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Comment by root_axis | Hacker News Reader

It's incredible to me that every single time there's a new model people scream "singularity" from the rooftops and every time they are wrong.

This is an impressive result, but there is absolutely zero evidence of "the singularity".

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It is not reasonable to not believe anything unless there is "evidence" (narrowly construed as an observation incompatible with the negation of some state of affairs). Beliefs have a wide spectrum of characterizations, and not all belief must wait until publicly corroborated evidence is available. Some events defy evidence and we can and should use experience and reasoning to infer unobservable states of affairs.

This is olympic level mental gymnastics to justify believing things without evidence. The double negative with the word evidence in scare quotes is chef's kiss.

I believe the sun will rise tomorrow without "evidence" (again, narrowly construed). We all do. It's only those who abuse the idea of epistemic hygiene who claim otherwise, usually with ulterior motives.

The evidence is the history of the sun rising since time immemorial, as well as the science of physics and cosmology that models the sun's motion with respect to the earth.

Yes, reasoning with models and making inferences are perfectly acceptable forms of evidence. But you can model the world based on ones knowledge and experience and infer when some event doesn't fit the typical pattern, then form beliefs about what that means. Also perfectly fine from an epistemic perspective. The rejoinder "there's no evidence" to a belief based on such an inference does no work.

...obviously it is evidence of the singularity. You're far more likely to see models solving Millenium Prize problems if a singularity is coming than if it's not. One'd have to be doing quite a lot of mental gymnastics to pretend otherwise.

Poor reasoning. You could apply the same logic to any improvement in any field of machine learning.

Not every improvement, no - if progress was steady or slowing down over time, that'd be evidence against. Instead we see what looks a lot like an accelerating growth in capability.

I think you are implying that it's invalid to consider every advance to be evidence "for", and I agree - that'd violate conservation of expected evidence. But not considering any advance to be evidence "for" is also invalid, for exactly the same reason. There has to be some news you may hear that'd make you think a singularity is more likely, and "millenium prize problem solved by an LLM" sure seems like one of those.

I suggest this article as background reading, "Losing control of AI is actually the plan"

https://substack.com/home/post/p-214653853

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