Nitter link

With interspaced sneerious rephrasing:

In the close vicinity of sorta-maybe-human-level general-ish AI, there may not be any sharp border between levels of increasing generality, or any objectively correct place to call it AGI. Any process is continuous if you zoom in close enough.

The profound mysteries of reality carving, means I get to move the goalposts as much as I want. Besides I need to re-iterate now that the foompocalypse is imminent!

Unless, empirically, somewhere along the line there’s a cascade of related abilities snowballing. In which case we will then say, post facto, that there’s a jump to hyperspace which happens at that point; and we’ll probably call that “the threshold of AGI”, after the fact.

I can’t prove this, but it’s the central tenet of my faith, we will recognize the face of god when we see it. I regret that our hindsight 20-20 event is so conveniently inconveniently placed in the future, the bad one no less.

Theory doesn’t predict-with-certainty that any such jump happens for AIs short of superhuman.

See how much authority I have, it is not “My Theory” it is “The Theory”, I have stared into the abyss and it peered back and marked me as its prophet.

If you zoom out on an evolutionary scale, that sort of capability jump empirically happened with humans–suddenly popping out writing and shortly after spaceships, in a tiny fragment of evolutionary time, without much further scaling of their brains.

The forward arrow of Progress™ is inevitable! S-curves don’t exist! The y-axis is practically infinite!
We should extrapolate only from the past (eugenically scaled certainly) century!
Almost 10 000 years of written history, and millions of years of unwritten history for the human family counts for nothing!

I don’t know a theoretically inevitable reason to predict certainly that some sharp jump like that happens with LLM scaling at a point before the world ends. There obviously could be a cascade like that for all I currently know; and there could also be a theoretical insight which would make that prediction obviously necessary. It’s just that I don’t have any such knowledge myself.

I know the AI god is a NeCeSSarY outcome, I’m not sure where to plant the goalposts for LLM’s and still be taken seriously. See how humble I am for admitting fallibility on this specific topic.

Absent that sort of human-style sudden capability jump, we may instead see an increasingly complicated debate about “how general is the latest AI exactly” and then “is this AI as general as a human yet”, which–if all hell doesn’t break loose at some earlier point–softly shifts over to “is this AI smarter and more general than the average human”. The world didn’t end when John von Neumann came along–albeit only one of him, running at a human speed.

Let me vaguely echo some of my beliefs:

  • History is driven by great men (of which I must be, but cannot so openly say), see our dearest elevated and canonized von Neumann.
  • JvN was so much above the average plebeian man (IQ and eugenics good?) and the AI god will be greater.
  • The greatest single entity/man will be the epitome of Intelligence™, breaking the wheel of history.

There isn’t any objective fact about whether or not GPT-4 is a dumber-than-human “Artificial General Intelligence”; just a question of where you draw an arbitrary line about using the word “AGI”. Albeit that itself is a drastically different state of affairs than in 2018, when there was no reasonable doubt that no publicly known program on the planet was worthy of being called an Artificial General Intelligence.

No no no, General (or Super) Intelligence is not an completely un-scoped metric. Again it is merely a fuzzy boundary where I will be able to arbitrarily move the goalposts while being able to claim my opponents are!

We’re now in the era where whether or not you call the current best stuff “AGI” is a question of definitions and taste. The world may or may not end abruptly before we reach a phase where only the evidence-oblivious are refusing to call publicly-demonstrated models “AGI”.

Purity-testing ahoy, you will be instructed to say shibboleth three times and present your Asherah poles for inspection. Do these mean unbelievers not see these N-rays as I do ? What do you mean we have (or almost have, I don’t want to be too easily dismissed) is not evidence of sparks of intelligence?

All of this is to say that you should probably ignore attempts to say (or deniably hint) “We achieved AGI!” about the next round of capability gains.

Wasn’t Sam the Altman so recently cheeky? He’ll ruin my grift!

I model that this is partially trying to grab hype, and mostly trying to pull a false fire alarm in hopes of replacing hostile legislation with confusion. After all, if current tech is already “AGI”, future tech couldn’t be any worse or more dangerous than that, right? Why, there doesn’t even exist any coherent concern you could talk about, once the word “AGI” only refers to things that you’re already doing!

Again I reserve the right to remain arbitrarily alarmist to maintain my doom cult.

Pulling the AGI alarm could be appropriate if a research group saw a sudden cascade of sharply increased capabilities feeding into each other, whose result was unmistakeably human-general to anyone with eyes.

Observing intelligence is famously something eyes are SufFicIent for! No this is not my implied racist, judge someone by the color of their skin, values seeping through.

If that hasn’t happened, though, deniably crying “AGI!” should be most obviously interpreted as enemy action to promote confusion; under the cover of selfishly grabbing for hype; as carried out based on carefully blind political instincts that wordlessly notice the benefit to themselves of their ‘jokes’ or ‘choice of terminology’ without there being allowed to be a conscious plan about that.

