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Comment by fxj | Hacker News Reader

People talk about a Butlerian Jihad against AI as if you could just ban LLMs and be done. I bet some govermenst would like to do that for ordinary people. They can ban visible products (chatbots, public APIs, GPAI services), and laws are already targeting those.

but you cant ban the math!

the same transformer/attention ideas work great as compressors, function approximators, and surrogate models in physics, chemistry, CFD, etc., where they show up as "PDE‑Transformer", "Neural Operator", or "Hybrid Surrogate Model", and not as "chatbot". ;-)

So even if you outlaw certain AI uses, the core tech will just move into scientific and engineering workflows under different names, where most people won’t recognize it. Would be interesting whether it is possible to write a LLM-like program just using compression and function interpolation algoritms.

just my 2 ct

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> People talk about a Butlerian Jihad against AI as if you could just ban LLMs and be done.

I don't think we're talking about bans. The word Jihad, in Islam means struggle and usually it's accompanied by a religious "war", but not necessarily violent (see below).

> jihad , In Islam, the central doctrine that calls on believers to combat the enemies of their religion. According to the Qurʾān and the Ḥadīth, jihad is a duty that may be fulfilled in four ways: by the heart, the tongue, the hand, or the sword. The first way (known in Sufism as the “greater jihad”) involves struggling against evil desires. The ways of the tongue and hand call for verbal defense and right actions. The jihad of the sword involves waging war against enemies of Islam. [0]

Maybe people can't win against machines, but they sure can fight e.g. by refusing to interact with AI online, at their job, vandalizing mass surveilance cameras, etc. etc.

[0] - https://www.britannica.com/summary/jihad

I believe the Butlerian Jihad caused a ban for "thinking machines" with a tenet of "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." This to me at least points at a ban for things that behave or feel like a human, not on the underlying math. An ornithopter probably has some fancy AI-esque flight stabilization, but it isn't expressed in a human way. The same goes for function approximators and surrogate models, no one would do the things we see people doing with AIs today, letting them talk them into heinous acts or fall in love with them.

That being said I can very much recommend the two Hyperion books for a good look at AI and co-dependence in sci-fi.

It'll have flight stabilization and controls and the like, but those things predate and / or do not need AI; AI algorithms are too expensive and slow for realtime flight control things. Some of those were traditionally done mechanically, even.

> Would be interesting whether it is possible to write a LLM-like program just using compression and function interpolation algoritms.

gzip can be used as a (not very good) LLM-like text and image generator: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668

You can ban the math by limiting the energy and the material resources.

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