calf

He recommends 2x speed for best listening results.

I especially enjoyed his summary of the HuggingFace incident since I had not read about it before.

I think this is the most beautiful letter on the subject I've read all year, it brought a tear to my eye. It's like reading those famous STEM letters/essays from history.

The metaphor as written is maybe bad, but the holographic idea really is outrageous and mindboggling. Because according to it the inside might as well be completely empty.

But these are not very good arguments, because it makes it about the fall of institutions (the funding) and people being miserable for personal reasons rather than prosocial reasons. Tao here clearly suggests that math is not reducible to "problem solving" or "proofs", the valuable part is much more than that framing.

The concerning argument about the status of math would be an outline that it will get destroyed by a process of societal atrophy and there is no turning back, and the AI powers are not a good substitute or replacement for it. If an entire society becomes reliant on these oracle machines then it would be analogous to children never learning arithmetic because they were handed calculators. How could the human race still flourish? We would anthropologically regress. We'd be little better than animals, like the Borg zombies.

That is a much more profound threat than people worrying about their own careers or faculties disappearing like the humanities. This is a serious anthropological reckoning.

If math experts are that freaked out already then basically all of science is soon to follow, decade by decade. "Singularity" comes to mind.

Why such a blinkered argument, I own the soda can I just drank but it is still, arguably, wrong of me to chuck it in the trash instead of the recycle bin. Yes, you have the "right" to dispose of things you own but there's more to what's right than that. There's human decency, consideration, awareness of the environment, the spirit of the laws, cases the laws were not designed for in mind etc.

Like, tell your mother or HS teacher you decided not to recycle because you own your trash. See how well that clever argument goes.

The problem with the Fields medallists petition was that its central argument relied on reiterating a very fashionable, neoliberal-academic trope, that science as a whole is "done by a culture of experts", implying that there is no value or even science existentially outside of "the social practices of science". It is a predictable extension of centrist-pseudoleft political ideologies (~ ivory tower belief system) which Thomas Piketty for instance has conceptualized as the Brahmin left. Indeed the whole AI/ASI/AGI issue is hugely political and it cannot be dismissed and analyzed as a neutral topic in isolation from people's political premises.

That said, I think there is an articulable concern about the recent AI events as it may threaten human's autonomy and relation to science and mathematics. Just not one premised on that. What's interesting is seeing different academics having predictable reactions, for example Sabine Hossenfelder is more politically libertarian so in this case she said DGAF about human mathematicians at all. Scott Aaronson is another interesting example, he wrote a blog post a couple days ago as well.

Such a simplistic historical comparison tells on yourself, it is precisely this mentality that larger sociopolitical forces exploit and reproduce new fascisms and the like. In other words your very argument demonstrates the falsity of the claim.

I'm not going articulate the answer but I will say whatever beef you have with the other commenter (or me), just copy this thread into ChatGPT and it will tell you why you are more in the wrong.

That commenter was already obnoxious under this thread, and today they are relitigating Searle-Turing via Hofstadter GEB slop, so they are also an ignoramus.

So the credibility of your friends weighs more than the credibility of tenured professors at world-class academic institutions, got it.

Clearly your degrees did not make you immune from fallacies and simplistic reductions.

"Synthesis" is obviously of different kinds. A duck has a different level of intelligence than a human. We do not say both are "just doing synthesis".

So the question is how can you be so disingenuous about such terminology? Answer, you are relying on a classic form of scientistic reductivism.

The fact that intelligence is physical, emerges from chemistry, etc,. has nothing to do with there being also objectively different levels of computational sophistication.

If you want to be scientific about that you could look at neuropsychology on one hand and computability/complexity on the other. There are levels and so equivocation of "mentorship" as "prompting" and fallacious variants thereof is a) frankly intellectually obtuse, b) par for the course for SV-levels of philosophizing, c) and a disservice to philosophy, physics, and Einstein's own philosophical outlooks himself.

I am well aware of the Hinton-style physics argument about human cognition, and unlike others I am partial to it. That "there is no special magic." But it is wrong to go about misunderstanding and/or conveying this physicalism/computationalim so grossly.

I also don't have to start replies thumping my chest about my credentials, also another kind of intellectual boorishness that works to cloud understanding and serious discussion.

I'm not sure which move is worse or more telling, those above or the one backhandedly accusing someone who disagrees with you of religious thinking. It is bad faith and undisciplined behavior. Having privileged and advanced degrees is clearly no antidote, as Asimov famously wrote.

