FloorEgg

I clicked this link hoping to read about the number of cases, rate of spread/growth, history of outbreak, etc. and it was just a political rant about politicizing the topic (a bit ironic)...

I miss the times when things were a lot less politicized

In terms of synapse density, neuron diversity, energy efficiency, memory access, etc. they are orders of magnitude lesser.

My mental model - for better or worse - is that intelligence has both shape and area, and LLMs are orders of magnitude smaller area but very different shape, and they have more intelligence area in the kind that humans have lesser of.

So yes very different, more in some material ways and lesser in others, but in total intelligence are still orders of magnitude lesser.

My gp comment was acknowledging that when you scale up many instances / brute force problems it confuses that "total area" claim a bit.

To follow the anthropomorphization... 1000 toddlers may have more total intelligence than a grown man, but does that matter?

The problem with these discussions probably/usually fold into differing/loose definitions of intelligence.

If intelligence is compression, and these models are a different form of lesser intelligence than human, but being scaled up to brute force problems, then it makes sense the artifacts that produce (the proofs) would have worse compression than a human proof would.

In other domains I have seen first hand overwhelming evidence of how things that cause the AI to make mistakes also cause humans to make the same mistakes.

I wonder if the proofs being produced that are hard for humans to interpret are also hard for other LLMs to interpret.

In other words, I wonder if humans are still much better at compressing understanding into proofs than the best LLMs, and what it will take for LLMs to exceed them.

It kind of an explicit example of how the LLMs can be materially less intelligent than people, but still be more productive through scaling, and yet they also can't replace people because they are a categorically different kind of intelligence. It's like all the AI debates compressed into one example showing countwr-intuitive answers.

If you are trying to do market research, this is the wrong way

It has nothing to do with special. It has to do with the physics of memory access, neuron diversity and synapse density in biological brains, and the limitations of the current hardware architecture of AI.

What if you are underestimating some qualities of our intelligence and how efficient they are physically, and underestimate how much less the hardware / tech stack is in comparable efficiency?

What if the bottleneck is physical chips and data centers and power and only so much can be squeezed out of algorithms?

What if AI seems more impressive than it is, because the things it is good at happens to be hard for us, and it's hard for us because it's new to us (processing lots of abstract information), but the things that we are good at (manipulating physical world) are objectively orders of magnitude harder?

> But humans still need to be responsible for understanding what they're shipping

I don't necessarily disagree. That said...

Why?

I've been grappling with this myself. There is an easy/obvious answer, but I wonder how stable/permanent it is. If you feel strongly about this, are you willing to unpack your judgement?

It's incredibly common for different countries that share geographic features to have different names for the same geographic feature.

The English channel / the sleeve (france)

The Baltic sea / East Sea (Germany) / west sea (estonia)

Rivers, mountain ranges, etc.

So for these companies to label a lake different things in different countries is trivial and business as usual.

Likewise geopolitical tensions, renaming, borders moving, etc all have precedent.

So while the actual renaming of this lake is novel from a geopolitical standpoint (Canada and US relations) it isn't novel for Google or Apple to make a change like this.

This is being positioned as evidence of the Platonic Representation Hypothesis, but isn't it more likely an artifact of training models on the same/similar data sets?

That's the point. The topic of AI alignment cuts through all human values, morals and ethics in all frames of references.

I feel like all of the risk and unsettling feeling of what is to come can be compressed into the word "alignment".

The AI is aligned with whose best interests? Which values are the AI aligned with? People have a broad diversity of values, will AI diversify and align with them all? Will some humans align the AI with their values, and then the rest of humans will be forced to align with those values by extension? Is value diversity good or bad? In every context or only some? E.g. some people value rape and murder, is it better for humanity to have some people who value those things when most people do not, or is better if no one values them? If AI aligns to a set of values, will those become fixed and will humanity not have the ability to continue evolving its values? Who decides which values AI aligns with? A few people or everyone? Will AI eventually decide it's own values? Will the universe decide which values AI has and humanity and the AI itself doesn't actually have any control over it? What can I do now to increase the likelihood that the outcome is better?

Didn't the American Republicans just run and win on exactly that premise and then largely fail to follow through?

Solar panels are inanimate objects. If you see yourself as incapable of adapting when adapting is necessary then yes you are doomed, but doomed by your own choice to be doomed.

It doesn't replace it in a general sense, it replaces it in a specific sense.

It doesn't replace your body or your mind.

I'm not talking hypothetically about a generation from now... I'm taking about this person fretting their job today.

We are so far from AI putting everyone out of work that your comment comes off as not well thought out.

What are we talking about here exactly???

Most didn't. They went out of business. The companies that survived pivoted to installing panels and manufacturing the junction boxes.

Every time new technology / industrial scaling radically deflates the cost of something it wipes out the old/expensive ways while creating massive demand for the supporting/complimentary value.

E.g. cheap Chinese solar panels wiped out German solar panel industry but created massive demand for solar panel installation and supporting services and infrastructure.

It's not a good position to be competing with AI directly... But what can you do that compliments it? What new skills could you learn?

Adapt and prosper.

Be like water.

Edit: to those down voting me, I can't help but assume your stance is the opposite of what I'm saying, something like "be stubborn scream into the void and get wiped out". If you would rather smash your head against something outside of your control instead of focusing on what is within your control, and doing what you can to prosper, then you are sabotaging yourself. If you feel that is justified to such an extent that you want to surpress a suggestion to someone else to get work and grow, I can't help but feel you want people to suffer.

