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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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It'd make me feel better if someone could muster a rebuttal that explained with specificity why further improvements aren't going to be sufficient to breach the "smarter than human" barrier.

To sum it up, to train superhuman performance you need superhumanly good data. Now, I'd be all okay for the patient, obvious approach there - eugenics, creating better future generations.

I'll quote twitter again

The Synthetic Data Solves ASI pill is a bit awkward:

  • Our AI plateaues ≈on intelligence level of expert humans because it's trained on human data
  • to train a superhuman AI, we need a superhuman data generating process based on real world dynamics, not Go board states -…fuck

In what ways are they wrong?

I'd not say they're wrong. Even present day polished applications with a lot of new compute could do a lot of stuff. They're betting they'll be able to make use of that compute even if AGI is late.

And remember, the money is essentially free for them. Those power stations will be profitable even if datacenters aren't, the datacenters will generate money even if taking over the world isn't a ready option. & There's no punishing interest rates for the big boys. That's for chumps with credit cards.