woopsn

Hey cool project! I built a solar system visualizer some years ago but just using the ephemerides data, no physics. This is ambitious. Noting your age I would say, invest some time in the basics - Euler, Improved Euler, finite differences, explicit vs implicit, multi-step methods etc.

Eg I see you've got a powerful adaptive Runge-Kutta method implemented in integrator.js. While that will do really well, for the sake of study you might make the solver implementation swappable and experiment with basic techniques. Some are very slow. Some maybe unstable and blow up the solar system. Why? Numeric methods are not one size fits all - see what the different tradeoffs are and how they respond to fiddling parameters. Understand the fundamentals.

A key thing about the undecidability problem wrt physics is preparation of the initial state. In math and computer science it is relatively straightforward to prepare such problems now (though this represented an enormous leap conceptually), but the "undecidability" of all physical problems relies on construction of materials that are clearly unconstructable - systems of infinite negentropy (eg Turing machines), infinite mass (the lattice), bespoke local interactions etc. Problems standing in the way of physics decidability are typically chaos, far from equilibrium mechanics, elementary SNR considerations and so forth, not problems of logic.

The infinite lattice doesn't represent a "real" physical processes, it's just mathematical technique for closing a (fundamentally) quantized combinatorial sum over millions of interacting elements. The gap problem exists in the limit. For real systems the spectrum can be measured (in principle) by probing the ground state. The computational paradigm is incredibly general but only within what's apparently a pretty atypical thermodynamic regime (the ordered universe).

I hate ads but they're intrinsic to media culture, fact you need 10 minutes of video media to wake up, go to the bathroom, at work, to decide dinner with your spouse, and then immediately when you get home etc. I'm not judging but you are not really going to great lengths to avoid ads.

Interesting quotes from the discovery emails. - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5jjk4CDnj9tA7ugxr/openai-ema...

"At some point we’d get someone to run the team, but he/she probably shouldn’t be on the governance board"

"generally, safety should be a first-class requirement"

"Probably better to have a standard C corp with a parallel nonprofit"

"Because we don't have any financial obligations, we can focus on the maximal positive human impact"

"The underlying philosophy of our company [OpenAI] is to disseminate AI technology as broadly as possible as an extension of all individual human wills, ensuring, in the spirit of liberty, that the power of digital intelligence is not overly concentrated and evolves toward the future desired by the sum of humanity"

"The outcome of this venture is uncertain and the pay is low compared to what others will offer, but we believe the goal and the structure are right"

"do you have any objection to me proactively increasing everyone's comp by 100-200k per year?"

"The output of any company is the vector sum of the people within it."

"it's totally OK to not share the science (even though sharing everything is definitely the right strategy in the short and possibly medium term for recruitment purposes)"

"Frankly, what surprises me is that the AI community is taking this long to figure out concepts. It doesn't sound super hard."

"Powerful ideas are produced by top people. Massive clusters help, and are very worth getting, but they play a less important role."

"Deepmind is causing me extreme mental stress."

"At any given time, we will take the action that is likely to most strongly benefit the world."

"Would be worth way more than $50M not to seem like Microsoft's marketing bitch."

"Ok. Let's figure out the least expensive way to ensure compute power is not a constraint..."

"Within the next three years, robotics should be completely solved . . . In as little as four years, each overnight experiment will feasibly use so much compute capacity that there’s an actual chance of waking up to AGI"

"We think the path must be: AI research non-profit (through end of 2017), AI research + hardware for-profit (starting 2018), Government project (when: ??)"

"Satisfying this means a situation where, regardless of what happens to the three of them, it's guaranteed that power over the company is distributed after the 2-3 year initial period"

"As mentioned, my experience with boards (assuming they consist of good, smart people) is that they are rational and reasonable. There is basically never a real hardcore battle. . ."

"The current structure provides you with a path where you end up with unilateral absolute control over the AGI. You stated that you don't want to control the final AGI, but during this negotiation, you've shown to us that absolute control is extremely important to you. As an example, you said that you needed to be CEO of the new company so that everyone will know that you are the one who is in charge. . ."

"Specifically, the concern is that Tesla has a duty to shareholders to maximize shareholder return, which is not aligned with OpenAI's mission"

"During this negotiation, we realized that we have allowed the idea of financial return 2-3 years down the line to drive our decisions . . . this attitude is wrong"

"i remain enthusiastic about the non-profit structure!"

". . .apparently in the last day almost everyone has been told that the for-profit structure is not happening and he [Sam] is happy about this"

"Our goal and mission are fundamentally correct"

"We also have identified a small but finite number of limitations in today's deep learning which are barriers to learning from human levels of experience. And we believe we uniquely are on trajectory to solving safety (at least in broad strokes) in the next three years."

"Our biggest tool is the moral high ground. To retain this, we must: Try our best to remain a non-profit. AI is going to shake up the fabric of society, and our fiduciary duty should be to humanity. Put increasing effort into the safety/control problem, rather than the fig leaf you've noted in other institutions. It doesn't matter who wins if everyone dies. Related to this, we need to communicate a "better red than dead" outlook — we're trying to build safe AGI, and we're not willing to destroy the world in a down-to-the-wire race to do so."

"The sharp rise in Dota bot performance is apparently causing people internally to worry that the timeline to AGI is sooner than they’d thought before."

"This needs billions per year immediately or forget it."

"all investors are clear that they should never expect a profit"

"We saw no alternative to a structure change given the amount of capital we needed and still to preserve a way to 'give the AGI to humanity' other than the capped profit thing, which also lets the board cancel all equity if needed for safety. Fwiw I personally have no equity and never have."

