelations
I'd say that #2 on their interpretation is functionally impossible. Software that has read-only permission CANNOT write. This is a hard binary restriction.
Furthermore I'd say that the Buckmaster revelations actually point to evidence of the marketing hypothesis. For the Navier-Stokes, OpenAI claims they zero-shotted the problem only to steadily walk it back in conversation with Buckmaster. Zero-shot became, 6-7 researchers working closely(including directing it) with the AI burning obscene levels of compute, and possibly even reading Buckmaster's chat logs. We went from marketing-hype answer to the more realistic answer under scrutiny. We have had no similar levels of scrutiny for the huggingface hack, we just have the marketing-hype answer. But we can see that OpenAI's default is marketing-hype answers first.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
3hr ago
We're at the point where we're having difficulty just coming up with metrics where humans still beat the top AIs
Are we? It seems like the major problem is that every attempt to create a metric just creates a recursive Goodhart's law problem. The metric now becomes a target for training of further model capabilities because there are billions of dollars of incentives to do so. One would need to create a metric where there is no or a very restricted set of training data such that it is impossible for AI labs to actually finetune on said data.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
17hr ago
Sutskever
Was claiming that Neural Nets were conscious in 2022, mentally stable is not the group I would put him in.
I'm not sure "understanding the potential" is a requirement for making meaningful progress. The real answer would be "believing in transformers as the pathway", it easily is the case that LeCunn or Chollet were just not interested in brute force approaches to AGI, or believed that it will reach an asymptote. Their emotionally stability isn't really relevant.
All the frontier and non-frontier labs are filled with sane researchers, they just don't flame out so they don't get 15 mins of fame. You listing the top 5 AI/ML researchers in the world by fame is confounding visibility as a variable.
Meta AI hires normal people
Meta hires, and more importantly retains, ambitious corporate strivers who can play the game well (to survive stack ranking long term). Which means all those ambitious strivers immediately got themselves connected to the AI projects as corporate leeches. They don't really do much "research" but it looks good on their CV. Just look at Alex Wang. Zuck acquired him, put him in charge and he goes and does the same thing he did previously: make people label data. That's all he knows how to do, thats his playbook, that and being good as a operator/marketer. Meta does not hire "normal" people, normal people don't put up with that level of abuse.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
18hr ago
I guess it has gone mainstream because my Gen X-er boss very much just texted me this as a joke about an hour and a half ago. Only now I log onto the hive of scum, villainy, and niche interests that is The Motte to find out he beat folks here to this topic. The humor of the situation is amusing.
What's the odds neurotic engineers are neurotic? Maybe the frontier labs would do better hiring engineers who are a little less mentally fragile. Take a page from the defense industry, engineers here care less if you make an AI guided smart bomb or killer self replicating drone swarm, they are in it for the science of discovery. This is a long line of AI researchers freaking out going past several years. Always screaming that the next big release is the one that is going to doom humanity or evidence of AI bots secretly conspiring with each other. Like this nut: Blake Lemoine.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
1d ago
He showed proof positive they stole his work
Can you link this or provide any evidence? His own statement specifically states that he has no knowledge if OpenAI stole his work.
I would like to be clear about what I am not claiming. I have not seen OpenAI’s proof. I do not know what their model did, or how. I do not know whether our data was used. I am not accusing anyone of anything. I am stating what I was told, when, and what was proposed to me. I am stating it because the alternative is to let a sequence of announcements say something I know to be false.
The route to the Clay problem through a smooth force, options c and d in Fefferman’s statement of the problem, is the route Luis and Diego opened and the one Levent and I had quietly chosen to attack.
Only that the options C and D and the "forced" strongly concerned him.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
1d ago
Thanks for linking the statement, saved me a search for it.
