pbw

A floppy disk is a fixed size. The number of thoughts human language can convey is infinite. English Wikipedia has 6.6M articles. The AI could drop a Wikipedia-sized batch of articles, expertly written and cross-referenced, every day, forever. At the same interval they could drop 100 million YouTube videos, expertly authored and hyper-clear.

So yes there might be an infinite amount they cannot convey, but there is also an infinite amount they can convey. I guess it's half-glass-empty test if you are happy about the infinite you get, or are just sad about the infinite you don't get.

That the AI's thinking might be more advanced than ours is not in dispute. What's different about humans->AI compared to cockroaches->humans is language. Imagine we take our library of congress, with 50M books, and create a cockroach version of the library. It's a totally pointless exercise.

Now imagine being an AI and creating a human-readable library with 50M AI-written books for us to read. They could easily do that. And then create 50M more, again and again. And they could read every book we wrote. And forget books, humans and AI could have hundreds of millions of simultaneous real-time video conversations between humans and AI, forever, on any topic.

So being a human in an AI worlds is nothing like being a cockroach in a human world. Sam Harris used the same analogy but said we were ants instead of cockroaches I've heard bacteria also. I think people trot out these bad analogies strictly because it sounds dramatic, and being dramatic seems like good way to get people's attention. Or else they just didn't think it through.

Human language is a Big Big Deal. It's a massive piece of cognitive technology. Any intelligent species with language is in the club and they can communicate with all other intelligent species -- even if those species have very different cognitive capabilities.

I never said we'll mentally rise to the level of AIs. That won't happen. I only said AIs will be able to communicate complex ideas to us, in a way that's totally unlike our ability to communicate complex ideas to cockroaches.

For example, if the AIs could design a complicated building, using our level of technology, they could explain to us how to build that building. And we could build it. Whereas if we come up with a better cockroach-house design, we cannot communicate it to the cockroaches, we simply cannot give them the information. So the AI->us is a very different relationship from us->cockroach.

This doesn't preclude that there might be some things the AI cannot explain to us. Only that there will be many things (infinite in fact) which they can explain to us.

The fact that AIs will have some information that we cannot understand, or will have more information than they can transmit (or we can absorb) does not make us cockroaches.

The AIs will deliver to us truly massive quantities of information, every minute, until the end of time, much of it civilization-changing. Thus the AIs relationship to us will thus be nothing like our relationship to cockroaches, where we essentially cannot tell them anything, not even the time or the day of the week, let alone the contents of Wikipedia.

I think Hofstadter is having an emotional reaction to AI. He says so as much. And it'a a common one, it's the woe is me phase. But I think he's totally wrong about the analogy. I'm 100% sure we will not feel like cockroaches when AI is in full swing, not in the slightest.

If there were a species whose average adult intelligence was that of a human three-year old, then yes you'd be limited in what you could teach them. But as for what AIs can teach humans, you have to assume we are using competent smart adults. My claim is just what AIs can teach competent smart adults is many many orders of magnitude more than what humans can teach competent smart cockroaches. Thus Hofstadter's analogy is not a good one.

No non-human animals are in the club that's marked by having a language with an infinitely generative syntax and a large (100,000+ words) and always-growing vocabulary.

Intelligence might be a spectrum, but powerful generative language is a step function: you have it or you don't. If you have it, then higher intelligences can communicate complex thoughts to you, if you don't they can't. We have it, so we are in the club, we are not cockroaches.

I suspect the limit of what can be expressed in human language and comprehended by the human mind is vast, but yes, not infinite. I think the AIs will absolutely saturate the connection between them and us, with a non-stop torrent of information which will range from useful to civilization-changing.

And I think this is all very unlike how we are currently impacting the lives of cockroaches with our insights about, well anything. Thus, it's not a good analogy.

I think the key difference is language. I think human language is above a key threshold. Our syntaxes are infinitely generative and we have large vocabularies (100,000+ words) which are fully extensible. No other animals have that. My claim is AIs will be able to express any complex ideas in our language. But we cannot express our ideas in "cockroach language". So the analogy is not a good one.

