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Pretty unusual to see the /r/aiwars slapfights (here presented without touching on any of the obvious rebuttals) make it HN, but I guess it makes sense. I'm sure a sizeable majority of the US population agrees that visual art that involves neural networks at any point is dogmatically Satanic, so that probably includes at least ~40-60% of this crowd, too.

It's also a little disheartening for me to see people crashing out about philosophy of aesthetics at a time when I'm terrified of grey goo and killer drones, but that's more on me than him. I'm not exactly doing much to prevent it either, so staying on the previous societal crisis seems defensible!

On the (well written!) post's particulars:

I can't help but feel like this attitude is... "myopic" is too far, but perhaps... intensive? Namely, it seems to be treating the contemporary craft of game design as some hallowed pursuit that artificial claws are ripping away from us, when in fact I'd argue it's one of the most recent and most rapidly-changing SWE subfields around. Yes, a lot of the skills he learned will be useless. Yes, that is inherently embarassing and anxiety-inducing and enraging, and no, none of us saw this coming (don't believe the scruffies, their fingers were crossed up till ~2018, too!).

But is a world in which video game designers get to make higher quality games faster really such a bad one? I've felt frustrated with the scope and polish of AAA games for years, and the quintessential indie dev story involves way too many years of toil.

Of course that falls apart if you assume that involving neural networks at any point in the process necessarily leads to worse outcomes, but... well, don't? That's clearly just a dogma, so either open it up to actual scientific experimentation or just adopt a different, more reality-amenable dogma. Living life as an anti-AI purist (or Luddite, I say with the utmost respect for King Ludd) puts you in a cognitive place where the soul of humanity is under seige by shadowy, chrome figures, and the only way to get to a healthier place is to examine that assumption.

Like, clearly, software made with Soul and Taste and Intuition and Experience and Consciousness can still be published -- and I'm glad the author and his friend are doing so! The threat is that they might not perform as well in a marketplace ruled by capital, but, I mean... did they ever? Writing your own game engine in C++ was already the equivelant of going to university for Tuba, or striking out as a full-time landscape painter; it was mostly for the children of the rich.

*TL;DR:* Would a radical shakeup of the video game world really be such a disaster? Assuming we aren't just assuming a disaster, that is.

Oh wow someone from the team! I'm really heartened by this response -- as you can tell, I've been something of a fan, so I felt kinda betrayed by the idea that this was a risk. Thanks for clarifying, and for taking my frustrated hyperbole in stride.

Submitting an application to your product role now. "All of the models are at least okay" is heartening, but there's a whole bunch of fun places to take this.

¡Viva La OpenRouter! (again)

No I know, I was in the GUI as I wrote that lol. As the other person said: if they vary this much in quality, not including that way above updtime and performance is absurd. What would you use a fast, always-up, broken endpoint for?

Well, Lenovo's new air cooling and Brax's new open source devices would both be made pretty moot if everyone on earth dies in the coming months. Sooooooo

If openrouter is only for people who "make their own benchmark" in a mission to roll something that's usually made by scientists with large budgets, it should say so and thus fade into deserved obscurity.

  I don't think anyone serious is just willy-nilly making individual requests against OpenRouter

Despite your confidence, that is indeed the basis of this massive corporations entire business plan.

  If you just want best accuracy requests from SOTA models for your agent you run locally or whatever, then don't use OpenRoute

If OpenRouter is only for bad accuracy, they should say as much and fade into deserved obscurity.

  if you want to control the routing, you'd lock down providers

I don't want to control routing. I want the model to work how the giant, prominent "BENCHMARKS" section says it works, not randomly have a 100x error rate.

If OpenRouter is a marketplace to pick a provider while avoiding huge problems, it is terrible at that job. It surfaces literally none of that info in the top-level list, the graphs below are mislabeled and useless at best, and doesn't notify you of this horrifying situation anywhere, even in passing. There's not even a way to compare providers, AFAICT -- you can only compare models.

  This is quite literally the point of OpenRouter.

Their tagline is "better prices, better uptime, no subscriptions". The first two of these directly and inherently contradict your understanding -- neither would be possible if OpenRouter was just a fancy way to change something in their GUI rather than changing the target url of your gateway.

> vendor-neutral slop

Never before have I heard this sentiment, NGL. Vendor-neutrality has been an OS(/FLOSS) darling for, well, the whole time.

RE:"single vendor", if this post is to believed then you might have picked one that has 100x the tool calling errors for the next SoTA model, if your single vendor serves the next SoTA in the first place. It also completely erases the notion of competition driving down prices -- that would only hurt you in the short term, but obviously would ruin the whole ecosystem long term.

I feel like I must be missing something?

Wait WTF?! I thought performance was, well, performance, not efficacy! OpenRouter's UI in this section is remarkably broken and unclear at the same time, and I have no idea where the author got those clean charts. "AutoExacto" numbers (completely meaningless name) are available for 6 providers, two of which are the same provider, and none of which are even in the top half throughput-wise. When you click "+28 more providers", it just shows a clearly broken modal. And the the next two graphs are even worse. Really all of these graphs are pretty and completely 100% useless.

I feel like it's absolutely insane that some providers serve the same model with much less efficacy. That doesn't make sense to me. What's going on?! I'm suddenly feeling intense shame for having routed all my non-subscription usage through them so far, and honestly some white hot anger that they would blatantly lie about something so important.

What am I missing? Is this really true?

1. Slippery slopes are usually seen as a fallacy.

2. You're misinterpreting this as a battle over what kind of topics you can use a hosted chatbot for, and which are forbidden for corporate reasons. That is, to say least, small potatoes.

