ragequittah

The argument (not sure I agree with it, but I also am not seeing many alternatives that make any sense) is that the world is already on fire, nobody is working to even slow the fire down really, and we're basically already doomed so as a hail Mary maybe AI can cause a technology boom that can help us fix it.

It is a somewhat coherent argument IMO. Humans are way too greedy and focused on the next financial quarter/unsustainable growth to ever put the fire out without some kind of sea change.

Is the crayon drawing made by a child "art"? I believe it is. They put what was in their head onto a piece of paper. Those images are no different. Some of the things people come up with is actually really neat to look at. If they did it in Photoshop pre-AI you'd probably be impressed. But now the outlook is tainted.

I'm a pretty big fan of this one and I'm not sure how anyone could say there's no creativity being shown just because it didn't take as much effort as it would've 5 years ago:

https://civitai.com/images/147579069

Being able to express your imagination with more fidelity should be celebrated shouldn't it? Taking what's in your mind and showing it to other people is a really neat thing that used to be restricted to a few people. Not sure why expanding it out is so controversial. And again once you take the word AI out of it you start to win a bunch of art contests, so it can't be all that bad.

I kinda disagree with both points maybe because I've been using / seeing AI art extensively for a while. Some people put in absolutely monumental effort into their stuff, and if it all looks the same then toy story looks the same as ghibli looks the same as 1950s Disney looks the same as Wallace and grommit (all of which you can replicate fairly faithfully, combine into something that looks new, whatever else).

I think AI art is much like ai coding where people used 1 model a couple of times then wrote it off completely as garbage. Then years of very quick progress happened and all the 10 fingers on a hand and every picture looking the same disappeared.

https://civitai.com/images

If you can make it through the first 20 images on civit and tell me nobody is expressing themselves or their imagination in some of these pictures I guess we agree to disagree.

This rings hollow to me for many reasons. When making CGI for movies quite a lot of the process has been completely automated for quite some time. So that scene in the movie is no longer art? Making video games you can use procedural generation to create a landscape, trees, rocks, etc. and most developers do at this point. Do we disregard all that when considering if the game is good or not? Or just blanket "it's bad because of that" like some people are doing with AI created stuff these days?

AI created art and photography keeps winning contests and people get all upset after the fact saying it's not real art. If it's not real art then why are the judges so impressed by it before they hear the word AI? I get the sentimental "but a soul that has experienced pain didn't create it" but if it's fun to look at and gives you joy is that not enough? And there is of course always a person in the loop creating it.

Definition of art: The conscious use of the imagination in the production of objects intended to be contemplated or appreciated as beautiful, as in the arrangement of forms, sounds, or words.

A director imagines the movie scene and has a rough storyboard sketched, then CGI artists make it who then usually have some form of algorithm or ML help them. I'm sure most people would agree that's art even though the director only had his thoughts interpreted by many different people / machines. Why is that so different than a person asking ChatGPT or Seedance to create something they (and only they) imagined? Is it the effort involved? What if they spent 2 hours refining 1 photo to obsessively to get exactly what was in their imagination onto the screen?

The alternative is pretty bad also. Let's create a chat app where people have the entire history of all the stupid things you said as a child and teenager for all time. I'm glad a grew up with ICQ and MSN messenger which were far more ephemeral histories mostly because nobody thought to save them.

I know people who know lots about their own domain. The instant you go to zoology or niche astronomy or architecture or whatever I have large doubts on the breadth of their knowledge. I do not have my doubts with Astra at all. It'll just search the internet for a good source (or 50) and get the correct answer.

When I was a kid we didn't need to learn multiplication tables or how to add/subtract large numbers or long division. By high school a pocket calculator could also do any algebra we were learning no sweat. We were still taught. But those graphing calculators that could do all of the work for us sure did come in handy to teach us a bunch of stuff faster/more clearly than was possible with the previous generation.

Whether or not 99% of people actually use those skills in life for anything other than to pat themselves on the back that they're "good at math" is another story. People are often proud if they can calculate a 20% tip in their head these days.

The more that the 'reliable support' becomes AI agents that make it harder and harder to get to an actual person, the more projects like this that can make good documentation that acts as support (if you point your own AI at it) make perfect sense.

Lots of smaller/medium sized companies where money is definitely an issue are also tethered to way too many SaaS subscriptions.

Anthropic seems to be leaving lots of money on the table because it made enough sense that they got pressured into putting up guardrails against it.

