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PaperclipPerfector  27d ago (text post)   32100 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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All this is at the "suppose" level. Yes, the god AI will be able to do this. IF it exists. I say the god AI will not exist.

And if there's alpha in taking a more minute view, scoping the model in to a particular stadium, why can't it do that? Where there is alpha in the AI getting information, the AI will go there and get the information.

It's an AI, a brain in a box. Even if it's really fucking smart, it has no advantage over us meat-brains in going places and getting information.

I say the god AI will not exist.

This is sort of the crux. I happen to agree with you. The point of my comment was to investigate the tenets of a group of folks and see what the implications are. I think that if one adopts a position like in that Scott quote, then the implication is something like the end of war.

Agreed, at least until the prices of solar panels and drones drop by a factor of 10-100.

Yes.

While I'm here, I'd suggest that so far in real life people index so hard on the intelligence that they overlook how little data the available AI can process at one time, which is a big limitation on IRL usefulness, or at least a speedbump. I have some professional experience with this (albeit mostly secondhand) and from what I can tell it's kinda like if you're dealing with a very smart intern with the memory of a goldfish. It can process data blazingly fast but you have to spoonfeed it one bite at a time. Which makes the blazing speed a bit underwhelming.

Now, this gives it definite advantages relative to all-human employment but you also have to hold its hand everywhere.

Note that I'm not making any predictions or claims, just noting my IRL understanding, and I know that context windows continue to be able to be expanded regularly - but AI ain't gonna be able to take over the world or even my job if it can't watch the entire Star Wars trilogy in one sitting.

I know that context windows continue to be able to be expanded regularly - but AI ain't gonna be able to take over the world or even my job if it can't watch the entire Star Wars trilogy in one sitting.

I just checked, and the current leader has 100 million tokens ("equivalent to 750 novels"), while non-specialized models are in the 100k-1M range. You're going to have to update your arguments (then update them again in a few months when AIs meet your new standards, then update them again...).

When we use them in practice we have to cut up the content that we feed them because we have much more content (gigabytes worth) than they can handle.

As I said, I think this is a solvable problem. But a lot of AI enthusiasts are, in my impression, just using them as personal assistants and not necessary engaging with them in more strenuous real-world use cases.

In my experience ‘real’ context is 5k to 15k max, even for the big models.

The large context windows are based on ‘can it retrieve very specific information from 1M tokens ago’ not ‘will it naturally remember that this information exists and how it might be relevant to whatever it’s doing at the moment’.

How is the alleged 100M model on RULER / NiaH? I find myself skeptical based on their blog post, the lack of concrete info therein, their choice to build a custom benchmark instead of using the industry standard ones (like RULER), their claims of having 100x'd context over publicly available SOTA, and their choice to name themselves "magic ai".

Your point does stand with gemini's 1M context window though - that one is the real deal, although the real killer will be a large-context reasoning model (without the ability to meaningfully process the things they retrieve from their context window, long-context LLMs don’t have much of an advantage over RAG).

I'm not familiar with that model (I just found it by searching), but I wouldn't doubt if they were simply Goodhearting their way into some flashy claims.

One thing to keep in mind is that these models are the worst they'll ever be. Give it a year or so and someone (either one of the big companies or someone building off their work) will release a model with both early-2025 level quality and >=100M context.

Agreed. Though I suspect progress on any concrete performance metric you care to predict will advance about as fast as you expect, and real-world practical uptake will be much slower than you expect (at least of you're Situational-Awareness-pilled, which is the vibe I get), because going from 5% to 95% on one of the benchmark tasks has limited practical value.

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