im not really holding water for them because i don’t find rationalism all that interesting. but the OP is basically coping that the people running things have bad aesthetics and there’s akshually a secret illuminati group with good aesthetics
@asukareadshegel it’s cope specifically because I’m not defending the subject matter at all. it’s just that vitalik, collison, Altman, maybe even elon seem to be LW types in no uncertain terms
It is not from the benevolence of the $SPXL, the $TSLA calls, or the $BTC futures that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.
@RichardMCNgo it’s like how fancy beers or experimental music taste/sounds bad to normal people
you are chasing a moving optimization target and end up in weird basins
@gojomo@sama my taxonomy doesn't go that deep -- on this website it's considered the kind of mainstream take that AGI is within view and that deep learning can provide it. in the scheme of things it's probably a much rarer belief than that it can't
@KurtBach1789@0x49fa98 humanity’s elites will approach the state of spacing guild vatmen. the best of best will be hyper specialized creatures that would’ve died if nature had her way
in the year 20XX the AWS solaris division runs a giant self expanding matrioshka cloud of chromium VMs running the @mightyapp browser. every web page consumes as much energy as our entire civilization today. checking the time calls a microservice on mars that wipes out a city
a senior software eng costs like $400k a year you guys
optimize the resources you’re actually short on to build viable businesses
tradeoff hard for code thats readable over performant
@growing_daniel right and facebook had to re-engineer everything like 10 times
it's true margins are still amazing but a startup probably shouldn't be worried about compute costs more than abt actually pushing products bc if the initial experiment works they're gonna rewrite everything anyway
they've set up the incentives such that
- if you delete tweet and admit to guilt your account is locked for 12 hours
- if you don't delete the tweet and appeal to twitter your account is locked for a week+
great stuff
@mimileo_@IsIsConfined@eigenrobot bad news: you picked the two mfers who have proven themselves to have the highest adhd of anyone around and now island will die
building a large scale datacenter requires
- government contracts
- finding massive untapped power supply
- chip contracts that are backordered by like a decade
- climate/weather requirements
- hiring an extremely inelastic pool of datacenter techs
over time your alcohol tolerance goes down and your social skill goes up
you have to make sure at any given age these two things are happening in complement or you're fucked
@thelawrenceyan@pataguccigoon yo all i'm saying is they vaccum up the people gifted with enormous natural talents i'm not commenting on the moral valence of this at all
@bhokaaa yeah I’m pretty sure he’s trolling me but it’s not that deep
just saying elite city mfers end up judging themselves against the best of the best
modern hatred of PUFAs is probably no different than the anti-sugar thing that happened for the last 5 years and the anti-fat thing that happened before that. quasi religious dietary restriction seems to recur in all societies
@DistractedAnna@realstar821 the reason i even invoke it is that these ppl literally look better and are taller and shit. is it taboo to allow any of that to be genetics now?
im not convinced that nuclear war is actually possible outside of a misfire. i bet modern nuclear states have too many veto powers for them to actually pull off a first strike
@eurydicelives being rapaciously and convincingly contrarian bc even in the worst case it adds more value than agreeing by testing people’s reasoning and assumptions
also AI risk doesnt mean only runaway paperclip optimizers (though I think those are very possible). It could mean anything from fragging the information environment with mass scale text models to small autonomous assassination drones etc.
@TaliaRinger almost every one of these arguments boil down to aesthetic repulsion and not anything serious
if the AI can’t provide its own agency but can provide intelligence than a sufficiently evil human owner agent can make this world hellish anyway
@TaliaRinger I’ll know it when I see it — large language models are intelligent and I feel no strong urge to prove this to anyone. If you spend long enough playing with one open endedly you’ll know I’m right
@theemilyaccount@bookdepth you’re using a particularly dumb thought experiment constructed and promulgated most likely as a joke to not engage w the topic seriously
MSE loss for GANs produces a lot of shitty blurry outputs because waffling & being uncertain allows the GAN to achieve lower loss. similarly an AGI trained on the moral objectives of all humanity may produce some shitty blurry amalgam that everyone hates and trap us in it forever
@dcwych i think it’s impressive that one model can do all these things which is the whole point of their “pathways” architecture. i think we were already capable of most of these things but doing them all at once leads to better and better arguments that general intelligence exists
@BarneyFlames the weird thing is that nuclear risk doesn’t scale with incompetence — when the guy in the Cuban missile crisis refused to pull that trigger it was insubordination
in the gpt-3 era it seemed like it might make allow companies to auto generate a ton of crappy code and make people worse but more prolific programmers. in the PaLM-Coder era it’s clear that these tools will vastly improve the code quality of mankind
@Suhail Ooh are you guys building your own for mighty? My intuition is that it’s reasonably easy to build small ones but extremely hard to build an Amazon scale half million node datacenter
