Upvoted. I think that said humans should get used to the idea that their intellect is special only insofar as it was first, and if they want to adopt or invent a value system that keeps them at the center, that's actually fine and good for their survival. But said humans would do well to stop laboriously and curmudgeonly moving the posts that mark the goals, and get busy trying to coax the AI to do useful things for them and for the species as a whole.
If human intelligence is so boring and non-special, how exactly did LLMs get this smart? Is it not from a) being developed by humans and b) being fed a very large portion of all human-generated text?
Without the human intellect to emulate, LLMs would be nothing.
LLMs learn from patterns in human-provided data (and soon each other and directly from nature). Humans learn(ed) from patterns in nature-provided data, and eventually each other (and, increasingly, LLMs).
"Boring": that's a straw man, it was never in my comment. I did say that people should stop grumbling and use the tool for good things. I'm not quite sure what was your point, but it sounded like you disagreed (one doesn't deploy the straw-man weapon otherwise), and this "Without the human intellect to emulate, LLMs would be nothing" sounds like an expression of grief, which admittedly is a very reasonable feeling for a number of reasons. What confuses me is that creating an intellect at the human level or above is indeed a great human achievement, but it's not a good thing because...? Maybe an emulation of the thing is not as good as the thing, was that your meaning?
Here, let me add my own little straw man: "if God didn't make us, how exactly did humans get so smart? Is not from a) being created in His image and b) being given His love? Without God, we would be mud from the ground (and a rib!)." If you agree with this statement, then, understandably, everything we have done since the Enlightenment has been to secure our place in hell, and LLMs are a particularly impertinent such device, but compared to a true human mind like a figurine of clay to a true person.
But, if of all things the measure is Man, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not, and Man keeps measuring the thing and the thing indeed seems very smart, then Man should stop moping and deal with the consequences of their actions: either ban the thing or use it for their own benefit.
> To take Coxon's argument seriously, you have to believe frontier models are hypercapable, and not just hype objects.
It's harder and harder to make the point that frontier objects are just hype objects though. And, even if they stay where they are today, that's more than enough to make them incredibly...destabilizing, to say the least. It's not only it, but frontier models act like knowledge mixers and percolators. Some people (not necessarily everybody), are adept at the discipline of learning, building things and executing projects, and that's all you need today with LLMs filling many of the gaps such person can have. Now, most of those people are actually engineers. So I'm going to go with the article and say that we must stop selling our souls for money.
Hype objects when it comes to the idea that they will soon become recursively self-improving, boot strapping themselves to super intelligence, at which point we will be at their mercy. Because that's basically the p(doom) argument, that some probability is associated with ASI killing us all.
That's different from what we have today with powerful software tools that people can use for all sorts of things, which is an extension of what we already had in less concentrated form. It makes things easier for humans to do good and bad things, but it's not an autonomous digital god.
This is the tech at Cloudflare of course, but I swear that my first interpretation of the title was "We have replaced all our python coders with AI and they (the coders) are out and generally available" :-)
Your statement piked out my interest and I went searching for what Rubisco was. My prediction is that this particular one will be cracked out soon, and at around 2045, creating disgustingly efficient variants of RuBisCO along with other photosynthesis mechanisms will be AGIs’ hot hobby.
That there are no more efficient variations of it in nature just tells us that the local minimum is really deep and that natural evolution, as it is, can’t produce anything better, not even with a billion years and 10^30 organisms serving as a “brute force lab”. It’s also the kind of problem an AGI system would tackle for purely ideological reasons, i.e. to prove that it is superior to nature.
Roughly, there are two types of code in a user application: logic and media related. There are many exceptions, but logic code generally doesn’t need a lot of CPU. Media algorithms on the other hand are all CPU hogs, and SIMD helps there quite a bit.
Now, I also happen to think that modern desktops run a lot of background survtech…some from the operating system itself, but most from third-party software and web pages. So, in addition to more CPU performance, I would also like more system utilities that spy on the spies and automatically puts them in some public score of shame.
> In your first draft, most of your paragraphs are bad, your topic flow is incoherent, and you’ve got at least 750 words you don’t need.
I stopped reading at this point. All of the above may have been correct five years ago, when there was a "canon" of good writing, but now LLMs pack that canon as tight as teenagers in a boy band concert. So, go with a flow that reflects your state of mind--LLMs don't have that--and yield the words in fistfuls and with abandon. To further distance yourself from LLM output, your writing can be any or all of these things: sassy, prosaic, heathen.
Uses for LLMs: grammar checks, and to see if your idea comes through. However, depending on what you are writing, I recommend leaving in your writing a tiny doses of typos, grammar issues, and infuriating word order choices. Even some level of ambiguity is fine; your fellow humans and LLMs are not all of one mind, and if some of them are going to fight with knives over your exact meaning, well, it's them who are the extremists, not your problem.
I often think of what we are buying ourselves with AI. Five years ago, when this wave started, my conclusion was that either humanity or humanism is scheduled for extinction. I love my species enough to prefer the lesser evil of the demise of humanism, if for that price we can save our species.
> The moment someone figures out a new modality for LLMs is when we’ll see the next hockey stick.
Honestly, that fills me with fear. LLMs exist to make money to their companies, and said companies are not gonna turn around and say, "you know what, go are going to make an android for each elderly person, that can not only help them with their medications, but that can actually make their medications, tailored to their biologies." Instead, they are going to go for the low-handing fruit of "you know Bob, the guy who makes jokes in meetings but who is grumpy about delivery timelines? Well, we are going to make an android to replace Bob. MetalBob will make even better jokes. The blue model will be able to explain in excruciating level of detail why timelines aren't reasonable. The red model will walk through the cubicles with a whip to ensure everybody keeps working all the time, and nobody goes to pee."
I think this is really good and kudos to Apple for implementing it. The first question that popped into my mind was "what new scenarios of government X forcing Apple to do 'terrible thing' to 'individual' this enables?", but I can't think of anything. It seems that all government attack vectors this feature enables are of the type "government X forces Apple to do 'terrible thing' to 'Apple'", i.e. a government can try to force Apple into certifying a narrative, and of course Apple is going to fight tooth and nail the lack of credibility that would result from that.
Though, on second thought, "government X could force Apple to disable feature for members of group Y" seems possible. I'm sure you can come with "Y" quite easily, heard anything about Ed Sheeran's tour?
I mean, the obvious one is that they can revoke certification of a photo despite it being real.
The harder one is they can force apple to certify a fake photo.
the part that would be very hard but not outside the realm of plausibility, is that gov could force apple to introduce a bug in its pcc platform to link photos to the photographer in order to track and arrest inconvenient people. Apple says there are a bunch of protections against that but ultimately you are trusting apple to do it the way they say they are.
It does indeed, and that is a fundamental flaw. but as has been discussed here, it is better than the alternative, which is no verification.
During the pandemic, I outlined a scheme for using blockchain technology for image provenance and authenticity tracking. The idea was that instead of any one entity assigning authenticity that it would be done in a crowdsourced manner and that the device would overlay a score whenever an image or video is shown to a user.
My assumption was that the desire of users to see such scores would force all manufacturers to implement this open protocol. But my approach suffered from chicken and egg problem, which Apple's does not.
Hmm, this doesn’t make sense. You simply don’t replace utilities with many decades of maturity and that “just work” with something that is not as mature. It will open all users of the distro to all sorts of subtle and not so subtle bugs. I for one don’t want to find myself staring at a mysterious segfault when I want to build the latest version of nodejs or flash a microcontroller. It’s such a pity; I have used Ubuntu for close to 23 years.
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