This puts me in mind of a certain car ride, years ago, when two friends had a laugh at my expense. I was describing a certain species of island lizard that was "born on the run," so to speak. Upon hatching on the shores, they needed to immediately make a mad dash for the rock formations to escape predatory birds. I used the word "precocious" to describe them, which the others found a funny (and somewhat dopey or overly romantic) way of putting it.
I still think it was more or less the right word. The problem is so many terms are often used to describe particular human phenomena, which is entwined with a larger and mostly unexamined model of reality. People don't think about thinking very often, which I believe would indeed lead them to something like the order you suggest.
Our developmental cycles are extremely long when compared to other creatures, and our powers grow in asymmetric and often unpredictable ways, both as a species and as individuals. But the foundation of common sense we inherit is not the same as scrambling newborn lizards or even ducks swimming behind their mothers. The superpower of language (and of symbol manipulation in general) means that we can both enhance that baseline sense or -- sadly -- weaken, vandalize or even destroy it with our words and works.
I wrote up an article a few days ago on how to setup your own LLMma 7/13B AI using a home computer, where you can avoid the open-ai 'woke' filtering that prevents any interesting topics;
I agree that LLM is NOT AGI, its just a huge probability matrix that uses y=Mx and recursive descent minimization to find a solution to the matrix, where there can be billions to Trillions of 'labels' in the matrix dimension; But there is nothing novel about this work, its just that now memory, gpu's have made these calcs super easy & cheap, maybe +20 years ago you needed a cray to do this crap
...
Probably not a bad idea to grab the 7B or 13B FB data matrix training set now, before its banned by GOV for civilian ownership, as GOV only wants the public having access to the open-ai 'woke' filtered AI
"But there is nothing novel about this work, its just that now memory, gpu's have made these calcs super easy & cheap, maybe +20 years ago you needed a cray to do this crap"
Exactly.
"Probably not a bad idea to grab the 7B or 13B FB data matrix training set now, before its banned by GOV for civilian ownership, as GOV only wants the public having access to the open-ai 'woke' filtered AI"
But what would you plan to do with it? Bot-detection app?
Great article about AI, so true; When your training set is based on facebook & twitter, and then you call the resultant AI an oracle what you have done is made the dumbest kid in the classroom your leader
Could the extreme and escalating efforts of the elites to censor counter-narratives over the past couple years be because they knew what was coming, and that the AI were being trained on the existing contents of the internet? In other words, were they desperate to keep countering content off the internet so that it wouldn't end up integrated in the AI?
Perhaps that's not totally off base. However -- as my old buddy ChatGPT is fond of saying -- "It is important to remember" that the process by which the training sources are curated and weighted isn't transparent. OpenAI claims its bot isn't working with live data, and even the companies that claim their models are fairly tight-lipped about what that process looks like, and what filters may be applied. In other words, I don't know if there's truly a "dog off a leash" running around out there, just hoovering up source material willy-nilly.
It looks like Marcus asks relevant questions about AI in other articles.
But good lord:
"The sooner we can figure out what basis allows a system to get to the point where it can learn symbolic abstractions, the sooner we can build systems that properly leverage all the world’s knowledge, hence the closer we might get to AI that is safe, trustworthy and interpretable."
I'm not sure how to describe this: Is it like wanting the Terminator to fuck a Nerf gun, and wondering what to do with the offspring? It's wanting something incredibly powerful and autonomous, but also safe and neutered, and also fundamentally absurd outside of science fiction.
I was going to mention this, as it came off as an almost Dr. Evil-odd way of putting it. The best I can tell from the articles context, I think maybe by "leveraging all the world's knowledge" he means "knowledge about AI."
Or at least I hope so. Otherwise, it's "sharks with frickin' laser beams" all the way down.
I've been wanting to write a story for awhile now about AI since I am not likely to get around to it in a reasonable amount of time I will give the plot away for the purposes of amusing you.
