I think this is spot on. I had that same thing happen at my former employer, which bought a lot of entirely pointless startups in 2010s instead of investing in core business equipment and processes.

Python code really requires 100% branch coverage tests as an absolute minimim… with statically typed languages the compiler will catch some types of bugs in branches you don’t test, with python chances are it won’t.

edit: basically think of non covered lines the way you think about files you didn’t compile.

Yeah a new form of apologism that I started seeing online is “this isn’t a bubble! Nobody expects an AGI, its just Sam Altman, it will all pay off nicely from 20 million software developers worldwide spending a few grand a year each”.

Which is next level idiotic, besides the numbers just not adding up. There’s only so much open source to plagiarize. It is a very niche activity! It’ll plateau and then a few months later tiny single GPU models catch up to this river boiling shit.

The answer to that has always been the singularity bullshit where the biggest models just keep staying ahead by such a large factor nobody uses the small ones.

Lol I literally told these folks, something like 15 years ago, that paying to elevate a random nobody like Yudkowsky as the premier “ai risk” researcher, in so much that there is any AI risk, would only increase it.

Boy did I end up more right on that than my most extreme imagination. All the moron has accomplished in life was helping these guys raise cash due to all his hype about how powerful the AI would be.

The billionaires who listened are spending hundreds of billions of dollars - soon to be trillions, if not already - on trying to prove Yudkowsky right by having an AI kill everyone. They literally tout “our product might kill everyone, idk” to raise even more cash. The only saving grace is that it is dumb as fuck and will only make the world a slightly worse place.

To be entirely honest I don’t even like the arguments against EDT.

Smoking lesion is hilarious. So theres a lesion that is making people smoke. It is also giving them cancer in some unrelated way which we don’t know, trust me bro. Please bro don’t leave this decision to the lesion, you gotta decide to smoke, it would be irrational to decide not to smoke if the lesion’s gonna make you smoke. Correlation is not causation, gotta smoke, bro.

Obviously in that dumb ass hypothetical, the conditional probability is conditional on the decision, not on the lesion, and the smoking in cancer cases is conditional on the lesion, not on the decision. If those two were indistinguishable then the right decision would be not to smoke. And more generally, adopting causal models without statistical data to back them up is called “being gullible”.

The tobacco companies actually did manufacture the data, too, thats where “type-A personality” comes from.

Tbh whenever I try to read anything on decision theory (even written by people other than rationalists), I end up wondering how do they think a redundant autopilot (with majority vote) would ever work. In an airplane, that is.

Considering just the physical consequences of a decision doesn’t work (unless theres a fault, consequences don’t make it through the voting electronics, so the alternative decisions made for the alternative that there is no fault, never make it through).

Each one simulating the two or more other autopilots is scifi-brained idiocy. Requiring that autopilots are exact copies is stupid (what if we had two different teams write different implementations, I think Airbus actually sort if did that).

Nothing is going to be simulating anything, and to make matters even worse for philosophers amateur and academic alike, the whole reason for redundancy is that sometimes there is a glitch that makes them not compute the same values, so any attempt to be clever with “ha, we just treat copies as one thing” doesn’t cut it either.

Even to the extent that they are “prompting it wrong” it’s still on the AI companies for calling this shit “AI”. LLMs fundamentally do not even attempt to do cognitive work (the way a chess engine does by iterating over possible moves).

Also, LLM tools do not exist. All you can get is a sales demo for the company stock (the actual product being sold), built to impress how close to AGI the company is. You have to creatively misuse these things to get any value out of them.

The closest they get to tools is “AI coding”, but even then, these things plagiarize code you don’t even want plagiarized (because its MIT licensed and you’d rather keep up with upstream fixes).

But just hear me out: if you delete your old emails, you won’t be roped into paying for extra space, and Microsoft or Google will have a little less money to buy water with!

Switch to Linux and avoid using any Microsoft products to conserve even more water.

Well yeah but the new age ones overthink everything. Edit: I suspect you could probably find one of them spelling it out.

The problem is that to start breaking encryption you need quantum computing with a bunch of qubits as originally defined and not “our lawyer signed off on the claim that we have 1000 qubits”.

I wonder if the weird tags are even strictly necessary, or if a sufficiently strongly worded and repetitive message would suffice.

Embryo selection may just be the eugenicist’s equivalent of greenwashing.

Eugenicists doing IVF is kind of funny, since it is a procedure that circumvents natural selection quite a bit, especially for the guys. It’s what, something like billion to one for the sperm?

If they’re doing IVF, being into eugenics, they need someone to tell them that they aren’t “worsening the species”, and the embryo selection provides just that.

edit: The worse part would be if people who don’t need IVF start doing IVF with embryo selection, expecting some sort of benefit for the offspring. With American tendency to sell people unnecessary treatments and procedures, I can totally see that happening.

I think I have a real example. Non hierarchical (or, at least, less hierarchical) arrangements. Anarchy is equated with chaos.

Anything in nature we ascribe a hierarchy to; ants or other hymenoptera and termites have supposed “queens”, parent wolves are “alphas” and so on. Fictional ant-like aliens have brain bugs, or cerebrates, or the like. Even the fucking zombies infected with a variant of the rabies virus get alphas somehow.

Every effort has went into twisting every view on reality and every fiction to align with the ideology.

