Techno-cynics are wounded techno-optimists
aftermath.site
aftermath.site
The hypocrisy in how copyright is enforced for AI companies vs everybody else is pretty infuriating though. We have courts ruling against people for downloading youtube videos to enable them to use clips for fair use purposes (https://torrentfreak.com/ripping-clips-for-youtube-reaction-...) while Nvidia is free to violate the DMCA in the exact same way to take youtuber's content in full (https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/nvidia-accused-of-scraping-80-y...).
“Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist.”
LLMs are amazing math systems. Give them enough input and they can replicate that input with exponential variations. That in and of itself is amazing.
If they were all trained on public domain material, or if the original authors of that material were compensated for having the corpus of their work tossed into the shredder, then the people who complain about it could easily be described as Luddites afraid of having their livelihood replaced by technology.
But you add in the wholesale theft of the content of almost every major, minor, great and mediocre work of fiction and non-fiction alike to be shredded and used as logical paper mache to wholesale replace the labor of living human beings for nickles on the dollar and their complains become much more valid and substantial in my opinion.
It's not that LLMs are bad. It's that the people running them are committing ethical crimes that have not been formally illegalized. We can't use the justice system to properly punish the people who have literally photocopied the soul of modern media for an enormously large quick buck. The frustration and impotence they feel is real and valid and yet another constant wound for them in a life full of frustrating constant wounds, which in itself is a lesser but still substantial portion of what we created society to guard the individual against.
It's a small group of ethically amoral people injuring thousands of innocent people and making money from it, mind thieves selling access to their mimeographs of the human soul for $20/month, thank you very much.
If some parallel of this existed in ancient Egypt or Rome, surely the culprits would be cooked alive in a brazen bull or drawn and quartered in the town square, but in the modern era they are given the power and authority and wealth of kings. Can you not see how that might cause misery?
All that being said, if the 20 year outcome of this misery is that everyone ends up in an GAI assisted beautiful world of happiness and delight, then surely the debt will be paid, but that is at bet a 5% likely outcome.
More likely, the tech will crash and burn, or the financial stability of the world that it needs to last for 20 years will crash and burn, or WWIII will break out and in a matter of days we will go from the modern march towards glory to irradiated survivors struggling for daily survival on a dark poisoned planet.
Either way, the manner in which we are allowing LLMS to be fed, trained, and handled is not one that works to the advantage of all humanity.
I think it's even worse than that - they are committing actual crimes that many people were punished severely for in the previous decades, (for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_Inc._v._Thoma...)
The strawberry thing has been solved and LLM's have moved way beyond that helping in mathematics and physics. Its easy for the blog author to pick this but lets try something different.
It would be a good idea to come up with a question that trips up a modern LLM like GPT with reasoning enabled. I don't think there exists such a question that can fool an LLM but not fool a reasonably smart person. Of course it has to be in text.
It seems like every couple weeks there's some embarrassing failure of AI that gets quickly patched, but just because AI companies scramble to hide the failures of their technology doesn't mean they haven't failed in ways that shouldn't have been possible if they were what they claim them to be.
> I don't think there exists such a question that can fool an LLM but not fool a reasonably smart person.
An example was on the front page here just a few days ago.
https://s3.eu-central-2.wasabisys.com/mastodonworld/media_at...
Until someone invents an LLM that has any actual understanding of the words it outputs (which doesn't seem likely to happen in my lifetime) these things are going to keep happening, just like how it's impossible to get them to stop hallucinating. The limitation is intrinsic to what they are. We call these chatbots AI, but there is no intelligence there that didn't come from the humans whose words were used to train them.
Every few weeks I see the same thing.
Come up with an example that trips up ChatGPT.
https://preview.redd.it/2jzzt66r5rjg1.png?width=1346&format=...
In fact give it 100 tries and post here if you find even one.
If your answer is that OpenAI is constantly patching these, then that's conspiracy level thinking. But if you really want to go there, then it should be easy to come up with a new prompt to stump chatgpt wouldn't it?
That's also why Apple is so worried about their App Store revenue above all else. The legal argument they make is that the 30% take is an IP licensing scheme, but the value of IP is Soviet central planning nonsense. Certainly, if the App Store was just there to take 30% from games, Apple wouldn't be defending it this fiercely[0], and they wouldn't have burned goodwill trying to impose the 30% on Patreon.
Likewise, the value of generative AI is not that the AI is going to give us post-scarcity mental labor or even that AI will augment human productivity. The former isn't happening and the latter is dwarfed by the fact that AI is a rules exploit to access a bunch of copyrighted information that would have otherwise cost lots of money. In that environment, it is unethical to evaluate the technology solely on its own merits. My opinion of your model and your thinly-veiled """research""" efforts will depend heavily on what the model is trained for and on, because that's the only intelligent way to evaluate such a thing.