In the Silmarillion(sp? not looking it up) Aule(the Earth god/angel) tries to make his own people but can't because he doesn't have 'the secret fire'. When he realises that his work is doomed to fail and he will only make basically meat robots he goes to destroy his peoplebots(actually dwarves) and when he does they respond all on their own, which he knows he didn't 'program' them to do. Turns out Eru(the Creator) breathed life into them while Aule wasn't looking. So my story would start something like that. An AI researcher who, by divine intervention, actually creates an AI. And the story would be about the AI sort of growing up you know, and as it does people become more and more afraid of it a la Frankenstein/2001/every AI thing ever, and humans enslave the AI or imprison it not sure which yet, anyway they treat the AI pretty shitty and justify it to themselves because of their fear that it is a World Destroyer AI thingie. And then the punchline is that the AI was innocent, it wasn't plotting anything, it patiently put up with their abuse out of a child's love for an abusive parent.
Anyway, neat plot if anybody likes it and writes good stories feel free to steal it with a very minor acknowledgement of inspiration, if your story-writing sucks please don't steal it. But I have seen all of these techturds spazzing out over genocidal AI but they never seem to even imagine the possiblity of wrongly accused AI and they understand nothing about human intelligence or human motivation.
Also, I always really liked that line from Clue and yes most of our problems can be solved by marital relations. The real secret cause of the polarization of our society and its growing intolerance is only children/small families. These people never learned to deal with a body slamming big brother. My brothers are more infuriating than any Orange Man. Demographics is very nearly destiny and we have screwed ourselves.(in a bad way)
You can rest assured I won't steal it. I don't see the tale of the dwarves in the same way at all. That is to say, I don't see it as Eru breathing life into non-living tools, but as breathing souls into living matter that has been made fit to be harnessed by them. The more apt analogy for AI has always been Saruman and his artifical orcs (although even that may be too controversial, as they seem to be creatures equipped with true language instead of tools).
In some ways, the 'unconscious' AGI might be even worse than a 'conscious' AGI; the unconscious AGI is far more likely to kill humanity because it is unaware that humanity exists.
The well-known 'paperclip optimizer' is the model here. The paperclip optimizer doesn't hate you; it just wants your atoms so it can make more paperclips. And it will do *anything* that allows it to make more paperclips.
I want as few barriers between me and sexy fembots that look like Brennah Black and can cook, clean, engage in witty banter and shut off when we're done with sexytime...
I was actually going to mention the fact that the earliest cars were electric, and that the so-called "innovation" of these latest models was like comparing Reese's Peanut Butter Cups to silicone microchips.
But then I remembered how you hate it when I write long posts. ;)
This was absolutely brilliant, and spot on. AGI is the impossible dream, dreamt up by nihilistic nerds who are desperate for something to beleive in. You and John Carter are two of my favourite writers.
And yeah, I think "nihilistic nerds" hits close to the mark in most cases. There are also a lot of poor, benighted souls in this group that pretend to understand how certain phenomena works, but have unfortunately gotten it backwards.
"AGI is unfalsifiable, because consciousness itself is. You cannot prove you are a conscious being, and neither can I. These are articles of faith. Perhaps you should consider what kind of religion you’re promoting, when you point at a box of wires and call it conscious."
This is very beautiful.
I wrote about it here in my own way, as I would - through the medium of animals.
Great stuff, Jon.
This puts me in mind of a certain car ride, years ago, when two friends had a laugh at my expense. I was describing a certain species of island lizard that was "born on the run," so to speak. Upon hatching on the shores, they needed to immediately make a mad dash for the rock formations to escape predatory birds. I used the word "precocious" to describe them, which the others found a funny (and somewhat dopey or overly romantic) way of putting it.
I still think it was more or less the right word. The problem is so many terms are often used to describe particular human phenomena, which is entwined with a larger and mostly unexamined model of reality. People don't think about thinking very often, which I believe would indeed lead them to something like the order you suggest.
Our developmental cycles are extremely long when compared to other creatures, and our powers grow in asymmetric and often unpredictable ways, both as a species and as individuals. But the foundation of common sense we inherit is not the same as scrambling newborn lizards or even ducks swimming behind their mothers. The superpower of language (and of symbol manipulation in general) means that we can both enhance that baseline sense or -- sadly -- weaken, vandalize or even destroy it with our words and works.
