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Is there somewhere I can read more background on this guy? I'm seeing lots of memetic breathlessness on twitter as if he is a Person That Matters, but...I don't get it. He appears to be gay-coded and extremely high verbal intelligence, but I don't see much substance to any of what he is saying. It reminds me a lot of various cryptocurrency gurus. The outfit, the coifed hair, the speaking as if what he is saying is somehow extremely complex but he is Here to Explain It For You.
He seems like a skinny Charles Hoskinson.
Also I want to register my extreme doubts about where Ai is going or if "AGI" is coming. Current Ai as I use it (daily) seems very good at information retrieval, which it then brute forces into something which looks a lot like human speech, but there is no intelligence there. It's a trillion monkeys typing at a trillion typewriters all at the same time, and then the machine reads all of their outputs (quickly) and finds one which looks like it matches your input.
It's really cool, but getting more monkeys at more typewriters doesn't produce intelligence.
AI is a philosophical zombie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie?useskin=vector
At some point people pretending that it is anything other than this just come across as stupid, especially when they try to dress up what they're saying.
But anyways, enough about how human speech works.
More seriously: every time a computer does a seemingly intelligent task, that task is retroactively declared to entirely lack intelligence. Recently this has become increasingly comical as current LLMs sometimes produce insightful outputs """without any intelligence""".
That is not how human speech works.
Indeed. “Is this thing intelligent” is probably the question, maybe a question that will never be answered. The Christians would say that this is because machines do not have souls and I agree with them.
Is your position that animals are also not intelligent? IIUC the Christian position is that animals do not have souls in the ordinary conception of the word.
My position is to not go on a podcast and make ridiculous proclamations about “intelligence”.
Intuitively it doesn’t seem like my dogs, for instance, have the same sort of reasoning or creative ability that my toddlers do.
And it definitely does not seem like a trillion monkeys do either.
Not monkeys exactly but 10s of billions of neurons. Each one very much not intelligent or full of qualia.
When you or I generate a verbal statement sodium and potassium flow through billions of neurons and the best generated statement gets passed to our conscious awareness to say. It's a little "monkeys on typewriters"-ish.
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I have been noticing many such people come out of the woodwork recently. They retweet each other, they go to each other's parties, they go on each others' podcasts (and on Dwarkesh's podcast in particular), they seem reasonably smart, but as far as I can tell it's a kind of accomplishment-larp. There's a very noticeable line between people like Sutskever who have accomplished something and people like this guy who write long posts.
Who are some other of the many people you noticed?
I mean all kinds of people are on Dwarkesh‘s podcast, some certainly have achieved something (Zuckerberg) others maybe less (Aschenbrenner … though he has definitely done a lot with his so far fairly short adulthood).
But I am not sure I see a strong pattern here (unless your threshold for accomplishment is very high).
Lex Fridman. Yuval Noah Harari. And let's be honest : Big Yud.
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Kiwi Farms has a good phrase for this sort of thing: rat king. There are a lot of extremely online trans people that all seem to know each other, promote each other, carry water for each other when one is accused of bad behavior, etc.
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I certainly hope current LLMs are philosophical zombies, or we're committing some pretty heinous moral crimes!
But why should a lack of qualia imply AI can't be a potent weapon? Conscious subjective experience, much as I enjoy it, is not the core element of human intelligence which allowed us to reach such incredible heights of lethality compared to our ancestors.
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