scruiser

I can imagine it clear... a chart showing minimum feature size decreasing over time (using cherry picked data points) with a dotted line projection of when 3d printers would get down nanotech scale. 3d printer related companies would warn of dangers of future nanotech and ask for legislation regulating it (with the language of the legislation completely failing to effect current 3d printing technology). Everyone would be buying 3d printers at home, and lots of shitty startups would be selling crappy 3d printed junk.

Yeah, that metaphor fits my feeling. And to extend the metaphor, I thought Gary Marcus was, if not a member of the village, at least an ally, but he doesn't seem to actually realize the battle lines. Like maybe to him hating on LLMs is just another way of pushing symbolic AI?

Those opening Peter Thiel quotes... Thiel uses talks about (in a kind of dated and maybe a bit offensive) trans people, to draw the comparison to transhumanists wanting to change themselves more extensively. The disgusting irony is that Thiel has empowered the right-wing ecosystem, which is deeply opposed to trans rights.

So recently (two weeks ago), I noticed Gary Marcus made a lesswrong account to directly engage with the rationalists. I noted it in a previous stubsack thread

Predicting in advance: Gary Marcus will be dragged down by lesswrong, not lesswrong dragged up towards sanity. He’ll start to use lesswrong lingo and terminology and using P(some event) based on numbers pulled out of his ass.

And sure enough, he has started talking about P(Doom). I hate being right. To be more than fair to him, he is addressing the scenario of Elon Musk or someone similar pulling off something catastrophic by placing too much trust in LLMs shoved into something critical. But he really should know better by now that using their lingo and their crit-hype terminology strengthens them.

Here’s a LW site dev whining about the study, he was in it and i think he thinks it was unfair to AI

There a complete lack of introspection. It seems like the obvious conclusion to draw from a study showing people's subjective estimates of their productivity with LLMs were the exact opposite of right would inspire him to question his subjectively felt intuitions and experience but instead he doubles down and insists the study must be wrong and surely with the latest model and best use of it it would be a big improvement.

You’re welcome.

Given their assumptions, the doomers should be thanking us for delaying AGI doom!

Ah, you see, you fail to grasp the shitlib logic that the US bombing other countries doesn't count as illegitimate violence as long as the US has some pretext and maintains some decorum about it.

They probably got fed up with a broken system giving up it's last shreds of legitimacy in favor of LLM garbage and are trying to fight back? Getting through an editor and appeasing reviewers already often requires some compromises in quality and integrity, this probably just seemed like one more.

The hidden prompt is only cheating if the reviewers fail to do their job right and outsource it to a chatbot, it does nothing to a human reviewer actually reading the paper properly. So I won't say it's right or ethical, but I'm much more sympathetic to these authors than to reviewers and editors outsourcing their job to an unreliable LLM.

The only question is who will get the blame.

Isn't it obvious? Us sneerers and the big name skeptics (like Gary Marcuses and Yann LeCuns) continuously cast doubt on LLM capabilities, even as they are getting within just a few more training runs and one more scaling of AGI Godhood. We'll clearly be the ones to blame for the VC funding drying up, not years of hype without delivery.

I think we mocked this one back when it came out on /r/sneerclub, but I can't find the thread. In general, I recall Yudkowsky went on a mini-podcast tour a few years back. I think the general trend was that he didn't interview that well, even by lesswrong's own standards. He tended to simultaneously assume too much background familiarity with his writing such that anyone not already familiar with it would be lost and fail to add anything actually new for anyone already familiar with his writing. And lots of circular arguments and repetitious discussion with the hosts. I guess that's the downside of hanging around within your own echo chamber blog for decades instead of engaging with wider academia.

For purposes of something easily definable and legally valid that makes sense, but it is still so worthy of mockery and sneering. Also, even if they needed a benchmark like that for their bizarre legal arrangements, there was no reason besides marketing hype to call that threshold "AGI".

In general the definitional games around AGI are so transparent and stupid, yet people still fall for them. AGI means performing at least human level across all cognitive tasks. Not across all benchmarks of cognitive tasks, the tasks themselves. Not superhuman in some narrow domains and blatantly stupid in most others. To be fair, the definition might not be that useful, but it's not really in question.