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Comment by nakamoto_damacy | Hacker News Reader

Perpetual Motion Machines were a thing at some point, too.

Don't laugh. PMMs work! I built mine ten years ago when I realised I could improve the SOTA by a huge 20%. I've been improving it for the last 10 years and I get an average performance boost of ~0.25 every year. We will have Free Energy in the next 10 years.

I find your comment interesting, even though I'm not sure if I really get what you're saying. You built a perpetual motion machine? You then made improvements? Can you share details?

Good news everyone, you've passed the Turing test.

Hmm, I guess I didn't pass it then.

they are claiming that they built a PMM prototype, which is not fully satisfying the business requirements yet, but they are on track to do so based on all the amazing documented validated peer-reviewed published progress they made already over the years!

That!

This is HN so I think it's fine to break standard protocol and clarify: I was joking. Specifically I was riffing off nakamoto_damacy's comment and carrying the comparison (of LLMs) with Perpetual Motion Machines (PMMs) to its logical conclusion.

20%? 0.25%? Those are rookie numbers! /s

(I feel like this post is underappreciated by at least 20%. :D )

The trick is you use magnets, momentum, and WD-40. That can get you most of the way.

It probably will eventually stop, though. Something about the Sun becoming a red giant...

Pf, magnets. That's so 1920's! Room-temperature superconductors are the thing nowadays. I'm sure we'll have those in just a few years.

Cool! Mine passively extracts unlimited energy from the expansion of space.

Not scientifically perpetual. But definitely, relative to the finite future lifetime of the human race, operable for perpetuity.

And by extracting dark energy, we can not only turn the big rip around. But by pulling dark energy out of space in a linear direction ahead of a ship, we can power the ship to high speed, as we contract space in front of the ship. Like fusion, we can use extracted dark energy to extract more dark energy. Essentially smoothly teleporting forward. No more fundamental speed limits relative to observers at distance. Looking forward to exploring beyond the observable universe.

It isn't "free" though. There are unique risks.

I refer to the endless self improving runaway AI as an “information theoretic perpetual motion machine.”

This will work in a sense. It will do… something… and learn… something. It will be unrelated to the physical universe in any way. See also: procedural landscape generators, etc.

Might kinda work if you gave it tools to do its research on the open internet, fiverr, mechanical Turk, etc.

On its own without any alignment or labelling. Super-intelligence or super-Grok?

The idea would be to use mech Turk and fiverr as touch points with reality. I’m not saying it’s a good idea, just that in theory it might work.

That’s at least some contact with reality, at least by proxy. I’m referring to a brain in a vat somehow learning.

Yeah, information about external reality cannot be generated from entropy alone.

Sure, it could up until some point where in order for it to figure out that it has to use a tool or access the Internet it will need more intelligence (to know that its answer or understanding is not sufficient or incorrect) How do we as humans know that? Someone tells us. Who's going to tell it? Then you end up at Minsky's Society of Mind, but also a distributed perpetual motion machine. Evolution seems to have figured out the intuition mechanism as some sort of probabilistic mechanism that's been honed for potentially millions of years, if not billions (white blood cells track pathogens, without having any neural network, so it's possible.) -- I think I opened a can of worms with these thoughts.

This makes sense on its face, but the flaw in the logic here is the implicit assumption that current procedures extract all information available in the datasets. We know this is not even remotely close to being true.

Many decades ago, statisticians made a similar erroneous assumption that maximum likelihood estimators, which also minimize entropy, are "optimal" in terms of saturating error. The fact that you can do better by smarter regularisation is the key to why DL works in the first place.

I'm no shill for AI, but you're going to need a better argument for why runaway AI up to obscene levels of performance is not theoretically possible. There are quite a few people, including some of my colleagues, that are looking in earnest but so far no one has found one.

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