Oh another thing, purely anekdotally, coding LLMs still suck at multithreading.

I feel that’s one part where they could legitimately make actual “AI” for, basically a tool that either proves that nothing depends on exact timing, finds a counter example, or tells you it can’t do either (in which case your code is probably just very bad). But big overfunded AI labs probably feel that such tooling is beneath them.

By the way, his argument about “you wouldn’t mention tools” is just plain wrong.

A few years back, at work, I found a security bug introduced by a commit that said something like “fix Coverity warnings”. I ended up reviewing every commit that mentioned Coverity, because that legacy codebase had a lot of rather bad tricks that triggered Coverity to have a false positive.

And when a large number of false positives were getting resolved by editing code, sometimes that resulted in a false negative. E.g. Coverity complains about a memory leak, you end up with double free. Or vice versa, it complains about double free, and you end up with a leak. (The exact example was even more on the nose; Coverity complained about use-after-free, and the fix for it introduced a real use-after-free).

Bottom line is, they do not want to have those labels because that would enable someone to actually measure how good or bad LLMs are at code.

This is another thing that is extremely familiar to most commercial developers: there’s an LLM-powered code review bot, but unlike any tool ever before, nobody’s even trying to capture statistics whether it works or not. Why? Because whoever rolls out AI tooling isn’t sure that the tooling actually works for its stated purpose, and wants to for sure get their recognition and promotion for rolling out AI tooling, without jeopardizing it with the risk of adverse KPIs.

Besides advertising their bots as slaves, they may just be using prompts as training data (or the whole chat histories in reinforcement learning), in which case they probably would prefer you don’t swear.

I think it’s like their “it can kill everyone” thing. The sort of people who actually care about things like slavery or the risk of everyone dying, with the exception of an occasional crazy person, are not interested in believing complete bullshit.

They’re upselling their product as slavery. Apparently this works because there’s no intersection between the set of people who buy into corporate marketing bullshit like this, and the sort of people who would oppose a corporation if it did slavery.

I think if no actual living beings (or some future AI that isn’t this feedforward memoryless bullshit) are being harmed then it’s not so much doing as it is saying in the sense of making a statement, which is kind of unclear.

That’s my take as well.

I think this Anthropic fellow is too much of a psychopath to understand that there’s other reasons to ponder the question of consciousness, than to try to upsell a chatbot as a slave, and so he can’t understand that it would actually be very bad for him if a bunch of normies were told, with full weight of divine authority, that these things are conscious. I mean, maybe not civil war level bad, but worse than PETA on your ass level bad for sure.

And that is to me very disturbing. He can’t even imagine that a reaction to “this is a slave” could be anything other than “shut up and take my money”.

I think that’s a separate phenomenon. Renewables are often cheaper than fossil fuels, which is great.

But to avoid pollution, we must actually leave fossil fuels in the ground, unused, unburned.

You know what is the big green initiative at fossil fuel companies? Using renewable energy to power fracking. The worst case scenario used to be that we only leave fossil fuels in the ground when the energy required for their extraction exceeds energy obtained by burning them. Now, the range of scenarios has expanded in both directions. We can leave fossil fuels in the ground because it’s cheaper to do renewables. But also we can extract and burn below-energy-breakeven fossil fuels.

We did give up on it. New shiny shit comes along and they need electricity, where do they get it? Converted airplane turbines, even reciprocating ship engines, etc, all running on natural gas. All the green pledge companies just polluting like there’s no tomorrow, quite literally.

Not to mention that if we didn’t give up on global warming, that would have slowed down AI development, giving more time to prevent AI doomsday.

Plus on the would be dooms day the AI would have less computing power available to it, meaning it would take it longer to figure out how to build another datacenter overnight. Plus if it is more distributed there’s greater latency.

The thing about Yudkowsky’s cult is that like any religion it is really all about not actually thinking anything through.

Everyone accuses them of not really believing what they say, because they can’t think straight about anything that they “believe”. To such an extreme extent it comes off as some sort of cynical ploy with a hidden agenda to convert the oxygen in the atmosphere into paperclips.

Well yeah its gonna likely fail to hack the power grid, but also just starting or stopping too many GPUs at once is a problem if they are grid connected, so I dunno. We damn near had a grid collapse from a freeze in Texas.

Also i used to point out that the real “foom” is how we are fucking up the planet after billions years of evolution. Practically in an instant. Like yeah it feels slow to us because we run pretty fast.

But on geological timeframe it really could just as well be their stupid AI dismantling the planet in 6 days (and on the seventh day, resting).

I would argue that the root cause is that they are complete morons who wouldn’t recognize paperclip maximization if it put a gas turbine in their backyard.

The emerging talk about “AI Chornobyl” is quite disturbing with regards to what this booga-booga gonna look like. If they don’t get enough booga booga from this stupid hacking incident, then what?

What’s really disturbing to me is that now they are talking about the power grid as a target. It’s not like their usual biblical stuff about plagues and locusts. Of course, power grid can’t be that insecure, or Iran would’ve went for it already, but they have privileged access courtesy of all the use of chatbots to run shell commands etc.

I think AI is kind of like that stupid universal socket wrench head that has a bunch of pins in it. The main skill in using something like that would be guessing when it’s not gonna work and not using it.

Yeah sloppers I know went from “see it proved new math! that totally clears us of plagiarism accusations we get when we repost that someone ai generated a frogger and a WoW clone” to “tried to use it for coding and it didn’t do a good job”.

The math stuff is mostly using Lean proof verifier and all that, by the way, the only use of LLM that they found that is actually legit because it doesn’t matter if its slopping, and you want your attempts randomized.

Anyone who would have tried the kind of bullshit he’s trying, a century ago, would have died of radium poisoning or something equally dreadful. The only reason this idiot is still alive is regulations; however he’s pretty good at risk compensating greater safety of quack treatments in 21th century with the sheer number of quack treatments he’s doing.

I’m going to prognosticate that he’ll die through some combination of the sheer brute force effort he’s putting into finding a lethal quack treatment, and the weakening of regulations and corresponding societal norms relating to quack treatments.

Fucking knew it. I follow some idiot slopper thread and they are all always going on about their prompting and absolutely none of them ever even considered measuring the effects.

Having actually done optimizations including professionally once upon a time, its so ridiculous to see people thinking they optimize a stochastic process [when they don’t even formally measure anything]. It is just gambling.

In addition to shoving absolute piece of shit “products” into everything. Prompt injectable “assistants”, worthless search overviews, shoveled out without any QA or security reviews or anything.

Take those doctor transcriotionists that make up whole sentences. Why in the fuck is there even an LLM in there? Oh it lowers word error rate? That’s because nobody expected having to benchmark bad faith efforts where coherent sentences can be completely made up, so nobody thought it necessary to disqualify for it.

They are still trying to prompt inject the robot god into turning us all into paperclips, I see.