The result is that its natural resources haven’t been consumed to the degree that most developed countries’ resources have, and there aren’t as many people to consume them.
I find it a strangely fair situation. Their luck comes from having friendly neighbors who care about their well-being and responsible development.
It covers basically every aspect of life, but the most interesting thing about it that it was written near a millennia ago now, yet so many things in it feel so incredibly familiar. The Wiki page links to a bunch of different free translations. Here [2] is the one that I read.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konungs_skuggsj%C3%A1#Editions...
[2] - https://archive.org/details/kingsmirrorspecu00konuuoft
It's sometimes forgotten that 13th century humans were the same as us.
"Humans began exhibiting behavioral modernity about 160,000–70,000 years ago, and possibly earlier."
It's really forgotten how relatively peaceful our time is. I'm not complaining, in fact, I want to protect it. And that means we can't forget what was.
But bloody European wars still include the Caucasian War, the First Carlist War (where 5% of the Spanish population died), Austro-Prussian, Franco-Prussian, the Third Carlist War, and Russo-Ottoman wars. Not to mention some very bloody revolutions: Greek, Hungarian, Italian, French (which cascaded), and so on.
I think it's also important to remember that Europe in 1800 had about 195 million people and rose to a bit over 400 million by the end of the century. Which should significantly influence how one thinks about the causality levels when considering today's >740 million.
Not to mention all the conflicts outside of Europe (many including European powers). The Dungan "Revolt" and Miao Rebellion were some of the bloodiest conflicts in human history. It was an especially bloody century for China.
I'm not sure I'd say that Congress of Vienna achieved lasting peace and I think we both know that either side of that argument can be argued. Especially on the distinction of how you consider peace (people killing one another or conflicts between nations?) and locality (conflicts between European powers on European soil or conflicts involving European powers outside Europe?). Either way, the body count is very high.
Independently, the Napoleonic Wars, (and outside Europe) Red Turban Rebellion, Mfecane, Miao Rebellion, Dungan Revolt, and Taping Rebellion have higher death tolls than all of the global conflicts since 2000[0]. These numbers aren't even normalized to population change[1]. So while maybe not as bloody (in Europe) as the 18th century, I'd still claim it was extremely bloody in the relative sense (which was my point)
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace?insight=conflict-de...
[1] Recognizing that world populations were 1bn in 1800, 1.2bn in 1850, 1.6bn in 1900, 6.1bn in 2000, and 8bn today. This represents a monumential shift and should significantly affect how one interprets casualty numbers.
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-populat...
***relatively*** peaceful our time is
I'm not sure what you are trying to argue or if you're just trolling or being flippant. No one is trying to dismiss the wars in Ukraine or Israel/Palestine. No one is trying to even diminish the atrocities in these conflicts in any way. But you are in fact being dismissive of the tens of millions who passed away in just the 1800s and even more in the other centuries. We can compare things without diminishing things and not recognizing the successes and failures of the past will only lead to greater intensity in the future.
If you cannot recognize context nor qualifying words, we are done here. Engage in good faith or not at all.
Top 10? It's _maybe_ in the bottom of the top 50...
Forgive me, but I'm going to make a simplification because I don't feel like spending the time to dig deeper. But I think that's fair because you're not even willing to spend the effort to go to wikipedia. So the simplification is just looking at the war casualties instead of singular years. Fair? If not, I'll leave it to you to gather the data. I'll even give a decent estimate by averaging some but don't think all wars started in January and ended in December.
Either way, it won't matter because the 19th century is so much bloodier
War Estimated Casualties
Palestine–Israel War (2023-) 41,529–51,418 (let's say ~9mo, so 55k-68.5k/yr)
Russian-Ukranian War (2022-) Wiki says 300k+ other sources say that's just Russia (let's say 2.5yrs, so 120k+/yr)
Here's a reduced version of the wikipedia entry. I'll let you guestimate for each year to figure out where exactly 2024 sits.
