dag100

Embrace the inner Cormac McCarthy in you and abandon punctuation altogether

Look carefully at the portion of derac's comment that was quoted.

I want accelerated material science, medical science, energy, better outcomes for people across the world.

Does it mention mathematics?

Let AI make advances in all these fields. But if most of the power and capital in society is captured by a tiny minority, then these advances will become inaccessible to common people.

I want accelerated material science, medical science, energy, better outcomes for people across the world.

There will be people benefiting from advances in these fields.

Neither you nor I will be one of them.

Oh no, now I'd better blame Hitler and Stalin's ancestors for their misdeeds. Of course, the SS soldier bears no responsibility, however, as he was just doing his job.

Literally the only important thing in life, the basis of all value, the formation of self-identity, comes from communication with other human beings.

I think you're mistaking their sarcasm for sincerity... especially considering the emphasis on self-identity ironically juxtaposed as originating from a decidedly non-self activity, which has all the hallmarks of being intentional...

On the other hand, reading their other content leads one to believe that they may, in fact, be serious... hmm...

Could the student really not infer the meanings of those words from context? I don't think Burgess expected his readers to have a working knowledge of Russian.

TFA means Capitalism in terms of "capitalism as it is today, particularly in the US". There are plenty of other ways of figuring out how to distribute resources.

And die in large numbers, yes.

providers do not want power-seeking LLMs

Sure they don't.

do you think training a power-seeking ASI is a good idea?

Do you really think that the major AI firms think this is a bad idea? I think the whole drama people have around ASI taking over the planet is ridiculous and fantastical and, honestly, a way to distract from the real problems of ASI - that is, creating a rigidly hierarchical world with zero social mobility.

They mistook you for the author of the original post (abirch). A little ironic for a comment regarding focused analysis of what someone has written.

It's reddit. The average intelligence of reddit users has been progressing downwards since 2010 or so with major drops in 2016 and 2020. Most users are clueless teenagers who haven't read a book in full throughout their lives.

Wow, I can't wait to live in a world where nobody knows how anything works, some people are arbitrarily rich and some arbitrarily poor with no ability to change their standing in life, and, worst of all, people celebrate these developments, even if they may be in the poor cohort, as progress.

I can't help but think that this is intentional and that model providers have subtly steered LLMs towards this personality. Golden Gate Claude (https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude) was two whole years ago and Anthropic has progressed by leaps and bounds since then. And with a population that becomes more and more trusting, and worse, reliant, on chatbots, these LLMs will be able to shape public opinion in a way never seen before, not even with social media.

Well, countries that limit the wealthy from leaving have never done particularly well for themselves. This has been the case historically, at least. Whether this has been due to their own deficiencies or external factors is highly debatable. Not to mention that wealth is power because we measure everything using money nowadays, and apart from money there is really no better universal unit.

We've developed a technology that with active critical analysis this can teach one practically anything.

While I would love to share your optimism, if AI continues improving at its current pace most people would be pushed into destitution before they have any ability or opportunity to utilize their newfound knowledge for their own betterment. That's the whole point of "permanent". Nothing you know or do will improve your living standards beyond that threshold.

That's good to hear about ML and AI research, but most research is not based on computers and so would require laboratory setups to reproduce. Not only is trying to reproduce such findings (beyond what is effectively a sanity check) through simulations a lost cause, if AI can reproduce such research it would be capable of doing such research itself... in which case it would be far more fruitful to use AI to do further research.

My hope is that the flood of AI articles pushes the academic publication system to its highly-anticipated breaking point.

This will just make research inaccessible to most researchers. There is no incentive to limit publishing, at all, other than at the highest echelons. Publish or perish will just become worse. Look at what is happening to programming and extrapolate that to research work.

And all for what? Just to keep up this facade of society until most of society can be excised, whether artificially or naturally though lack of reproduction.

i felt more welcome in china

Are you white? Try being non-white. Chinese people, and most Asians - yes, the entire continent, or at least most of it - are deferent to white people.

and even in the US for example than anywhere in europe

The US is one of, if not the most, welcoming countries in the world. Additionally, I suppose you probably lived in a city or at least a large town in the US rather than anywhere rural or more closed-off.

