This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Claude didn't "get decent at playing" games in a couple of months. A human wrote a scaffold to let a very expensive text prediction model, along with a vision model, attempt to play a video game. A human constructed a memory system and knowledge transfer system, and wired up ways for the model to influence the emulator, read relevant RAM states, wedge all that stuff into its prompt, etc. So far this is mostly a construct of human engineering, which still collapses the moment it gets left to its own devices.
When you say it's "understanding" and "thinking strategically", what you really mean it that it's generating plausible-looking text that, in the small, resembles human reasoning. That's what these models are designed to do. But if you hide the text window and judge it by how it's behaving, how intelligent does it look, really? This is what makes it so funny, the model is slowly blundering around in dumb loops while producing volumes of eloquent optimistic narrative about its plans and how much progress it's making.
I'm not saying there isn't something there, but we live in a world where it's claimed that programmers will be obsolete in 2 years, people are fretting about superintelligent AI killing us all, openAI is planning to rent "phd level" AI agent "employees" to companies for large sums, etc. Maybe this is a sign that we should back up a bit.
This is something I don't understand. The LLM generates text that goes in the 'thinking' box, which purports to explain its 'thought' process. Why does anybody take that as actually granting insight into anything? Isn't that just the LLM doing the same thing the LLM does all the time by default, i.e. make up text to fill a prompt? Surely it's just as much meaningless gobbledygook as all text an LLM produces? I would expect that box to faithfully explain what's actually going on in the model just as much as an LLM is able to faithfully describe the outside world, i.e., not at all.
More options
Context Copy link
What I mean by thinking strategically is exactly what makes the thing interesting. It’s not just creating plausible texts, but it understands how the game works. It understands that losing HP means losing a life, and thus if the HP of the enemy and its STR are too high for it to handle at a given level. In other words, it can contextualize that information and use it not only to understand, but to work toward a goal.
I’m not saying this is the highest standard. It’s about what a 3-4 year old can understand about a game of that complexity. And as a proof of concept, I think it shows that AI can reason a bit. Give this thing 10 years, a decent research budget, I think it could probably take on something like Morrowind. It’s slow, but I think given what it can do now, im pretty optimistic that an AI can make data driven decisions in a fairly short timeframe.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link