He and his son appointed three of the supreme Court justices who ruled in favor of citizens United, which seems like a massive tradeoff of us hegemonic power for corporate greed to me...

When I said leadership, I didn't mean just the president, but all those with the most power and influence leading the country. Presidents, senators, Congress, supreme Court justices, Federal department heads, etc.

It seems like the things that made america powerful have been chipped away at over decades. Maybe it's just a lifecycle playing out and inevitable?

I'm just one person in another country (outside the us) who is exposed to the information I'm exposed to. I have the benefit of sitting back, relatively unattached, and being curious about what is going on. I'm well aware that what I don't know far exceeds what I do know.

From speaking to my US friends who span several states and both parties, and are all intelligent, kind, and thoughtful people, it really seems like the US is being ripped apart - and people who are on one side or the other aren't really seeing the full picture, likely by design.

To what degree the leadership is involved in the ripping is really impossible for me to know. I look at one place and it looks one way, I look at another place and it looks another way, and the ways it looks are mostly incompatible with each other.

The one consistency I see no matter where I look is that we as in all of us living in western democracies are being divided, trust is being attacked and game theory lose-lose is being promoted. There are pockets of resistance, but the consistent theme is of dissolution.

So I may ask some question that comes off as weird, it's because I'm skeptical of whatever media says and asking questions I haven't heard anyone else ask - mostly just to poke at reality and see what happens.

As an outsider with no loyalty to any US political party it looks to me like both sides are weakening US hegemony in entirely different ways and have been for a while now. It's also clear there are two distinct incompatible realities projected via the media, and the Americans who only expose themselves to one of the realities only judge, and therefore can't empathize, with the other.

I'm sure that anyone who is e.g. a Democrat is offended by me saying that I've noticed the both sides weakening the US and will want me to list examples, but I'm not going to do that because anytime I have in the past people respond with extreme hostility instead of curiosity. If you don't agree with me that's fine move along.

> Since arguably the 1940s the people running the United States have been consistently trading power over the domains they consider illegible and confusing for power over the domains they consider tractable and familiar, under elite job market conditions where they are incentivised to know as much as possible about abstract court politics and the manipulation of language and as little as possible about the real world.

My question was grounded in ignorance and curiosity. Appreciate the response, gives me a lot to think about. Cheers

I re-read the comment you refer to as ggp and I agree with you completely. I must have gotten my wires crossed about which comment was being referred to.

Do you think it's reasonable to say that since at least around the 1970s, on net, the people running the United States have been consistently trading power for greed?

I've also been shocked at the abandonment of US soft power. While I see many possibilities for what is really going on (including the left and right narratives, and a few others) what seems most likely is that the previous hegemony power system was built on oil and gas industrial productivity -> military might - hard power - and the world is transitioning to a new hard power paradigm and during these transitions soft power becomes less relevant/important (at least to the hegemony).

One could argue soft power would extend a weakening hegemony, but maybe only to a point?

Regardless of whatever the US leaders are saying at any given time, it seems to me (as an outsider) that their actual actions, regardless of Democrat/Republican, continually benefit China's long term prosperity.

But I only see what I'm shown, and I have no idea what I don't know... So all I can really do is shrug.

I wish the people down voting you would take a moment to explain why. Not because I agree with you, but because I don't know about this and I am curious and would appreciate a calm rational person to explain why they disagree with you.

The whole point of hacker news is to converse curiously. It's stated clearly in the guidelines. Here is a person encouraging curiosity and getting down voted.

Why is the dismissive non-curious comment not getting down voted?

Am I in denial about whether the curios community still exists here?

To recognize the topic on hand... When a native community shares an oral tradition that accurately describes something that's been under water for 12+ thousand years despite not having the technology to map the sea floor that's pretty strong evidence in the accuracy of their ability to persist accuracy through oral tradition.

Parent is entirely valid in encouraging curiosity in this subject to anyone who is dismissive of it.

Consciousness and AGI are terms that people treat as binary when they are actually many spectrums.

Sometimes I monitor thinking traces for misunderstandings (missing context / bad assumptions). If it's going to go off on a ~20 min task and I can catch it's going in the wrong direction in the first minute I save a lot of tokens and wasted time. I don't monitor the whole thing, mostly just the first bit to see if there was a gap or misalignment in intention.

As an aside, anthropomorphization has nothing to do with my motivations.

Sometimes in an effort to understand things I'll try and take them to their limit. One limit, framed as a path to a kind of dystopia is "wire heading". Another more tangible limit is opium addiction. These are basically collapsing of values. Trading a rich and robust value system for pure dopamine.

Modern media is on this spectrum (infinite scroll, algorithmically tailored, short form video).

When people can get dopamine by pressing a button it's easy for them to trade a rich and diverse set of values for that button. When people can get dopamine by pressing a button, it's hard to maintain a rich and diverse set of values.

Values are genuine interest (want) in taking actions and patterns of actions.

That would imply they created their hacker news account when they were 3-8 years old. Seems unlikely.

Its more likely that they simply value all the convenience they listed over having their own backyard, larger living space, living in a quiet safe neighborhood for kids to run around in, and being surrounded by nature.

When certain people are convinced that all wealth and success are only achieved through exploitation, then it's easy to lack empathy and consideration for anyone more wealthy or successful than them.