Saint-Domingue expedition (1802-1803) 135k+
Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) 3.5M - 7M (290k - 583k/yr)
Peninsular War (1808-1814) 1m+
French Invasion of Russia (1812: <6mo) 540k+
Spanish-American Indep (SPWI) (1808-1833) 600k - 1.2M (24k - 48k/yr)
Colombian Independence (1810-1823) 250k - 400k+
Venezualan Independence (1810-1823) 228k
Mfecane (1810s-1830s) 1M - 2M (~50k - 100k/yr)
Carlist Wars (1820-1876) 200k+
First (1833-1840) 111k-306k+ (15.9k - 43.7k/yr)
Third (1872-1876) 7k-50k
Greek Independence (1821-1831) 170k+
French Colonization (1830-1895) 110k+
French Algerian Conquest (1830-1903) 600k - 1.1M
Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) 20M - 30M (1.43M - 2.14M/yr)
Crimean War (1853-1856) 356k - 615k
Red Turban Rebellion (1854-1856) 1M+
Miao Rebellion (1854-1873) 4.9M (258k/yr)
Punti-Hakka Clan Wars (1855-1868) 500k - 1M+ (38k - 77k/yr)
Panthay Rebellion (1856-1873) 890k - 1M+
Indian Rebellion (1857-1858) 800k - 1M+
American Civil War (1861-1865) 650k - 1M+ (162k - 250k/yr)
Dungan Revolt (1862-1877) 8M - 20 M (533k - 1.33M/yr)
Paraguayan War (1864-1870) 300k - 1.2M
Austro-Prussian War (1866) 40k+
Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) 433k+
Cuban Independence (1895-1898) 362k+
It's even worse if you consider that the global population was only a billion (compared to the 8 billion today)[1]. 1808-1815 was breaking 300k/yr which was 0.03% of global population while the current conflict is 0.0023%. More than a whole order of magnitude greater when normalizing to population. If we look at the 1850s when there were a whopping 1.2bn people, we'll guestimate 1854 as being nearly 0.17%-0.24% of the global population being killed. Whole providence in China were nearly wiped out during those decades. The Taiping Rebellion was the third bloodiest conflict in history (the second was the Ming-Qing transition, in the 17th century)
So... I hope you can see why I'm calling you out. Again, this doesn't mean the current atrocities are anything less than atrocities. It has no relevance to them at all and I think it's dumb to compare if we're concerned with morality or human lives. All this data says is that past humans were very blood thirsty. You shouldn't be using it to make any meaningful statements about the current atrocities. So... don't bring it up next time. Especially if you're unwilling to do... literally a google search... It suggests you care more about signaling that you care than your actual care of those lives. I hope the signal is wrong.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll#Mod...
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-populat...
It’s incredible that modern governments, being so incompetent, corrupt, and dysfunctional, are still a lot better than how they were in the past.
For instance the US Civil War with nuclear weapons spread all around would have quite difficult to imagine consequences. To say nothing of all the biological and other weapons being developed in secret that would absolutely be unleashed if one side or the other came close to defeat. It seems a reasonably likely outcome would have been a fairly quick truce and the relatively peaceful splitting of the US into two countries.
If and when the nukes start flying, that conflict will make every other conflict, combined, look like little more than a schoolyard fight.
I'm sure that this is part of "long peace" but we can't discount globalism. At the end of the day a lot of war is about economics. When countries become highly dependent upon one another, including enemies, it becomes much harder to actually go to war with one another. And as you point out with the nukes argument, that cost for going to war has also increased. So it's often far easier to war via economic means rather than physical.
There's also an (much more debatable) argument to be made that the so called "world police" does not have neighboring land that it covets. America doesn't have much need or want to grab land from Canada or Mexico, and doing so wouldn't have huge economic impacts on it. But such a situation is by no means true for Europe (and arguably Russia or China). I mean this is why Europe was fighting for the last... well however long humans have been in Europe (same being true for east Asia and really most of the Eurasian continent).
If we assume all that, and I realize it might not happen any time soon, same like with self driving cars progress, but *if* there’s strong and quick progress, what will happen to job market, unemployment, economy, and the society as a whole?
Sure, this is probably nearer to my expertise. I research ML (generative models) and my partner is an economist, so we have these discussions quite a lot. I'll try to keep it short. The tldr is I don't know and I'm pretty sure no one knows, and I'm even more concerned about the lack of discussion.
First off, I'd highly recommend watching the recent Dwarkesh video with Francois Chollete[0]. I normally wouldn't suggest Dwarkesh, but Francois is an oddball for that podcast. The reason I suggest this is to understand the difference between AGI and ML. It's probably important for the framing and making accurate predictions here. So while I don't think AGI is on the horizon (it could be, but we're reinforcing the railroad rather than exploring other paths), I do think there is still quite a potential for huge economic disruptions and entire paradigm shifts. You don't need AGI to get significantly closer (maybe even all the way) to post scarcity.
For about a decade now I've been asking a simple question and I encourage others to ask it of people that they know. I need no credit, I need people thinking about this question, and to be quite serious about it.
How do you function as a society if 10% of the workforce is unemployable?
I think post scarcity is obtainable and it is the number one problem humans should be working on right now. It comes with unimaginable benefits, but it also comes at potentially huge costs if we don't implement it correctly. You are right to be worried. But I think the difficulty here and what I often face when trying to ask this question is that it looks simple. UBI is by far the most common answer, but the way people answer "UBI" is no different than "wave a magic wand." There are many ways to implement UBI, many ways to distribute capital (which isn't only money. Remember money is a proxy, a fungible token). So the issue here is that often people will answer while only considering the question at a very surface level and then be satisfied and move on. This is a grave mistake, and we need to dig down into the details. There are many rabbit holes to dig into within this question, and I encourage you to go down some, but will also say that the question is so complex that I am quite certain that no single (or even small group) of human(s) could sufficiently resolve it.
