scruiser

Well, OpenAI and Anthropic have repeatedly degraded their service through unacknowledged quantization and/or dynamically swapping models on the user. /r/singularity has gotten sick of it to the point it is a meme. It is because they can't actually afford to offer quality SOTA models at the price point people will actually pay for them.

The percentage isn't total progress to some key point of AI 2027, it is progress relative to their timeline. A constant 1.0 would be staying on track with their predictions, numbers less than that would be falling behind. So they are admitting the real numbers are falling behind their predictions more and more (while still not acknowledging their entire timelines was bs in the first place).

Ed Zitron has also explained his suspicion that lots of GPUs are sitting around in warehouses waiting to be installed, in some cases sold (to juice NVIDIA's revenue) but not even shipped yet.

And I'm really skeptical speedup from AIs claimed by the LLM companies is in anyway related to reality.

That wouldn't make sense, because 1.07 would mean progress is negative. I think they meant it as a multiplier? So 1.07 is almost exactly what the predicted, .17 is only 17% of what they expected.

Anyway, it doesn't really matter, because so much of the input numbers to these calcs are garbage.

That is even worse than using the ARRs, which Ed Zitron has extensively explained are wildly distorted numbers done by shuffling sales and costs around to get really good 30-day to 1-month stretches.

Bioman has already pointed out the "Economic Value" numbers they are using for these tables are probably bullshit (based on self reported run-rate extrapolations that are deliberate distortions at best, based on VC valuation at worst). To add to this... the compute values are also probably bullshit. They are likely based on data center announcements and not confirmed totally complete data centers (Ed Zitron has ripped into how much bs there is in data center announcements). "Coding Time Horizon" is probably METR, which, while some of the best numbers for estimating actual AI improvement for practical purposes, are still really bad in several key ways. (They don't have enough human task performers for the longer duration tasks even if everything else was right, because they aren't, and there are several ways systematic bias could have leaked in and compelted distorted the constructed measure of task duration.)

"AI Software R&D Uplift" is the single most important category to their scenario of recursive self improvement... and they have it at a small fraction of what they estimated.

I've had the same thought about Factory Porn, it's is basically what Image slop generators are, right down to the addictive nature, even when it isn't porn being generated.

Lol, I assume he was just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what would stick?

Skimming the linked nature article... is my understanding correct that you can basically disable the watermarking by turning temperature down to 0?

For example, if the LLM distribution is very low entropy, meaning it almost always returns the exact same response to the given prompt, then Tournament sampling cannot choose tokens that score more highly under the g functions.

Other highlights from the linked paper... to get a true positive rate of 90% with a false positive rate of 1% you need 400 tokens (which should be a few paragraphs worth of text)? (If I'm reading figure 3 right?) That actually isn't that much, relative to the lengths of essays people write for high school and college classes. ...well actually... 1% false positive doesn't sound too bad, but if you have thousands of freshmen students all taking classes involving writing essays and checking for watermarks becomes the norm, that is dozens and dozens of false positive, which means lots of false accusations, and as we've seen from how teachers and institutions have tried utilizing the existing "AI detection" tools that are much much less reliable... I'm getting angry just thinking about it.

Edit: on turning temperature down, it should be noted Anthropic and OpenAI have been increasingly denying the end user internals of their models, such as summarizing or even outright hiding the thinking traces, and not allowing them access to temperature settings either.

This view on the community also explains his recklessness not only with aggressively monetizing HPMOR, but also his willingness to risk drawing JK Rowlings attention to his fanfiction (towards the end of HPMOR, one of his author's notes was looking for someone to reach out to her).

I would try to get in touch with J. K. Rowling to see if HPMOR could be published in book form, maybe as HJPEV and the Methods of Rationality, with all profits accruing to a UK charity. I’m not getting my hopes up, but I do have a rule telling me to try rather than automatically giving up and assuming something can’t be done. If any reader thinks they can put me in touch with J. K. Rowling, or for that matter Daniel Radcliffe, regarding this matter, I do hereby ask them to contact me at yudkowsky@gmail.com.

Rowling (and Warner Brothers) have been litigious with their IP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_disputes_over_the_Harry_Potter_series#Other_accusations_of_infringement . So this was a reckless move on EY's part, possibly indicating that he doesn't appreciate the delicate place fanfic (and its communities) are in.

Edit: thinking about the way Rowling has shown her true face over the past decade... "with all profits accruing to a UK charity" makes me wonder if in whatever fantasy universe Eliezer did talk Rowling into allowing published fanfic to be monetized for "charities", that money would all end up going to TERF "charities".

One of the plot threads was about the invention of AI, in the Data-from-Star-Trek kind of sense.

Going on a tangent from this... Its funny how much AI-related sci-fi is feeling increasing quaint (and often foolishly optimistic).

You know what depiction of AI has held up, and maybe makes even more sense in light of modern AI? Star Wars' take on Droid. Prior to LLMs it seems obvious that droids were sentient and deserving of rights. Post LLMs... it seems pretty plausible you could get something like C3PO that blabbers on but lacks any meaningful sentience or sapience. Also, it seemed obviously idiotic the way the Trade Federation had humanoid droids acting as pilots and gunners instead of building proper autopilots and targeting system. But after seeing LLMs get shoved everywhere, I totally could imagine a megacorp shoving droids built from standardized pretrained modules into all kinds of applications they aren't fit for.

Stealing technical terms from other fields to make their fantasies feel more real.