Did you train on public domain or compensated and consensually provided data? Good for you.
Did you train an art generator on a bunch of artists' deviantART or Dribbble pages? Fuck off, slopmonger.
Did you train on a bunch of Elsevier journals? You know what? Fuck them, they deserve it, now please give me the weights for free.
Humans can smell exploitation a mile away, and the people shitting on AI are doing so because they smell the exploitation.
[0] As a company, Apple has always been mildly hostile to videogames. Like, strictly speaking, operating a videogame platform requires special attention to backwards compatibility that only Microsoft and console vendors have traditionally been willing to offer. The API stability guarantees Apple and Google provide - i.e. "we don't change things for dumb reasons, but when we do change them we expect you to move within X years" are not acceptable to anything other than perpetually updated live service games. The one-and-done model of most videogames is not economically compatible with the moving target that is Apple platforms.
It seems to me that this take will start to resonate with more and more people
By putting capital ahead of everything else of course capitalism gives you technological progress. If we didn't have capitalism we'd still be making crucible steel and the bit would cost more than the horse [1] -- but if you can license the open hearth furnace from Siemens and get a banker to front you to buy 1000 tons of firebricks it is all different, you can afford to make buildings and bridges out of steel.
Similarly, a society with different priorities wouldn't have an arms race between entrepreneurs to spend billions training AI models.
[1] an ancient "sword" often looks like a moderately sized knife to our eyes
The history of how steel got cheap is not really capital-based. It wasn't done by throwing money at the problem, not until the technology worked. The Bessemer Converter was a simple, but touchy beast. The Romans could have built one, but it wouldn't have worked. The metallurgy hadn't been figured out, and the quantitative analysis needed to get repeatability had to be developed. Once it was possible to know what was going into the process, repeatability was possible. Then it took a lot of trial and error, about 10,000 heats. Finally, consistently good steel emerged.
That's when capitalism took over and scaled it up. The technological progress preceded the funding.
If it goes into a codified state system, it's regulated, resulting in a lack of motivation to take risks to make it better.
What do investors want? Returns on their investment right.
So, as an investor do you throw your money blindly at a high risk endeavor that is likely to fail due to competition, or
Do you invest in setting up a limited rent seeking market that guarantees income in the future.
Unregulated free market capitalism always turns into one large bully that dominates over everyone else because one large bully that dominates over everyone else is a very effective system. Vote based governments such as democracy are a means of attempting to ensure that said government are somewhat controlled by the people and not by a king/corporations in the first place.
For instance on Matt Stoller's blog there are endless articles about how private equity is buying up medical practices, veterinary practices, cheerleading leagues, all sorts of low-risk, high-reward rollups. You also see things like the current AI bubble where there is very much an "arms race" where it seems quite likely that investors are willing to risk wasting their money because of the fear of missing out.
Some other kind of social system is going to face the same trade-offs and note that "communism" in the sense of the USSR and China might not be a true alternative. I mean, Stalin's great accomplishment was starving his peasants to promote rapid industrialization (capital formation!) so they could fight off Germany and then challenge the US for world supremacy. People who are impressed with China today are impressed that they're building huge solar farms, factories that build affordable electric cars, have entrepreneurial companies that develop video games and social media sites, etc. That is, they seem to out-capitalize us.
I think this hazard extends up and down too; a balance we each have of how we regard possibility & value vs whether we default to looking for problems or denial. This becomes a pattern of perspective people adopt. And I worry so much at how doubt & denial pervade. In our hearts and… well… in the comments, everywhere.
I get it and I respect it; it's true: we need to be aware, alert, and on guard. Everything is very complicated. Hazards and bad patterns abound. But especially as techies, finding possibility is enormously valuable to me. Being willing to believe and amplify the maybe, even when it's a challenging situation. I cherish that so much.
Thank you very much Steve Yegge for the life-changing experience of Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus. I did not realize, did not have framing to understand the base human motivations of tech & building & the comments. I see the world so much differently for grokking the thesis here, see much more the outlooks people come from than I did. It has pushed me in life to look for higher possibility & reach, & to avoid closings of the mind, to avoid rejecting, to avoid fear uncertainty and doubt. https://gist.github.com/cornchz/3313150
It's one of the most Light Side vs Dark Side noospherically illuminating pieces I've ever read. The article here touches upon those who care, and what they see: it frames the world. Yegge's post I think reflects further, back at the techie, on what happens to caring thoughtful people, Carlin's arc if idealist -> disappointed -> cynic. And to me Notes was a rallying cry to have fortitude, & to keep a certain purity of hope close, and to work against thought terminating fear uncertainty and doubt.