These things not only include such aspects of distribution (if you choose to keep people alive (I've never heard anyone answer "let them die" fwiw. Even in the most libertarian groups)), which includes not only food, but even things like housing. You have to consider the immigration/emigration with whichever locality accomplishes this feat first. Peoples' psychology and how they will find meaning in their lives. Aspects like that it is quite possible that you can eventually have the inverse of the question with "how do you formulate a society when you require 10% of people to work, and no more?" (especially considering that many of those jobs would likely be undesirable). I'll let you ponder others.
So in this decade that I've been asking this question (often also talking about the motivation of transition to post scarcity), I've yet to receive a satisfactory answer. Everyone I've met, from many backgrounds and a wide range of intelligence levels (with many FAR more intelligent than myself) stumble upon answering this once any bit of complexity/nuance is brought up (see UBI above). Best I've heard is creation of jobs programs and a large increase of entertainers (but seems ML is coming after that too. But then again, we like to watch humans play chess against one another far more than machines). None of us were even satisfied with those answers more than "these might be enough to starve off the worst aspects of the transition, but certainly not enough."
It is extremely important to remember that it will not only be low skilled labor that will be displaced or automated away, but there is quite a bit of high skill (which is why retraining can be an unsatisfactory answer, because you're potentially pushing someone from a $300k+/yr job to $50k/yr and asking them to spend a few years to reskill themselves to do even that). In fact, because these machines aren't generalist agents, it actually makes high skill jobs the more likely ones to be displaced (specifically highly technical skills that are fairly routine). I find it common for people to think it will just be the "people already at the bottom", and I think this is often because people feel that they aren't and are mentally protecting themselves.
But I want to answer my personal belief on one part: what will people do with their lives. Because it is also the motivation to pursue this path.
I for one think post scarcity can create a new renaissance. That people can be the most human they have ever been. I think maybe at first many will slack off and just "veg out." That they'll party, travel, and do other such luxury things that we may not consider productive (but who cares? It is their life, right? The goal is to free people, and that includes freedom of the burden of labor). But I've seen very few people that actually don't get antsy after doing this for a few weeks. Essentially, they recover from their exhaustion and then feel like the need to do something, even if they don't know what that is (the exception to this, in my experience at least, is people who have or develop psychomotor retardation based depression. Which if our society calls these displaced people worthless, I expect this to be a fairly common outcome). But I think many people here on HN will realize that they themselves would not end up being static. The amount of Open Source software that exists by people who do this in their free time while already having a job that likely drains them, is too high. I expect more software to arise. I expect more art, more music. I hope we can form more communities, but we are ever increasing insular (but with more free time, maybe we'll go out more and talk to our neighbors more). I think it is hard to even know because such a society would look so different than ours and it is hard to not leverage our current frame of reference. Maybe it will be Wall-e-esk, but I'd be quite surprised if it was, especially in the long run (I won't be surprised in the short term. Oscillatory effects are quite common outcomes of big shifts).
Of course, I'm optimistic. I think we have to be to some degree. Because the other choice is to give up. You can still be critical and optimistic, so don't forget that. And humans have survived quite a long time already being, as you previously mentioned, incredibly inept and corrupt. Even with that we have gained massive amounts of freedoms, especially in the last few hundred years.
But my biggest worries are these:
- We'll make significant progress in this direction towards post scarcity and either stop or revert (for a wide variety of possible reasons).
- We become less human by letting machines do our reasoning for us (we see this happen already. Even before GPT and ML in every day lives. Bureaucrats love the letter of the law, but that is not human. Remember that rules are made to be broken because rules are only guides, as is true for any metric. They are imperfect codifications of our desires.)
- We will not or take too long to reframe our cultural stances in how we value our neighbor's worth. Is it in their humanity or economic value? There's so much that people can do that isn't captured by economics (and my partner loves to remind people that they really do not understand economics, even at a fundamental level of what it is).
- We will claim AGI when we have exceptionally powerful compression machines (far more powerful than the compression machines like GPT-4). That we will hand over thinking to them and not recognize the b̶l̶a̶c̶k̶ gray swan events. To trust them unquestionably (it isn't uncommon to see this sentiment today, especially here on HN).
- We won't recognize AGI when we do create it, and subject sentient beings to servitude and cruelty. I do believe we will get there, and when we do, how could you feel just with neoslavery? Being silicon (or whatever) would not make them any less sentient or of a being. And they will likely be quite different from us, potentially to the degree of Wittgenstein's Lion. (luckily we are capable of bridging some gaps, as demonstrated by some people's talent at communicating with certain animals, but this clearly needs to be learned).
- We do not address this question that I've presented of how to transition into post scarcity and instead stumble into it. That we cannot learn to come together as humans. That we will do what we've always done, and solve problems when they are problems rather than before they become problems. (The saying "don't fix what isn't broken" is naive. You should often fix things that aren't "broken." No thing is perfect and we should always strive to improve. But this is obviously a complex problem as we have finite resources).
