andallthat

I agree. I was almost skipping it because of the title, but the article is nuanced and has some very good reflections on topics other that AI. Every technical progress is a tradeoff. The article mentions cars to get to the grocery store and how there are advantages in walking that we give up when always using a car. Are cars in general a stupid and useless technology? No, but we need to be aware of where the tradeoffs are. And eventually most of these tradeoffs are economic in nature.

By industrializing the production of carpets we might have lost some of our collective ability to produce those hand-made masterpieces of old, but we get to buy ok-looking carpets for cheap.

By reducing and industrializing the production of text content, our mastery of language is declining, but we get to read a lot of not-very-good content for free. This pre-dates AI btw, as can be seen by standardized tests in schools everywhere.

The new thing about GenAI, though is that it upends the promise that technology was going to do the grueling, boring work for us and free up time for us to do the creative things that give us joy. I feel the roles have reversed: even when I have to write an email or a piece of coding, AI does the creative piece and I'm the glorified proofreader and corrector.

cover letters, meeting notes, some process documentation: the stuff that for some reason "needs" to be done, usually written by people who don't want to write it for people who don't want to read it. That's all perfect for GenAI.

"he's no longer the sensitive man and caring lover that I used to know"

That would be... horrifyingly effective. Just the thought makes me want to bleach my brain

In other news: AI is a better human than Duolingo CEO

You are right. Bunch of incel 19-year-olds... This is probably more about hiding their browser history from their moms

" Under the mighty gaze of our Beloved Supreme Leader, steel folded and the Great Warship itself bowed. Cower and tremble, enemies of our Powerful State!"

Easy, we just give AI access to all our files and personal information and it will know our age!

Look up stuff where? Some things are verifiable more or less directly: the Moon is not 80% made of cheese,adding glue to pizza is not healthy, the average human hand does not have seven fingers. A "reasoning" model might do better with those than current LLMs.

But for a lot of our knowledge, verifying means "I say X because here are two reputable sources that say X". For that, having AI-generated text creeping up everywhere (including peer-reviewed scientific papers, that tend to be considered reputable) is blurring the line between truth and "hallucination" for both LLMs and humans

Basically, model collapse happens when the training data no longer matches real-world data

I'm more concerned about LLMs collaping the whole idea of "real-world".

I'm not a machine learning expert but I do get the basic concept of training a model and then evaluating its output against real data. But the whole thing rests on the idea that you have a model trained with relatively small samples of the real world and a big, clearly distinct "real world" to check the model's performance.

If LLMs have already ingested basically the entire information in the "real world" and their output is so pervasive that you can't easily tell what's true and what's AI-generated slop "how do we train our models now" is not my main concern.

As an example, take the judges who found made-up cases because lawyers used a LLM. What happens if made-up cases are referenced in several other places, including some legal textbooks used in Law Schools? Don't they become part of the "real world"?

I tried reading the paper. There is a free preprint version on arxiv. This page (from the article linked by OP) also links the code they used and the data they tried compressing, in the end.

While most of the theory is above my head, the basic intuition is that compression improves if you have some level of "understanding" or higher-level context of the data you are compressing. And LLMs are generally better at doing that than numeric algorithms.

As an example if you recognize a sequence of letters as the first chapter of the book Moby-Dick you'll probably transmit that information more efficiently than a compression algorithm. "The first chapter of Moby-Dick"; there .. I just did it.

I was not blaming your country at all, you're more than doing your part. It's just frustrating.

Thinking of the families of the victims, I hope that knowing they are not forgotten and people are trying to uncover the truth about what happened will at least provide some closure.