The kids were using Adobe for Education. This calls itself “the creative resource for K–12 and Higher Education” and it includes the Adobe Express AI image generator.
I feel the extent to which schooling in the USA is of the this arts and crafts class brought to you by Carl's Jr™ variety is probably understated.
Malo Bourgon, MIRI CEO, makes a cameo in the comments to discuss Ziz's claims about SA payoffs and how he thinks Yud's salary (the equivalent of like 150.000 malaria vaccines) is defensible for reasons that definitely exist, but they live in Canada, you can't see them.
A few hours later, he sends me an example of how he’s been using AI. It’s a “hidden role deduction” game he’s working on. At the top is the prompt he put into ChatGPT: “You are five blind lesbian adventurers out for a good night out. Slaying dragons and whatnot. But one of your number is a hulking great troll pretending to be a woman. Find the troll lesbian and then devise an amusing punishment without giving him an erection.
No idea if it was intentional given how long a series' production cycle can be before it ends up on tv/streaming, but it's hard not to see Vince Gilligan's Pluribus as a weird extended impact-of-chatbots metaphor.
It's also somewhat tedious and seems to be working under the assumption that cool cinematography is a sufficient substitute for character development.
most BNPL loans aren’t reported to credit bureaus, creating what regulators call “phantom debt.” That means other lenders can’t see when someone has taken out five different BNPL loans across multiple platforms. The credit system is flying blind.
I always thought it was cool that (there is a case to be made that) HPL created Azathoth, the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space, as a mythological reimagining of a black hole. Stuff like The Dreams in the Witch-house shows he was up to date on a bunch of cutting edge for the time physics stuff, at least as far as terminology is concerned, massive nerd that he was.
'Genetic engineering to merge with machines' is both a stream of words with negative meaning and something I don't think he could come up with on his own, like the solar system sized dyson sphere or the lab leak stuff. He just strikes me as too incurious to have come across the concepts he mashes together on his own.
Simplest explanation I guess is he's just deliberately joeroganing the CEO thing and that's about as deep as it goes.
Michael Hendricks, a professor of neurobiology at McGill, said: “Rich people who are fascinated with these dumb transhumanist ideas” are muddying public understanding of the potential of neurotechnology. “Neuralink is doing legitimate technology development for neuroscience, and then Elon Musk comes along and starts talking about telepathy and stuff.”
Fun article.
Altman, though quieter on the subject, has blogged about the impending “merge” between humans and machines – which he suggested would either through genetic engineering or plugging “an electrode into the brain”.
Occasionally I feel that Altman may be plugged into something that's even dumber and more under the radar than vanilla rationalism.
What if quantum but magically more achievable at nearly current technology levels. Instead of qbits they have pbits (probabilistic bits, apparently) and this is supposed to help you fit more compute in the same data center.
Also they like to use the word thermodynamic a lot to describe the (proposed) hardware.
I feel the devs should just ask the chatbot themselves before submitting if they feel it helps, automating the procedure invites a slippery slope in an environment were doing it the wrong way is being pushed extremely strongly and executives' careers are made on 'I was the one who led AI adoption in company x (but left before any long term issues became apparent)'
Plus the fact that it's always weirdos like the hating AI is xenophobia person who are willing to go to bat for AI doesn't inspire much confidence.
As far as I can tell there's absolutely no ideology in the original transformers paper, what a baffling way to describe it.
James Watson was also a cunt, but calling "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" one of the founding texts of eugenicist ideology or whatever would be just dumb.
So if a company does want to use LLM, it is best done using local servers, such as Mac Studios or Nvidia DGX Sparks: relatively low-cost systems with lots of memory and accelerators optimized for processing ML tasks.
Eh, Local LLMs don't really scale, you can't do much better than one person per one computer, unless it's really sparse usage, and buying everyone a top-of-the-line GPU only works if they aren't currently on work laptops and VMs.
Sparks type machines will do better eventually but for now they're supposedly geared more towards training than inference, it says here that running a 70b model there returns around one word per second (three tokens) which is snail's pace.
What's a government backstop, and does it happen often? It sounds like they're asking for a preemptive bail-out.
I checked the rest of Zitron's feed before posting and its weirder in context:
Interview:
She also hinted at a role for the US government "to backstop the guarantee that allows the financing to happen", but did not elaborate on how this would work.
Later at the jobsite:
I want to clarify my comments earlier today. OpenAI is not seeking a government backstop for our infrastructure commitments. I used the word "backstop" and it mudlled the point.
She then proceeds to explain she just meant that the government 'should play its part'.
it often obfuscates from the real problems that exist and are harming people now.
I am firmly on the side of it's possible to pay attention to more than one problem at a time, but the AI doomers are in fact actively downplaying stuff like climate change and even nuclear war, so them trying to suck all the oxygen out of the room is a legitimate problem.
Yudkowsky and his ilk are cranks.
That Yud is the Neil Breen of AI is the best thing ever written about rationalism in a youtube comment.
I feel the extent to which schooling in the USA is of the this arts and crafts class brought to you by Carl's Jr™ variety is probably understated.