Why would that be a waste? The average professor at any college would probably be as smart as your friend. Professors (at least in the field I did my PhD in) are smart as hell.
694 karma · joined April 18, 2022
I have a deep drive to build the "important" stuff so that my life has meaning, but there's something hard to motivate about any given thing being "important" when you look at it long enough. It seems like the "important" thing I'm building eventually looks ridiculous and I bounce off of it.
OpenAI is going for the consumer-grade AI market, as opposed to a company like Anthropic making a specialized developer tool. Google can inject their AI tool in front of everybody in the world, and already have with Google AI search. All of these models are just going to reach parity eventually, but Google is burning cash compared to OpenAI burning debt. It seems like for consumer-grade purposes, AI use will just be free sooner or later (DeepSeek is free, Google AI search is free, students can get Gemini Pro for free for a year already). So all I'm seeing that OpenAI has is Sora, which seems like a business loser though I don't really understand it, and also ChatGPT seems to own the market of people roleplaying with chat bots as companions (which doesn't really seem like a multi-trillion dollar business but I could be wrong).
Basically these tools can you you to a 100k LOC project without much effort, but it's not going to be a serious product. A serious product requires understanding still.
Wow I'm doing it way wrong. How do I get the good stuff?
"consuming vast amounts of RAM" Also this. Claude will leave hanging instances all the time. If you check your task manager after a few days of using it without doing a full reset you'll see a number of hanging Claude processes using up 400 mb of RAM.
Claude actually has a huge number of very painful bugs. I'm aware of at least a dozen.
>>>"Not that it really changes anything if the particular way quarks interact did affect the brain in a way that couldn't be explained through the simplified view of a proton. It adds a few more particles to consider and the weirdness of quantum chromodynamics, but nothing there explains consciousness either.
>>>So how do you go from particles pushing and pulling on each other to consciousness? It seems to me no matter how you arrange a bunch of particles, there is never any reason to assume that arrangement is conscious. It's just a bunch of points moving according to a few simple rules."
The pushing and pulling is another computational process. Consciousness must be some irreducible component of matter or of certain arrangements of matter, so that this matter "just is conscious". The pulling / pushing done in the correct way imposes a complex experience on that matter. I would love to tell you what it is, but my reasoning is a process of elimination, where we eliminate the popular idea that consciousness = computation now when it is very important to humanity to do so.
>>>"equally absurd".
I don't think it is, and I am very passionate about this. If computation is the only explainer of consciousness, then every large enough random collection of bits can be interpreted as representing some conscious process given a complicated enough interpretation rule set. E.g. take an exabyte of random data and extract from it a 1 mb ChatGPT conversation by deciding to include this bit and to exclude that bit. Who's to say that my rule for extracting the correct bits isn't a valid computational process? If I just write a random bit string over an exabyte memory bank over and over, and if some way of interpreting part of it at this frame, and some way of interpreting it in the next frame etc.. etc.. results in an intelligent conversation, was a conscious being simulated? Let's make it more absurd. Take a computation which expresses consciousness. Print out the conversation in bit form onto a piece of paper. Cut up and rearrange the paper into a sequence first of all the 0's and then all the 1's. Then show the result to your friend and say this can be interpreted at a conscious process, therefore is conscious. This is ridiculous. Why is a blank sheet of paper not a conscious process if some guy says by looking at the paper he imagines 50 0's in a row and 100 1's in a row, and those can be rearranged to express a thought in some manner?
>>>"how would you even go about recognizing which artificial thinking machines have the required physical process for consciousness?"
We would not be able to tell until we actually learn more physics, which is the deepest reason I think it is unethical to build them at all. My position on the physical nature of consciousness makes me believe that everything with a neuron-based brain probably has consciousness. And so if we are hell-bent on making something with consciousness, we could do it by growing a brain in a lab. That's not to say I believe only a brain can have consciousness, it's just that it is the only kind I will have confidence in for the time being. The reason I doubt our computer hardware has consciousness is that computation is abundant in the universe (basically anything can be interpreted as computation), and so I doubt that just any arbitrary hardware we've created is likely to interact the computation with the special sauce in the right way.
If I impose a computational interpretation onto inert material after the fact, did that material possess the consciousness? Suppose I overlay a projection of the calculation of an AGI onto a circuit board, is that projection equally conscious to if that circuit board did the computation in the usual way?
Said differently, suppose we take a large computer and simulate a sequence of random byte strings. At each tick we contrive a substring and form a new sequence out of these substrings such that the combined sequence of substrings simulates an AGI. Was consciousness present in the original sequence. Is it even necessary to do any computation at all to create the consciousness then since any intelligent sequence can be interpreted out of anything?
No, that is absurd. The reasonable view is that computation is irrelevant and what is relevant is some special physical process.
The simpler belief than the idea that just any intelligent process is conscious is that consciousness is some kind of physical process that happens in particular conditions.
So do you think that most of the low hanging fruit for improving these tools has already been picked because there's just so much energy going into AI these days? E.g. there's a clear boost by connecting to the internet, by configuring thinking mode, by configuring Agents (which I assume is some kind of specialized thinking mode), etc..., but perhaps the base technology could be leveling off? I was definitely lulled into a false sense of security when GPT5 underperformed, at least in the media, but this was shattered when I tried out claude.