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scarmigon Everybody's Lost Their Minds

Someone complaining about water usage is a very strong indicator that they aren't well-informed enough to contribute anything worth reading, though.

scarmigon How GLM built its own inference infrastructure

As the sibling comment points out, that is incorrect: they solved a smaller, simpler problem, and OAI solved the actual Millennium Problem. But even if they had solved the actual problem and OAI stole it by digging through chats, that hardly supports the "AI has stalled" thesis; Claude played the major role in creating their blowup to a different problem.

How, exactly, does "it was Claude that solved Navier Stokes, not ChatGPT!" get you to "AI has hit a wall and stalled"? That's, not to put too fine a point on it, incoherent, and is just noise thrown into the discussion to avoid grappling with the fact that AI continues to rapidly improve.

scarmigon How GLM built its own inference infrastructure

Yeah, it's been over a week since a Millennium Problem was solved. AI has hit a wall.

scarmigon Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher

Then: "LLMs only cured cancer as a marketing stunt."

scarmigon OpenAI considers slowing advanced AI development, Sam Altman tells employees

The dominant opinion on HN is, apparently, "It's been a full four days since OpenAI resolved Navier-Stokes, they must be hitting a wall."

scarmigon Reflections on Americans' Net Worth

Note that Caplan is focusing on medians and percentiles in his table, not on means.

scarmigon Reflections on Americans' Net Worth

I do kind of get the point that ensuring Boomers who have a lot of wealth in real estate can pass a paid off house to their heirs isn't a socially valuable goal (especially since Social Security is funded by working people, including many who don't own a house or aren't due to inherit one). Maybe instead SS benefit can be considered more like a loan with the house as collateral, payable on death or transfer.

scarmigon How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?

Reading through them, Luu's grades seem fair and accurate to me. Best defense of Kurzweil I can give is that if you give a grace period of a decade and scope them down substantially (to maybe a subset of well-off Americans in coastal cities), he looks much better, though still under 50%.

One of Kurzweil's close-but-no-cigar failed predictions was "neural nets and genetic algorithms," killed off by the conjunction and being a couple years too early (2009 for increasing interest, and 2019 for wide use).

scarmigon How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?

But even those concessions have been a shift: at every point, he's been as bearish as possible on LLMs, often past credibility.

And if you take it as a given that AI will never be any better than ~~now~~ a year ago, and that anyone who disagrees is an idiot or a liar, then that pretty much demands that the entire AI economy must be as fraudulent as he imagines. Which, while it serves his purpose of serving up AI-skeptic invective slop well, doesn't actually model what's going on, which is speculative investments that have the potential to generate extraordinary returns.

scarmigon Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1

Still a flaw--the SVG should account for how different client devices will render it! Existential doom averted, for now.

scarmigon We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

That's a pretty crass attempt to shift the burden of proof. You're stating that LLMs are definitively not conscious and never could be; I'm saying we should approach the question with a sense of humility and agnosticism since we know so little about consciousness.

And it's unclear what your actual argument about the nature of consciousness is, aside from what seems like a bald assertion that humans are the only conscious beings.

scarmigon We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

Why? What makes you so absolutely certain? 100% is a lot, which implies you do have at least some privileged understanding of consciousness.

scarmigon We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

My argument isn't that current AI is definitively conscious or that it will be in the short term. It's that nobody has a cohesive theory of consciousness, and that we should therefore approach questions of what's conscious and what's not with humility.

For LLMs in particular, it's notable that they both 1) originate from a lineage that attempted to model biological brains mathematically and 2) are the only other known entities in the universe able to reproduce many types of human intellectual labor. That is surprising and striking. Does that mean that they definitively share other traits with humans like consciousness? No, but it does make them one of the most interesting candidates, particularly when we have a very limited understanding of how humans themselves are conscious.

scarmigon We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

No one understands these things, which is why considering machine consciousness as a possibility is entirely reasonable. People who have a shallow model of how they work ("it's just linear algebra!") betray a lack of understanding.

scarmigon AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

Unfortunately, that's not the case in the United States. The LOC only selects around half of published books to be permanently held. The rest are disposed of (usually returning them to the publisher, donating them to a library, or destroying them).

scarmigon AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

The magical library in the countryside, to be painfully explicit, does not exist.

scarmigon AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

Is your complaint that they follow copyright law, or that they don't follow copyright law?

scarmigon AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

Dumpsters also don't typically come equipped with a robot scanner and network uplink built in.

