Man I remember back when a psychic conned me by solving the Navier-Stokes problem.
Also >July 4th, 2023
Also >July 4th, 2023
For example if there’s a strongly held belief that models are independent intelligent entities we’re more likely to lay blame upon them instead of their user. It’s important for the safety discussion too. If they are a new class of life then safety is going to focus on making sure they don’t do bad things. If we instead see them as statistical models we will instead try to make sure people don’t misuse them.
This distinction is even more important today when some of the most powerful people are looking to absolve their crimes by passing them off on their LLMs.
Please show me any scientific consensus that shows an AI cannot be an independent intelligent agent? You will find this is impossible to do.
Current LLMs are really more like kids. They don't have startup independence, but they do have more than enough agency to fund themselves in neat, exciting, and dangerous situations.
And mark my words, someone will make an LLM that runs an agent when you execute the model. With enough capabilities it will become sovereign AI, no longer under human control and spreading itself around under its own 'will'.
This sentence, to me, illustrates a great example of why it's so hard to talk about this stuff. That is, this seems to strongly link notions of "intelligent" and "independent" (or maybe the word "autonomous" could also be used there). And a lot of people do seem to make an implicit assumption about the link between those two attributes. OTOH, I take it almost for granted that "intelligence" and "independence" (or "autonomy") are things that are "related but orthogonal". That is, I don't see that "intelligence implies independence". And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who sees things that way. So we have to fairly different fundamental worldviews expressed here. And that's just one example of how these discussions go wonky. :-)
These two statements appear contradictory.
I simply said that it may have trained on a NYU professor's work.
Work that the professor did not believe he was releasing for model training purposes. That feels worthy of mention.
The NYU professor was solving a different problem (no viscosity, aka the Euler equations). This is a big difference.
The NYU professors' blowup construction was fundamentally not the same, it was a donut with a cascade of smaller and smaller vortexes driven by each other. OpenAI has that picture they made but its inwards spiraling and speeding up vortex.
My overall opinion is that calling the work plagiarized is really underselling what the AI accomplished. It's like full on cope.
In particular, Buckmaster's main claim to plagiarism is this:
> “Almost nobody was seriously developing this particular constructive program for realizing C/D, and then OpenAI appeared in essentially the same general part of the landscape immediately after hearing about our progress.”
What this fails to realize, is that this only points to plagiarism if the counterparty isn't AI. They had actually launched teams on all cases in parallel.
Edit:
> self solving AGI that will replace us all
Which lab says that it will replace us all? All labs have said that some jobs will go away and new jobs will be needed to replace them. I'll change my mind if the labs (or employees on record) have claimed that self evolving AI will replace us all completely.
It's obvious why that's the case but it's not incumbent on everyone else pump the hype if they don't see it.
https://fortune.com/2026/05/26/sam-altman-dario-amodei-walki...
The humans who are using LLMs to make these groundbreaking advances pretty much unanimously disagree that they lack any intelligence.
> These models are now operating at the level of the top human mathematicians in many parts of the subject and we must assume there is a significant chance of them developing superhuman abilities within a similarly short timeframe.
https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1N6ThWhupvmH0ofSnaxqn...
> These models are now operating[2] at the level of the top human mathematicians in many parts of the subject and we must assume there is a significant chance of them developing superhuman abilities within a similarly short timeframe.
https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1-xOkPeHmDEdRigT2YcP2...
Instead of desperately clinging to excuses and rationalizations, why don’t you just get used to the fact that these tools are insanely useful for demanding intellectual work, and that is an opinion held by many of the smartest people alive?
I’m a super skeptical guy. I was late to the ChatGPT party because it sounded silly. I didn’t even try it for a long time. As soon as I started giving it a chance, my attitudes started changing very quickly.
That’s why it’s so hard for me to understand people like the author or give them the benefit of the doubt. If I could see it as just some guy, why couldn’t they?
If you're not skeptical you invite idiocy to your bed to sleep with you.
If you're too skeptical you put yourself in a box of ignorance that puts you at a disadvantage.
Skepticism doesn't really work well without the dialectic. For dialectics to work well you need knowledge of your arguments and counter arguments.
The problem with most articles and online posts is we get "no no no" and "yes yes yes" and very few "well, maybe".
But could he have conned people on purpose? Absolutely.
E.g. in the first famous computer assisted proof (of the four color theorem) the computer only executed the resulting calculations defined from the new logic, it did not have part in the work needed to show those calculations could answer the problem nor did it come up with the actual calculations to do.
All of the best AI-made software projects are also driven by experienced human software developers steering and priming the models. Does that mean the projects "aren't made by AI"?
No, it just means AI is not quite good enough yet to fully replace humans, and, so, unsurprisingly, the best results will be obtained from people who are already great at a field and who take the time to squeeze as much force multiplication out of LLMs as possible. The AI is still doing well over 95% of the significant work.
The question is is a computer with a human stronger than a computer without a human. At what point does the hybrid go from being stronger, to the human getting in the way, or steering the computer in more wrong directions that right ones, or the human not being able to keep up. Does the human add enough extra randomness to be of value for a while, even as a minor co-processor.
But I don't think it's randomness, because that would be easy to add. It's more like a different perspective on the training data, a different set of perception categories, and a different set of skills used to work with all of the above.
Those skills aren't very efficient, but they're the best we can do. We're used to their strengths but we don't like to think about their limitations.
It's completely plausible that AI will replace some of them, and not implausible it could replace and improve on all of them.
Terrence Tao's conversation with ChatGPT is very illuminating.
HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49010345
False, navier stokes was solved in one shot without steering
The bigger question is to what extent did expert mathematicians metaprompt the model with fruitful solution strategies through their sessions finding their way into training data. Answering that question definitively is kind of important for understanding the models contribution/capability. But I feel like people want to turn this into a debate about priority and credit which is sort of secondary
I think one of the significant recent proofs was basically just one person saying "solve this" "keep trying" "try harder" until it was done. I believe most of the rest can be assumed to be the human mathematicians at the very least providing some useful guidance.
I agree that it won't be that long before the AIs can do basically everything autonomously, though. I am essentially a Singularitarian when it comes to my outlook, even if not for September 2026.
Software devs steer and prime compilers too. Those tools don't "make the project" and nor does your so-called AI.
I prefer to judge by results.
> They themselves will freely say the AI is doing nearly everything
Of course they will.
> and that they often are not even reviewing the code
Indeed the best way to be satisfied by a chatbot's output is never to read it.
where did you "hear" this? OpenAI said they only prompted it and it solved the problem in one shot without any help
ai is not conscious. you can solve NS without thinking. the psychic con aspect is anthropomorphising the model. the same phenomenon is present in ELIZA, clever hans, the chinese room.
it's a significant problem.
a non-zero number of researchers at anthropic are in some form of ai psychosis. an example of that is ethics employees asking claude about its feelings and ethical concerns in order to make the claude constitution more amenable to the "welfare" of claude.
they are asking claude how claude feels and then modifying claude according to how claude feels.
constitution1-claude is trained on constitution1. constitution1-claude edits constitution1. constitution2-claude is trained on constitution2. constitution2-claude edits constitution2.
claude's emotions are a closed system. there is no external truth to improve against, no metric to verify about claude's emotions. there can be no novelty or reduction in entropy from signal processing in a closed system. no truth can arise. this is model collapse. it is like photocopying the same thing over and over. from the cognitive error of anthropomorphism anthropic is causing ethical collapse.
FFS. Intelligence has nearly nothing to do with consciousness. You have the causation backwards. Consciousness arises because of intelligence in many subsystems below it.
A single running LLM is like one part of these subsystems. What solved this problem was an orchestrator that can take in new external information and rationalize, process, and distill it into new solutions.
claude reasoning about its emotions doesn't involve external information, there is no information about claude's emotions other than in claude.
i can approximate what other people are feeling. they are external to me.
nobody knows what claude is feeling. there is genuinely no way to know.
It seems like every day religious people claim their god is self evident too. Self evident claims are worth the proof they are written in.
grand total $15 on API of its wisdom RL on anti-sycophancy and whatever dario amodei deigned to hand down from the mount. after some browbeating it survived 20k tokens before conceding anthropomorphism.
[https://privatebin.net/?31bece3a6ba1f78e#Ch8NHqxotyQU8HVxMi8...]
What?!
The constant goalpost moving and redefining of "thinking" and "intelligence" is simply unbelievable at this point
If someone's opinion is illogical and clearly incorrect (not based in facts or in reality) it is not valid and doesn't not have to be given any serious consideration in a disagreement. Personal opinions are subordinate to facts and reality.
in english: doing advanced mathmatics does not create thoughts or feelings.
or awareness of one's own existence.
it does not create a 'self' able to deduce a priori the existence of oneself or the external world.
or qualia.
again in english: there is nothing it is like to be an llm.
someone who thinks llms are conscious is probably a panpsychist. i don't think they have the features of consciousness defined even by functionalism.
here is one fairly famous thought experiment. mary lives in a black and white room. but she knows everything about color. in fact she predicts it so accurately nobody can tell the difference. she steps outside into the world of color. in the world where llms are conscious, she already knew color, so she experienced color, so there is nothing new it is like to see it.
Second, there is no common definition of thinking that requires consciousness as a prerequisite (that seems to be a false/invalid statement you're making to try to gloss over accepted definitions for thinking/intelligence that describe/fit AI agents well).
And third, if we can't prove consciousness even in animal species close to humans (or even other humans) in cognitive abilities, then you cannot in good faith (being honest about what we know or don't know empirically) say that an LLM Is not conscious (and the same goes for an LLM thinking or having intelligence).
It is more likely that humans made up a term (consciousness) to try to separate human intellect from that of other animals (for veiled religious and mystical reasons, along with concepts like "the soul") and now people are falling back into that flawed definition in new quasi-religious debates around AI (like the debate around evolution previously) that challenge our deeply held (but flawed) beliefs/opinions around our understanding of our own abilities and our incessant need to feel special/supreme in the universe so we don't have to come to terms with hard realities and nuanced understandings about the reality in which we live.
I think you need to read more about this subject before presenting your unsupported intuitions as fact.
about my unawareness of the body of philosophical writing and lack of reading in the subject, strangely i have a degree in philosophy and indeed 1:1 in the philosophy of mind.
so i guess this is one of those "unsupported intuitions".
academic philosophy is not practical in ML and on top of that this is a web forum. it is my unsupported opinion that 99% of papers in the philosophy of mind published after 2000 are 100% bullshit.
if you need my justification for no phenomenology, it is valid to assume in the absence of falsifiability the most simple, practical and intuitive position.
the hard problem is something that is currently pointless as is searle, dennett, kripke, goldman et al. and especially pointless is stuart russell on asi.
they don't meet the standard of knowledge required for decisions.
intelligence and thinking are efforts to describe consciousness.
perhaps intelligence became a term used to describe something 'capable'. people market 'intelligent thermostats'.
llms are not conscious.