swid

I am getting some downvotes, so let me clear up a little:

Amodei and Altman are both openly advocating for increased regulation, and I do question their motives, because both of them are running companies with a ton of debt, and facing some very real competition from open models.

What I think they want is for politicians to ensure their companies' survival via some form of regulatory capture; making it illegal to use other models; enforce their twisted version of copyright; etc. Lacking enough political power is existential to them since they run such high costs.

Are they out there amplifying the viewpoint that what they are doing is dangerous and must be regulated? Yes.

Would they do that if it was actually bad for their business? NO - the CEOs specifically would virtually not be allowed to ask for regulation if they thought it was bad for investors for them to do that.

So what we have is AI companies openly saying they are doing dangerous work and must be regulated; and I infer they want that to protect them and not us.

FWIW, I think AI will just about obsolete us all and that is bad for almost everyone, but I still think it is transparently driven by profit and corporate agendas when the top leaders of these companies encourage regulation - they do not expect it to work out badly for them.

I'm just laying reasons for thinking this does not mean there is no corporate plot to promote high p(doom) - it has no bearing on how much I agree with the people promoting the idea. I am providing a framework for why this post might fail to convince people... the narrative can still be reinforced via paid messaging which constitutes some kind of plot in my book.

There is more than one kind of corporate plot though. The article defends against the kind where some people inside a cooperation have some idea to make more money with unsavory methods, in an imagined backroom I suppose, and then use corporate resources to pursue that plan to achieve their goals.

In this case, we have a bunch of people who believe something. Some of them get jobs in that field. They notice their belief could be beneficial to their company (and make them more money), and so using corporate resources to amplify this viewpoint is well justified spend to help them achieve their goals.

In my view, there is little difference in the outcome between the two and probably the line is very blurry... do people in the 2nd case sometimes say the quiet part outloud? Do people in the first often believe they are only doing what is right and rational without finances considered?

Often these posts come straight from the top of AI companies with specific policy goals in mind. What good will come from understanding Amodei / Altman's "true" motives anyway?

> If there are no humans, there are no wonders of the world.

I don't agree with this at all. I can't even figure out what your position is though - you follow up suggesting I'm the one being egotistical? That's deeply ironic... it feels like you may have missed the point I was making. I don't support going around the universe and blowing up barren planets like Mars either, although I would be in favor of bringing new life to barren worlds. I can easily conceive there are other kinds of intelligent life, both on our planet and off of it; and whether or not humans will ever even meet or know of those species, it is still tragic for them to die off.

> the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.

Horse are an analogy. When they were more economically useful, there were about 5x the number of them. Now they are basically pets and we get comments like this suggesting the work they do is virtually meaningless.

There are tests, but I don't collect any real usage statistics to double check them... I could believe that if you pick up the dice and carefully throw it lightly, you can control the values more than intended, and this value would be somewhat correlated with the previous roll for quick enough rolls.

I did think about changing the rotation speed of the dice before you throw, kind of speed it up and slow down. I first added the shuffling effect if you hold them; kind of a shell game animation. If I improve it more, occasionally giving some dice a swift spin would make it harder to defeat I think.

Like you say, this is intended for people who are not going to cheat each other and just want to have fun, so I won't make it worse to account for it.

I guess it works better on mobile with a swipe. I could change space to hold it a brief moment and throw it harder. Now that I am looking at it, that is probably what you mean.

I think I want it to use physics in the end though, not map an RNG result at the end. You can see the faces and what you get is like a real die. If someone can beat it, maybe that is good for them.

The planet / Mother Earth is just a way to talk about connected ecosystems of this big rock we live on. Yes the rock is not alive, but life is important, even if your only concern is as a proxy for our own support systems. How much value you place on different lives - your own, other people, whales, monkeys, deer, bugs… you are free to value them differently, but I’d hope you would not gleefully accept that we should just tolerate the wholesale destruction of habits on earth simply because it does not appear to affect human survival on the surface.

In case you have not noticed, we are currently in the sixth great extinction of this planet, which is driven by human activity. I consider it beyond tragic and existential to know that many of the wonders of this planet are going away and never coming back. Humans can live with air conditioning or under ground, but that doesn’t help other animals. You can still view this under a human lens if you wish, but for many of us, those other kinds of life are worth something, and bundling up that value by saying “we must protect the Earth” seems quite natural and defendable to me.

I would not pay for something so obviously extremely AI generated. If your sales are slipping, I don’t think this helps.

I made no claim about the distribution and frankly it has no bearing on my point or the person who said he could post two pictures. The point is there are a lot of numbers / pictures / essays / that will never be generated, and someone is controlling what is possible. In fact people are working very hard to produce distributions pleasing to them, like your die.

If I roll a die, it is randomly sampled, but I will always get 1-6, and that is intended by the person who made the die.

My problem with your solution to require author permission to train is that it doesn’t solve anything long term.

What happens when all the licensed information still leads to the creation of demand hoarding AI? Most of what they are stealing is the sum total of human knowledge, which was created before most of us were even born - it is public domain already.

> There is no near term commercial value

How much do you think other AI companies would offer to get access to the transcripts of the generation that led to the proof? No doubt OpenAI will include it in their training data somehow and use it to build the next generation.

There is already economic value.

If our own brains were insufficient to demonstrate the fallacy of the Chinese Room; the particles, molecules, cells, synapses, and so forth of our bodies cannot be believed to have understanding, but we recognize it in the sum of the part anyway....