See Unbelievers! I can also detect the currents of misleading hype, I am no buffoon, only these hypesters are not undermining your concerns, they are undermining mine: namely damaging our ability to appear serious and recruit new cult members.

  • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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    1 year ago

    Even his tweets need an editor. And lol, at the bluecheck trying to explain AGI doomsday fears at EY. Guess his cult has escaped the box.

    “No offense, but I hear Chatgpt is great at summarizing long rambling posts into a clear concise paragraph or two. Check it out 😂”

    See how much authority I have, it is not “My Theory” it is “The Theory

    Technically this isn’t his theory, but Kurzweils, his ‘evidence’ he talks about here is all just ‘the singularity is near’ nothing more. EY didn’t add that much to that, in the whole ‘lore about the coming singularity’ sense.

    • froztbyte@awful.systems
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      1 year ago

      I miss out on the replies because loginless twitter no longer deigns to give mere mortals the undeserving such fodder wisdom. is there something[0] that’s a reliable workaround for that?

      [0] esides being logged in. the less traffic emeraldboy gets to his site the more he has to fake shit and maybe something can come of that in the end. edit: ah, apparently nitter will do this in general. guess I shall make that a viewing habit

  • swlabr@awful.systems
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    1 year ago

    Being a doomsday cult leader who denies being a cult leader must be hard. On one hand, you always need to say the end is nigh. On the other hand, if something resembling your foretold end appears, you need to downplay its apocalyptic potential while also praising it as a harbinger of the one true apocalypse. You must find the right balance so that your believers adhere to their faith, lest you lose your power source. Sounds exhausting!

    • jonhendry@awful.systems
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      1 year ago

      Fred Clark (https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/) recently drew attention to John Hagee, a Texas preacher who’s been preaching about the imminent Rapture since the 1980s. His church recently spent millions of dollars to start a K-12 school. Which really isn’t consistent behavior if you really believe the Rapture is imminent.

  • self@awful.systemsM
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    1 year ago

    of all the awful replies that EY tweets attract, my favorite this time is the Rick & Morty cosplayer trying to fake their way to computer science expertise via buzzword explosion:

    please tell me more about eval and “GPU”, pickle rick

    • bitofhope@awful.systems
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      1 year ago

      Reminds me of the technobabble generator I built for an IRC bot years ago. Seems that it still works:

      The developer will pipe the log before they frobnicate the USB. Now we execute the logs and fork the BSOD. Why don’t you populate the terminal unless you define the protocol. You just untar the octals lest they undo the ECC RAM. Our only option is to kill -9 the more magic or compile the patch. The developer will convert the tarball before you rebase the virtualization. Let us mask the compilation and then WONTFIX the wetware. Now rebase the ECC RAM or you might have to fix the Layer 4.

      I wonder if I should update it with more ML/FP buzzwords.

      • self@awful.systemsM
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        1 year ago

        the banner on their profile and vibe of their posts makes so much more sense now! this is just Time Cube posting but with more CS terms

        • blakestacey@awful.systemsM
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          1 year ago

          Having met Gene “the Time Cube guy” Ray and found him to be a simmering cauldron of rage just waiting to boil over, that’s oddly fitting.

          • froztbyte@awful.systems
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            1 year ago

            Given the username on the account in question, I have to wonder if it’s actually an outright inspired copy/clone parodying the EAists

            • self@awful.systemsM
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              1 year ago

              actually yeah, the Time Cube guy meeting a real physicist sounds like an amazing story

              • blakestacey@awful.systemsM
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                1 year ago

                When I was an undergrad at MIT, I knew (not terribly well) the people who invited him to “debate” Time Cube there. He came to a low-key student party; someone tried to teach him the game of go because, you know, squares. The whole thing seemed funny at first and then vaguely mean-spirited and exploitative, so I blew off the “debate” itself. What sticks with me most after all these years are the vibes. He was genuinely happy to be there, a little perplexed and stand-offish among all the college kids… and on some level beneath that, wounded and angry.

                Of the odd people in our orbit, Gene Ray was much less genial than Love 22, the street entertainer/numerologist from Key West who showed up for baseball games and who delighted in showing off his passport, which gave his legal name as “LOVE XXII”. The Roman numerals meant that he was royalty in Europe, he’d say.

        • swlabr@awful.systems
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          1 year ago

          At least time cube was brave enough to tackle universal truths. AGI is pissweak. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest in 4 simultaneously occurring days, time cube guy

    • froztbyte@awful.systems
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      1 year ago

      I took psychic damage reading this tweet

      “normed to sum to 1” BECAUSE IT"S GOTTA BE ABOUT STAT-USTICKS, amirite

      good god

  • gerikson@awful.systems
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    1 year ago

    You are doing the Robot God’s work here, my friend.

