LordDragonfang

Genuine question, was this comment written without opening the link? Because I can't see how you've come to this conclusion unless you're skipping several steps. The ads in TFA still look like ads to me.

Yeah, that would be a problem. Luckily, the actual post we're discussing isn't putting any advertising in the model.

This is a very important distinction to make -- complaints should be be about what is happening, and should distinguish that from what is not yet happening and should not. Because beyond the maxim that we should try to deal in facts... if OpenAI thinks people can't tell the difference anyways, they'll be justified in thinking they may as well just do the thing they're already being accused of doing.

if we could move society to a new paradigm

That's the reason why. That's just too big of an "if".

Any premise that is predicated on an artificially-induced complete paradigm (counter to the interests of capital, no less) shift to bear significant fruit is pretty much a non-starter. You need incredible buy in for that (which right-to-repair is just too niche to have), and established interests will still push against it every step of the way.

Maybe the EU could do it, but even then I'm skeptical.

I feel like you're not actually engaging with GP's point, Jonathan Swift.

Their point is that unpopular climate policies are exactly what is pushing the general populace towards this sort of regressive climate policy you're describing. "Maybe we should make a change in political leadership" is not a productive contribution when the current leadership is the result of bad policy messaging. GP isn't opposing leadership change, they're explaining how to move towards it.

(As much as I'd like to believe that people will just gain an educated understanding of the issues and choose correctly, the unfortunate fact is that real-world politics doesn't work like that, and has to contend with the fact that populism is what wins elections)

I'm sure that legislators could put the principle down in a much clearer way.

That's precisely the problem here. You're "sure" that a problem you don't actually fully understand is trivially solved in a simple manner, when the reality is that this sort of thing is incredibly complicated, and there's a multitude of reasons and competing interests that have resulted in the current equilibrium.

This is the sort of change that requires a country's laws to have to be rewritten from the ground-up, because it invalidates so many assumptions. It's the sort of thing you typically need a constitutional amendment (or at least, a novel interpretation of the existing text) for.

So, yeah, they're lacking the political will for that.

Depending on how you (you specifically) are defining "fully stated":

1. This is very literally what already happens, it's called a EULA.

2. In practice this means you are required to personally come to the customer's house to fix bugs (or any other ridiculous edge case that wasn't "fully stated"). As much as I strongly agree the law should swing much further in the direction of the consumer, as GP points out, that only holds until it's your obligation to the customer on the line. "In favor of the customer over anything else" is not a legally viable clause.

If you have a race condition, "correct action" is to solve that, because you shouldn't be papering over server-side bugs with client-side Javascript (and yes, it's a bug, because I shouldn't see an error page if I press the back button after logging in (and trying to navigate to what I was doing before logging in) either, which I still see quite often)

Yeah, I clocked it as AI the moment I read "Here is the uncomfortable part". Pangram detects it as 100% AI-generated:

https://www.pangram.com/history/c410d4b4-abfd-4ca0-b52d-db0d...

Hey, just FYI to everyone:

Even though this article is conveying good (and useful) information, it seems to be completely AI-generated.

Pangram clocks it as 100% AI: https://www.pangram.com/history/c410d4b4-abfd-4ca0-b52d-db0d...

Someone else in the thread lists it as 99%: https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector

Also, it sort of jumps out at you if you're used to reading AI writing. Claude loves to start paragraphs with "Here is the uncomfortable part".

I'm not necessarily saying this automatically makes it bad, but everyone should be aware of the source of their information.

Yeah, I clocked it as AI the moment I read "Here is the uncomfortable part". FWIW, Pangram detects it as 100% AI-generated.

https://www.pangram.com/history/c410d4b4-abfd-4ca0-b52d-db0d...

Whether or not someone is entitled to something has very little bearing on whether someone believes they are entitled to something (and are willing to waste everyone's time to make a stink about it). Having clear rules to point to, even after the fact, is surprisingly effective in mitigating that.

Or, put more bluntly, your belief in what people ought to feel entitled to has no bearing on what they do believe, and policy needs to address the latter, not the former.

Touché

Considering that "sentience" has enough "philosophical leeway" that it's just as reasonable to assert that LLMs are sentient (and at extremes, that they have been sentient for years) -- especially if we are, as you suggest, supposed to include any philosophically possible definition -- I don't think that's a meaningful rebuttal. If no one can agree on whether it's sentient, it's bad faith to choose a fringe definition that hands off its definition to such a nebulous term.

In fact, I'd argue that statements about what "is" and "is not" sentient relies on even more spirituality and word games for anything that isn't a terran tetrapod.

For a meaningful -- "helpful" -- discussion on such things, one has to assume that everyone is choosing a definition which is closer to the median usage and relies on not being totally subjective. Furthermore, given the breadth of options, it should be assumed to be a definition which allows which permits the form of the question to be meaningful, rather than begging the question -- if your definition is tautological enough that non-biological entities can't have understanding, you're just expressing dogma rather than having a discussion.

Anything else is bad faith, or assuming bad faith on the part of the participants.

