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Comment by EA-3167 | Hacker News Reader

This is the "Pilot testimony of UFO sighting" levels of naive.

What's more likely? Anthropic is doing some deeply unethical marketing in the lead up to their multi-trillion dollar IPO? Or they're inventing a machine god? There's ample evidence of the former because that's their entire business model, but no evidence whatsoever to support the latter claims.

If you want an extreme claim to be taken seriously, provide commensurate evidence.

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The proof is that LLMs could barely solve arithmetic 3 years ago, but now surpass the best human mathematicians, and that this has all occurred from simple principles (RL + compute) that will continue to scale up by factors of millions in the coming years.

Also, advocating for slowing LLM progress does not benefit Anthropic or OpenAI.

They surpass the best human mathematicians in one specific way: they don't get tired or bored.

It won't scale up by factors of millions, that's just obscene hyperbole. Since chatgpt we've probably made things 10x more intelligent on the same hardware. We've also made way more expensive models. Maybe we get a maximum of another 10x efficiency and 5x model size/expense from this point but millions is a joke.

Haven't people learned about the peril of assuming, "Line go up" yet?!

TRENDS HAVE FEEDBACK

Trends don't go on forever, but the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. There's no good rule of thumb for this, other than maybe the Lindy effect.

I won’t presume to time it, but at this point I think anyone can see what’s coming. It’s precisely because it can’t be timed that a sane person should stand well clear.

I certainly can't see what's coming. I believe that nobody really knows what's coming. Some people are overconfident.

We know that they're trying to invent a machine god, and if they're even partway successful shit's gonna get real, real fast.

> There's ample evidence of the former because that's their entire business model

Given the economic numbers is it not reasonable to suppose that the latter also underpins their business model?

I wouldn't rule out pilot testimony of UFO sightings, nor the possibility we're indeed developing a machine God.

There's ample evidence to support both by now.

So what is your credence that they will build a machine god in the next twenty years?

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