    An aside - what will EY do when/if ole Muskovitch slams the paywall down on the smoking ruins of ExTwitter? All these perfectly crafted missives, lost from plebeian view. Such a tragedy.

      • gerikson@awful.systems
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        1 year ago

        At the very least I hope they’re making copies (dunno if the Twitter archive dump works anymore). Just being in Elon’s good graces now means nada, the funniest thing about the whole “Twitter Files” saga is Matt Tiabbi being booted from Twitter because his main platform is Substack, and Elon then shadowbanning links to Substack in some form of demented revenge.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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          It is amazing how petty the man is, and how much he never got out of the highschool mindset. With the weird bully impulses. (See the weird ‘you like blocking? How about I block you instead!’ impulse he got at people who he used to try and impress).

        • froztbyte@awful.systems
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          1 year ago

          I… hmm.

          so, some of them seem to be making copies of their own things. but… none of them particularly seem to care?

          I can see instances of it being (willfully blind) optimistic ignorance, or near-complicit intentional-avoidance, or or or… but given that even for some time prior to The Tusking so much of that collective dialogue was “Twitter = Teh Public Square, no backsies!” even while facebook et al were garden-tightening, well, let’s just say my reserve for good-faith guesses are low.

          and that’s before some of the other themes I’ve noticed, such as the language used around certain things. I’m not sure if these observations are accurate, as I still have to find some spoons to go review some of that in detail. but the reason they stand out is, in part, because of other associated TREACLES fuckery. a number of people in that sphere are signalling “A Gentler Path To Collecting Power”, and the implied “[which you can use however]” at the end of it has a lot of associated question marks given the other people they hang out with

          • gerikson@awful.systems
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            1 year ago

            I for one welcome Musk burning the birdsite to the ground (not that he’ll actually do it). Might break my remaining addiction (mostly stuff related to the Ukraine conflict).

  • froztbyte@awful.systems
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    1 year ago

    I’m on pocket glasscomputer right now so I can’t do a full reply in detail, but something that stands out for me in some of those quotes is an air of negotiating desperation?

    “I totally wasn’t wrong but also wow would you look at all this other shit? I can’t say it’s fancy, though, that would compliment The Opposition. But I’m a bit jelly. Woweeee would you look at that prompt go?!”

  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Oh great, this irony-proof hypocrisy box made the jump from reddit. Yaaay…

    Lemmy was so lacking in bad-faith readings. I just love callout posts where comparing millions of years to thousands of years means ignoring the thousands of years, somehow. And where ‘I don’t know’ must be the height of cocksure overconfidence. And where intelligence is simple enough that fuzzy definitions are cowardice, but complex enough that mentioning it is genocide.

    Guys.

    The dude’s post amounts to ‘there are no sentient computers yet, and people will soon say there are, and they’ll probably be wrong.’

    And you are bending over inside-out to scoff. Over the idea computers are doing stuff that used to be science fiction, and that might cause problems.

    Teachers are struggling to grade essays because current LLMs write about as well as the kind of teenagers who’d try using an LLM.

    Multiple creative industries have been on-strike in part because of demonstrated and expected applications of these technologies that didn’t really exist two years ago.

    Image sites are flooded because a picture turns out to be worth about two hundred words and some floating-point numbers. They’re not great. But last month they weren’t even good, and last year they weren’t possible.

    You are crying bigotry over the idea of detecting spambots through conversations in text. A thing you’ve definitely done, if only to hang up on telemarketing scams. A thing that definitely got harder, recently, thanks to a wildly overcomplicated next-letter-guesser. And voice mimicry. And video, to a much lesser extent, because that part still sucks. For now.

    Does anyone wanna pretend those demonstrated capabilities won’t get better, and fast? Did we forget the demonstrated capabilities of these systems include writing code and finding software vulnerabilities? They’re not great at either, yet, but how talented does one model have to be before it’s impractical for most organizations to fight off ten thousand of them?

    Bear in mind none of this is describing AGI. None of these concerns require explaining how John Searle is a stubborn asshole. This is all just do-as-I-say programs under the direct control of human actors. And it’s already getting weird, in a hurry… in ways that will allow humans to point the program at the program to improve the program. If you think that has a hard upper limit, sure. If you think human beings are at that limit, why.

    • self@awful.systemsM
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      1 year ago

      come on now, work just ended and I was about to start dinner and you give me this much sneering material? fuck me running, why can’t posters explode on contact with the barest mention of SneerClub at a more opportune time?

    • self@awful.systemsM
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      I decided to look at their post history since they were posting on TechTakes without realizing it’s SneerClub with a wider scope and of course there’s a Stallman-esque take on “generated” CSAM in one of their recent posts:

      There is no such thing as generated CSAM.

      That is the entire god-danged point of calling it “CSAM.”

      You can’t abuse children who do not exist

      fucking gag