SneerClub

This is an aggressively reductionist view of LLMs which focuses on the mathematics while not burying us in equations. Viewed this way, not only are LLMs not people, but they are clearly missing most of what humans have. Choice sneer:

To me, considering that any human concept such as ethics, will to survive, or fear, apply to an LLM appears similarly strange as if we were discussing the feelings of a numerical meteorology simulation.

"Ban women from universities, higher education and most white-collar jobs."

"Allow people to privately borrow against the taxable part of the future incomes or other economic activities of their children."

So many execrable takes in one tweet, and that's only two of them. I'm tempted to think he's cynically outrage-farming, but then I remember who he is.

Found this article on the front page of r/nyc

Nate Soares and Big Yud have a book coming out. It's called "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies". From the names of the authors and the title of the book, you already know everything you need to know about its contents without having to read it. (In fact, given the signature prolixity of the rationalists, you can be sure that it says in 50,000 words what could just as easily have been said in 20.)

In this LessWrong post, Nate identifies the real reason the rationalists have been unsuccessful at convincing people in power to take the idea of existential risk seriously. The rationalists simply don't speak with enough conviction. They hide the strength of their beliefs. They aren't bold enough.

As if rationalists have ever been shy about stating their kooky beliefs.

But more importantly, buy his book. Buy so many copies of the book that it shows up on all the best-seller lists. Buy so many copies that he gets invited to speak on fancy talk shows that will sell even more books. Basically, make him famous. Make him rich. Make him a household name. Only then can we make sure that the AI god doesn't kill us all.

Nice racket.

covers some of the usual suspects here

NYT Really Needs to Proofread Their Op-Ed Titles

New Rolling Stone piece from Alex Morris, focusing heavily on our very good friends and the tech billionaires they're buddies with.

(Also, that's a pretty clever alternate title)

"TheFutureIsDesigned" bluechecks thusly:

You: takes 2 hours to read 1 book

Me: take 2 minutes to think of precisely the information I need, write a well-structured query, tell my agent AI to distribute it to the 17 models I've selected to help me with research, who then traverse approximately 1 million books, extract 17 different versions of the information I'm looking for, which my overseer agent then reviews, eliminates duplicate points, highlights purely conflicting ones for my review, and creates a 3-level summary.

And then I drink coffee for 58 minutes.

We are not the same.

For bonus points:

I want to live in the world of Hyperion, Ringworld, Foundation, and Dune.

You know, Dune.

(Via)

jesus this is gross man

This is unironically the most interesting accidental showcase of their psyche I've seen 😭 all the comments saying this is a convincing sim argument when half of the points for it are not points

Usually their arguments give me anxiety but this is actually deluded lol

Mfw my doomsday ai cult attracts ai cultists of a flavor I don't like

Not a fan of yud but getting daily emails from delulus would drive me to wish for the basilisk

https://xcancel.com/netflix/status/1928153876475097117

by College Hill

An excerpt has surfaced from the AI2027 podcast with siskind and the ex AI researcher, where the dear doctor makes the case for how an AGI could build an army of terminators in a year if it wanted.

It goes something like: OpenAI is worth as much as all US car companies (except tesla) combined, so it could buy up every car factory and convert it to a murderbot factory, because that's kind of like what the US gov did in WW2 to build bombers, reaching peak capacity in three years, and AGI would obviously be more efficient than a US wartime gov so let's say one year, generally a completely unassailable syllogism from very serious people.

Even /r/ssc commenters are calling him out about the whole AI doomer thing getting more noticeably culty than usual edit: The thread even features a rare heavily downvoted siskind post, -10 at the time of this edit.

The latter part of the clip is the interviewer pointing out that there might be technological bottlenecks that could require upending our entire economic model before stuff like curing cancer could be achieved, positing that if we somehow had AGI-like tech in the 1960s it would probably have to use its limited means to invent the entire tech tree that leads to late 2020s GPUs out of thin air, international supply chains and all, before starting on the road to becoming really useful.

Siskind then goes "nuh-uh!" and ultimately proceeds to give Elon's metaphorical asshole a tongue bath of unprecedented depth and rigor, all but claiming that what's keeping modern technology down is the inability to extract more man hours from Grimes' ex, and that's how we should view the eventual AGI-LLMs, like wittle Elons that don't need sleep. And didn't you know, having non-experts micromanage everything in a project is cool and awesome actually.

Begrudgingly Yeast (@begrudginglyyeast.bsky.social) on bsky informed me that I should read this short story called 'Death and the Gorgon' by Greg Egan as he has a good handle on the subjects/subjects we talk about. We have talked about Greg before on Reddit.

I was glad I did, so going to suggest that more people he do it. The only complaint you can have is that it gives no real 'steelman' airtime to the subjects/subjects it is being negative about. But well, he doesn't have to, he isn't the guardian. Anyway, not going to spoil it, best to just give it a read.

And if you are wondering, did the lesswrongers also read it? Of course: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hx5EkHFH5hGzngZDs/comment-on-death-and-the-gorgon (Warning, spoilers for the story)

(Note im not sure this pdf was intended to be public, I did find it on google, but might not be meant to be accessible this way).

