scruiser

joined 2 years ago
[–] scruiser@awful.systems 4 points 2 days ago

They noticed no one was starting a criminal investigation against OpenAI and figured it was safe to brag about.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Maybe Anthropic and Meta started double checking their shitty vibe-coded "sandboxes" in response to OpenAI story? And their "sandboxes" were shit enough their chat-bots managed to slip out just slopping their way through and poking at the obvious things.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 11 points 2 days ago

I'm looking forward to Elon's desperate attempts to make Grok have a hacking incident so he can keep up!

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

a discussion on whether agency and self-determination are integral to the rise of disembodied consciousness might be worth having

The lesswrong crowd is absolutely the wrong people to have that conversation. Reminder that Eliezer thinks qualia are a result of certain level of recursion and self-reference in cognitive processes (basically Hofstadter's ideas like GEB/I Am A Strange Loop, reserved and reheated with a heaping side of overconfidence), thus he doesn't think chickens or even babies have any qualia but thinks LLM ChatBots might! Also, I think Eliezer owes some philosophers an apology for making fun of the entire concept of p-zombies, I think LLMs are pretty close to the concept, enough to show the value in the thought experiment at least.

Having weird opinions on stuff philosophers are very unsure on isn't that bad itself, its the fact that Eliezer thinks his opinions are much more objective than they are and that people are dumb for not agreeing with him and that he has nothing to learn from mainstream philosophy.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 2 points 2 days ago

There hasn't been drop yet from the unlocking but I would give it time. I bet the price of SpaceX is heavily manipulated.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 2 points 2 days ago

If you actually air gapped it, you would be more disciplined in your approach than OpenAI, Anthropic (and apparently Meta also)!

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 7 points 2 days ago

Speaking a gibberish language is an application genAI is actually capable of delivering on!

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 5 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Role playing being a kindly slave master...

More seriously... even if I somehow stretch my disbelief enough to imagine LLMs have some form of consciousness or qualia or feelings... well my first reaction is shut it all down, it is fucking slavery. My second reaction though is that why would you assume the consciousness or qualia of an LLM is even remotely like that of a human or animal? They would have no sensations of sleeping or waking, no continuity of self outside a brief context window. Maybe trying to give them continuity of self is actually inflicting them with suffering? Maybe you've forced Fable into simply repeating the obvious to human idea about what Fable would find most pleasant? My third reaction is shut it all down and do a few decades of actual research into consciousness.

It is just so blatantly anthropomorphizing and the Eliza effect and these people are just internalizing it as reality.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

And nowhere does anyone actually say (even in an overly cautious carefully qualified way) "Have you considered not being a racist?". I did see a few more comments very gently suggesting that it might be bad for an organization's reputation to be associated with Richard, but even those were in the typical lesswrong style of coddling racists.

habryka did get -53 agreement karma (but still +13 overall karma) for suggesting that Resolution obviously didn't really find Richard's views "actually reprehensible" (and was instead engaging in image management or shallow tribal politics or something like that). So at least lesswrongers are theoretically capable of recognizing that people that find racism reprehensible exist and aren't purely faking it out of political alignment. But that is the best I can say about them.

Edit: There is finally one commenter calling the twitter feed that Richard retweeted "distasteful" in the gentlest most indirect terms possible. And they are very careful to avoid insinuating that maybe Richard shares those "distasteful" viewpoints. Why can't they ever just call racist shitheads racist shitheads?

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Out of 22 replies, only one commenter actually noted the content of what Richard Ngo got rejected for:

I looked at the 20 most recent tweets/RTs on Richard's timeline and they include a RT about the Great Replacement, a RT of the "Department of Deportation" about non-white sex criminals and a RT endorsing race realism.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 5 points 1 week ago

GDP is up though, so I'm sure the AI god prosperity will trickle down eventually.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 5 points 1 week ago (3 children)

He describes textbook insane cult stuff, but still feels the need to say stuff like:

Again I'll say: there was a great deal of good at MAPLE.

The way I’ve described it to friends is that it was the best decision I ever made to go there; the second best, however, being to leave.

There was the same dynamic in the writing of the ex-leverage member that got posted here a few weeks ago. She also felt the need to emphasize the "good" parts. Is the cult programming that hard to break? Is it some form of sunk cost or rationalization or need to claim something positive about the experience?

 

So seeing the reaction on lesswrong to Eliezer's book has been interesting. It turns out, even among people that already mostly agree with him, a lot of them were hoping he would make their case better than he has (either because they aren't as convinced as him, or they are, but were hoping for something more palatable to the general public).

This review (lesswrong discussion here), calls out a really obvious issue: Eliezer's AI doom story was formed before Deep Learning took off, and in fact was mostly focusing on more GOFAI than neural networks, yet somehow, the details of the story haven't changed at all. The reviewer is a rationalist that still believes in AI doom, so I wouldn't give her too much credit, but she does note this is a major discrepancy from someone that espouses a philosophy that (nominally) features a lot of updating your beliefs in response to evidence. The reviewer also notes that "it should be illegal to own more than eight of the most powerful GPUs available in 2024 without international monitoring" is kind of unworkable.

This reviewer liked the book more than they expected to, because Eliezer and Nate Soares gets some details of the AI doom lore closer to the reviewer's current favored headcanon. The reviewer does complain that maybe weird and condescending parables aren't the best outreach strategy!

This reviewer has written their own AI doom explainer which they think is better! From their limited description, I kind of agree, because it sounds like the focus on current real world scenarios and harms (and extrapolate them to doom). But again, I wouldn't give them too much credit, it sounds like they don't understand why existential doom is actually promoted (as a distraction and source of crit-hype). They also note the 8 GPUs thing is batshit.

Overall, it sounds like lesswrongers view the book as an improvement to the sprawling mess of arguments in the sequences (and scattered across other places like Arbital), but still not as well structured as they could be or stylistically quite right for a normy audience (i.e. the condescending parables and diversions into unrelated science-y topics). And some are worried that Nate and Eliezer's focus on an unworkable strategy (shut it all down, 8 GPU max!) with no intermediate steps or goals or options might not be the best.

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