I agree "one AI" might produce output that keeps humans busy for decades. But that doesn't make us cockroaches. Cockroaches can't understand language, at all. You can't teach a cockroach calculus if had a trillion years. That's not our position relative to AIs. We will be learning shit-tons from them constantly. I think people who say humans will be "cockroaches" or "ants" or "bacteria" are fear-mongering, or just confused.

Yes I agree it might be same thing under the hood. But with intelligence many very smart people seem to fall into using these analogies that diminish humans in a way I don't think is accurate. And I feel that makes people more scared of AI than they need to be, makes AI seem totally alien. [1]

The AIs might spit out entire fields of knowledge, and it might take humans decades of study to understand it all. And no single human might actually understand it all at the same time. But that's how very advanced fields of study already are.

But the "cockroach" slur implies AIs would be in this other stratosphere having endless discussions that we cannot remotely grok. My guess is that won't happen. Because if the AI were to say "I cannot explain this to you" I'd take that as evidence it wasn't all that intelligent after all.

[1] - https://metastable.org/alien.html

My point is you cannot teach a cockroach calculus, but if AIs invent a new type of math, they would be able to teach it to us. That's my claim. So the analogy of "we are cockroaches compared to the AI" is wrong, that won't be the case.

Once you have "enough" intelligence to have a complex language, like we do, I'm claiming you are in the club of intelligent species, and all species in that club can communicate ideas with each other. Even if the way they natively think is quite different.

I'm talking about the entire human species, not myself or any one person. I'm saying that humans relating to AIs would not be like cockroaches relating to people. Cockroaches don't have human-level language, but we do, and I'm proposing it is generative and extensible enough to explain any idea. I'm proposing there's non-intelligent species and intelligent species, but there's no intelligent++ species that would look down on us as cockroaches. I'm claiming that won't happen.

Hofstadter says humans will be like cockroaches compared to AI. This is an oft-repeated line: sometimes we are ants or bacteria. But I think these comparisons might be totally wrong.

I think it's very possible there's a Intelligence Completeness theorem that's analogous to Turing Completeness. A theorem that says intelligence is in some ways universal, and that our intelligence will be compatible with all other forms of intelligence, even if they are much "smarter".

Cockroaches are not an intelligent species, so they cannot understand our thoughts. But humans are intelligent, human languages have a universal grammar and can be indefinitely extended with new words. I think this puts us in the intelligence species club, and all species in that club can all discuss any idea.

AI might eventually be able to think much quicker than us, to see patterns and make insights better and faster than us. But I don't think makes us cockroaches. I think if they are so smart, they are by definition smart enough to explain us any idea, and with effort we'll be able to understand it and contribute our own thoughts.

Since it's Mapbox I wonder if they are using the Isochrone API[1], or if this is more custom b/c it's subways? I agree an adjustable duration of trip would be neat.

[1] - https://docs.mapbox.com/api/navigation/isochrone/

The "I will be happy when" trap is a dangerous one. Work on being content with that you have. Your health, your family, your friends, your hobbies. The fact that you live in 2023 and have the entire world of entertainment and information at your fingertips, something no human in the previous 200,000 years had.

> Everyone says ... a true engineer's paradise.

I've never had this impression of FAANG. I always figured there were a tiny number of people working on amazing projects, surrounded by a much larger number of people keeping the lights on, or working on very periphery projects that either no one cares about or which will never ship because of politics or business whims. Did you really think it would be ... paradise? Thinking that about ANYTHING is a recipe for dire soul-crushing disappointment.

This is simplistic: "AI operates by making high-probability choices". AI has parameters like "temperature" (GPT) or "--creative" (Midjourney) which can trivially steer the AI towards lower probability choices.

My guess is we'll end up with a 2nd "author" neural net to do highly "creative" work. The second net represents the POV of the author, its "life experience" and political leanings. It will choose lower probability options very mindfully, with deep meaning relative to the author.

> Humans are not exposed to "billions of words" ... continuous signals

Yes humans need to learn to extract words from signals, but that does not mean it's not correct to count the number of words they've been exposed to in their lifetime. Your comment is like saying we can't count the number of hamburgers someone has eaten, because they actually eat myofibrillar proteins, not burgers.

I don't have the source, it was a video interview, but Sam said he has personally invested in around 400 startups. And it says here he employs "a couple of dozen people" to manage his investment and homes. At that scale I think you yourself basically are a venture capital firm.

Meter thick panels with the density of rock? I’m seeing current satellite solar panels are 1-2mm thick with talk of getting them down to < 100 nanometers.

The last 1/3 is really about existential risk of any kind, beyond AI. And it says our relatively small Minimum Viable Population (~500) might allow us to bounce back from even really bad disasters, like nuclear war or an extremely deadly pandemic.

Plenty of MLM's will be "anything goes". That OpenAI does not want its brand associated with the worst things its users dream up, especially this early while it's still a research preview, makes sense to me. OpenAI was bold enough to put out a live LLM for people to hammer on, something several other companies declined to do. I think they've done a good job keeping the plane flying while plugging holes. Not a perfect job but a decent one.

Is there any prior work on how to integrate a LLM with something as primitive as a simple calculator? I suspect it's hard. Does ChatGPT even know what question to ask? Integrating LLM's with logic/reasoning/computation seems important, but I wonder if it's a ways off?

I doubt anyone would bother integration with Wolfram except for Wolfram, though.

I wrote about training my TikTok a while back: https://metastable.org/tiktok.html

My take-away was there's good stuff on there and awful stuff on there. Similar to the internet itself. The HN comments on my post were very split between loving and despising TikTok: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31360955

Medium is paywalled. Unless they are paying you a lot to post there, it’s a bad idea because many people will not be able to read your article. People can read X articles for free then it’s paywalled.

I don’t know how the “don’t paywall my article” works, but I run into paywalled Medium articles all the time.

Elon thinks PR is "manipulating the press" and that Tesla is better off spending their time and energy on product development.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2021/06/07/...

Like many TikTok reviewers, she's unknowingly broadcasting to the world her own tastes and preferences in describing "what is on TikTok". TikTok is like the Harry Potter mirror, it shows you exactly what you are looking for.

This part is totally wrong, "TikTok is not a suitable place for content that is purely informative or educational". I have seen endless informative and educational videos, thousands of them. She says TikTok videos have to be shocking, irreverent, socially awkward, scary --- she says this because she stopped and watched those videos. That's how it works. Like I describe here[1] there is plenty of good content on TikTok, but you do have to diligently and decisively skip of the bad content to see it. It's baffling that someone doing a PhD in "privacy & data protection" spent 30 days using TikTok without figuring that out.

That said, TikTok does contain an infinite amount of junk content, and it's super easy to go down that rabbit hole and never come out. Although... the internet as a whole is the same way: mostly junk, some good stuff you have to work to find.

[1] - https://metastable.org/tiktok.html

I went into college expecting to major in physics. My first non-general physics class was Modern Physics. The first half was a review of all of classical physics and I got an A on that half. The second half was quantum mechanics and I got an F on that half. It was just too abstract for me and the math was too intense. I switched my major to Computer Science.

The genome, all of our DNA combined, is just a bunch of 1D strings like "cgtattctgcttgta". Those strings encode proteins, which fold up into a 3D shape once created. This 3D shape is what determines what the protein actually does inside the cell. Without understanding protein folding we don't understand what the DNA actually does.

I think that AI will deliver a form of StrechText for every document, plus video and audio. It will condense the media down to any length you want.

A funny example of this is many people pad their YouTube videos out to 10+ minutes because they do better that way. With AI you'll be able to request a short version of that video. At which point the AI will squeeze out the duplication the human purposely added in to satisfy the algorithm.

Some companies offer unlimited PTO. The catch is the culture often discourages people from taking more than a few weeks off. It's been shown if the company just offers N weeks people take more time off than if it were unlimited, which seems ironic.

https://www.betterup.com/blog/unlimited-pto