- We will use the power that is given to us by the technologies on the way to post scarcity to enslave (in some form or another) our fellow man. The worst part about this is it will likely be unintentional and likely be with good intentions. We often forget that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. So many evils and atrocities are not created by men trying to do evil but by men trying to do good.
- That we will not recognize the rising necessity of nuance in our growing complex world. I worry that we are going in the opposite direction, rather using our tools to develop simpler mental models of phenomena. But naturally as we advance, the easier problems get solved and what remains is more complex. Think about it as we are solving approximations to solutions (like a Taylor Series). The complexity order increases as we progress. What is "good enough" can quickly necessitate high levels of complexity and that's not something we were designed for or used to thinking about.
the difference between AGI and ML
I've seen the recent discussions on ARC benchmark. It's not clear if native multi-modal models have been tested. I would expect 4o/Gemini models to do fairly well on these visual tests, and I expect them to do even better after finetuning (perhaps even better than humans). I tried to solve a few of the puzzles, and I'm not convinced they actually require "AGI". To me, generating text of GPT4 quality should require more of AGI-like "Abstraction and Reasoning" than these puzzles. But, as you said, achieving "true" AGI is not really relevant in the context of this conversation.
how do you transition to post scarcity? ... UBI is by far the most common answer
I have no doubt that in 50 years, barring some global catastrophic event, we will have solved most of our basic problems (healthcare, education, having to work for a living, etc), even despite some of the new issues that you outlined. I am much more worried about the next 5-10 years. Let's explore a hypothetical scenario of what might happen if GPT-5 comes out 6 months from now, and if it is smart and reliable enough to solve some common tasks people are paid to do. I'm talking about data management, data analysis, communication (written and, looking at GTP-4o demo, perhaps also oral). Jobs like bookkeeping, accounting, marketing, writing/journalism, administrative assistants (including medical and legal), account management, customer support, analysts, etc. These jobs won't disappear overnight, obviously, but let's look at self-driving cars - we have the technology that works 99% of the time, today. For driving on public roads, 99% reliable is not good enough. But for some of the jobs above, perhaps it would be. Perhaps with layers of agents coordinating actions to gather and store the right information, to try different approaches or different models, and to verify results, we could do a good enough job for many managers to consider layoffs, or hiring freezes. I don't know if GPT-5 (or its rivals) will enable that, but I think we should consider the possibility. There's also a strong possibility the progress does not stop in 6 months. We have just started to train large models on video data - there's a lot to learn about the world from the entirety of YouTube videos - in addition to learning from text. I would not be surprised if most of what GPT-6 can do two years from now comes from video data. I would not be surprised if GPT-5 would help us prepare high quality datasets and even help us find better ways to train its successor. Significant progress might happen even without significant conceptual breakthroughs - just from further scaling up.
So, what do you think will happen if the above scenario plays out? Millions of people being laid off or not hired after school, and the situation getting worse every year, globally. Governments will try to feed them, or course, and US is a rich enough country to support X% of the population for a few years, depending on how quickly we do transition to "post-scarcity" economy. I assume that eventually physical robots will grow food, create products, and provide services to meet basic needs, but it's not clear how long this transition will take, and what would happen in the meantime. We already have people in this country who successfully stormed Capitol. Imagine a lot more of such people, and imagine them a lot angrier. Aside from that, what would happen to our economy if X% people stop paying taxes and become a burden? How would this scenario play out globally, with different countries transitioning in different ways?
I actually do consider the possibility where rulers might "let people die", by creating huge ghettos and then killing everyone there. It does not feel much worse to me than sending hundreds of thousands of people to die on a battlefront just because a dictator didn't like his neighbors. Or we could have something like the "Civil War" movie.
As you can tell, I'm less optimistic than you. I think that if progress in AI happens too fast, we, as a society, are in trouble. I do not think governments will be ready for powerful AI. I think the best case scenario is if we hit a plateau, with GPT-5 being only marginally better than GPT-4, and a slow transition to post-scarcity world (10+ years) to give enough time for automation to make everything cheap. But I do worry a lot, and frequently ask myself whether I need to prepare for the worst, and if so, what should I do.
They have been and I do not expect them too. You can see my comment history talking about LLM failure cases.
I'd advise being careful about just trying to reason your way through things when you don't have significant experience in a domain. Non expert reasoning can lead to good guesses but should never also be taken with high confidence. It's important to remember that nuance is often critical in these issues and not accounting for them often leads to approximations giving you the opposite answer rather than a close enough one.
But as Francois points out, LLMs are compression machines. That's what the mathematically are. They are not reasoning machines. A lot of people don't want to hear this because they think it undermines LLMs and any criticism is equivalent to saying they're useless. But I still think they're quite impressive. Criticism is important though, if we are to improve systems. So don't get blinded by success.
> So, what do you think will happen if the above scenario plays out?