ppl are looking at this all wrong lol. sure he has an activist investor to please but in his book he just raised the share price 30% in his first 4 months on the job. great success https://x.com/paraga/status/1511320953598357505
@storebrandguy@TheCaptain_Nemo ok but a few notes are that I don’t think twitter’s free speech policy has radically changed. and yet elon chooses to take over 4 months after the ceo change. why would he do the harder thing rather than the easier thing (buy it out from under Jack)? I think this must be easier
@pmarca p̶̢̨̢̢̢̧̥̘̣̮͔͔̠̘̻̭͖̣͔͕̮̎͑̃̊͂̂̈́͌̇̀̚̚͜͜͝a̵̧͇̱̟̭̘͉͕̖̣̯̫̯̖̬̣̹̲̦͍̖̠͑̒̊̆̅͆̊̆͗̈́͑̎̕ͅş̸̛̼͙̜̘͎͍̠̥̼̖̇̃̆̇̒̏̄͂͒̽̓̈̍̀͛͐͘̚̚͜͜͜͠ͅͅt̵̡̧̻̻̫̫͙̳̳͇̱͈̯̗͔̰̺̥̓͒͊̾́̽͒̈́̐̀̀̄̍̾̾̄͆̔̋͗͆̅̈́́̚͜͠͝ current thing
@eigenrobot@liminal_warmth@Aella_Girl i don’t know how to put this except that you are funnier and higher decoupling than most ppl and 99% percentile in having both. these are uncommon skills and allow you to get away with insanity. I also bet they have a male tilt
typical EA/rationalist failure mode: they forget to ascribe utilitarian value to symbols. an internet full of videos of CP is a desecration one of the most important symbols of mankind. symbolic loss is real utility loss https://x.com/Aella_Girl/status/1512106557059829764
@Aella_Girl for most, meaning is spread mimetically in a way that utilizes the attractor points built into biology: most cultures have a taboo against sexualizing children
@storebrandguy@chairsign one difference is that given another thousand years of human cultural evolution I doubt the norms around sexualizing children changes but the Catholic Church will probably be dead
@jeff82874662 good question - I think there’s several point defects with the produced images but the eyes are most noticeable since our own perception gravitates to eyes immediately
@petergodofsky@maelcumries@jeff82874662 thinking you need explicit symbolic reasoning to understand how the tennis ball makes contact with the racket and crosses the net again is the peak of idiocy
@jeff82874662 another part of it is that there’s noise inherent to the image construction process — if the beginning of an eye forms somewhere before the global structure becomes clear, the model may end up completing 3 eyes. run it even longer and it may get rid of one of them
@BLUNDERBUSSTED@jeff82874662 no lol there’s incredible amounts of intentional assembly - sorry but there’s not a chance in hell you could draw a painting as visually creative as some of these
an eye is probably one of the most common features in human image space - so starting from pure static the diffusion model is likely to spawn several eyes across the blank canvas. then slowly it works on global coherence and may end up leaving in one too few or too many eyes
every time someone points out an example of “move fast” going wrong it’s a situation where they absolutely would not have predicted the unknown unknown and also one where the original party has probably already fixed the situation
facebook moved fast and caused a genocide:
tenuous, there are no real early Cassandras of people calling out that something like this might happen, hard to pin a genocide on a communications medium. trained novel machine learning models to moderate burmese language comments
facebook moved fast and broke democracy:
tenuous, everyone was cheering it on when facebook and others caused the arab spring. trained complex censorship algorithms to weed out dissidents come 2020
uber moved fast and ?
actually i don't even know the complaint here uber worked miracles by destroying some of the most onerous red tape and rent seeking in the world
tesla moved fast and people died in autopilot accidents
tenuous: after some point no amount of simulation can get you further along the learning curve of self driving. real data is needed. every accident immediately updates the whole fleet such that it's not possible again 1/
moreover its not like anyone predicted the specific failure modes it fell prey to such as "white lane divider on a sunny day". everyone was very focused on rainy or adverse conditions. also nobody considers the counterfactual damage of slowing down self driving dev 2/
@atroyn do they though lol? did oil&gas predict global warming? did the automakers predict that they were too reliant on corporate paper? this is an impossible to prove counterfactual
the primary effect of the printing press was collapsing several governments and religious institutions. then only later on contributed to the Renaissance / Enlightenment https://x.com/arctanno/status/1513199167711027203
when the falun gong at the park ask me to sign their anti-ccp petitions i refuse. i am avoiding the fate of CCP supercomputers retroactively torturing me for my disobedience
a nearly foolproof cultural screen interview would be to see what candidate thinks of elon. if positive -> probably a chaos loving technocapitalist. if not probably not with the mission and will not tolerate chaos
AI alignment risk is real but where i depart from the rationalists is that I have no faith slowing down AI researchers will allow us to solve it via pure deduction in the interim. especially seeing as nobody seems to care
instead, accelerate -- the first signs of real danger will bring about insane amounts of interest in model understanding and alignment. plus it seems like the only fruitful paradigm in AI alignment seems to be empirical eg https://openai.com/blog/instruction-following/
@hdevalence@dystopiabreaker mfer you are worried about united fruit corporation and i am worried about the known universe being tiled into pytorch float tensor rewards