Cynicism is the mind's way of protecting itself from repeating unproductive loops that can be damaging. Anyone who ever had a waking dream come crashing down more than once likely understands this.
It doesn't necessarily logically follow that you wholesale reject entire categories of technology which have already shown multiple net positive use cases just because some people are using it wastefully or destructively. There will always be someone who does that. The severity of each situation is worth discussing, but I'm not a big fan of the thought-terminating cliché.
There's understandably some concerns over how it will impact people's jobs in the future, but that's a societal issue, not a problem with the technology.
I think the problem people have is with how that technology was created by people looking to privately profit from the hard work of others without compensation, how it is massively destructive to the environment, how it is being used to harm others, and how the people controlling it are indifferent to the harms they cause at best and at worst are trying to destroy or undermine our society. These are valid concerns to have and it's only natural for it to impact people's attitudes towards the technology as it's been implemented and how its used today.
The author doesn't understand Marx but merely parrots leftist talking points. Marx strongly claims that without change in technology, feudalism would not have changed to capitalism.
No idea where you get your statement from. Care to post a source?
I find this argument even stranger. Every system can be reduced to its parts and made to sound trivial thereby. My brain is still just neurons firing. The world is just made up of atoms. Humans are just made up of cells.
>here’s actually a few commonly understood theories of existence that are generally accepted even by laypeople, like, “if I ask a sentient being how many Rs there are in the word ‘strawberry’ it should be able to use logic to determine that there are three and not two,” which is a test that generative AI frequently fails.
This shows that the author is not very curious because its easy to take the worst examples from the cheapest models and extrapolate. Its like asking a baby some questions and interpreting humanity's potential on that basis. What's the point of this?
> The questions leftists ask about AI are: does this improve my life? Does this improve my livelihood? So far, the answer for everyone who doesn’t stand to get rich off AI is no.
I'll spill the real tension here for all of you. There are people who really like their comfy jobs and have got attached to their routine. Their status, self worth and everything is attached to it. Anything that disrupts this routine is obviously worth opposing. Its quite easy to see how AI can make a person's life better - I have so many examples. But that's not what "leftists" care about - its about security of their job.
The rest of the article is pretty low quality and full of errors.
I find this line of reasoning compelling. Curiosity ( and trying to break things ) will get you a lot fun. The issue I find that people don't even try to break things ( in interesting ways ), but repeat common failure modes more as a gospel and not an observed experiment. The fun thing is that even the strawberry issue tells us more about the limitations of llms than not. In other words, that error is useful...
<< Their status, self worth and everything is attached to it. Anything that disrupts this routine is obviously worth opposing.
There is some of that for sure. Of all days, today I had my manager argue against use of AI for a use case that would affect his buddy's workflow. I let it go, because I am not sure what it actually means, but some resistance is based on 'what we have always done'.
That's a fair way to look at it - failure modes tell us something useful about the underlying system. In this case it tells us something about how LLM's work at the token level.
But if you go a step beyond that, you would realise that this problem is solved at a _general_ level with the reasoning models. GPT o1 was internally named strawberry as far as I remember. This would be a nice discussion to have but instead of shallow dismissal of AI as a technology with a failure mode that has been pretty much solved.
What really has not been solved is long context and continual learning (and world model stuff but I don't find that interesting).
I wonder about that. In a sense, the solution seems simple.. allow more context. One of the issues, based on progression of chatgpt models, was that too much context allowed for a much easier jailbreak and the fear most corporates have over that make me question the service. Don't get me wrong, I am not one of those people missing 4o for telling me "I love you". I do miss it its nerfed capability to go across all conversations. Working context is was made more narrow now. For a paid sub, that kind of limitation is annoying.
My point is, I know there are some interesting trade-offs to be made ( mostly because I am navigating those on local inference machine ), but with all those data centers one would think, providers have enough power to solve that.. if they so chose.
But the trivialization does not come from being reduced to parts, but what parts you end up with.
It is like realizing the toy that seems to be able figure out a path around obstacles, cannot actually "see", but works by a clever arrangement of gears.
in this case can you come up with things that the toy can't do but a toy with eyes could have?
you've asked me 4 times now, can you tell me what an LLM can't do that a human can? whats the edge case?
There is your answer.
if you can find an edge case for an LLM, tell me. i think you genuinely can't find it and saving face.
I asked a question about this thread posing as you.
ChatGPT doesn’t have a good opinion on your communication style.
I would suggest purchasing the subscription and using ChatGPT for help in new discussions.
I ask you again, what edge case does there exist for an LLM that an LLM can't perform but a human can?
Without dodging the question or asking me sheepishly to ask an LLM, can you unambiguously answer the question with a single edge case?
If you still can't answer me with a single edge case that a human can do but an LLM can't (in text and limited context) then it is clear you are trying to save face.