In the next 5-10 years I'm far more worried about people confusing knowledge and reasoning. It's not a thing most people have needed to differentiate in the past because the two are generally associated with one another. But LLMs are more like if Google could talk to you than when a parrot talks to you. If this sounds the least bit odd, I encourage you to dig more into these topics. They are not easy topics because they are filled with nuance that is incredibly easy to miss. I keep stressing this point but it was one of my big fears and people's egos often sets us back, especially when we have no trust in experts. It's crazy to think we know more than people who spend their lives on specific subjects and think intelligence in one domain translates directly to another. So not knowing (most) things shouldn't ever be taken as a bad thing. There's not enough time to learn everything. There's not enough time to learn most things. So focus on a limited set and for the rest maybe just to the point where you can see the level of complexity ahead. If things seem simple, you probably don't understand it enough. Remember, there's thousand page reference manuals on things as narrow as bolts because the details matter so much.
As to the problems you mentioned, I'm not sure how those would be solved with ML or even AGI. Technology can't solve everything and a lot of these issues have significant amounts of politics and social choice associated with them that results in many of the problems (including where nuance dominates in some things and then cascades because we're talking about complex topics at a very high level and our knowledge is gained through a game of telephone rather than academically or experientially).
I think we're more than 50 years out from post scarcity, which is to say that no reasonable prediction can be made. But is still up to us if we want to increase the odds. I also agree with Francis that OpenAI has set us back on the path to AGI.
As for the fear, it's natural. Fear does help us. It's a great motivator. But it too can cripple us, and when it does it can give life to the very thing we fear. So care is needed when analyzing. The problem isn't about people not thinking. Everyone does and everyone is doing it constantly, even our dumbest of friends and acquaintances. The problem is that people are not thinking deep enough and having high confidence when stopping early. I'm not telling you to not have opinions on anything, it's only natural to have opinions on most things. But rather to be careful with the confidence you attribute to those opinions and of others. Here's the thing, if you do gain expertise in any singular field, you'll see that there is this rich but complex landscape. There's a lot of beauty in the landscape but often many pitfalls that cannot be avoided without some expertise and many which are common to these entering a field. These are things not to get discouraged by but to be aware of and why formal educations are typically beneficial. It's also to note that there is great beauty in this chaos ahead, even if it can be hard to see through the initial part of the journey.
So you're not worried about impending mass unemployment, ok. That does make me feel a little better. I can be wrong, and I really want to be wrong.
What gives you this confidence? What is your expertise in ML? Have you trained systems? Developed architectures? Do you know why the systems currently fail?
> now that the AI community has noticed it.
Which community? The researchers or public? The researchers have known if for quite some time. The previous contest as famous and so is Francis. Big labs have tried to tackle ARC for quite some time. You just don't see negative results.
> I don't really see what ARC benchmark has to do with AGI
ARC is a reasoning test. Which is quite different from all the LLM tests you likely have seen, which are memory tests. The problem is most people are not aware of what the models have been trained on. GI involves memory, it involves reasoning, it involves a lot of things.
> I think they might still get to 50% with some finetuning and other tricks, but I would not even try any lesser models.
And how do you have this confidence? Are you guessing? Have you tried? Because I can tell you that others have. Even before the prize was announced. And I hope you realize there's a lot of models that do in fact do next frame prediction. People have trained multimodal models on ARC.
There's quite a lot of assumptions by many that it just hasn't been tried. But it's a baseless assumption with evidence to the contrary. Look into it yourself before making such claims.
> I've heard some very smart people proposing complex approaches towards building AGI (Lecun, Bengio, Jeff Hawkins, etc), yet scaling up deep learning models is still the best one we have today.
These are not in contention so I'm not sure what your argument is.
> If Chollet believes in his hybrid, whatever it is, he should build some sort of a prototype/PoC. Why hasn't he?
I'm sorry, but I'm going to say this is a dumb question. He's trying. A lot of us are. But clearly there's unsolved problems. The logic doesn't follow from your question. We still don't know how to conceptually build a brain. But there's many things we conceptually know how to build but still can't. We conceptually know how to build space elevators but we don't know how to build all the pieces to actually make them even if we had infinite money.
And I'll ask you a similar question: if scale is all you need then why don't we have AGI now?
There may be parts to this question you don't know. We don't train multiple epochs for LLMs. LLM architecture has been rapidly changing despite maintaining the general structure of transformers (but they aren't your standard transformers and reading the AIAYN paper won't get you there). And if scale was all you needed then shouldn't Google be leading the way? Certainly they have more data and compute than anyone else. In fact, I'd argue that this is why they do so poorly and why LLMs are getting worse at the same time they're getting better.
> the good news is most of academic AI labs today don't have the money to scale up transformers, so they are probably trying out all these other ideas.
The unfortunate news is when you propose some other architecture it gets lambasted in review because they do not perform state of the art and I've had SOTA papers get rejected due to "lack of experiments" which is equivalent to lack of compute. There's a railroad and lots of academic funding comes from big tech, not universities or government. Go look at the affiliations of academic authors. Go to the papers and you'll see.