@hdevalence@dystopiabreaker no it's not lol -- this is playing language gotcha games. a corporation with an AGI is dangerous because of the AGI not because it's a corporation. ditto if an individual or a government or an alien or entirely random reward function creates one
@Smerity@karpathy very good but disappointing that the differences in communication were basically purely cosmetic. different syntax families underlying the exact same semantics and cultural contexts. 'arrival' is better in this respect for making the alien cognition truly alien
@Smerity@karpathy i want to see aliens that don't at all have a similar emotional range to humans, that can't empathize easily with us, that have vastly different strategic thinking, etc
vast majority of ppl making incremental technological progress on hard problems outside of pure web startups had advanced degrees. think AI, biotech, much of the founding teams of SpaceX and google. there are several exceptions but they’re notable because they’re rare
silicon valley sells you the dreams and impact of ppl who have grinded in the techno monastery for years while simultaneously disparaging them w its get rich quick youth worshiping culture
anyway you haven’t felt Blackpill until some decidedly mercenary decidedly mid vc or software guy tells you grad school is useless bc they dropped out of their polisci phd program or whatever
@Pavel_Asparagus I’m not gatekeeping lol. I’m literally an ML researcher without a PhD
1) varda is a pre product startup
2) i pointed out that there are several notable exceptions
3) it looks like two of the cofounders have masters degrees and significant academic research background
@Pavel_Asparagus it’s not about credentials. it’s about people choosing to work on difficult science problems for years and years without much reward. very few that do this outside academia. there are a few that I respect immensely
@cauchyfriend@growing_daniel no the people at openai and deepmind are all extremely online and think carefully about AI safety + organize things like EA Global. they have alignment and model understanding arms that consume significant resources
@Pavel_Asparagus@Bootleginternet not at all - I’m pointing out the existence of nonfinancial incentives as the motivator for most human behavior and also that financial incentives aren’t obviously perfectly aligned with technological progress
i think the new thing of techno accelerationism is markedly different. it's more prescriptivist, sets forward the common goal of 'humanity on a hundred worlds', complete dominion over nature and the universe, etc. it's basically like the starship troopers ideology
i'm not sure what the teleological selling point of 'new atheism' was. it mostly preached a gospel of religion bad, nonintervention, a certain type of moral progress, and maybe mild libertarianism
@AaronEstel@chaosprime@polyparadigm yeah this is a real failure though. america was created as a counterexample to british government but had much more to offer than as a refutation
@varunramg midwit argument, clearly underinformed -- there have been many proposals to do congestions pricing on runways and gates and FAA doesn't care
i basically grin smugly every day remembering the people who when gpt3 came out in 2020 their first reaction was to belittle everyone who was amazed by it or thought it was a worthwhile scientific endeavor. 'deep learning has hit a wall' they said, not knowing that numbers go up
i like to argue about things i don't understand by assuming stuff works how it sounds. the good old verbal intelligence. anyway this failed when i guessed the 'british commonwealth' had any legal obligations at all to each other
@peachblvd anyway 99.9% of people are at all times focused on acquiring social status. in some rare miracles people step out of the game to become eggheads and briefly pursue divinity let em do their thing
@Tjdriii@peachblvd same difference really. harvard/my dad/ my friend vouched for me. in my experience when anyone is at all talented or possesses arcane knowledge ppl come bang down your door to get you to work w them. most people are more lacking in arcane knowledge than they are in networks
@Tjdriii@peachblvd thus leading to the common yuppie failing of 20 somethings endlessly networking w.o. any real ask from the ppl they're meeting. just collecting optionality like an addiction
@Tjdriii@peachblvd part of the reason i love twitter is that you can hunt out the authentic schizos and autists locked in their techno monasteries bc they might at least have new and interesting ideas, which are the only real scarce resource in postscarcity world
cautionary tale about the importance of the technomonastery & "island gigantism". he chose the less stressful option so he could pursue his interests and it grew into something huge
survives cancer, completely changes the AI world 10 years later, his textbook is best-selling, AlphaGo & AlphaStar are created based on his principles, DeepMind opens a whole office in Edmonton for him (previous backwater) etc, etc
he takes an offer at the University of Alberta, a complete backwater in CS and starts teaching there bc they offer him complete freedom to study as much reinforcement learning as he wants (which hadn't been a popular topic for a while). tells his students he may not make it
richard sutton, one of the creators of modern reinforcement learning / actor-critic methods. he writes a seminal phd thesis and works in several high ranking CS labs and gets offers from several more. until he gets a cancer diagnosis in 2002 and packs up his life
the people who stuck it through the AI winter staring at MNIST day in day out only to be granted lavish offices constructed around their lives at the end of it by FAIR, DeepMind, GBrain, etc are braver than the troops