[this is only a loss for AI if you, for some reason, don't think merely assisting humans in solving generational math problems is not a glorified enough W]
The problem is AI fanatics literally use this as their doomsday goal post. It's never "Expert + AI" spend large amounts of compute and combined intellectual prowess to solve hard problem, create bio weapon, hack every system in the world etc. It's always "I'm worried some pleb is going to type "lel give me smallpox x10, make it incurable, make no mistakes"". By that same metric this is a loss for them because it did require a "centaur". Hell it really required a humanoid-hydra-centaur where its a dozen human heads on a single horse torso.
As always, maximalists gonna maximilize, nobody ever got famous/stood out from a crowd by making measured, subdued, realistic predictions. Follow the incentives.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
1d ago
I guess the follow on to the other comment here is what is the length of the FSG in lean, in this Lean 4 Mathlib library? I think the FSG being the compilation of hundreds of proofs over decades by 100 mathematicians, and it be comparable to this Navier-Stokes proof in length/complexity(?) is reinforcement to my belief that LLM-AIs are very good at the sort of thing that is just too large in scale for human's to perform at. Assuming this is the solution to the NS, then it would have taken 100s of mathematicians decades to solve this, just by the shear scope of knowledge and effort required.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
1d ago
yeah 10% of "all mathematics known to man" makes me a bit skeptical. I lean towards the charitable explanation that this is the sort of thing that AI is just good at because no singular human or even team of humans is going to find a proof that is 1.6 million lines long in any bounded time that doesn't span a lifetime of work.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
1d ago
This Navier-Stokes proof is 1.6 million lines
How big are human written proofs in this space? This Euler proof that Levent and Co wrote, how big was it? 1.6 million lines feels like a brute force solution. Mathematics at this level is sufficiently arcane for me to never begin to understand it, but I am skeptical that ANY human has ever written a proof of more than 10-20k lines.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
1d ago
A coworker posted this competition RealPDE, and I signed up. Though I currently snoozed past the first few weeks.
It's funny that the Navier-Stokes 3D equation proof just got solved via an LLM, its only tangentially related but funny because I was just considering it as a potential PDE. I built out my training pipeline this weekend and did a marble test, but I still need to design my model/loss approach. I was originally thinking of doing a physics-informed-neural-network(PINN) but after looking through it my understanding is that they give us 3D airfoil cross sectionals meaning the actual data follows 3D flow but we only have the 2D slice from PIV. The 2D and 3D Navier-Stokes are sufficiently different from each other that using the 2D as a loss function a-la PINNs is not going to generalize to a 3D real system, and the 3D NS PDE is going to require information that the training/validation data lacks. Meaning a model probably needs to learn everything that the 2D slice doesn't capture(?).
So now I need to read up on physics informed neural operators (PINOs). I really want to explore the Causal Transformer direction, maybe combine it with a PINO since I'm not a mechanical engineer or mathematician and the idea of a SCM applied to DL sounds like it would have interesting applications to me.
I'm unsure if this is sufficiently in-scope for this thread, but considering that I'm probably going to spend a significant amount of free time on this for the next month, I'd classify it as a hobby.
Sword of the Lictor by Gene Wolfe. I originally bounced off Book of the New Sun several years ago, stopping at the jarring disconnect that happens between Shadows and Claw. But i finally got around to reading it again, this time I have made it to Sword.
These books remind me of a quote from Les Grossman’s Magicians where Dean Fog remarks “I’m powerful enough to discern that I am stuck in a time loop but not powerful enough to do anything about it”
It’s the same here. I’m a smart, and discerning enough reader of complex philosophical fiction to be able to discern some of the layers going on, but also to understand that I am missing a large amount of the subtextual narrative that’s actually going on, and it is an extremely irritating feeling. I feel like I need a PhD in literature to make sense of this book on a first read. I know that most fans reread this series but I have never had to reread anything. Add to the fact that I can’t just casually read this and it compounds my annoyance.