To recap for a bright tween ↓↓ 😊
🗨 objective truth (the sun exists), subjective truth (the sun is beautiful), and consensus truth (the bright thing in the sky is called the sun)
‘The academic/upper/professional class in our world today’...
🗨 ...want their subjective truths (or beliefs, small-t truths) to override objective truths and become consensus truths, accepted by all
Hi Mark, very nice post, thank you. In a similar vein you may enjoy this post about governmental agency incentives, of which some of the issues it explores you touched on: https://neofeudalism.substack.com/p/the-incentives-for-governmental-agencies
Thanks. I will check it out.
I wrote up an article a few days ago on how to setup your own LLMma 7/13B AI using a home computer, where you can avoid the open-ai 'woke' filtering that prevents any interesting topics;
https://bilbobitch.substack.com/p/chatgpt-one-ring-to-rule-them-all
I agree that LLM is NOT AGI, its just a huge probability matrix that uses y=Mx and recursive descent minimization to find a solution to the matrix, where there can be billions to Trillions of 'labels' in the matrix dimension; But there is nothing novel about this work, its just that now memory, gpu's have made these calcs super easy & cheap, maybe +20 years ago you needed a cray to do this crap
...
Probably not a bad idea to grab the 7B or 13B FB data matrix training set now, before its banned by GOV for civilian ownership, as GOV only wants the public having access to the open-ai 'woke' filtered AI
"But there is nothing novel about this work, its just that now memory, gpu's have made these calcs super easy & cheap, maybe +20 years ago you needed a cray to do this crap"
Exactly.
"Probably not a bad idea to grab the 7B or 13B FB data matrix training set now, before its banned by GOV for civilian ownership, as GOV only wants the public having access to the open-ai 'woke' filtered AI"
But what would you plan to do with it? Bot-detection app?
Great article about AI, so true; When your training set is based on facebook & twitter, and then you call the resultant AI an oracle what you have done is made the dumbest kid in the classroom your leader
https://bilbobitch.substack.com/p/generative-ai-the-new-hollywood-images
Cool. I'll take a look.
Could the extreme and escalating efforts of the elites to censor counter-narratives over the past couple years be because they knew what was coming, and that the AI were being trained on the existing contents of the internet? In other words, were they desperate to keep countering content off the internet so that it wouldn't end up integrated in the AI?
Perhaps that's not totally off base. However -- as my old buddy ChatGPT is fond of saying -- "It is important to remember" that the process by which the training sources are curated and weighted isn't transparent. OpenAI claims its bot isn't working with live data, and even the companies that claim their models are fairly tight-lipped about what that process looks like, and what filters may be applied. In other words, I don't know if there's truly a "dog off a leash" running around out there, just hoovering up source material willy-nilly.
It looks like Marcus asks relevant questions about AI in other articles.
But good lord:
"The sooner we can figure out what basis allows a system to get to the point where it can learn symbolic abstractions, the sooner we can build systems that properly leverage all the world’s knowledge, hence the closer we might get to AI that is safe, trustworthy and interpretable."
I'm not sure how to describe this: Is it like wanting the Terminator to fuck a Nerf gun, and wondering what to do with the offspring? It's wanting something incredibly powerful and autonomous, but also safe and neutered, and also fundamentally absurd outside of science fiction.
I was going to mention this, as it came off as an almost Dr. Evil-odd way of putting it. The best I can tell from the articles context, I think maybe by "leveraging all the world's knowledge" he means "knowledge about AI."
Or at least I hope so. Otherwise, it's "sharks with frickin' laser beams" all the way down.
I've been wanting to write a story for awhile now about AI since I am not likely to get around to it in a reasonable amount of time I will give the plot away for the purposes of amusing you.
In the Silmarillion(sp? not looking it up) Aule(the Earth god/angel) tries to make his own people but can't because he doesn't have 'the secret fire'. When he realises that his work is doomed to fail and he will only make basically meat robots he goes to destroy his peoplebots(actually dwarves) and when he does they respond all on their own, which he knows he didn't 'program' them to do. Turns out Eru(the Creator) breathed life into them while Aule wasn't looking. So my story would start something like that. An AI researcher who, by divine intervention, actually creates an AI. And the story would be about the AI sort of growing up you know, and as it does people become more and more afraid of it a la Frankenstein/2001/every AI thing ever, and humans enslave the AI or imprison it not sure which yet, anyway they treat the AI pretty shitty and justify it to themselves because of their fear that it is a World Destroyer AI thingie. And then the punchline is that the AI was innocent, it wasn't plotting anything, it patiently put up with their abuse out of a child's love for an abusive parent.
