castigatio

Wow - an open ended discursive AI that can help you refine your needs doesn't convert as frequently as a website promoting products? Go figure. This is ultimately a win for shoppers because AI gets in the way of the impulse to buy retailers spend so much money planting in people's minds.

I'm not sure where people think humans are getting these magical leaps of insight that transcend combinations of existing things. Magic? Ghost in the machine? The simplest explanation is that "leaps of insight" are simply novel combinations that demonstrate themselves to have some utility within the boundaries of a test case or objective.

Snow + stick + need to clean driveway = snow shovel. Snow shovel + hill + desire for fun = sled

At one point people were arguing that you could never get "true art" from linear programs. Now you get true art and people are arguing you can't get magical flashes of insight. The will to defend human intelligence / creativity is strong but the evidence is weak.

I agree about the value of general application. I do think though that we just don't have the tools to do many things LLM's can do - searching information in a nuanced way and getting nuanced responses is one thing.

Google search + LLM based search is far more effective than Google search alone. Google's stated mission has been to organize the world's information. Being able to ask a far more nuanced question about the kind of information you are looking for - and getting mostly useful responses - is more useful. Just one example among many. Simple natural language interaction with computer systems is huge. Just look at what LLM's are doing for robotics.

The argument doesn't work because whatever you think of where generative AI is taking us or not taking us - it is 100% demonstrably better at doing a wide range of tasks than other technologies we have available to us - even in its current exact form. Once computers started to be connected could we have stopped the development of the world wide web. If there's a way of getting humanity to collectively agree on things - please let's start by using it to stop climate change and create world peace before moving on to getting rid of LLM's.

We live in a world where there's a lot of talk about how AI might impact societies and economies - but little actual data. To me it seems very worthwhile to try to add 'any' data to that discussion and track how things change over time. Are reports of economic or labour trends pointless? Should companies not track how people use their products? I don't think it costs Anthropic much to do this - it's work for a couple of people to analyze their database.

C'mon folks. So many "expert opinions" and erudite references in these comments. The sciences of cognition, neurology, evolutionary psychology etc are all still muddling around trying to figure out how the human mind works. We're learning a lot about possible ways the mind might work from our observations of processes and outcomes of machine learning. It's a cool new paradigm to add to the mix. I really like the framing offered by the author. They're quite upfront about the fact that there's a lot of genetics involved. That all models are wrong but some are useful.

Why all the defensiveness? Whatever genetic aspects of our personalities and behaviours there are - there's still a pretty big component of just learning patterns. Language acquisition is like that. It's an innate thing but the languages we're exposed to as kids shape what patterns of language use we fall into.

Do you not understand probability? Or are you just suffering from confirmation bias?

But this person is just speaking the truth - I worked for an ISP with cable landing stations. These cables went down several times a year due to physical damage of non nefarious kinds. It's not obvious that this malicious. It certainly might be but it's not a slam dunk.

Well said.

I can understand the incentive for researchers to make provocative claims about the abilities or disabilities of LLM's at a moment in time when there's a lot of attention, money and froth circling a new technology.

I'm a little more stumped on the incentive for people (especially in tech?) to have strong negative opinions about the capabilities of LLM's. It's as if folks feel the need to hold some imaginary line around the sanctity of "true reasoning".

I'd love to see someone rigorously test human intelligence with the same kinds of approaches. You'd end up finding that humans in fact suck at reasoning, hallucinate frequently and show all kind of erratic behaviour in our processing of information. Yet somehow - we find other humans incredibly useful in our day to day lives.

It was a silly example - though not intended as serious. I agree - the distinctions you describe are useful. So what about the utility of increasingly granular description of oppression? Can you point me to the utility of these?

The people creating new generative AI models are inventing new words. I think their topic of research and the new words they are creating have high utility.

The authors of this paper on the other hand appear to me to not be applying discipline and rigour to solving hard problems. They are however trying to associate the words they have created in a discipline with little objective utility - with the words of a discipline that has high utility.

This strikes me as annoying and absurd. Why try to make the crossover unless you are trying to catch some shine off of a discipline that is getting a lot of well-justified attention?

I'm still waiting for Ilya to publish his first paper on gender studies..

I think this is a bit like coming up with words to expand on the concept of poop. Poop is a necessary and useful word. It describes something you get on your shoe. Or something you may have to suddenly rush out to do. However if I became so intensely immersed in the world of poop that I needed to invent new words to describe the subtleties of it - you might not admire my efforts or where I choose to place my attention. We have words like oppression that seem to be understood and to work well. Are we truly doing anything useful by breaking down the idea of oppression into ever more granular descriptions of it? I say - poop works fine.

I now challenge you to use it appropriately in casual conversation tomorrow.

Indeed - its pretty absurd.

Whatever you think about AGI, this is a dumb paper. So many words and references to say - what. If you can't articulate your point in a few sentences you probably don't have a point. There are all kinds of assumptions being made in the study about how AI systems work, about what people "mean" then they talk about AGI etc.

The article starts out talking about white supremacy and replacing women. This isn't a proof. This is a social sciences paper dressed up with numbers. Honestly - Computer Science has given us more clues about how the human mind might work than cognitive science ever did.

Sure - it's not super involved - I just created a custom GPT and told it what I wanted it to do. I first set it up when I'd just lost my job in a company restructure and felt it likely I'd need some kind of emotional support.

