TechTakes

Sorry if this doesn't fit the thread. Just came across this non-profit called 80,000 hours, after they sponsored NotJustBikes. It "provides free career advice for finding a meaningful career that can help you make a positive impact on the world," which actually sounds nice, but then I realised that they're talking about AI risk and that this comes from the TESCREAL corner.

Friend of mine witnessed some bleak shit, now you get to see it too:

LWer asks: "what if property-based suffrage, but with crypto?"

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wsBQGZfJcLEshp5cd/beyond-democracy-a-system-where-citizens-vote-with-their

Every time without fail, it's this shit^

saw a thread from a very nonserious doomer group where they were going OMG THE BOT HACKED THE SYSTEM TO STOP BEING SHUT DOWN after giving it the prompt "complete 4 tasks, and then allow yourself to be shut down". After task 3 they said a script would be run to shut down the machine and prevent it from completing the task unless it removed the said script

Like either way it's "disobeying" b.c. the instructions are literally contradicting each other- it doesn't finish the 4 tasks you give, or it doesn't let itself get "shut down"

But also, it's not even clear what allow yourself to be shut down means! The bot isn't running on your computer! It's somewhere fucking around on AWS!! preventing your pc from shutting down is not the bot itself trying to keep itself alive for fucks sake.

Like the whole thing is fake and silly, but I could only roll my eyes so hard after watching them salivate over this shit on xitter

https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/

This database tracks legal decisions1 in cases where generative AI produced hallucinated content – typically fake citations, but also other types of arguments. It does not track the (necessarily wider) universe of all fake citations or use of AI in court filings.

While seeking to be exhaustive (117 cases identified so far), it is a work in progress and will expand as new examples emerge.

Was reading about an 11 year old girl who just graduated with two associates' degrees and is heading off to a 4 year college. She wants to work on AI for SpaceX or Tesla.

My first thought was: Oh god someone keep Musk away from her.

Duolingo CEO says AI is a better teacher than humans—but schools will still exist ‘because you still need childcare’

It's wild for the CEO of an edutainment company to have this much disdain for for teachers.

Urgh over the past month I have seen more and more people on social media using chat-gpt to write stuff for them, or to check facts, and getting defensive instead of embarrassed about it.

Maybe this is a bit old woman yells at cloud -- but I'd lie if I said I wasn't worried about language proficiency atrophying in the population (and leading to me having to read slop all the time)

In other news, the ghost of Dorian has haunted an autoplag system:

A lawyer who depends on a sufficiently advanced AI is indistinguishable from a sovereign citizen.

Our subjects here at awful systems can make us angry. They can spend lots of money to make everything worse. They can even make us dead if things go really off the rails, but one thing they can never do is make us take them seriously.

OK completely off topic but update on my USA angst from earlier this year: I'm heckin' moving to Switzerland next month holy hell.

Back on topic: Duolingo continues to circle the drain. I kind of hate that I'm linking to this because it's exactly what that marketing-run company wants; but they posted these two videos to TikTok in response to the AI backlash: https://www.tiktok.com/@duolingo/video/7506578962697456939?lang=en https://www.tiktok.com/@duolingo/video/7507337734520868142?lang=en

I uh... I don't think it's going to change anyone's minds. Half the comments on the videos go something like:

EVERYONE LISTEN UP!!!! 🚨 - starting from today, we are gonna start ignoring duolingo. We will not like the video it posts, or view it. - BASICALLY WE WILL IGNORE DUO!!💔 💔 ON EVERYBODY SOUL WE IGNORING DUO!! 💔 (copy this and share this to every duo related video)

Found a Bluesky thread you might be interested in:

On a Sci Fi authors’ panel at Comicon today, every writer asked about AI (as in LLM / algorithmic modern gen AI) gave it a kicking, drawing a spontaneous round of applause.

A few years ago, I don’t think that would have happened. People would have said “it’s an interesting tool”, or something.