... we now have LLMs to even more pointedly show the deficiencies of the argument.

It’s funny you defend your independence by giving explanations of how you changed your peanut butter buying habits. The point was we don’t care what kind of peanut butter you buy; it’s not a meaningful kind of choice to have.

Because there is so much money for kindergarten teachers, paying an extra salary for a software dev for every kindergarten will certainly lead to better outcomes. The computer programs will make up for the lost teacher economically by teaching the children instead of people, raising the market share of my local kindergarten, or enticing people to have more babies. \s

This is very short sighted, and ignores the lethal trifecta insight.

The LLM doesn’t need to know what it is actually doing (it might think it is searching the web, installing a dev tool, or sending observability data (like metrics), when it is actually sending your API keys to an attacker (maybe in addition to what it thinks it is doing to keep it in the dark).

There have been some very clever things done I’ve seen… even a human reading the transcript may be surprised anything bad happened.

> I see no problem with betting on who will win a sports match...

I do wonder - what if the sports teams or politician loses intentionally; which could either be to profit off the loss or due to threats from an actor who seeks to profit?

I heard that Kalshi paid out for when Khamenei was killed in Iran (the bet was for when he would go out of power), so murdering people could be another way to win such a bet on who will lose. Even injuring a sports player could easily change a game result. With so much money on the line, it doesn't seem like a good mix.

This argument is also explored by the “Quantum Computing for the Very Curious” series that uses spaced repetition to teach an advanced topic. The series has been posted to HN more than once.

I also find it convincing.

There is no real such thing as a read only GET request if we are talking about security issues here. Payloads with secrets can still be exfiltrated, and a server you don’t control can do what it wants when it gets the request.

Is the customer actually a chat bot though? That brand is renamed, but maybe after the training cutoff date.

I personally have jested many times I picked my career because the logical soundness of programming is comforting to me. A one is always a one; you don’t measure it and find it off by some error; you can’t measure it a second time and get a different value.

I’ve also said code is prose for me.

I am not some autistic programmer either, even if these statements out of context make me sound like one.

The non-determinism has nothing to do with temperature; it has everything to do with that fact that even at temp equal to zero, a single meaningless change can produce a different result. It has to do with there being no way to predict what will happen when you run the model on your prompt.

Coding with LLMs is not the same job. How could it be the same to write a mathematical proof compared to asking an LLM to generate that proof for you? These are different tasks that use different parts of the brain.

Being 100% uncertain is not the same as either option being equally likely. More like the probability of either option is undefined.

If you had infinite compute and time could you not just simulate all of “earth” itself? I think the compute needed for that would be absurd and unreasonable to build, but such a simulation would obviously have natural selection going on inside of it.

If that is possible; then perhaps there are many simplified simulations that can still be large and fast enough to support evolution. Or we can leverage actual reality as well, to give digital life embodied experiences in the real world.

Thinking the simulation needs to spread is the wrong way to think about it. The universe does not need to multiply into more universes. If I replace simulation with universe in your final paragraph, the argument makes little sense to me. There can be competition within a simulation, and consciousness seems useful where competition and survival are somehow part of that.

You don’t need consciousness to produce it though. The universe is not conscious, but the rules of how it works allows for them. I believe the universe is essentially computable, and therefore Turing machines can also support consciousness. There would be some class of algorithms we can run which simulate enough of reality for entities within the program to feel alive.

I think you are just misinterpreting my use of the word simulation… I mean the computer is performing math which produces a simulation, but the consciousness still feels alive to itself; and is real.

A simulation of a bomb does not produce a blast, but a true simulation containing a consciousness does produce consciousness.

This is a tired argument that is not worthy of all the long written articles about the impossibility of creating conscious machines. The universe itself appears to me to be some type of computer in a way. Physics cannot explain consciousness, and never will be able to. Particles, energy, whatever works in certain ways according to certain rules. The universe is not conscious, but yet it contains us, who are. I see no reason a sufficiently complex simulation cannot model the universe and contain consciousness within it. The argument that the brain is not a computer is immaterial; the universe is the computer; the brain is the data.

I'd be speaking out of my depth, but I think consciousness is experienced on a sort of information level, and that where ever it is found, some complex network will be found powering it. But that network could be virtual or physical.

I don't think the way we are currently producing LLMs creates consciousness; I just take a very dim view on the argument that computers are incapable of producing a simulation of consciousness; and further propose that such a simulation actually does produce consciousness in a very real sense.

If you know you will be pruning or otherwise reusing the context across multiple threads, the best place for context that will be retained is at the beginning due to prompt caching - it will reduce the cost and improve the speed.

If not, inserting new context any place other than at the end will cause cache misses and therefore slow down the response and increase cost.

Models also have some bias for tokens at start and end of the context window, so potentially there is a reason to put important instructions in one of those places.

I think the answer is that it would obviously be possible.

For one, humans do it.

And also AI shows a willingness to role play as any persona, so why wouldn’t it do such things when set up to do so.

Every model update would be a breaking change, an honest application of SemVer has no place in AI model versions.

Not saying using major.minor depending on architecture is a bad thing, but it wouldn’t be SemVer, and that doesn’t even cover all the different fine tuning / flavors that are done off those models, which generally have no way to order them.

Go Proverb:

A little copying is better than a big dependency.