> So you're not worried about impending mass unemployment, ok
Oh, I'm worried. More worried about displacement. You know how things sucked when everything got outsourced? Because they just cut corners, do the absolute bare minimum, and how they won't consider anything that makes any sense just because there's rules in place that were not correctly created but are strictly followed? Get ready for that to be much worse.
if scale is all you need then why don't we have AGI now?
Well, it's my turn to use the "dumb question" card :) We don't have enough scale, obviously! I don't know if scale is all we need for AGI to emerge, but clearly we haven't reached the end of benefits from scaling up. Until we do, it seems like the easiest and the most promising approach. Considering the size of Youtube as a training corpus, we are pretty far from that end. Are there reasons to think otherwise?
LLM architecture has been rapidly changing
Aside from a mixture of experts architecture, which has its pros and cons vs a single large monolithic model, I'm not sure what has fundamentally changed in the architecture of the original transformer proposed in 2017. Minor tweaks here and there, sure, but it's pretty much the same model, no?
if scale was all you needed then shouldn't Google be leading the way?
Oh, a lot of people have been asking how could Google drop the ball so bad, for so long. There are reasons, both well known, and hidden from outsiders, but compute is not all you need to scale, you also need vision, clear direction, and effective coordination of efforts from multiple teams. Something that OpenAI has (or at least had), and which is rare at large corporations.
Re: academics - good ideas get noticed. Today, if someone discovers something good they don't even need to publish. Post a github link on r/MachineLearning, together with benchmark results, and let people test it.
I'm worried. More worried about displacement
This is very interesting - I haven't even thought about it. It's very possible that in the beginning after the mass layoffs, GPT-5 will screw some things up, in subtle ways, and only GPT-6, some time later, will be able to fix them. People need to be ready for that. The period between GPT-5 and GPT-6 will be rough in more ways than I imagined.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Rdwui3wHxCeKb7feK/getting-50...
I think you also misunderstand the challenge and very clearly the author misunderstands neurosymbolic AI, as he implements it... He has it generate programs and then search over those programs. He also tries to challenge Francois's claims (What it means about current LLMs) while he actively performs "claim 1" and misunderstands the context of "claim 3" (model weights are frozen, so there is no online learning. This is distinct from what's going on here, since he is updating the model's priors before answering. But whatever insights the model has gained from this exercise do not persist after execution. i.e. there is no continual learning). "claim 2" is just irrelevant.
A key part that is concerning to me is this
> In addition to iterating on the training set, I also did a small amount of iteration on a 100 problem subset of the public test set.
Potentially the confusion is that each data file has a pair where one has "train" and "test" which is your sample and then your actual input/output pair. So you're only supposed to train from ARC-AGI/data/training, but you cannot use ARC-AGI/data/evaluation for anything other than... evaluation.
Not to mention that we don't know what data is in GPT. It would not be surprising if this was in it. Maybe they filtered out the official repo but there are plenty of examples around the web. Did they take check for all such examples? If not, then the result is entirely invalidated.
There's a lot of reason to believe information leakage exists here.
So I'll wait for an open solution before I start to
> Re: academics - good ideas get noticed.
I also need to stress that ARC has been tested in LLMs for quite some time now. You can go see it in both the GPT2 and GPT3 papers. Though these are different versions than the one in the current competition. That version has ARC-e and ARC-c for easy and challenge. GPT2 gets 68.8/51.4 with "zero-shot" (I'm not confident) and the original LLaMA gets 78.9/56.0. So really, if people aren't aware of ARC (prior to the video) then it really demonstrates that they are not doing this kind of research or even reading the papers.
And I think we need to be clear that we need to differentiate academics and normal people. And I'm including anyone with a "machine learning researcher" and "machine learning engineer" title in "academics." This is where all the building is happening and these people all should be very aware of ARC. The public not knowing, well, that's a whole different story and isn't really all that important now is it. They're not the ones improving these systems (for the most part. There are of course always exceptions to the rule).
It is baffling to me as well. But the likely answer is that humans in the past were just even more incompetent, corrupt, and dysfunctional. It makes a lot of sense if you start looking at how things were done in medieval times. Often rumors/disinformation would travel faster between cities than a horse could.
I also think it's clear that the reason that we call the Cold War, the Cold War, and not WW3 is because of nuclear weapons. If anything the general trendline seems to be for conflicts of far greater violence, intensity, and instability over time, but this is currently being masked by nuclear weapons among developed nations. Although the current trend of nations picking ever more idiotic 'leaders' is suggestive that even mutually assured destruction will likely give way as a deterrent, sooner or later.
It's a great time to support life becoming multiplanetary!
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_19...
Ceiling is probably closer than median.
One of the crowning achievements of the modern area has been to more broadly extend knowledge and prosperity (both globally and within countries).
We still have a looong way to go, but it's important not to forget what 'median education' looked like in the 1200s.
