jedharris

Never mind debates about intelligence. How many actions can a system take at 99% reliability before a human must intervene? This metric is doubling every 7 months.

"Our results show that simple algorithmic improvements can enable significantly more data-efficient pre-training in a compute-rich future."

Certainly one of my criteria for a utopia would be that some of the beings in it are engaged in intriguing or exciting activities with meaningful consequences. I'd require more than Special Circumstances to meet this criterion -- they are too small a piece of the total system.

In Player of Games we see a corner of a gaming culture which partly meets this criterion but it does not have meaningful consequences outside the gaming participants (unless you count the ways the Minds use it to manipulate Gurgeh).

Maybe by this criterion utopias are impossible, since the disruption caused by exciting activities with consequences conflict too much with the optimality of the society. But I don't think anyone now can prove this would be the case.

In the Culture Series history hasn't ended, and the members of the Culture can and do leave and live in ways the Culture would find repugnant. Also there are marginal participants (such as the Mind known as Meat Fucker) who are more or less in the Culture but act in ways the Culture finds repugnant, but are not punished or controlled.

So according to your definition the Culture is not a utopia.

This is an example that supports Scott's point that people don't have world models. The people who "believe" this don't wonder how stock market continues to operate now that NYC is a wreck. Etc.

I wonder in what sense they really do "believe". If they had a strong practical reason to go to a big city, what would they do?

it's possible for simple normal trains of thought to latch your brain into a very undesirable state.

This seems very incorrect, or at least drastically underspecified. These trains of thought are "normal" (i.e. common and unremarkable) so why don't they "latch your brain into a very undesirable state" lots of the time?

I don't think Scott or anyone up to speed on modern neuroscience would deny the coupling of mental state and brain chemistry--in fact I think it would be more accurate to say both of them are aspects of the dynamics of the brain.

But this doesn't imply that "simple normal trains of thought" can latch our brain dynamics into bad states -- i.e. in dynamics language move us into a undesirable attractor. That would require a very problematic fragility in our normal self-regulation of brain dynamics.

some pointers to the research program please?

We often weaken ourselves by thinking we have a moral duty to be tolerant, even in the face of intolerance.

What the journey from AI assistant to full-virtuality can teach us about the nature of love.

See also independent RL based reasoning results, fully open source: https://hkust-nlp.notion.site/simplerl-reason

Very small training set!

"we replicate the DeepSeek-R1-Zero and DeepSeek-R1 training on small models with limited data. We show that long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and self-reflection can emerge on a 7B model with only 8K MATH examples, and we achieve surprisingly strong results on complex mathematical reasoning. Importantly, we fully open-source our training code and details to the community to inspire more works on reasoning."

They replicate the DeepSeek-R1-Zero and DeepSeek-R1 training on small models with limited data. We show that long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and self-reflection can emerge on a 7B model with only 8K MATH examples, and they achieve surprisingly strong results on complex mathematical reasoning. They fully open-source their training code and details to the community to inspire more works on reasoning.

PDF available at <https://dare.uva.nl/search?identifier=41ed9d6d-70a7-4bc7-882...>

None of the MP4 videos play in Firefox. The MOV videos play fine.

All the videos play in Safari. I have not tried Chrome.

That matches how philosophers typically talk about the Chinese room. However the Chinese room is supposed to "behaves as if it understands Chinese" and can engage in a conversation (let us assume via text). To do this the room must "remember" previously mentioned facts, people, etc. Furthermore it must line up ambiguous references correctly (both in reading and writing).

As we now know from more than 60 years of good old fashioned AI efforts, plus recent learning based AI, this CAN be done using computers but CANNOT be done using just ordinary if - then - else type rules no matter how complicated. Searle wrote before we had any systems that could actually (behave as if they) understood language and could converse like humans, so he can be forgiven for failing to understand this.

Now that we do know how to build these systems, we can still imagine a Chinese room. The little guy in the room will still be "following pre-written scripted algorithmic procedures." He'll have archives of billions of weights for his "dictionary". He will have to translate each character he "reads" into one or more vectors of hundreds or thousands of numbers, perform billions of matrix multiplies on the results, and translate the output of the calculations -- more vectors -- into characters to reply. (We may come up with something better, but the brain can clearly do something very much like this.)

Of course this will take the guy hundreds or thousands of years from "reading" some Chinese to "writing" a reply. Realistically if we use error correcting codes to handle his inevitable mistakes that will increase the time greatly.

Implication: Once we expand our image of the Chinese room enough to actually fulfill Searle's requirements, I can no longer imagine the actual system concretely, and I'm not convinced that the ROOM ITSELF "doesn't have a mind" that somehow emerges from the interaction of all these vectors and weights.

Too bad Searle is dead, I'd love to have his reply to this.

Very fully open-sourced (hardware, software, data). About $30 K BOM.

Seems like a great starting point for open source human scale robotics.