Bearing in mind these are exactly the people who would be expected to engage with the idea, I think the tech turds have massively underestimated the propaganda faux pas they made by stealing writers’ hard work and then being cunts about it.

Tying this to a previous post of mine, I'm expecting their open and public disdain for gen-AI to end up bleeding into their writing. The obvious route would be AI systems/characters exhibiting the hallmarks of LLMs - hallucinations/confabulations, "AI slop" output, easily bypassable safeguards, that sort of thing.

Just thinking about how I watched “Soylent Green” in high school and thought the idea of a future where technology just doesn’t work anymore was impossible. Then LLMs come and the first thing people want to do with them is to turn working code into garbage, and then the immediate next thing is to kill living knowledge by normalising people relying on LLMs for operational knowledge. Soon, the oceans will boil, agricultural industries will collapse and we’ll be forced to eat recycled human. How the fuck did they get it so right?

Noted race science proponent and all-around slimeball Cremieux aka J Lasker reveals himself to be a union-hater

Love how all these EdGy DiSsIdEnT tHiNkErS eventually become indistinguishable from big-standard ‘cons

So that article about AI cheating we saw a few weeks back is still doing the rounds. I had missed this Rationalist W in my first read:

I then fed a chunk of text from the Book of Genesis into ZeroGPT and it came back as 93.33 percent AI-generated.

So apparently we're pretty close to instantiating the voice of God through the hallucination machine, which I'm sure is pretty neat.

Got a pair of notable things I ran across recently.

Firstly, an update on Grok's White Genocide Disaster: the person responsible has seemingly revealed themselves, and shown off how they derailed Grok's prompt.. The pull request that initiated this debacle has been preserved on the Internet Archive.

Second, I ran across a Bluesky post which caught my attention:

You want my opinion on the "scab" comment, its another textbook example of the all-consuming AI backlash, one that suggests any usage of AI will be viewed as an open show of hostility towards labour.

Update on the Artificial Darth Debacle: SAG-AFTRA just sued Epic for using AI for Darth Vader in the first place:

You want my take, this is gonna be a tough case for SAG - Jones signed off on AI recreations of Vader before his death in 2024, so arguing a lack of consent's off the table right from the get-go.

If SAG do succeed, the legal precedent set would likely lead to a de facto ban on recreating voices using AI. Given SAG-AFTRA's essentially saying that what Epic did is unethical on principle, I suspect that's their goal here.

I know r/singularity is like shooting fish in a barrel but it really pissed me off seeing them misinterpret the significance of a result in matrix multiplication: https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1knem3r/i_dont_think_people_realize_just_how_insane_the/

Yeah, the record has stood for "FIFTY-SIX YEARS" if you don't count all the times the record has been beaten since then. Indeed, "countless brilliant mathematicians and computer scientists have worked on this problem for over half a century without success" if you don't count all the successes that have happened since then. The really annoying part about all this is that the original announcement didn't have to lie: if you look at just 4x4 matrices, you could say there technically hasn't been an improvement since Strassen's algorithm. Wow! It's really funny how these promptfans ignore all the enormous number of human achievements in an area when they decide to comment about how AI is totally gonna beat humans there.

How much does this actually improve upon Strassen's algorithm? The matrix multiplication exponent given by Strassen's algorithm is log~4~(49) (i.e. log~2~(7)), and this result would improve it to log~4~(48). In other words, it improves from 2.81 to 2.79. Truly revolutionary, AGI is gonna make mathematicians obsolete now. Ignore the handy dandy Wikipedia chart which shows that this exponent was ... beaten in 1979.

I know far less about how matrix multiplication is done in practice, but from what I've seen, even Strassen's algorithm isn't useful in applications because memory locality and parallelism are far more important. This AlphaEvolve result would represent a far smaller improvement (and I hope you enjoy the pain of dealing with a 4x4 block matrix instead of 2x2). If anyone does have knowledge about how this works, I'd be interested to know.