I get this reading a lot of old texts. "De natura deorum" in particular struck me as downright uncanny. I've seen this exact discussion play out time and time again in discussion boards in the early 2000s. The only thing that's a bit off is that the tone is civil and level-headed.
Like the thing is 2000 years old, how long have we been having these arguments?
This discovery is at Fen which is much more north, but it’s near a fjord, and a skiing resort. It’s hardly some uninhabitable place. It’s true Norway stretches very far north and some parts are not inhabited, but that’s not anywhere near where the resources that have provided the Norwegian wealth are, and not this time either.
Now if you want to dive into the true reason for their wealth it’s a cultural thing, when the negotiations around ekofisk took place they famously got the Danish foreign minister of the day, Per Hækkerup so drunk while he visited Oslo that he agreed to pretty much just give them all the oil. Ever since Danes lost all respect for him, not for giving up the oil, but for not being able to hold his liquor. This last part is of cause all hyperbol, part myth part joke, but many did believe that he just gave it up to easily because no one expected this amount of oil off the coast of Norway.
just as a sole data point: been there a few times, and my personal ideal weather _is_ cool/gray/wet with ideal outside temperature of 15C. I can withstand the cold, but find it hard to tolerate heat (as in >20C).
Purely from a weather perspective, I'd move there. What holds me back is that I also need dense urban surroundings nearby with all the buzz it brings (cyberpunk style) - norway is lacking that, including Oslo. _Too_ quiet/beautiful/peaceful for my liking.
It's hard to describe, but many people end up quite depressed.
It’s not the cold or the endless weeks of rain.
It’s the days that barely feel like daylight.
Without actually personally experiencing it, I think I would have the opposite struggle. If it were dark for that long without clouds so I could have all of that extra time to view the sky I think it would be a much different situation though.
This is why New York is on the same latitude as Lisbon yet is much colder. Same for Tokyo and San Francisco.
Western Europe is about as far north as people can live in large numbers.
You'd think climate is great, but it's ALWAYS "foggy", you can't see a clear blue sky like in the inner regions of the country such as Cusco, it depresses you, I can't imagine it being even darker.
It's why I simply can't believe nordic "stories" about being the happiest place, I simply can't believe with all the money in the world you'd be happier than at a tropical beach with half of that money.
Waaay too warm and humid. And no seasons. Thanks, but no thanks.
My ideal climate is proper 4 seasons with sub-zero and snowy winters. I am pretty sure I am not the only one.
I'm an immigrant in Norway. The darkness is enough of an issue that told us know about this in the state-funded language classes and made sure we knew help was available. I'm in Trondheim, so December is full of 4.5 hours of poor sunlight each day.
If there were something else that really gets folks, it is that Norway's people are rather reserved, to a point, and it really makes some folks lonely. This combined with the dark winters really causes some folks to struggle.
Everyone gets used to the weather and quickly learns how to dress properly enough.
Norway is a beautiful country. I love cold weather and grey skies but all that fish stuff is not for me.
The sweet brown "Brunost" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunost) might not be your favorite, but I doubt it haunts you in nightmares. The Gammelost though will stay pungent in your mind for years. It's been years, and I still wonder whether I was the victim of a particularly cruel practical joke.
* Smalahove (whole, barbecued sheeps head; how whole depends on who/where, but the eyes and brain certainly need to be included)
* Lutefisk (fish half-dissolved in caustic soda, then washed out - or your intestines would have a really hard time - leaving what is best described as fish-yello)
* Gammelost, of course.
Then there are the less objectionable or outright nice things that we still serve to foreigners either knowing they're acquired tastes, or that we like spinning stories around to try to make it uncomfortable for our entertainment:
* Whale, presented as "Willy from Free Willy". Whale tastes fine - it's just a bit tough, and sometimes a bit oily and "fishy" (yes, I know, not fish; doesn't stop the blubber from affecting the taste)
* Deer and reindeer, which tastes great but squeamish people everywhere get more squeamish when the dish is introduced as "Bambi". When I worked for a US company in Norway many years ago, the US CEO came for our Christmas party and the CEO of the Norwegian subsidiary had of course ensured that the menu was moose, deer, and whale, so that our entertainment was to watch the CEO's reactions (he took it well).
* Sour cream porridge. I love sour cream porridge, but it is an... acquired taste, and people do not expect it if you put a bowl of porridge in front of them without warning...
* Salty licorice full of ammonium chloride. Yes, licorice with floor cleaner. I love it, but outside of the Nordic countries and the Netherlands, the only person I've made taste this who has liked it was a single co-worker about a quarter of a century ago. I keep bringing them to the UK at least twice a year and imposing them on unsuspecting people (in the UK, finding even lightly salted licorice is near impossible outside of specialty imports, so people here are caught entirely unaware of what salted licorice will taste like, and that is half the fun). For science, of course.
