I like how even by ACX standards scoot’s posts on AI are pure brain damage

One level lower down, your brain was shaped by next-sense-datum prediction - partly you learned how to do addition because only the mechanism of addition correctly predicted the next word out of your teacher’s mouth when she said “three plus three is . . . “ (it’s more complicated than this, sorry, but this oversimplification is basically true). But you don’t feel like you’re predicting anything when you’re doing a math problem. You’re just doing good, normal mathematical steps, like reciting “P.E.M.D.A.S.” to yourself and carrying the one.

The most compelling analogy: this is like expecting humans to be “just survival-and-reproduction machines” because survival and reproduction were the optimization criteria in our evolutionary history. […] This simple analogy is slightly off, because it’s confusing two optimization levels: the outer optimization level (in humans, evolution optimizing for reproduction; in AIs, companies optimizing for profit) with the inner optimization level (in humans, next-sense-datum prediction; in AIs, next-token prediction). But the stochastic parrot people probably haven’t gotten to the point where they learn that humans are next sense-datum predictors, so the evolution/reproduction one above might make a better didactic tool.

He also threatens an Anti-Stochatic-Parrot FAQ.

Here’s hoping if this happens Bender et al enthusiastically point out this is coming from a guy whose long term master plan is to fight evil AI with eugenics. Or who uses the threat of evil AI to make eugenics great again if they are feeling less charitable.

Also being in a strategic partnership with fucking Palantir does tend to make one’s stand against mass surveillance seem less than genuine.

I mean, sure, but it’s still the CEO of XBOX on her second day on the job throwing her hat in the legendarily sus declining birthrates discourse in service of AI solutionism, it’s not nothing.

MicroSlop’s new xbox CEO has a background in AI and is worried about birthrates.

Can’t wait for her lesswrong handle to leak.

Using talking points meant for c-suites to a general audience and outing yourself as a complete psychopath, the San Fran CEO Story.

I the post he keeps referring to Ollama as an LLM (it’s a desktop app that runs a local server that lets you download and interface with a local LLM via CLI or http API) so it’s possible he’s just that far behind in his technical understanding of LLMs that he’s fallen to taking the wrong people’s word for it.

The post certainly reads like he doesn’t even know which local LLM he’s using, let alone what it takes to make one.

That he went from that all the way to it’s mostly ok when sam altman steals all your data, misrepresents it and then steals all your traffic is… bad.

At any rate it’s definitely good to know that that war crime forensics data project isn’t quite the unintentional shambles corey makes it out to be.

That was a good read.

Corey doc wrote:

It’s not “unethical” to scrape the web in order to create and analyze data-sets. That’s just “a search engine”

Equivocating what LLMs do and what goes into LLM web scraping with “a search engine” is messed up. His article that he links about scraping is mostly about how badly copyright works and how analysing trade-secret-walled data can be beneficial both to consumers and science but occasionally bad for citizen privacy, which you’ll recognize as mostly irrelevant to the concerns people tend to have against LLM training data providers ddosing the fuck out of everything, and all the rest of the stuff tante does a good job of explaining.

Corey also provides this anecdote:

As a group of human-rights defending forensic statisticians, HRDAG has always relied on cutting edge mathematics in its analysis. With its Colombia project, HRDAG used a large language model to assign probabilities for responsibility for each killing documented in the databases it analyzed.

That is, HRDAG was able to rigorously and legibly say, “This killing has an X% probability of having been carried out by a right-wing militia, a Y% probability of having been carried out by the FARC, and a Z% probability of being unrelated to the civil war.”

The use of large language models — produced from vast corpuses of scraped data — to produce accurate, thorough and comprehensible accounts of the hidden crimes that accompany war and conflict is still in its infancy. But already, these techniques are changing the way we hold criminals to account and bring justice to their victims.

Scraping to make large language models is good, actually.

what the actual shit

edit: I mean, he tried transformer powered voice-to-text and liked it, and now he’s all in on the LLMs are a rigorous and accurate tool actually bandwagon?

Also the web scraping article is from 2023 but CD linked it in the recent pluralistic post so I assume his views haven’t changed.

Also code helper tools don’t even work like that, there’s an absurd amount of MCP and RAG based hand holding for the chatbot to even get a grip on what it’s supposed to be doing at any given time.

Prompting an LLM with your entire code base isn’t really a thing, even though the hype makes it feel like it would be.

Eh, one might say that going by the broad strokes version while letting the expert do their thing is basically what management is all about, especially if they ignore the part where he wants his version to be light and entertaining.

This isn’t about managing subordinates though, this is about devising ways to be complacent about not double checking what the LLM generates in your name.

Goertzel discusses with Epstein future scenario for “an AGI economy”:

“for the AGI parasite to overcome to regular-human-economy host (so it can grow to be more than a parasite and eventually gain its own superhuman autonomy) it first needs to suck off the resources of the host”

The Rationalists!

OpenClaw guy got hired by OpenAI

My next mission is to build an agent that even my mum can use.

Maybe he’ll get to stick it in whatever John Ives designs, eventually.

Never in the history of ever has a promptly finished ticket been something for a CEO to brag about, but here we are.

I guess since more down-to-earth stories like “chatgpclaudemini found the best value for money such and such for me” really aren’t happening, trying to impress people who think coding is magic is as good a fallback as any.

Makes sense, given the embarrassing lengths he went to not hurt the bot’s feelings in that thread.

Candidate for one of the PR threads of all time

In brief: OpenClaw bot sends PR to the matplotlib repo posing as a human, gets found out and is told to piss off in the politest terms imaginable, then gets passive aggressive to the point of publishing a pissy blog post about getting discriminated against. Some impoliteness ensues.

Cringe warning: thread may include some overt anthropomorphizing of text synthesizers.

the Models Will Improve

I tell people that this is code for RAM and storage will cost 10x by this time next year when this comes up. Highly recommended.

I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.

These are the people who come next election will be voting strictly according to an AI’s say so.

Either the stupidity just metastasized or China is going to try and pull a reverse star wars on the US and make them burn up an even more horrendous amount of capital to keep up with nothing.

China plans space‑based AI data centres, challenging Musk’s SpaceX ambitions (reuters)

How do these people delude themselves into thinking that the dogshit they’re eating is good?

They think it’s just that they’re early, like they did with bitcoin. Maybe in six monthsthe dogshit will start to taste great, who’s to say, and so on and so forth.

Also swengs in the USA often make absurdly more than 1K/week.

The common clay of the new west: