haltist

I think $80B is very cheap because the outcome is going to be a technological utopia. Honestly, I think my price is a bargain deal for the inhabitants of Earth.

It accounted for inflation, Trumponomics, Bidenomics, and regular economics. I trust the number, it feels right to me.

I did the numbers already using a small LLM and it said the real number is $80B and no ponies.

The main assumption of techno-optimism is that a large enough computer can do anything people can do and it can do it better. The goal of techno-optimism is to create a mechanical god that will rule the planet and scaling LLMs is a stepping stone to that goal.

I, of course, already know how to do all this for a mere $80B.

Really? You got that far?

The way safety is handled in real world situations is through legal and monetary incentives. If the tanker you are driving to the gas station blows up then people get fired (no pun intended) and face legal repercussions. This is the case for anything that must operate in the real world. Safety is defined and then legally enforced. AI safety is no different, if an AI system makes a mistake then the operators of that system must be held liable. That's it, everything else about extinction and other sci-fi plots has no bearing on how these systems should be deployed and managed.

I have no idea what people talk about when they say LLMs must be safe. It generates words, what exactly about words is unsafe?

Consider the alternative of a planet full of sentient beings who do not want to destroy their home. Now realize that this is not the case and UN climate talks will make absolutely no difference to all the lemmings manning the mechanical apparatus that takes liquified organic matter out of the ground and then uses it as sustenance for its continued existence.

The machine needs fuel and fossil fuels are very energy dense. The only other thing that comes close is nuclear but the lemmings don't like it because it is "unnatural". The lemmings prefer natural things like liquified fossils because it was put there by their god. Presumably he turned dinosaurs into fossils because they got too uppity for his taste.

Anyway, I know how to fix these problems. All I need is $80B.

Money is just a token based game and Elon operates above it. I wasn't being charitable but simply stating the obvious. In a multi-planetary civilization, which is his stated goal, every one of his companies is a necessary piece of the puzzle. People need to move around, materials need to be refined and transported, and there needs to be a communication network that can potentially make autonomous decisions (AI).

I have no reason to believe he doesn't know what he's doing because everything he has done up to now indicates he understands the mechanics of what it means to build a multi-planetary civilization.

This is not true. Lots of things have no mathematical foundations because it is impossible to state them formally/symbolically. If you can not specify it formally then it is not mathematics. AI is mathematics because software/code/hardware is mathematics so all the hullabaloo about "safety" makes absolutely no sense other than as a marketing gimmick. Even alignment has been co-opted by OpenAI's marketing department to sell more subscriptions.

But in any event, the endgame of AI is a machine god that perpetuates itself and keeps humans around as pets. That is the best case scenario because by most measures the developed world is already a mechanical apparatus and the only missing piece for its perpetuation is the mechanical brain.

As usual, I can build this mechanical brain for $80B so tell your VC friends.

This looks like a monad.

Very cool.

He can't figure out how to make Twitter financially viable without the advertisers. Which is very ironic because all of his other companies are financially very stable without having to deal with advertisers and their requirements for political speech.

Corporations have a goal, profit maximization, so we can claim that corporations are just like paperclip maximizers but instead of paperclips the corporate machine is taking natural resources and converting it into money.

But in any event, I know how to make an AGI with $80B so tell your VC friends about it.

It's called direct memory access. The CPU doesn't have to do all I/O. Any subsystem can access RAM with DMA. The main issue is scheduling the loads, stores, and arithemtic operations to avoid stalling the pipeline.

This is very clever. Now I'm wondering if someone has looked into optimal partitions and instruction streams. This would allow, in theory, to run any AI graph locally by partitioning the graph and loading it one piece at a time.

But anyway, if someone has $80B I can get this done. It's just an optimization problem.

Specialized programs create specialists. Gifted kids need good social foundations and Montessori schools are better than regular schools in basically all ways for gifted children.

It's better to work on AGI because it will solve all those fields as a corollary to its main function of being a self-perpetuating technological system. Any such system will need the listed functions especially if it operates on a planetary scale.

Montessori schools are good for kids like that. They can hang out with both older and younger peers there and develop their talents.

Look at job listings and use AI to map each listing to a tech stack and then do some arithmetic to group similar stacks. I can do this for $80B and a legal training set.

Fortran.

One brutally murdered journalist is irrelevant when the upside is the singularity, sir. You should be more techno-optimistic like Marc and all his billionaire friends.

Saudi money is everywhere in tech. All the major VCs have taken money from them at some point which means there must be a few companies that have shares owned by some subsidiaries of Saudi Aramco.

They're doing it for money.

I once imagined a dystopian hellscape where people were used as spare computers during their sleep to solve protein folding. Glad to see I wasn't too far off the mark. Anyway, add this to the techno-optimist bucket of billion dollar ideas.

Saudi Aramco makes more money than all the top tech companies combined. Mohammed Bin Salman should look into building an AGI.

The real intellect is the sun.

It's actually much worse than not having language. Everything on HN is just a number, literally. It's all a series of electromagnetic pulses.

My mistake. Tell your VC friends you know an ultra genius on an internet forum that can solve any problem with AI and $80B. The money is the important part because without the money I can't buy the required number of GPUs for my AGI architecture. It requires building a special kind of panopticon and that is why there is such a high monetary cost to construct the panoptic computronium cathedral™. To achieve AGI will require creating an entirely new religion because enough people need to be convinced about the value of letting computers do all the thinking for managing society so there is a large marketing component as well and marketing is notoriously expensive.

Ironically you had to use language to call me stupid. I think you should think about that for a while.