Like, I really don't know what people objecting to this imagine typically happens to old, unwanted books. They don't get sent to some magical library in the countryside if unpurchased where they are carefully maintained forever (next to where Rover spends the rest of his days). They are very literally thrown into the trash.

That said, I'd be thrilled if the US government required AI companies to make them available to the public. I'd even settle for the US government making it legal for them to.

scarmigon AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

Relinquishing copyright does not imply any of the labor you're suggesting. It's the opposite: you're just committing not to perform the labor of pursuing legal action against someone who does digitize and freely distribute the work.

Anna's Archive, for one, would be more than happy to host at no cost to the author.

scarmigon AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

You've got to compare it to the alternative. Books have a half-life, and the vast majority of these books being purchased are grody, moldering ex-lib copies of books that no one has read in decades. Their other likely outcome is mulching.

scarmigon AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

The hypothetical "heroic figure goes and buys last copy of a 1962 guide to Ford cars to carefully maintain it in an appropriately climate controlled library" is vanishingly unlikely. A ten or a hundred or a thousand times to one, it just goes to the trash. At least here it gets scanned by the AI company.

scarmigon If your agent commits a crime, who is responsible?

Yes. Otherwise, you open the door for every criminal to use "oopsie" as their defense.

scarmigon Pacing model development in an era of cyber-critical capabilities

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Look_Up

A movie fit for our time.

You can produce detailed descriptions of the incident, verified by adversarial parties, and some people will still scream "it's a conspiracy! It's a marketing stunt!"

This is all very unfortunate--there's a meaningful chance that AI will cause unprecedented disaster, with the HF incident being just a small preview, but people would rather squawk "stochastic parrot" for the millionth time than revise their beliefs.

scarmigon Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

California and Arizona use literally orders of magnitude more water for alfalfa farming than they do for data centers.

scarmigon Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

> we shouldn't be building these heat generating facilitates

Jesus.

scarmigon Norway should buy OpenAI

California's biggest problems are mostly along the lines of "too many people want to live here."

I have plenty of complaints about California governance, many of them conservative coded. But if California is a failed state, it's a failed state that much of the world aspires to be.

scarmigon AI Isn't Outthinking Mathematicians. It's Out-Remembering Them

So, what you're asking for is an example of someone extracting value out of something that is fundamentally irreducible random noise?

scarmigon AI Isn't Outthinking Mathematicians. It's Out-Remembering Them

There are plenty of artifacts that, if not impossible for humans to understand, then at least no human has ever completely understood. To start with, the universe as a whole. Despite that, we are able to choose legible pieces of it to model and perform useful actions from.

This will shift your argument--that doesn't count! etc., to the point where it's by construction unsatisfiable and vacuous. And it doesn't matter: an LLM might e.g. break some cryptographic algorithm in a way utterly unintelligible to humans, but the fact that it works would be sufficient on its own to make all of us choose to abandon that algorithm and choose different ones.

scarmigon AI has access to a vastly larger working memory than the human brain

Take something like

  (1+x*y)^3*z+y^2*(1+x*y)*(4+3*x*y);y+3*x*(1+x*y)^2*z+3*x*y^2*(4+3*x*y);2*x-3*x^2*y-x^3*z|0,0,-1/4|1,-3/2,13/2

If a thousand monkeys typed at a character per second, on a keyboard with the 23 relevant characters, it would take roughly 10^136 years for them to come up with this counterexample. Though, to be fair to monkey scenario, there's a large family of them known now, so it's not quite this bad: suppose there are a trillion permutations and similar examples that fit in this string. Then we are down to 10^124 years.

If LLMs are monkeys, somehow trained LLM weights allow them to model and prune massive numbers of universes in parallel.