I think it’s a mixture of it being cosplay and these folks being extreme believers in capitalism, in the inevitability of it and impossibility of any alternative. They are all successful grifters, and they didn’t get there through some scheming and clever deception, they got there through sincere beliefs that aligned with the party line.

They don’t believe that anything can actually be done about this progression towards doom, just as much as they don’t properly believe in the doom.

So it got them so upset presumably because they thought it mocked the basilisk incident, I guess with Roko as Laurentius and Yudkowsky as the other guy?

I’d say its a combo of them feeling entitled to plagiarise people’s work and fundamentally not respecting the work of others (a point OpenAI’s Studio Ghibli abomination machine demonstrated at humanity’s expense.

Its fucking disgusting how they denigrate the very work on which they built their fucking business on. I think its a mixture of the two though, they want it plagiarized so that it looks like their bot is doing more coding than it is actually capable of.

On a wider front, I expect this AI bubble’s gonna cripple the popularity of FOSS licenses - the expectation of properly credited work was a major aspect of the current FOSS ecosystem, and that expectation has been kneecapped by the automated plagiarism machines, and programmers are likely gonna be much stingier with sharing their work because of it.

Oh absolutely. My current project is sitting in a private git repo, hosted on a VPS. And no fucking way will I share it under anything less than GPL3 .

We need a license with specific AI verbiage. Forbidding training outright won’t work (they just claim fair use).

I was thinking adding a requirement that the license header should not be removed unless a specific string (“This code was adapted from libsomeshit_6.23”) is included in the comments by the tool, for the purpose of propagation of security fixes and supporting a consulting market for the authors. In the US they do own the judges, but in the rest of the world the minuscule alleged benefit of not attributing would be weighted against harm to their customers (security fixes not propagated) and harm to the authors (missing out on consulting gigs).

edit: perhaps even an explainer that authors see non attribution as fundamentally fraudulent against the user of the coding tool: the authors of libsomeshit routinely publish security fixes and the user of the coding tool, who has been defrauded to believe that the code was created de-novo by the coding tool, is likely to suffer harm from misuse of published security fixes by hackers (which wouldn’t be possible if the code was in fact created de-novo).

I think provenance has value outside copyright… here’s a hypothetical scenario:

libsomeshit is licensed under MIT-0 . It does not even need attribution. Version 3.0 has introduced a security exploit. It has been fixed in version 6.23 and widely reported.

A plagiaristic LLM with training date cutoff before 6.23 can just shit out the exploit in question, even though it already has been fixed.

A less plagiaristic LLM could RAG in the current version of libsomeshit and perhaps avoid introducing the exploit and update the BOM with a reference to “libsomeshit 6.23” so that when version 6.934 fixes some other big bad exploit an automated tool could raise an alarm.

Better yet, it could actually add a proper dependency instead of cut and pasting things.

And it would not need to store libsomeshit inside its weights (which is extremely expensive) at the same fidelity. It just needs to be able to shit out a vector database’s key.

I think the market right now is far too distorted by idiots with money trying to build the robot god. Code plagiarism is an integral part of it, because it makes the LLM appear closer to singularity (it can write code for itself! it is gonna recursively self-improve!).

In case of code, what I find the most infuriating is that they didn’t even need to plagiarize. Much of open source code is permissively enough licensed, requiring only attribution.

Anthropic plagiarizes it when they prompt their tool to claim that it wrote the code from some sort of general knowledge, it just learned from all the implementations blah blah blah to make their tool look more impressive.

I don’t need that, in fact it would be vastly superior to just “steal” from one particularly good implementation that has a compatible license you can just comply with. (And better yet to try to avoid copying the code and to find a library if at all possible). Why in the fuck even do the copyright laundering on code that is under MIT or similar license? The authors literally tell you that you can just use it.

No no I am talking of actual non bullshit work on the underlying math. Think layernorm, skip connections, that sort of thing, changes how the neural network is computed so that it trains more effectively. edit: in that case would be changing it so that after training, at inference for the typical query, most (intermediary) values computed will be zero.

I dunno, I guess I should try it just to see what the buzz is all about, but I am rather opposed to plagiarism and river boiling combination, and paying them money is like having Peter Thiel do 10x donations matching for donations to a captain planet villain.

I personally want a model that does not store much specific code in its weights, uses RAG on compatibly licensed open source and cites what it RAG’d . E.g. I want to set app icon on Linux, it’s fine if it looks into GLFW and just borrows code with attribution that I will make sure to preserve. I don’t need it to be gaslighting me that it wrote it from reading the docs. And this isn’t literature, theres nothing to be gained from trying to dilute copyright by mixing together a hundred different pieces of code doing the same thing.

I also don’t particularly get the need to hop onto the bandwagon right away.

It has all the feel of boiling a lake to do for(int i=0; i<strlen(s); ++i) . LLMs are so energy intensive in large part because of quadratic scaling, but we know the problem is not intrinsically quadratic otherwise we wouldn’t be able to write, read, or even compile the code.

Each token has the potential of relating to any other token but does only relate to a few.

I’d give the bastards some time to figure this out. I wouldn’t use an O(N^2) compiler I can’t run locally, either, there is also a strategic disadvantage in any dependence on proprietary garbage.

Edit: also i have a very strong suspicion that someone will figure out a way to make most matrix multiplications in an LLM be sparse, doing mostly same shit in a different basis. An answer to a specific query does not intrinsically use every piece of information that LLM has memorized.