Yarvin’s DOGE disillusionment is somewhat surreal, almost as if Marx had lived long enough to troll the Bolsheviks for misreading “Das Kapital.”

Archived version here.

Just for the record, I'm not suicidal.

I found a neat essay discussing the history of Doug Lenat, Eurisko, and cyc here. The essay is pretty cool, Doug Lenat made one of the largest and most systematic efforts to make Good Old Fashioned Symbolic AI reach AGI through sheer volume and detail of expert system entries. It didn't work (obviously), but what's interesting (especially in contrast to LLMs), is that Doug made his business, Cycorp actually profitable and actually produce useful products in the form of custom built expert systems to various customers over the decades with a steady level of employees and effort spent (as opposed to LLM companies sucking up massive VC capital to generate crappy products that will probably go bust).

This sparked memories of lesswrong discussion of Eurisko... which leads to some choice sneerable classic lines.

In a sequence classic, Eliezer discusses Eurisko. Having read an essay explaining Eurisko more clearly, a lot of Eliezer's discussion seems a lot emptier now.

To the best of my inexhaustive knowledge, EURISKO may still be the most sophisticated self-improving AI ever built - in the 1980s, by Douglas Lenat before he started wasting his life on Cyc. EURISKO was applied in domains ranging from the Traveller war game (EURISKO became champion without having ever before fought a human) to VLSI circuit design.

This line is classic Eliezer dunning-kruger arrogance. The lesson from Cyc were used in useful expert systems and effort building the expert systems was used to continue to advance Cyc, so I would call Doug really successful actually, much more successful than many AGI efforts (including Eliezer's). And it didn't depend on endless VC funding or hype cycles.

EURISKO used "heuristics" to, for example, design potential space fleets. It also had heuristics for suggesting new heuristics, and metaheuristics could apply to any heuristic, including metaheuristics. E.g. EURISKO started with the heuristic "investigate extreme cases" but moved on to "investigate cases close to extremes". The heuristics were written in RLL, which stands for Representation Language Language. According to Lenat, it was figuring out how to represent the heuristics in such fashion that they could usefully modify themselves without always just breaking, that consumed most of the conceptual effort in creating EURISKO.

...

EURISKO lacked what I called "insight" - that is, the type of abstract knowledge that lets humans fly through the search space. And so its recursive access to its own heuristics proved to be for nought. Unless, y'know, you're counting becoming world champion at Traveller without ever previously playing a human, as some sort of accomplishment.

Eliezer simultaneously mocks Doug's big achievements but exaggerates this one. The detailed essay I linked at the beginning actually explains this properly. Traveller's rules inadvertently encouraged a narrow degenerate (in the mathematical sense) strategy. The second place person actually found the same broken strategy Doug (using Eurisko) did, Doug just did it slightly better because he had gamed it out more and included a few ship designs that countered the opponent doing the same broken strategy. It was a nice feat of a human leveraging a computer to mathematically explore a game, it wasn't an AI independently exploring a game.

Another lesswronger brings up Eurisko here. Eliezer is of course worried:

This is a road that does not lead to Friendly AI, only to AGI. I doubt this has anything to do with Lenat's motives - but I'm glad the source code isn't published and I don't think you'd be doing a service to the human species by trying to reimplement it.

And yes, Eliezer actually is worried a 1970s dead end in AI might lead to FOOM and AGI doom. To a comment here:

Are you really afraid that AI is so easy that it's a very short distance between "ooh, cool" and "oh, shit"?

Eliezer responds:

Depends how cool. I don't know the space of self-modifying programs very well. Anything cooler than anything that's been tried before, even marginally cooler, has a noticeable subjective probability of going to shit. I mean, if you kept on making it marginally cooler and cooler, it'd go to "oh, shit" one day after a sequence of "ooh, cools" and I don't know how long that sequence is.

Fearmongering back in 2008 even before he had given up and gone full doomer.

And this reminds me, Eliezer did not actually predict which paths lead to better AI. In 2008 he was pretty convinced Neural Networks were not a path to AGI.

Not to mention that neural networks have also been "failing" (i.e., not yet succeeding) to produce real AI for 30 years now. I don't think this particular raw fact licenses any conclusions in particular. But at least don't tell me it's still the new revolutionary idea in AI.

Apparently it took all the way until AlphaGo (sometime 2015 to 2017) for Eliezer to start to realize he was wrong. (He never made a major post about changing his mind, I had to reconstruct this process and estimate this date from other lesswronger's discussing it and noticing small comments from him here and there.) Of course, even as late as 2017, MIRI was still neglecting neural networks to focus on abstract frameworks like "Highly Reliable Agent Design".

So yeah. Puts things into context, doesn't it.

Bonus: One of Doug's last papers, which lists out a lot of lessons LLMs could take from cyc and expert systems. You might recognize the co-author, Gary Marcus, from one of the LLM critical blogs: https://garymarcus.substack.com/

archive: https://archive.ph/2Gk9F

original accusation: https://dynomight.substack.com/p/jaccuse https://archive.is/CHZx5