Comment by codetrotter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codetrotter | Hacker News Reader

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Idk, I found the text a bit hard to read as well. I asked ChatGPT to simplify it. Here is what ChatGPT simplified the text to:

> It appears that someone is modifying the behavior of a near-AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) in real time, potentially causing threats to industries and society. The situation is potentially serious, involving a mysterious foundation and a lack of trust in media.

I then asked ChatGPT to make the simplified text sound academic, which resulted in the following:

> Preliminary observations suggest that an individual or group is actively modifying the behavior of a near-AGI in real time, with potentially dire consequences for various industries and society as a whole. The involvement of a mysterious foundation adds an additional layer of complexity and concern, as does the apparent erosion of trust in media. Further research is warranted in order to fully understand and address this situation.

I then asked it to translate that into French, and it responded:

> Il semble qu'une personne ou un groupe modifie en temps réel le comportement d'une IA générale (near-AGI) potentiellement causant des menaces pour les industries et la société. L'implication d'une fondation mystérieuse ajoute une couche supplémentaire de complexité et de préoccupation, tout comme l'érosion apparente de la confiance dans les médias. Des recherches supplémentaires sont nécessaires pour comprendre pleinement et aborder cette situation.

I don’t know French beyond only a handful of words, so I don’t know if the translation is good or not. But I found all of these responses impressive nonetheless.

My french is a little rusty, but it looks fine to me.

I just had a conversation in Dutch about the role of Belgium in the peace accords in Yugoslavia in the 90's with only minor spelling issues, then diverged into the conflict's ethnic groups and their languages, and finally had it translate its last answer into Hungarian, which it seemed to do fine (according to google translate, as I don't speak Hungarian myself).

Yesterday I had a conversation about learning how to play the piano, where it gave some excellent advice, pointed out typical beginners mistakes correctly, and even gave a mostly reasonable selection of digital pianos to look into if I was a first time buyer (one very popular older model, but otherwise it was a good selection of last year's entry-level models, including a short recap of the advantages of each). I asked it some tips to study a specific technique, and it gave a decent answer.

For me this passes the threshold of what I expected from first-gen AGI, even if won't pass a Turing test and even if it isn't human-level quite yet. It is both exciting and unnerving. Once a technology like this gets unleashed as bots on social media to influence humans, we'll be deep into singularity territory. It's just too good at telling us what we want to hear.

> It's just too good at telling us what we want to hear.

This got me. Imagine segmenting the LLM into a zeitgeist, various demographics, geolocation, etc. and then these all bubbling up to knobs on bots you could turn unleashing content to skew public discord in so many different ways than already are. Make up “facts”, publish articles, generate images, calls to action, etc. for each topic, demographic, etc.

The only image I could conjure up was “Q” from QAnon fame and it’s scary.

I asked it to translate into Polish and it’s very decent. One small mistake only.

In general it speaks my language fluently, although a bit quirkly and with some mistakes here and there. I would say on a level of a foreigner that has spent a few years in Poland.

> Obserwacje wstępne sugerują, że osoba lub grupa aktywnie modyfikuje zachowanie bliskiego AGI w czasie rzeczywistym, co może mieć potencjalnie poważne konsekwencje dla różnych branż i społeczeństwa jako całości. Udział tajemniczego fundacji dodaje dodatkową warstwę złożoności i obaw, podobnie jak widoczne osłabienie zaufania do mediów. Dalsze badania są uzasadnione w celu pełnego zrozumienia i zajęcia się tą sytuacją.

The translation is reasonable. It loses a bit of the academic feeling ("preliminary observations suggest" replaced by a plain "it seems"), but I'm sure it could complexify it in French too if you insisted.

Very impressive. All these use cases, and they're also generalized!

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