200fifty

Exchange presented without comment:

My prediction: the advance of tech by AI will far surpasse what it consume in energy.

To look at the energy consumption of current model is extremely short sighted. If AI create a new material, a new solar cell, advance fusion reactor is all of humanity that jump forward.

Furthermore new generation of AI accelerators and new algorithms will improve efficiency by order of magnitute, it's still early days.

For every good thing, come up with a bad.

The material created will be a better poison/virus. The algorithm to keep the fusion tokamak from going boom will be at best 99% correct. The new solar cell? More exotic materials required than the current.

Blind optimism is a vice we cannot afford.

The post you're responding to doesn't argue from blind optimism, it argued a reasonably-expected gain in net beneficial effects.

When people say stuff like this it always makes me wonder "what pace, exactly?" Truthfully, I feel like hearing someone say "well, generative AI is such a fast-moving field" at this point is enough on its own to ping my BS detector.

Maybe it was forgivable to say it in May 2023, but at this point it definitely feels like progress has slowed down/leveled off. AI doesn't really seem to me to be significantly more capable than it was a year ago -- I guess OpenAI can generate videos now, but it's been almost a year since "will smith eating spaghetti," so...

I'm confused how this is even supposed to demonstrating "metacognition" or whatever? It's not discussing its own thought process or demonstrating awareness of its own internal state, it just said "this sentence might have been added to see if I was paying attention." Am I missing something here? Is it just that it said "I... paying attention"?

This is a thing humans already do sometimes in real life and discuss -- when I was in middle school, I'd sometimes put the word "banana" randomly into the middle of my essays to see if the teacher noticed -- so pardon me if I assume the LLM is doing this by the same means it does literally everything else, i.e. mimicking a human phrasing about a situation that occurred, rather than suddenly developing radical new capabilities that it has never demonstrated before even in situations where those would be useful.

I'm so sorry to inform you...

(10,959 words... I don't think I hate myself enough to read this one all the way through.)

Everything about Zack is sad.

I have to say, if you look past the, well, you know, stuff, he's actually pretty decent at injecting pathos into the posts about his personal life. His writing does a good job bringing you into his extremely depressing/self-loathing inner world -- you really feel for the guy, or at least I do. That said, it's this exact effect which makes me think he is probably not perceiving things as lucidly as he thinks he is. Depression can feel like clarity, but that's no way to live.

I love this unhinged Yudkowsky quote buried in here:

This is a filter affecting your evidence; it has not to my own knowledge filtered out a giant valid counterargument that invalidates this whole post. I would have kept silent in that case, for to speak then would have been dishonest.

Personally, I'm used to operating without the cognitive support of a civilization in controversial domains, and have some confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it myself before speaking. So you know, from having read this, that I checked all the speakable and unspeakable arguments I had thought of, and concluded that this speakable argument would be good on net to publish[...]

Zack is actually correct that this is a pretty wild thing to say... "Rest assured that I considered all possible counterarguments against my position which I was able to generate with my mega super brain. No, I haven't actually looked at the arguments against my position, but I'm confident in my ability to think of everything that people who disagree with me would say."

It so happens that Yudkowsky is on the 'right side' politically in this particular case, but man, this is real sloppy for someone who claims to be on the side of capital-T truth.

The problem is... well, Zack correctly recognizes Yudkowsky is maybe not as world-changingly smart as he presents himself, and may be engaging in motivated reasoning rather than disinterested truth-seeking, but then his solution (a) doesn't involve questioning his belief in the rest of the robot apocalypse mythos, and (b) does involve running crying directly into the arms of Moldbug and a bunch of TERFs, which like, dude. Maybe consider critically interrogating those people's arguments too??

I feel like it was all over from the moment they made it talk in first person. No one had any illusions that Inferkit or NovelAI were general intelligences, because it was obvious that they were just language models autocompleting a sentence you typed in.

each of us has a strong ethical obligation to live so as to alleviate the suffering of those less fortunate than ourselves

Sounds like he did a bad job at living up to those principles then, huh?

Also is it just me or is this not actually a very good description of utilitarian beliefs lol

Wow, he seems so confident and secure in his masculinity! No one's gonna think this guy has issues with his sexuality after he made this tweet, that's for darn sure.

this made me laugh out loud thank you

And who doesn’t want to be younger for longer?

Oh, of course it's about this. Is it ever not about this with Thiel?