Microsoft copilot is the other one. Copilot has done so much damage to AI's reputation I think AI companies probably despise Microsoft.

Seconding this. It's come to the point where I tried out gemini (argon) and saw it was giving me a wrong answer and was immediately shocked how far behind google obviously still is.

If $1 million on the line general knowledge question I had to choose between an answer from chatgpt Astra and the answer coming from anyone I know currently (or everyone I know answering if even 1 of them gets it right I win) I'm choosing Astra 10/10 times based on my experience. And I suspect I'd likely leave this game with $10 million.

Every company has to collaborate with spy agencies. Majn difference vs. Gmail or most others is for email and files Proton have no information to give except the IP you used (really hard for users to mask), and they seem to deny VPN activity logs 100% of the time.

If you're a criminal that has nation state actors after you I'm not sure what service I'd recommend. For most every other person Proton is way more than private enough.

https://proton.me/legal/transparency

I think I'm with some of the other commenters in that there seems to be an oddly smelling smear campaign against them right now.

My favorite line I hear as a Canadian is that we don't make up enough of the population of the world to care about our emissions. Usually followed or preceded by some form of 'and besides the other guys aren't doing it'. Somehow people can't seem to see the irony.

I don't think Mythos is even close to what is available privately. If you can touch it as a consumer it's been heavily nerfed / censored and isn't using nearly as much compute as an actual SOTA model. But it'll reach the benchmark of improving itself (it's already building improved chips for itself - crafting its own brain) and people will change the goalposts again.

It really feels like a lack of imagination to think that this technology that surprises even the researchers working on it all the time will just stop improving in the fashion skeptics keep saying it will. I've been hearing it's "hit a wall" on every update since GPT 3.5 and the rate of improvement just keeps accelerating. Every single time someone says it'll never be able to do X (math was the big one I heard a lot - how can a language model do math?) it tends to do X not only well but better than us in time.

Sophistry goes both ways. My guess is if you're a skeptic and you're able to go back and see your thoughts from 2022 they were much different arguments than what they are now. Arguing that LLMs aren't going to be more intelligent than humans because of what they can do now could be like arguing the industrial revolution will stop at the steam engine. How can we possibly know either way?

My personal bet comes from the rate of change I'm seeing and how it's making many of my friends (even the high paid ones, in fact especially the high paid ones) obsolete overnight.

If that's your definition of AGI then there's never a proper way to measure it. Them being conscious and autonomous may very well already be the case. Remember that we only have access to the consumer LLMs, the tech is way further along than what we're seeing. But "consciousness" has no definition and I have a feeling, like intelligence, there's a subset of people who will never believe it's conscious because 'of course humans are better than X' is part of our DNA.

Again if you can't find 100 things an LLM is better than you at in an afternoon I call you a liar. Just because it's different in kind doesn't mean we can't marvel at how insane it is and give it credit for what it can do that we obviously can't. I feel the same way about an octopus and I equally can't tell if an octopus is less intelligent than us just because it doesn't have the capacity to do exactly what we do.

What an odd bar. People need to be involved because we haven't built the proper amount of robotics to create a data center from sand yet. I wouldn't be surprised at all if we could given enough effort and the current set of technologies though. I actually hope I'm wrong because the implications are terrifying, but I think most people are vastly underestimating just how far this technology can go. But the thing is we won't be limited to just this technology for very long. It will keep advancing as it continues to teach us new math, science, chip design, whatever else.

Go through the various definitions of AGI. They didn't start to become "it has to be a god that can do everything 100x better than a human" until very recently. If you can't find 100 tasks an AI is better/faster than you at in an afternoon I'd call you a liar. I'm unsure why there's so much skepticism about LLMs being extremely useful / "intelligent" (whatever that means, about as well defined as AGI) despite this fact. My guess is that humans just have a base instinct to refuse to cede their superiority.

“Twenty years ago, I think people would have happily agreed that systems with the ability of GPT-4 or (Google's) Gemini had achieved general intelligence comparable to that of humans,” Hinton said. “Being able to answer more or less any question in a sensible way would have passed the test. But now that AI can do that, people want to change the test.” - Geoffrey Hinton[1]

[1] https://www.clickorlando.com/business/2024/04/04/tech-compan...

* results may vary depending on your specific definition of AGI.