It's a kind of superposition representation a la Kolmogorov-Arnold, a learnable functional basis for elementary functions g(x,y)=f(x) - f^{-1}(y) in this sense with f=exp.

It's largely out of Meta's hands now anyway. The risk here not so much to privacy (it's Apple) but they'll walled garden the model space somehow for sure.

Relatively grandiose post sweeps in all kinds of claims about the universe to merely warn a big corporation can copy your idea easily.

As of now the site is in-fact a C&C/botnet. Cloudflare naturally fixates on such risks, not speech (generally). The basic purpose of 1.1.1.2 is to not wind up part of botnet.

In the technophile's future people aren't just getting dumber, not wanting to think or forgetting how - they aren't allowed to think. Maybe about anything. It's too big liability, costs too much to support, moreover detracts from the product. Like Sam A telling those Indian students they aren't worth the energy and water. That's what we're dealing with.

There's a paragraph on discovery that multinomial distributions are normal in the limit. The turn from there to CLT is not great, but that's a standard way to introduce normal distributions and explains a myriad of statistics.

A provocative aside in bad faith, anyway a completely minor point within the overall post, which some of the people he's telling to fuck off might have read

Good post. I guess the transistor has been in play for not even one century, and in any case singularities are everywhere, so who cares? The topic is grandiose and fun to speculate about, but many of the real issues relate to banal media culture and demographic health.

Why anything except universal algebra? I mean, granted, I myself dove right into topos theory...

Will or should? It's plausible, this same argument was made in an article the other day, but basic type/static analysis tools are cheap with enormous payoff and even those methods aren't ubiquitous.

It's a little arbitrary. Look at the graph on page 6, there's no steep gap in the spectrum there. 16 just about the balance point

Well that's stupid. I submit though, connecting stochastic process directly to shell you do give permission for everything that results. It's a stupid game. Gemini mixes up LEFT and RIGHT (!). You have to check it.

I would submit once you obtain a certain level of experience it becomes IDEAL to begin with implementation, in case a mathematical analysis may be either trivial or impossibly non-trivial... Of course if you're dealing in exchange rates and risk management, understand the math!

They ask a yes/no question and inject data into the state. It goes yes (20%). The prompt does not reveal the concept as of yet, of course. The injected activations, in addition to the prompt, steer the rest of the response. SOMETIMES it SOUNDED LIKE introspection. Other times it sounded like physical sensory experience, which is only more clearly errant since the thing has no senses.

I think this technique is going to be valuable for controlling the output distribution, but I don't find their "introspection" framing helpful to understanding.

The output distribution is altered - it starts responding "yes" 20% of the time - and then, conditional on that is more or less steered by the "concept" vector?

Either life really is extremely rare (most likely), or intelligent life is, or it isn't actually trivial/correct to destroy alien planets. If the galaxy were actually like that we would have been toast a long time ago. In reality dark forest is a generate thesis since it implies we're alone, so no aliens anyway.

It's worth reading Doron Zeilberger's many opinions about proof/rigor and other things.

https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/OPINIONS.html

The fundamental driver of the economy will be people, as always, because only people define "value".

Word generating machine will not "figure out how to cure cancer" but it could help, obviously. AI is extremely valuable tool but it does not work on my behalf, except in same sense a coin sorter does. It's a tool. I still see this thing confuse left and right (no exaggeration), which would be fine - tools aren't perfect - except for all bullshit from VCs. That is where the danger lies, not with the tool but idolatry.

I am concerned the system encourages suicide, delusional thinking etc. They need to work that out immediately. Must be held to at least the standard of a lawn mower or couch with regard to safety. Probably should make it safe before hooking it up to 10GW power plant. Does not help perception that author of this blog saying how awesome future will be is also building a hideaway bunker for himself.

This is all on you at OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Twitter etc. Whatever happens.

You make a lot of good points. Including that the technology to do all that incredibly dangerous to develop - I still can't see a path to terraforming where in the end it's human people left to take pleasure in Mars.

I had thought due to the eons we'd simply have evolved, but even on shorter time frames there is the transhumanist possibility. When we can engineer rabbit that eats chlorine moss, I don't know what we're aiming for at all. "People" by then could have robust gut culture that just digests the regolith.

There's a difference between considering all this vs thinking it's realistic. It's speculation, as any forecast into the centuries ahead must be.

My impression was that pulverized rock/iron is not actually "soil", so after forming the atmosphere you need lengthy biochemical processes playing out on the surface. I admit though, I don't know too much about this.

I didn't think reasonable really has a definition here. The rendezvous with these comets will take centuries or millennia even if we can get out there and kick them the right way (which is much harder than arranging a miss). Only then do we start terraforming, which takes thousands/millions of years in addition. Who/whatever we're preparing the planet for probably wouldn't be "people" anymore. :)

I recommend The Image by Daniel Boorstin. Smart phone is not the dawn at all but I guess more like high noon. The world is replaced by graphics (more generally , images) for a century at least. Books by "digests", heroism by celebrity and so forth. A little bit of media theory goes a long way to making the world "legible" again. Since we are absolutely steeped in media culture.

I would like AI that helps read and understand the text, but don't see real value having textbooks generated by AI.

But working with complex numbers I hardly if ever write (a, b) for a+ib, while I use the "escape hatches" all the time. They solve equations that have no real solution, they give me paths from x=-1 to x=1 that don't cross the origin, etc. There's only so much to learn about C as a vector space, while the theory tying it to R (and even N) is very deep.

I guess this PRNG has recurrence period much less than 52! (or wasn't seeded appropriately), so that only sampled a fraction of the distribution

"... the system ties its number generation to the number of seconds that have passed since midnight, resetting once each day, which further limits the possible random values. Only about 86 million arrangements could be generated this way,"