Also, you are obviously wrong (or rhetorical?) when you say "No one is talking about what a machine intends to do." We certainly do! You can say "No one should" or other normative condemnations but then we're arguing on different territory.

Some philosophers take that position. Dennett, explicitly cited in the article, wrote The Intentional Stance (1987) about exactly the approach to intentionality taken in the article. His approach is accepted by many philosophers.

As you point out, the approach you cite can't be used in a materialist metaphysical position. That's a pretty severe problem for that definition! So Dennett's approach, or something like it, has major advantages.

Cool way of putting it. Let's run with that. A good actor can be seen as instantiating a Boltzmann Brain while on stage -- especially when improvising (as always may be needed). Maybe each of us is instantiating some superposition of Boltzmann Brains in everyday life as we wend our way through various social roles...

From now on I'll listen for the subtle popping sounds as these BBs get instantiated and de-instantiated all around me...

Of course a philosopher can object that (1) these BBs are on a substrate that's richer than they are so aren't "really" BBs and (2) they often leave traces that are available to them in later instantiations which again classical BBs can't. So maybe make up another name -- but a great way to think.

The article provides a very clear reason for using the idea of "intention": that framing helps us understand and predict the behavior. In contrast framing a mathematical function as having "intention" doesn't help. The underlying mechanism isn't relevant to this criterion.

Clearly the system we're understanding as "intentional" has state; we can engage in multi-round interactions. It doesn't matter that we can separate the mutable state from the function that updates that state.

I'm surprised / disappointed this got so little attention on HN.

Very clean design, easier to understand than Rust (partly because better explained). Maybe shows the outlines of a clearer way to think about parallelism, which I hope will be fleshed out by further design moves, some of which are previewed in the last few paragraphs.

The reasons in the story are mostly symptoms of financialization -- the people making the major decisions were only looking at financial metrics, not operational metrics. The operational failures were driven by financial constraints. In turn the financial metrics weren't driven by actual constraints (capital available) but by gameable financial goals like ROI.

If the business had goals of being sustainable and reasonably profitable, and was run with strong operational guidance, it could have been successful.

I'm surprised that none of these comments address the completely new interaction paradigm -- eye tracking + hand gesture tracking. Previous devices couldn't track accurately enough to provide high quality user interaction this way. All the ones I know about required holding controllers.

If this is successful it will be the first completely new interaction paradigm since the mouse. Of course so far interactions are mapped down to hover and click because existing software can then run, but the UI tools aren't limited to that at all.

I'd expect that in five years we'll have a completely different sense of interaction with content through Vision (or Vision like products).

(For those who want to quibble -- Touch is somewhat new relative to the mouse, and multi-touch gestures are truly new but very limited. But the design of apps and user interaction hasn't significantly evolved relative to the mouse-bound era.)

The top comments miss the big driver for the first couple of years: business applications that are remote and/or collaboration heavy. I think these can easily drive more demand than Apple can fulfill in the first few years. Such applications are very price-insensitive.

Also the military training applications are potentially enormous. The cost reduction in training with simulated environments is huge, there's already a lot of DOD investment in this. I don't know how quickly this will ramp up, though.

Lots of excellent references showing LLMs have rich internal models such as color spaces. Good argument meaning doesn't require "grounding" in perceptions (with citations).

Lots of excellent references showing LLMs have internal models. Good precis of the philosophical argument that meaning doesn't require reference.

Probably in this case "Incentive Stock Options"

After a fair amount of searching I found what seems to be an equivalent powder at https://www.technoglowproducts.com/glow-in-the-dark-powder . The price is indeed better and the company offers interesting options for grain size.

From Wikipedia: The tetragonal disphenoid tetrahedral honeycomb is a space-filling tessellation (or honeycomb) in Euclidean 3-space made up of identical tetragonal disphenoidal cells.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetragonal_disphenoid_honeycom...

The term "illusion" here is confusing -- see most of the comments.

Consider a rainbow. It looks like a colored thing in the sky. If it is complete enough it seems to come down to earth at specific points. We even talk about "the end of the rainbow". We definitely see it, we have a real physical and also subjective experience of seeing a rainbow. We can even photograph it.

HOWEVER, there is no "thing in the sky". There are no "places it comes down to earth". The particular experience we have of seeing a rainbow is specific to the point where we are standing, the angle of the sun, the rain in the air, etc. none of which are part of our idea of a "thing in the sky".

So is a rainbow an illusion? It is certainly real in that we see and can photograph it. But also it is not at all the kind of THING that it seems.

Consciousness is also real. We can experience conscious periods, remember them, and with advancing imaging tech someday we can photograph them in the brain.

On the other hand the underlying reality of our conscious experiences isn't very much like our experience. Also, conscious experiences can be observed in meditation and other altered states in ways that make them seem very much like illusions.

So is consciousness an illusion? Yes and no, in the same way as a rainbow is and is not an illusion.