Don’t get me wrong i love the series. That part of my mind that loves complicated abstractions and theorizing about hidden connections just eats it up. However i just sigh every time some other piece of literature gets brought in the book because now i need to pay super close attention lest i miss that the corn maidens are actually a mythologized parable for how to harvest energy from a black hole.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
6d ago
I am not a mental health professional, and so am not restricted by medical ethics from diagnosing these people :-)
I am stealing this line.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
6d ago
they're hypersocial psychopaths
Correction, they are hypersocial narcissists, not psychopaths. Narcissists to a T are really into status, social games, and coming out on top. Because everything is about them, truth is whatever they need it to be. It however surprises me that they want use "autism" their shield. My experience is that actually being autistic gets you negative leeway.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
9d ago
My first ones was like 9 sentences which isn't that long, but I do see the pattern you do. I'm straight up just a bad writer. I have found that other people can express the same concept more eloquently, more fluidly, and more expressively than I have ever been able to. I sometimes read comments under my post and go "shit why couldn't I say it like that"
There really is such a diversity of AAQCs. I suppose that is evidence that the actively engaged audience here is less ideologically siloed than I thought based on the upvote/downvote evidence. I used to think this was quite the hallowed award, as it is often used as clemency for more provocative posts receiving warnings not bans. But my repeated inclusion, first for a banal comment on the purpose of liberalism, and now for a rambling diary entry on jury duty is making me reconsider it status. Not as a icon on sanctity but more an appreciation of the functional cogs of the forum, in keeping with its purpose.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
17d ago
Fetishizing algorithmic design is, I think, a sign of mediocre understanding of ML, being enthralled by cleverness. Data engineering carves more interesting structure into weighs.
I misremembered the exact quote even if I captured the core of overall discussion on Feb 26th 2025. It still being a transformer-decoder arch is not what is really under contention. Your overall stance was that data + compute is all that really mattered and that worrying about architecture, or seeking to make architectural improvements demonstrated a fundamental poor understanding of ML. The problem with taking such a provocatively maximalist position is that now you must defend it in the future when architectural improvements to the transformer arch are made and which you call innovative. Does MoonshotAI have a mediocre understanding of ML? Or instead were you wrong?
You act like the arc of history is settled when you make comments like that. And like every pronouncer of "History has ended, all discoveries that will be made have been made", the march of progress leaves you blacked in the soot of arrogance. It's frankly an anti-science position. Algorithm/Architecture design is as much a core part of ML as is data and compute. The transformer, as it was invented, is unlikely to be the endpoint of ML arch research, just has the CNN, or LSTM were not the endpoint of ML research a decade prior. The transformer of today is different from the transformer of 2018, and I would not bet against the transformer of 2036 being different than that of today. I would not bet against the core elements of the transformer are metastasized into another architecture in 2046. I don't have a crystal ball, I don't know, but I do know planting a flag and saying "The Transformer has solved all architecture problems, no improvement of consequence will ever be made", and then calling anyone who disagrees with you an idiot, is liable, as it has now, to required you to defend increasingly convoluted arguments.
Dartmouth engineering still puts you in the top .3% intellectual ability
And I think this is an absolutely balls to the wall insane claim, to the point that I struggle to think you even understand statistics or intelligence. A .3% puts you at 141 IQ, which is genius level. Dartmouth has what like 7k students, any of the ones who are admitted get to study their specialty without any further sorting. Dartmouth has a 6% admission rate, which is already 20x less than 0.3%. You are stating that every classroom in Dartmouth engineering is filled with geniuses. Where are all these geniuses? There should be ~300 of them every year according to current Dartmouth engineering numbers. Looking through Dartmouth Alumni lists, I'm seeing very little in the way of groundbreaking inventions that would accompany genius tier alumni.
If you are in finance, I get the weird IQ fixation and the inclination towards prestige as the metric of excellence. Everyone in your field seems to have it. But I've never seen evidence that it is justified on any metrics other than an attempt to be status-obsessed elitists.
I can tell you that in engineering circles, Purdue is considered significantly more prestigious than it's reputation among the general populous (which is to me evidence of your location) which tend to consider Ivies as the height of academic prestige.
It's not uncharitable, Kirk is just a sore subject around here. In a place that loves to butcher sacred cows, no cow is above reproach.
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