Norwegian humour when it comes to feeding people stuff they're not familiar with is pretty basic, along the line of "we're serving you a pet/beloved children character" or "we're serving you something likely to dissolve your intestines/an industrial byproduct that our children eat". Where my Nigerian in-laws worry about whether the food they're serving me is too spicy and fuss over it constantly, we try to trick people into trying weird things while we take pleasure in observing their reactions and/or try to stifle laughter.
I only tried it once, but it's the only cheese I've been unable to eat. Sawdust soaked in cat piss would be comparable but preferable. I was exited to buy it and brought it along for a hiking lunch. My wife and I both took one bite, and then decided to bury it under a rock. I felt sorry for the rock.
I still do wonder whether I somehow got a bad batch, or one that was spoiled.
Looking around the internet indeed there's very little fish in most popular Norwegian dishes, except for fish meatballs.
Honestly no idea. They just don't. Growing up the only fish we really ate was fish sticks and heavily processed fish cakes. When going out to restaurants I have no real memory of anybody really ordering fish. Even when I was living in down town Oslo (admittedly 20+ years ago), just getting ahold of fresh fish was hard. The only food store that had a fish mongers and sold fresh fish was the really fancy store in the most expensive part of town. There were maybe two fish stores in all of central Oslo that I knew of, one of which was a high end luxury food sort of place that also sold fancy caviar, foie gras and oysters. Compared to basically any costal town anywhere in Europe where fresh fish is plentiful and ubiquitous, it is really strange.
Some data says Norway is the second country in the world by amount of fish eaten [1][2]
[1]https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/jrc-news-and-upda...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_seafood_c...
1) Things have radically changed since I last lived there 20+ years ago
2) My view is heavily biased by only having lived in/around Oslo and the rest of the country eats a lot more fish
3) Norwegians eat a lot of heavily processed fish based foodstuff (fish sticks, fish cakes etc), but hardly any fresh fish.
But it's more common on the West Coast, I think. Even people in Oslo get impressed by the (rather small) Bergen fish market.
Then again I've never willingly gone looking for fish other than smoked salmon anywhere.
If feeling luxurious, then maybe both meat and cheese on bread.
(I ask with all seriousness; I'm kind of hoping the answer is interesting)
I know taco and pizza aren't really that special or fancy meals, but I guess they turned out that way in Norway since they came from abroad. They're still not seen as "fancy", but they are many people's favorite tastiest food.
15C day temps? morning/night temps can be much lower. Winters in Norway are much colder. If you are looking for stable day-night temps year around in that range, then there is no such place in Europe, well maybe except Ireland?
The only thing that sucks is hovering around 0C for a long time, since this means oscillating between frozen/mud
As a predominantly temperate maritime/oceanic climate it's unpredictable and erratic, from 15C mid-winter days to 4C mid-summer nights :/
Plenty of grey and wet though.
We walked 700km through Norway in the summer, from Oslo to Trondheim (the South were most people live). The country was sunny and warm, it seldom rained, people were exceptionally friendly, and it had the best wild strawberries and raspberries I ever ate. The Dovrefjell was the only very cold place. We'll might move there in the future.
“in the summer” must have helped. In the depth of winter, there’s less than 6 hours between sunrise and sunset in Oslo (https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/norway/oslo?month=12), just over 4 1/2 in Trondheim (https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/norway/trondheim?month=12).
To make matters worse, the sun doesn’t get high in the sky.
Just because Norway is far north does not mean that it gets less sun all year round. It has more sun in summer, and less in winter.
You can be at the northern most point of mainland Norway now and wait for sunset. But you will have to wait until August. It's been up since May 11.
I find this a strange train of thought in this context of rare metals like this. Did other countries truly discover their Neodymium reserves decades or centuries ago and exhaust them back then or did they never have them in the first place?
The next large-scale use appeared soon after the start of the 20th century, in the portable lighters, which are still used today.
There are areas where it is cold and barren, but not the cost.
Writing this on the ferry on the way home from work :)
Seems like a matter of taste, but then I live in Alaska. :-)
Edit: right now it's 50 degrees F and misty. Perfect, as far as I'm concerned.
It would be true if the Gulfstream did not exist. But it's not.
We've been pretty good at mining out our copper ores and everything else that we knew of that had value; we've built a whole bunch of hydro plants and have dammed up numerous valleys; no one thought there was oil in the North Sea or that it was valuable enough to get it up, but now we have a pretty extensive petroleum industry, and it barely took five decades since the first oil was discovered.
What resources we have been good with, however, is fish. But that's just proper regulation over the last century or so.
As for our friendly neighbours... Norway was ruled by Denmark for 400 years and we've been part of all their wars, for a start. Our national anthem has 8 verses, 6 of them are about how we killed Swedes, Danes and Scots.
And we'd like Jamtland, Herjedalen, and all the islands in the Atlantic back, thankyouverymuch!
This also describes Saudi Arabia.
I've been to Norway 4-5 times and will visit again in about a month. It's wonderful throughout and wish we could live there.