Or protein folding as per Scott Aaronson.

It's like AlphaGo but playing against all living mathematicians. (Overhang being low hanging fruit is what allows this comparison, of course the general moot point is the skepticism that LLMs are also innovative etc.)

So you're just equivocating on terms like "prompt", "synthesis" and the like. Clearly a PhD in physics does not free people from scientistic modes of thinking and poor philosophy.

To think this discussion is about Einstein who had a much better mind on these things as well.

Also how quickly the discourse forgets, literally that was a month ago.

And humanities have a word for this, exploitation, or appropriation, maybe it's time scientists and engineers revisited basic ethical notions. Skimming a dozen threads and nobody seems to have this vocabulary or willing to say it.

If only prompts could also be watermarked.

Buckmaster is letting the reader connect the dots, it is all the more disrespectful to be disingenuous and say they're nothing there concerning to see or worth further ethical scrutiny given the coincidences.

You realize that hill is a mathematical argument, not a physical hill.

Your perspective is not helpful until you read and reflect on Tristan's letter stating serious grievances. Your remarks here have minimized his complaints and that is a sign of bias. Do not then pre-accuse HN commenters of being convinced when there reasonable skepticism such biased behavior showing itself in this very thread, saying things that amount to "my tribe/company would never be so egregious and if you think that then it is bad faith". That's the projection. If the word prejudice means anything to you then please do the work of attending to that instead of using the platform to reinforce such biases. If you are not a PhD yourself maybe your are not culturally qualified to assess and expound on the overall situation anyways.

The difference is no one writes punchcards so the comparison is inapt. It is more like supposing AI eats everything humans attempt to do. They will take your work as you are working on it, any interaction at all. It is meta-plagiarism, on another level.

It has no legs as an "explanation" because the content of the email (as described) already acknowledges as much. It's the whole reason he wrote contact email. His chief complaint now includes how the hell did Altman's people know specifically his line of attack down to certain technical keywords. E.g. AI plagiarism.

> I'm not even sure what to say to this, but I think this should be widely known if it is indeed what happened.

Call this behavior what it is, technofascism. Another comment compared it to the Godfather. To think this is the 21st century and academics are still horrible human beings.

One should not evaluate explanations based on level of "fine"/innocuousness, in ethics that is called motivated reasoning or something.

The whole point of Tristan's first email was to address the issue of the rumors so in fact this explanation confounds several things (in terms of the mutual knowledge of the conversants and their intentions).

Based on this lack of understanding it is pointless to continue this thread

Then that's naive of him to write the email, he fell for their trap essentially.

That's a fake explanation, it skips explaining/justifying how OpenAi "heard about" the result

I literally thought of this comparison last week. The problem I noticed was how my parents' generation lacked the cognitive "defenses" to separate AI social media content on YouTube, WhatsApp and the like from high quality information. The AI generated content does not trigger an "uncanny valley" reaction, and so people (I myself included) have greater difficulty immediately separating what information is genuine and what is synthetic, and then this spreads exponentially through social networks.

Then where does self-reference appear in other animals? Famously most higher animals such as mammals still fail the mirror test.

I agree with the point that self-reference comes "for free" due to computationalist reasons, namely Quining and Godel and liar's paradox all show that. But then self-computations should be more prevalent relative to phenomena like consciousness. Example could be the human immune system functioning, in that on the level of DNA there is some encoding of identifying what is "self", etc.

Also if self reference is easy for the reasons he mentions then should we see non-LLM systems, say AlphaGo or image generators, learning a sense of self vs other? E.g. inside AlphaGo's black box it could utilize a concept of "my strategy".

I'm stupid, consider a quadrilateral with points

    b
  a    c
     d

Then the area needs to be the trapezoids projected to x axis is ab+bc-ad-dc. What is the correct way to keep track of the signs? I.e. what is the definition of "right-to-left"?

The statement, written by someone else, matches what I happen to generally believe about the Economist.

Do not presume to understand other people's concerns based on one or two sentences. I don't know how to explain that in an online conversation, this is more a learn to interact with real life people kind of thing. I would assume older generations still behave that way, because they are more authoritarian.

I could talk about why the 'implication' is not necessarily problem and about why what is 'obvious' to yourself should not be taken for granted when talking through disagreements with other people. But that would take more time and I think a well-rounded college education is supposed teach people these basic humanities skills, not something that can be sorted out online especially these days.