Unless reviewing becomes more profitable than publishing, anything that makes both easier will drive one up far more than the other. And it is difficult to conceive of something that would make reviewing much easier without making publishing much easier.

heck, even as a native german if you move from one region in germany to another you are treated as an unwelcome outsider. less so in big cities where you are more anonymous but still. if you are lucky you can find "your tribe" and your children may be accepted if they grow up there.

This is standard for most of the world. Really, only some countries, all of them developed, are exceptions to this.

This is an incredible project for an undergraduate. Very impressive. Interesting to note that Firefox is 25% slower than Chrome/Safari, I wonder why.

The 80s happened because of the stagnation of the 70s.

But, ideally, with each day, more useful products and services are being made and delivered. It'd be useful to have extra dollars around to account for more stuff being made and more things being done. Thus having more dollars in existence doesn't necessarily mean the value of a dollar is decreasing.

What does cause inflation, however, is when more dollars are printed versus things being made. You can't precisely measure the latter, so you have to make do with price indices and such. Which makes inflation hard to actually gauge, especially when everyone expects more and more to be produced every year (i.e. they expect their savings and investments to appreciate/gain interest) so you have to print more dollars to at least keep up the facade.

mathematics were one of the rare sciences were great scientists could emerge from any country with a good education system.

But would they be able to realize their potential without further (mostly monetary and institutional) support from their country? In that way, things now are not so different from before. However, the story will probably change in a few years' time.

Computational intelligence obviates the role of the human in making capital reproduce and multiply. Mathematics as its own field of study might become pointless other than as a hobby - an endeavour reserved for those entitled to the machine's output. What the machine develops in the place of mathematics may not be recognizable enough to even share the same label - that is, if it even uses mathematical principles rather than just finding correlations that are 'good enough' for its use.

Is it really that surprising that no-one has invested the time and effort into figuring out the personal information of some tech employee-turned-founder? I bet no-one outside of tech even knows his name.

Can't really practice medical or legal skills from the comfort of your home on devices everyone has had for 10 years now. Also, unlike computers which must obey every whim of their master, lawyers and doctors deal with humans. Which makes raw skill less important.

Asking for payment for written work is hardly rent-seeking...

Really makes you wonder who is going through the reasoning traces and how many of them they are parsing through per-hour for their eyes to completely gloss over at seeing this rather than recognise that this, in fact, completely legible.

What's also interesting is the use of emojis to represent dead ends. I guess they really have become morphemes now.

Err, yes, until the surplus kills off all other competition and allows the supplier to jack prices up sky high, or otherwise bend consumers to their will. There's a reason most countries will stop foreign firms from doing this to them.

The point is that the technology is already too democratized for anyone to hold onto it. Google had chatbot LLMs in 2019 and tried to keep them under wraps, how many years did that buy them?

They were hardly the only ones in the space. OpenAI has been around since 2015. GPT-3 was released in 2020 and ChatGPT in 2022. Not to mention, I wouldn't call something produced by a handful of megacorporations worldwide particularly democratized. In fact, Google's transparency is what allowed it to be democratized, because it published its findings about transformers publicly.

So far, LLMs are great and all, but they only really "fill in the blanks." That's a fundamental limitation of the entire concept of modelling in general; you cannot generalize to out-of-distribution inputs. The bottleneck is going to end up being human beings no matter which way you slice it.

This is a laughably naïve take especially when LLMs have a) been trained on quite literally all the data the world can provide and b) are being trained more and more using reinforcement learning techniques - which don't rely on data at all and instead on producing emergent behaviour from a set of ground rules. With every new release their agentic capabilities improve and they become more independent, requiring only the impetus to get going.

This is also called the Jevons paradox, when making a resource less expensive leads to overall market growing.

Oh yes, there will definitely be more software. That is guaranteed. What is not guaranteed is how many humans will be involved in making it. Just as more coal is being mined than ever but fewer people are involved in it. Efficiencies in coal mining aren't what made the average coal miner's working conditions or income better, regulations are.

If you went back a thousand years ago and told someone carrying a bucket full of water that one day pipes would run across the civilized world and water would literally be free basically everywhere

If you told a Roman this, they would not be as surprised as you would think as aqueducts already existed back then. They would be more surprised that the common man had the ability to vote in most countries. I doubt it will stay that way with improvements in AI, at least not without a great reduction in population.