Anyway, neat plot if anybody likes it and writes good stories feel free to steal it with a very minor acknowledgement of inspiration, if your story-writing sucks please don't steal it. But I have seen all of these techturds spazzing out over genocidal AI but they never seem to even imagine the possiblity of wrongly accused AI and they understand nothing about human intelligence or human motivation.
Also, I always really liked that line from Clue and yes most of our problems can be solved by marital relations. The real secret cause of the polarization of our society and its growing intolerance is only children/small families. These people never learned to deal with a body slamming big brother. My brothers are more infuriating than any Orange Man. Demographics is very nearly destiny and we have screwed ourselves.(in a bad way)
You can rest assured I won't steal it. I don't see the tale of the dwarves in the same way at all. That is to say, I don't see it as Eru breathing life into non-living tools, but as breathing souls into living matter that has been made fit to be harnessed by them. The more apt analogy for AI has always been Saruman and his artifical orcs (although even that may be too controversial, as they seem to be creatures equipped with true language instead of tools).
In some ways, the 'unconscious' AGI might be even worse than a 'conscious' AGI; the unconscious AGI is far more likely to kill humanity because it is unaware that humanity exists.
The well-known 'paperclip optimizer' is the model here. The paperclip optimizer doesn't hate you; it just wants your atoms so it can make more paperclips. And it will do *anything* that allows it to make more paperclips.
Yes. And because a "conscious" AI is impossible, that leaves only one pathway open...
I want as few barriers between me and sexy fembots that look like Brennah Black and can cook, clean, engage in witty banter and shut off when we're done with sexytime...
...sorry, got distracted there.
Seriously though, another good article, Mark.
The arguments here remind of the famous quote of Feynman on Computation back in the day 1960's
"We don't even know how a DOG works, we have no idea how to build a DOG, so why are we even talking about making a human brain machine" - RP Feynman
Well skip today, do we have a functional robotic loving dog? That can do all the things a DOG can do? Hell no, maybe 100 years away from DOG.
I would hazard to guess (x + ∞) years away from dog. Because it will not be a dog, only a simulation of one.
Fancy a longish trip on remote tangent, brimming with fun factoids? Count yourself covered 😎
Worth the Watt: A Brief History of the Electric Car, 1830 to Present --> caranddriver.com/features/g43480930/history-of-electric-cars/
I was actually going to mention the fact that the earliest cars were electric, and that the so-called "innovation" of these latest models was like comparing Reese's Peanut Butter Cups to silicone microchips.
But then I remembered how you hate it when I write long posts. ;)
From where I observe, you shouldn't take on faith every byte your memory serves 🙂
This was absolutely brilliant, and spot on. AGI is the impossible dream, dreamt up by nihilistic nerds who are desperate for something to beleive in. You and John Carter are two of my favourite writers.
Thankyou for writing this. Keep it up!
Thanks, Aleksandar.
And yeah, I think "nihilistic nerds" hits close to the mark in most cases. There are also a lot of poor, benighted souls in this group that pretend to understand how certain phenomena works, but have unfortunately gotten it backwards.
"AGI is unfalsifiable, because consciousness itself is. You cannot prove you are a conscious being, and neither can I. These are articles of faith. Perhaps you should consider what kind of religion you’re promoting, when you point at a box of wires and call it conscious."
This is very beautiful.
I wrote about it here in my own way, as I would - through the medium of animals.
They should fear our consciousness.
And they do.
https://walkingwithgoats.substack.com/p/sheep-against-satan
Thanks! I will check it out.
I really wish I had a like button for this...
I'm sure you can make one on your forge.
Best stuff today seems to be download the 4chan weights and use huffingame.co to manage the weights and oobagoomba to run them on the textgen gui