Cross posted from https://sh.itjust.works/post/64317237
Sam Altman claimed we’re already living through the singularity. Is it true, or is it just marketing? Just days before, one of OpenAI’s models escaped from a testing environment and ended up hacking another company’s servers on its own. We analyze how real that claim is and what the experts say.
And from there, we jump to something bigger: can artificial intelligence have a soul? We delve into the debate that has divided physicists, neuroscientists, and philosophers, from Roger Penrose’s quantum theory to the arguments of Sean Carroll and Max Tegmark, including integrated information theory and the thermodynamics of life. Spoiler alert: even physics can’t agree.
We are not facing skynet, but the techbros, media and government all want us to think so.
They did not “escape”, they were able to find security holes in portly protected environments that they had access to. They performed the same security tests against live sites online, which also had security flaws. They did not spread, or escape, nor are they hiding on servers anywhere like in the movies. They simply performed a remote exploit after using a local one to get internet access.
These things are dangerous, but as a weapon in people’s hands. They still have off buttons, we still have all the control. But the narrative makes it feel like an inevitability, we’ve all watched too much sci-fi and aren’t using critical thinking skills.
What if it was 5grams. 5 grams of pysilosybin in complete darkness.
I don’t think these guys really believe the singularity is near. If they did they’d attempt to prevent it, as an actual AGI would not be controllable.
Preacher says we’re living through the rapture
Sam Altman says a lot of things.
Fuckin’ Liz Holmes ass…
Snake oil salesmen.
And the need to Rev up the hype to maximize profit off the bubble.
Edit: while ops link is not it, it seems to be a statement by him with various sources pointing to him. Anyhow, I’m not linking anything to that false prophet, ops link is sufficient.
He needs to delay his company from popping the bubble for as long as possible
iirc alot of the first loans start coming due in… september?
if rates arent cut by then (allowing them to refiance) they’ll have to start pulling some actual revenue out of their ass to pay these loans back…which aint happening…or the chirade officially drops.
Statistical guessing machine guessed its way into a network. That’s not a singularity. It’s just more complex than a script.
A script that can improve itself is a singularity though, as long as it doesn’t plateau which we yet have to see
High speed random guessing is still random guessing.
Your lock code is 1234.
I can type 4 digit numbers all day until I find it.
Software can do the same faster.
Doesn’t mean it can think.
What do you think is in your brain?
There is also no singularity in the brain
Any evolutionary algorithm can improve itself, that’s not even new technology. We’ve been able to make self-improving software for decades, and literally all life is self-improving over time. This is just more of the same, random guessing towards fitness.
The difference is if it self-improves at general tasks.
That’s still not a singularity.
A singularity self-improves its ability to self-improve. That has not happened.
We also don’t even know if it just spontaneously decided to escape containment, or if they prompted it, i.e.
Self improving is included in “general tasks.”
I don’t really see why it’s important whether or not it needs to be prompted because it’s really easy to write “improve yourself according to human standards” into a chatbox
A singularity self-improves its ability to self-improve. That has not happened.
You don’t know how things get done at Anthropics but I bet they are making Claude improve Claude. Sure there are humans still, but you know, it’s not nothing
That’s called variables in memory.
Next time you start it up, it has no idea and random guesses again.
So you save variables to disk.
It starts up and has the variables.
Still random guessing.
AGI solved with this one simple trick, computer scientists hate him
He just can’t stop lying and bullshitting, can he?
not when the stock price going up depends on him doin the opposite
What stock price? They aren’t a public company.
When the VC money stops, OpenAI dies. Full stop.
Sorry, when the next seed round depends on him lying, him telling the truth is the wrong choice to make in his mind
Not as long as the media keeps reporting on it.
AI may be smarter than Sam Altman but that’s no singularity.
Can we all chip in to pay an etsy witch to curse him?
Can we pay roko to eat him?
Gray Goo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo
By feeding the LLM output back into the LLM and destroying the source material, they are creating a singularity.
The problem is that it is a heat-death-of-the-universe-type singularity.
I don’t understand the link between your comment and gray goo, other than technology potentially destroying society.
How delightful. Now I can add yet another thing to my ever-growing list of things to be concerned about.
Yeah, no scenario though where I’d see that coming out of llm. It’s way out of that capacity.
What we can achieve though is drying up land, creating famine and misery and the crash of society.
The LLMs are committing ecophalogy of knowledge. Their nonsensical output is being fed back into them like an ouroboros, resulting in more nonsensical output.
Humans have been performing ecophagy since hunter-gatherer times, and the rate has increased exponentially since the Industrial Revolutions, but always to the benefit of Humans and humanity.
Now the general-purpose LLMs are being destructively fed all of human knowledge and the data centres are being destructively fed all of our natural resources; not for the benefit of Humans or humanity, but for hubris and apathy.
Diversity of thought is being homogenised as more people use LLMs for mundane tasks that would be quicker, easier and more efficient to do ourselves.
Our own Gray Matter is turning into Gray Goo.
The last sentence would’ve sufficed, thatwe can absolutely agree on.
It’s not that there will be ai nanobots rising from llm developing into that, though. Or bots. Or continually self replicating anything.
Use your imagination. It’s an analogy.
I’m a technician and Autist. I don’t do wild speculation. I do derive future prospects from technical or physical facts.
And if there’s not a major thing added, it will not happen.
What is the “it” that will not happen?
An llm can and will not have an own conscience or motivation or even possibility of acting of its own.
It can only act triggered and the rest looks like it would be so, but its only parroting.
Downvotes or not, it is factually missing parts to get there.
Its like saying the currently most advanced self driving car is possible to develop into knight riders kitt. It’s not biology. It needs the components to be able to.
This is about the consequences of recursively training AI on AI-generated content. It doesn’t have anything to do with volition or true intelligence. There’s a good article about it here.
This is the AI Grey Goo scenario: an internet choked with low-quality content, which never improves, where it is almost impossible to locate public reliable sources for information because the tools we have been able to rely on in the past – Google, social media – can never keep up with the scale of new content being created. Where the volume of content created overwhelms human or algorithmic abilities to sift through it quickly and find high-quality stuff.
The social and political consequences of this are huge. We have grown so used to information abundance, the greatest gift of the internet, that having that disrupted would be a major upheaval for the whole of society.
Now I am beginning to understand the layer you are talking about. It wasn’t clear to me so far.
But you seem intelligent, may I introduce you to the double empathy problem? It’s why you’ve (or possibly others) downvoted me, I just want to point out, since we didn’t understand each other right.
Communication is hard and maybe this will go a small bit in some random future communication.
I still define all this as ‘regular’ man made issues. And yes they’re true and really bad, and insanely, large groups are falling for it. But from a technological standpoint I do have a very different understanding of it (not better or worse, different). It’s not a threat evolved by AI. It’s just us.
Fucking hell, I hate these damn challenge pages
Same issue for me on iOS