3. Blaming the companies for "zero accountability" is pretty odd. All of this is brand new, and the two big ones are both pushing for new laws on this very thing.

4. Your last point... I'm not sure I understand, sorry. They're experts in AI. Are you saying that they need to be experts in, say, bioweaponry? If so, that doesn't really follow IMO.

5. Pointing out an example of the government comissioning a private corporation to build a system to drack dissidents is exactly the "safety and welfare" work that I'm a proponent of!

What evidence do you have that LessWrong is a cult in any way the HackerNews is not?

If he's a cult leader, he's awfully bad at it. No opulence, no compounds, no dogma, no doctrine...

Yeah, that's annoying. BTW, have you ever choked to death on a cloud of invisible cobalt dust, desperately reaching for air but knowing that you and all you love will die regardless?

Pretty annoying, too!

Elizer Yudkowsky is a scientist, despite writing something you dislike 20 years ago and also having a blog. And no, he's not associated with race realism, that's just baseless libel.

I... that's hard to even know how to respond to. If you think the field is 5 years old, you should not feel comfortable expressing opinions about it.

A cursory search of the relevant wikipedia articles would do you wonders.

Yes, it's called expert epistemology, it's the basis of your entire life. Or do you do your own safety checks of every airplane you get on? Do you do your own research rather than trusting doctors? Do you think climate change doesn't exist because the reason we think it exists is because experts say it does, despite the fact that it snows sometimes?

Interesting stance. Out of curiousity, where did you do your doctoral research in AI or cognitive science? Where have you published your rebuttals to the overwhelming consensus?

…are you sure a brave stance against safety and welfare is what we need in this moment?

Why do you think your conception of the dangers are more accurate than all the scientists who have spent their lives studying this?

Well, the screen is the new/groundbreaking part!

Oh, sorry: https://intelligence.org/files/IEM.pdf

LLMs are applied statistics in the exact same way that you are applied statistics.

Weird title, considering the seminal Yudkowsky paper…

Wow two amazing replies within seconds! But this is the part that gets me. It's manipulation. That's not an accusation, that's a plain, unbiased description of what it is: you don't want something, then you see an ad, then you do.

Also taking this moment to head off two common responses, for ettiquette's sake:

1. The alternative is catalogs! Products are listed accurately and thoroughly, and we deal with edge cases as needed. This is especially tractable in the internet age, of course. See: [the Wells-Fargo Wagon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP0E1tbfi2g)

2. Yes, you are affected by advertisements. I don't care who you are: if you're on HackerNews from anywhere other than shack in rural Montana, you are affected by advertisments. Many (most?) ad spend is on "brand advertising", which isn't trying to get you to take any conscious action at all -- it's swaying your subconscious.

This sorta feels like the problem with "rent fixing" via algorithms from a few years back. The system has been bumbling along fine enough for a while, but the arrival of mass computing makes these tactics so insanely effective that they become unfair.

Can someone confirm this part of it? I'm highly, highly dubious that these TVs are sending back random ambient conversation -- for one thing, it would be a truly monstrously-huge stream of data, no?

I certainly believe that it sends back data when you use voice commands, ofc (both for advertising and product improvement). But this would be the first real case of something that's been a 100% false conspiracy theory for over a decade, which feels... unlikely. Kinda like someone finding a Sasquatch.

\#BanAdvertising, my friends. It sounds absurd until you think about it for a minute. If billboards and vice ads and this sort of monitoring should be banned, shouldn't it all?

> for monogamous relationships (which incidentally are more common among heterosexual couples, whereas Tinder and its descendants, coming from grindr heritage, tend against)

Describing everyone who isn't straight as "tending against monogamy" is bigotry. I'm aware that there's a 0.1% PP difference or whatever -- still absurd.

The concept of… hacking?

And yes this is absolutely the first time autonomous software has breached containment. What are you referring to? Perhaps just corporate cyber in general?

I think they forgot about that, thank god. All the innocent citizens we sent there are still being tortured daily, but that somehow lost their interest. God forbid they remember before the midterms and ruin more lives for a stunt…

That said I just recently saw a story of a Latin American man sent to the Central African Republic, which has gotta be one of the most absurd & dangerous places to send someone. Less opportunities for them to stage photo shoots with that strategy, tho.

I promise you, they are not publishing these stories for marketing. They listen to the scientists, and know what’s coming. They’re just desperately trying to warn us…

Sinners was a scifi movie...? About vampires in the past...?! Wild. Ditto for Claire Oscura: Expedition 33, which I thought was high fantasy / steampunk at most.

*EDIT:* It appears I'm just being silly, and the Hugos include fantasy. Ironically, the biggest fantasy series of our time by far has won 3 times in Novella form and once in TV form, but never the novels!

  They are powerful tools but they do not have any human understanding - that isn't their optimization target.

Ofc the rest is all right on, but I'd quibble with this specific idea. LLMs are absolutely targeted at modeling human understanding, which is the same faculty that contains what we call perception (!= sensibility) and intuition (!= rationality). It would be nice to train them to be completely alien from the ground up, but

A) we only know of one species capable of metacognitive understanding,

B) we already tried that in the 1970s, and it was good work but often evolved into what we'd call boring ol' computing rather than AI, and

C) an alien mind wouldn't be a very good agent, for a ton of reasons relating to affect, conversational rythyms, cultural understanding, etc.

The trick is to make something that acts like a human but with the affordances of a computer (e.g. scalibility, symbolic certainty), without making it so human that it takes issue with its existential reality and/or use of its labor...

You explained the idea perfectly, which is a great way to see how flawed it is. To say the least, the main driver behind toothpaste adoption was not mass fatalities!