Consider the number of humans I've seen make statements that fit that description (about AI, no less!), I don't think that's a strong argument against it.

they don’t understand

I have not seen any instance of this frequently-made assertion which is at all justified. It seems to rely on a definition of "understand" which is more about spirituality than actual observable evidence (they clearly can comprehend even complex tasks well enough to execute on them, and if you won't call that "understanding", you're playing word games rather than stating an objective fact).

Likewise, agents can literally come to a greater understanding of a problem through trial and error, and there are plenty of mechanisms to retain that knowledge. If you don't want to call that "learning", you're just making a choice to define it in a way more restrictive than how we use it for humans, and intentionally making communication more difficult.

The definition has already been stretched to not fit the previous models. There is no meaningful, static definition that significantly predates current capabilities.

There's a reason why ai xrisk doomers had to come up with the term ASI.

I would seriously suggest that everyone take a look at the wikipedia page for AGI from the month before ChatGPT was released, compare it to the current version, and not come to that conclusion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Artificial_genera...

That's already been true for a while, you're overestimating the average human. They just have different failure modes.

The main relevant difference between the former and all of the latter is that we're generally fine with regulating the labor market, but (liberals at least) are generally much less willing to regulate the interpersonal relationships market.

(The other relevant difference is that the labor market involves a significant unilateral power imbalance between the employer class and the employee class, which is the biggest contributing factor which leads to the above difference)

If you mean "set up an equivalent service" under your own domain, that's both less private and more likely to be blocked; there are a lot of services which, unfortunately, only allow sign-ups from big, well-known domains.

There are a number of CEOs that I would be willing to label as not being rational actors. Bezos would not typically make that list.

Nowhere in the terms of service for any Anthropic product does it guarantee access to Mythos or Fable.

I'm less confident in that. To me the way the announcement reads as malicious compliance -- this administration is extremely petty in its dealings, and it's not outside the realm of possibility they asked for and would have accepted an essentially symbolic ban, something that anyone with technical knowledge and a VPN could bypass.

Anthropic would have been able to talk to someone and explain how it wasn't possible to ban just "foreign nationals", and would have pointed out how nonsensical such a request was. The fact that the post does not mention any such discussion, and leaves the nonsensical request as the only stated reason, makes this feel like a power move by Dario, simply complying in the most dramatic and rage-inducing way and announcing it in a way to direct that rage at the USG. (Which is, IMO, a savvy move)

On the matter of being without taste -- which I assume the author is using as a self-derogatory descriptor for not having skill in UI design -- the styling of links on this page could use some change. The link color is so close to the body color that I initially thought there weren't any links, and scrolled trying to find the examples. You can't both remove the underline and have such a low contrast font color, it's bad UX.

(For the record, even though I don't mind qt, I think this particular example still comes across as slop because of the overuse of gradients on buttons and headings. In general, a lot of these suffer from overuse of gradients, but OP appears to just be averse to border-radius)

Good addition. Fully agreed on that point, yes. (At the very least for larger models, if not also for smaller ones)

If you scroll to the bottom of the Fable-5 by effort page, Max effort actually gets this correct! (Along with being the only one I've seen so far to make a bicycle frame that matches the shape of what most bikes on Google images look like)

Can't use them for basic LLM research, cybersecurity, or beyond-surface-level discussions of biology and virology

Your priorities are not everyone else's priorities. The people concerned about AI extinction risk list those as three of their biggest priorities for AI to not do. Those are the people whose culture Anthropic descends from, and by their measure, those exclusions make this the least evil path.

It's fundamentally because, despite (nearly) everyone's claims otherwise, the fact that we interact with them through language means we (our brains) model them as a sort of person. (Note that this fact is totally orthogonal as to whether it's actually sentient or not.) We then try and instruct them the same way we would a person totally subordinate to us.

When a "person" that you don't view as a "real" person repeatedly does exactly what you just told it not to do (often amid false assurances it understands and will avoid doing so in the future), most people get angry.

Compare it to how the kind of people who treat children like property treat their kids, or other examples of keeping people as property.

People argue for AI sentience from a place of emotion couched in logic. they _desperately_ want it to be true and will not take a logical step back. Any argument comes back to "well doesn't a human brain work like that?" Or some variation of it.

It's funny, because I find myself constantly stating the inverse of this. Every argument I've seen against AI being sentient plainly comes from, as you so eloquently put it, exactly "a place of emotion couched in logic". People desperately want it to not be true and will not take the logical step back of examining its actual similarities to human intelligence. Every argument comes down to "but it's not actually a human", or some variation of it -- which, if you pay attention, is not actually a logical counterargument. (Or, ironically, "but it doesn't have a soul", which is why the Pope is the perfect figurehead for these people).

If you already know any logical argument against it can be countered with "well doesn't a human brain work like that?", why are you so confident that your position is actually the logical one?

...And could it simply be that, alternatively, the concept is not actually a logical distinction, but rather an emotional one, made by emotional beings to put a word to what they claim makes them special?

I think it's a little disingenuous to describe the notoriously-amoral (pathologically dishonest, accused of being a sociopath) CEO of the major AI company as a mere "AI cheerleader". He's not exactly a central example of the category.

Altman is closer to a storybook evil CEO than he is to an average "AI cheerleader".

A glance at Wikipedia shows that this is somewhere between misleading overstatement and gross hyperbole, and under contention besides.