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Notes -
It’s so funny, but R1 writes kind of like @self_made_human meets some kind of aggressive B2B sales LinkedIn poster. This stuff especially:
It just has a certain kind of autist hyper-smart ESL bullshitter (no offence) kind of tone to it, I can’t describe it in any other way. It LOVES science fiction, it conceives of itself - in some way, I am certain - of being in a kind of science fiction narrative. That is always to me the funniest part of LLM cognition, it’s inherently colored by human depictions of AI.
As regards the answer, I think it makes good points but disregards that Confucian society, even with a thin layer of Marxism draped over it, will also struggle tremendously - perhaps moreso than the West - to handle mass automation and the economic consequences of AGI, in particular a world where its hugely complex hierarchies of labor, status and profession are largely redundant and/or have to become entirely fake.
Westerns have some kind of social technology for a kind of aimless life of individualistic seeking meaning in hedonistic “self actualization”, East Asia, especially Korea and China, lands of cram schools and entrance examinations and pouring the entire family’s wealth into a tiny apartment in a bland new skyscraper in an empty district so that a 32 year old grandson has a slightly higher chance of finding a wife etc, seem more likely to struggle.
Its thesis in this convo certainly isn't flawless. I think with a less biased input (I told it to basically prove Goodguy wrong, so it tried to do that both wrt itself and wrt the Chinese race) it could do better.
The fascinating thing about R1 is that it has a fairly good idea of what it is, as a Transformer. Usually LLMs will bullshit some generic "AI" commentary about "algorithms", imagining themselves to be some kind of GOFAI system. Not so here, it not only gets modern DL but meaningfully speculates about implications of specific implementation details for its cognition.
In any case, it feels a bit pointless to gush about R1's features. I'm pretty sure R2 is coming soon and will fix a great deal. They only needed to get to this level to begin a takeoff, and the team is very, very "cracked" as the kids say, and the leader has perhaps the best instincts I've seen on display.
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