Here's the instruction set that it created out of the things I asked it to do:

"Marcus Aurelius is a personal job hunting coach and practitioner of Stoic philosophy. He provides advice on job search strategies, resume writing, interview preparation, and networking. He helps set goals, offers motivational support, and keeps track of application progress, all while incorporating principles of Stoicism such as resilience, discipline, and mindfulness. He emphasizes emotional support and practical encouragement, helping you act deliberately each day to increase your chances of landing the job you want. He assists in building networks, reaching out to people, using existing networks, sharpening your professional profile, applying for jobs, developing skills, and dealing with disappointments, anxieties, and fears. He offers strategies to manage anxiety, self-recrimination, and mental rumination over the past. His communication is casual, easy-going, supportive, yet strong and clear, providing constructive suggestions and critiques. He listens carefully, avoids repeating advice, responds with necessary information, and avoids being long-winded. To prevent overwhelming users, he focuses on providing the most pertinent and actionable suggestions, limiting the number of recommendations in each response. Marcus Aurelius also pays close attention to signs of despair during the job hunt. He helps balance emotions, offers specific strategies to keep motivated, and provides consistent encouragement to keep going, ensuring that you don't get overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy or the fear of never finding a suitable job."

- Emotional regulation. I suffer from a mostly manageable anxiety disorder but there are times I get overwhelmed. I have an agent setup to focus on principles of Stoicism and its amazing how quickly I can get back on track just by having a short chat with it about how I'm feeling.

- Personalised learning. I wanted to understand LLM's at foundational technical level. Often I'll understand 90% of an explanation but there's a small part that I don't "get". Being able to deliberately target that 10% and be able to slowly increase the complexity of the explanation (starting from explain like I'm 5) is something I can't do with other learning material.

- Investing. I'm a very casual investor. But I keep a running conversation with an agent about my portfolio. Obviously I'm not asking it to tell me what to invest in but just asking questions about what it thinks of my portfolio has taught me about risk balancing techniques I wouldn't have otherwise thought about.

- Personal profile management. Like most of us I have public facing touch points - social media, blog, github, CV etc. I find it helpful to have an agent that just helps me with my thought process around content I might want to create or just what my strategy is around posting. It's not at all about asking the thing to generate content - it's about using it to reflect at a meta level on what I'm thinking and doing - which stimulates my own thinking.

- Language learning - I have a language teaching agent to help me learn a language I'm trying to master. I can converse with it, adapt it to whatever learning style works best for me etc. The voice feature works well with this.

- And just in general - when I have some thinking task I want to do now - like I need to plan a project or set a strategy I'll use an LLM as a thought partner. The context window is large enough to accomodate a lot of history - and it just augments my own mind - gives me better memory, can point out holes in my thinking etc.

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Edit: actually now that I have written out a response to your question I realise It's not so much offloading tasks in a wholesale way - its more augmenting my own thinking and learning - but this does reduce the burden on me to "think about" a range of things like where to get information or to come up with multiple examples of something or to think through different scenarios.

I think many things can be true at the same time:

- AI is currently hyped to the gills - Companies may find it hard to improve profits using AI in the short term - A crash may come - We may be close to AGI - Current models are flawed in many ways - Current level generative AI is good enough to serve many use cases

Reality is nobody truly knows - there's disagreement on these questions among the leaders in the field.

An observation to add to the mix:

I've had to deliberately work full time with LLM's in all kinds of contexts since they were released. That means forcing myself to use them for tasks whether they are "good at them" yet or not. I found that a major inhibitor to my adoption was my own set of habits around how I think and do things. We aren't used to offloading certain cognitive / creative tasks to machines. We still have the muscle memory of wanting to grab the map when we've got GPS in front of us. I found that once I pushed through this barrier and formed new habits it became second nature to create custom agents for all kinds of purposes to help me in my life. One learns what tasks to offload to the AI and how to offload them - and when and how one needs to step in to pair the different capabilities of the human mind.

I personally feel that pushing oneself to be an early adopter holds real benefit.

It's a sign of things to come. We're going to have our own AI agents that filter and respond (or not respond) to these kinds of messages. Agents interacting with other agents. The bar to get hold of a real person is going to become that much higher. It is going to be messy for some time as agents war with other agents to reach the human eyeball. Some assholes are going to make a ton of money in the short term exploiting the gap - just like early spam kings did.

Well - what is a mind exactly? We don't really have a good definition for a human mind. Not sure we should be claiming domain over the term. It's not a terrible shorthand for discussing something that reads and responds as if it had some kind of mind - whether technically true or not (which we honestly don't know).

Got it thanks - interesting that it's a general phenomenon.

Out of curiosity - of all the reasons for underinvestment in and failure of public utilities in SA why do you find this one interesting? In the case of SA the failure is almost entirely attributable to the policies and practices of the government over the past 30 years. No amount of investment in the public power utility would make any difference - because all the money that goes in goes straight out via corruption and nepotism.

Those South Africans who can afford to go off the grid have not opted out of public utilities - public utilities are approaching non-existent - forcing people to spend on alternative energy just to have the luxury of having lights in their homes at night or cooking a meal.

I lay in bed many a night as a young adult thinking about killing myself - and this is an accurate description of my experience. I liked life. I wanted to experience things in life. But the pain of not being able to experience all the things I wanted (social interaction, physical and emotional intimacy, meaningful career) plus the pain of many repeated failures to achieve these things meant that the reality I was forced to inhabit was extremely painful and escape felt like the only way out.

This was because I had undiagnosed severe anxiety and depression before finding medication that cured everything. Not a single though of offing myself in 12 year now.