I like the way Kevin Roose put it: if you were to bring Astra or Opus 5.5 back to 2017 and show it to the leading AI researchers at the time and ask them if it were a form of AGI what would they say? The goal posts shift too fast to keep up with. Some people still worried about it counting Rs in strawberry as the models are making progress in frontier math and physics.

My take is that most art, prose, and code was really bad before AI too. Now there's just more of it good and bad. It's like hating that YouTube exists because cable TV was so good. Now anyone with a camera can make and upload whatever nonsense they want but in the end lots of very good content was made on top of the huge pile of rubbish.

Video games are a perfect example of how innovation all but stops when a few companies have access to all of the resources. Companies like EA, Ubisoft, Activision Blizzard all make mostly hot garbage these days because they 'innovated' themselves into making the same 4 games over and over. It's happening with movies too where everything is either a sequel or a remake because recognizable IP has been deemed more important than making something actually good.

Video games have always been about copying the other guy and making it better though. Blizzard famously akways just made the best parts of all other games in the genre packaged up with cool looking cinematics. Every single FPS borrows from every other FPS any time something new comes along. And thankfully when Nintendo tried to stop it with Palworld they (mostly) got egg on their face.

The one famous example that did stick that I can remember is warner bros patented the nemesis system in Shadow of Mordor. Nobody can use that actually rather cool idea until 2036 and it hasn't been used in a decade now. Real cool stuff and definitely pushed the industry forward.

>But "sudo make me a sandwich" style of vibe coding is just removing the obstacles to enshrining ambiguities and bad decisions in code.

I'm of the opinion that if you think it will stay this way you haven't been paying attention. "sudo find me a security flaw" already embarrasses top security researchers who have been working on the same code for decades. "sudo decompile this program/firmware/game" is doing absolute wondrous things right now even if there are still some flaws. If it can do these things better / significantly faster than humans already, and if it keeps improving at the rate it has been "sudo make me an operating system" that spits out something actually pretty good is probably within a decade.

There's a reason why enterprises don't give you an admin account on Windows. Sure damage can still be done, but the blast radius is highly reduced. It was like the first rule I learned about Linux back in the day: don't ever log in as root, don't even bother enabling it. Hell it's not even a good idea to do it on an offline computer cuz you might accidentally bork something yourself. The barrier of at least a password to install system level software or delete critical files is a good one to have.

Such a wild take to me. I install an entirely different operating system on my phone (graphene) which also advises me not to root because it's stupidly unsafe to do so. I also don't log in as root on linux, nor do I log in as an administrator in windows. None of these are sane practices to anyone worried about security.

I can root my Android phone and have in the past, but I have absolutely no desire to do so now because it adds almost no functionality in exchange for a very large security risk. I consider rooting my phone in the past quite a foolish move by someone who didn't know better.

I love Nintendo and have since the NES was released. Taking a day or 2 to set up an Ayn Thor w/ every game I've ever played from my childhood, the instruction manuals, and whatever other conveniences modern emulation affords really does beat trying to find the old hardware and games at a ridiculous premium. Also buying most all of the old stuff doesn't help Nintendo in any way so the 'morality' goes out the window. The setup IS a bit tedious but once it's done you rarely have to change anything.

I also own a Switch 1 w/ Breath of The Wild but I prefer to emulate it because you can increase the draw distance, get 60 FPS, add some HD textures [1], and fix some other issues that I had with the game because the Switch 1 was such terrible hardware. Even the Switch 2 version isn't nearly as good as the one you can get from emulating.

[1]https://youtu.be/YK2lkGsaoaw

Wait until you see how the Apollo lunar modules and such maneuvered in the 60s. This is pretty much all 60s and 70s tech we've seen before. Except it was much more impressive in the 60s on the moon. And I guess if you want cold-gas propulsion not chemical NASA Skylab is the way cooler actually practical example.

Do we not see a path forward where the humans are further informed, don't need to do so much heavy grunt work, and thus can think on deeper questions? I really don't see the final outcome being knowledge work for humans completely disappearing. In fact having something that potentially can do it better and faster will make keeping up with that knowledge all the more fascinating won't it? This whole conversation feels like what someone with an abacus would say when they saw the first digital pocket calculator.

I think when the open source models catch up (likely soon) we'll long for the days when companies could control it like this. I could easily see a teenager with openclaw and a single prompt causing millions of dollars in damage. Multiply that by the number of stupid people in the world and we have a problem.